An Atlas of Impossible Longing

my book diaries #2

Hi All !

This is the second edition in the “My Book Diaries” series where I express my thoughts on the books I have read recently. This one is on the magnificent “An Atlas of Impossible Longing” by one of my favorites - Anuradha Roy. The post is quite long as it also explains the plot in my words. Feel free to skip and scroll around. Please share your own thoughts about the book, if you have read it and your views on my analysis, regardless.

Started - 28.02.2021

When people ask me, “What genre of books do you like?”, I struggle to give them a perfect answer. I say things like - “I like fiction but not hard-core fiction, not fiction for the sake of fiction. I like books which deal with human emotions and their complexity.” Well, this book by Anuradha Roy fits that description like a baby fits its mother’s arms. 

Roy never fails to impress me - with her simple, yet beautiful expression, a pace which is neither rushed nor sluggish, a plot which is not too obvious, nor too complicated. As the title suggests, the book is about the one of the most intense and painful emotions that a human being can experience - longing. 

It is a story about a family living in pre-independent India. The patriarch of the family sets up his newly married life in a remote town of West Bengal. Away from the hubbub of Calcutta and its relatives, fairs, markets, noises and smells, he takes his wife to a town on the verge of a forest, which is the centre of mining operations. 

Excuse my digression here : It is said and I believe rightly so, that art and literature are open to interpretation. Similarly, I sensed themes in this book which may not be the original focus of the author. For instance, in the forest town described above, you see subtle undertones of the exploitation that tribal people undergo on a daily basis. Living in extreme penury, they become accustomed to vulgar comments and passes and learn to live a life stripped of dignity. It is an attempt, in my view, to show to us - the urban, middle class, the realities of some of the most marginalised communities. 

Coming back to our story; the wife of Amulya feels stranded, alone. We begin to sense why the book is called what it is. She develops a longing for merriment, for noisy relatives, for people to argue with. Slowly over time, she develops a madness - she starts cursing people in her home and she is asked to confine herself in her room - lest she scandalise others. In the house in front of theirs, there lives an Anglo-Indian couple. The woman in the house represents a waking dream wish fulfilment for our mad matriarch. She has a secret relationship, murders her husband and then lives a life of illusions, dreams and music. The “mad lady” in the house is witness to the murder but protects the Anglo-Indian. Thus, starts their friendship. But they only ever meet for one day - when Larissa takes our mad lady to a picnic - where our mad lady drinks wine, eats sandwiches, gossips and laughs. For the rest of her life, she satiates her longings with this sweet memory.

Then, we have Amulya’s younger son - Nirmal Babu who is married to Shanti, a young girl from a village on the edge of a river. They start off a happy married life and all goes well. Shanti becomes pregnant and is sent to her maternal home, as tradition demands, for giving birth to her first child. There, in an old, archaic house, she lies on her bed and goes into premature labour when the river swells, engulfs the house and takes with it - the life of a young girl while sparing her baby. Across the house, stands a bakul tree, silent, witness to everything. 

Nirmal is shattered. His longing for his wife destroys him. He gets his daughter - Bakul - from Shanti’s home, leaves her in the custody of his elder brother and goes on a job with the Archaeological Survey of India. Along with Bakul, he leaves at his house - Meera, a distant relative who is widowed and in search of a home and Mukund, an orphan whose expenses were borne by Nirmal’s father. 

What follows is a (slow) rollercoaster of events. Bakul and Mukunda develop a relationship that neither friendship nor intimacy can describe. They are partners in everything. Meera becomes their caretaker. Nirmal stays away from home. Inside Bakul, there is left a void and resentment - a longing for her father who deserted her. Meera lives the life of a widow - prohibited by society from experiencing love and happiness again, she longs for small pleasures like fish at meals and saris of colour. 

When Nirmal returns, Bakul is anything but happy. She sees her father with anger and contempt. All this while, our mad lady lives a life of delusions. All this while, Mukunda remains ostracised - the illegitimate son of an unknown tribal woman - casteless and condemned. 

Soon, Mukunda is banished to Calcutta, to a boarding school because “he and Bakul had grown up and their closeness could mean anything”. Mukunda resolves to break all ties with a family which gave him shelter and then severed those ties.  

Back at home, Meera and Nirmal develop a longing for each other. Both of them - widowed. They wish to experience love again. The mad lady curses Meera in ignorance and it hurts her self-respect; she leaves. 

Mukunda starts his own life, he becomes an agent of a shrewd businessman who grabs houses and sells them, insensitive to all longings. Mukunda is given shelter by a Muslim family - which has to soon evacuate and run to East Pakistan owing to the seeds of hatred sown during the Partition. (As I read these pages, my heart fills with sadness, not just because it happened but because I can see it happening again.)

Chance brings Mukunda back to his origins. He is tasked with grabbing the home he grew up in - now inhabited by Bakul and her father. He pays them a visit not knowing what to do. His longing for Bakul, for his childhood love, which he had tried to suppress for so long, wakes up from its slumber. In an effort to salvage Bakul’s home - he sells his own, the one entrusted to him by the Muslim family. 

Mukunda meets Bakul back at the remote town where they had first met. The longing both of them had experienced comes back. This intrudes into Mukund’s life so much that his wife deserts him. He starts living a very different life until he receives a letter from Nirmal Babu telling him that Bakul’s maternal home, the one where the pregnant mother had died, the one on the edge of the mighty river was involved in a title dispute. Nirmal asks Mukunda to help Bakul out with the matter. 

All this while, Mukunda is under the impression that Bakul is married and settled. But, as soon as Nirmal’s letter arrives, he rushes to the old town. There, he meets Bakul once again. With the shrewdness he had developed over the years in the business, he is able to ward off predators to the title. The book ends with Bakul and Mukunda sitting on the edge of the river. Their longing finally answered. 

Why I loved this book was because of the way it explores the human emotion of longing and love - from a multitude of perspectives. Besides the main characters of Mukunda and Bakul, it is the small longings of minor characters which touched me. For example; the mad matriarch’s longings for picnics, adventure and noise, the Anglo-Indian’s longing for escape from her marriage, Meera’s desire to lead a happy, new life - to break the fast imposed upon her by society. People’s longings for their homes - not mere houses - iconised via the tragic separation of the Muslim family from their ancestral home. The family pet’s longing for its old masters. Nirmal’s longing for his late wife. Bakul’s longing for a mother who was snatched from her and a father who never was. Mukunda’s longing for Bakul and a place to call home. 

I truly believe in the aphorism - “distance makes the heart grow fonder” for I have experienced it myself and this book only reinforces that. Human beings, by their very nature perhaps need an anchor - a person to love and a place to embrace, and when they are separated from it, they experience an emotion that is too complex to be explained. But Roy succeeds in doing just that. 

Finished - 03.03.2021

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