Anuradha Roy is a publisher and prize-winning author of four books, one of which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work has been translated into more than fourteen languages. In An Atlas of Impossible Longing, her debut, she charts the life of a family from Songarh, a small town in rural Bengal, to Calcutta and many other Indian locales detailing their loves, deaths, marriages, separations, and evolution with the backdrop of India in the early 20th century before and after independence.
With every opportunity to be flowery, Anuradha Roy’s prose is simple, apposite, and gives off a poetic cadence shifting as they transfer from landscape to action to character’s thoughts to flashbacks, flash-forwards and fantasies. The result is a large cast of characters who—even the inconsequential traveller who recounts his encounter with a spaceship, the cyclist who expresses his life philosophy, the thug who forces people out of their homes, the servant keeping a master’s secrets, etc.—have ample narrative space to establish upon the reader a lasting impression in the line or two in which they are described or allowed to speak. The narrative comes alive with lush descriptions of rural Bengal complete with the greenery, silence, weather, loneliness, the sound, and smell, the feeling of the jungle, empty space, and the ruins of the past. This is also done to bring to life the cacophony, disorder, rioting, and indifference of urban India.
Within all the characters is yearning. They have a thing or two they long for but in many ways have been denied. Amulya, from an inconsequential family, and laughed at by his in-laws, moves his wife to Songarh in rural Bengal, far away from her people, into a big house—a monument to his triumph—with only a single neighbour and surrounded by jungle and tribal people. None of his children inherit his love for flowers nor gardens, and the legacy he longed to create never materialises. Instead, Kananbala, his wife, suppressed by a husband who values work over her, is homesick, lonely, and longs to form a deep meaningful connection. She finds companionship in a lion only she can hear roaring in the jungle. This marks her decline into madness which in turn comes in the form of disinhibition allowing her to utter profanities and express herself freely. However, she is confined to a single room where she witnesses a murder and forms a bond with a neighbour she only ever spies through her window. The women, though presented as suppressed, sad, lonely, and voiceless in the vicinity of the men, and despite their yearning, soar into fully-formed, strong-willed characters, that later overturn the narrative and become the saviours.
In the background all through the narrative, we glimpse the evolution of India in the early to mid-20th century—from being part of the British Empire to its independence and to the violence leading up to Partition. Within, there are pockets of pastoral calm in which small villages become towns and then district headquarters and some even states. Within those same pockets, divisions according to caste, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and religion are made apparent through the process of arranging marriages, ownership of business and property, etc. Arunadha Roy portrays India as continuously evolving along those lines, and hopefully out of them.
The first two parts of the novel are in the third person with essentially one generational character at the center supported by a host of others, among whom Anuradha flows so naturally to create an atmosphere of the generation in focus. The third part of the novel is told through Mukunda in the first person. Throughout the narrative, he is casteless, and has no identity, whether familial, tribal, or cultural, and seeks to define himself. Unburdened by caste, he is free but is also an outsider and shifts within identities to survive. The family that adopts him later pushes him away. He finds refuge with an old Muslim couple who are later forced to abandon him due to Muslim killings at the time of Partition. He gains a family and loses them just as fast. Within the structure of the book, he subverts the narrative and takes ownership of the first person to claim the story as his. The voiceless take over from here onwards. In his point of view, the suppressed come alive and triumph, saving those who once held them down. This shift in the narrative, however, robs the third part of the story of the bird’s eye view the reader enjoys in the first two parts and limits them to Mukunda’s observations and internal monologue. The rich atmosphere created around a central character through points of view of the surrounding minor characters is lost. Anuradha Roy makes up for it in Mukunda’s clear and distinct voice that shocks the reader at first and then, like the parrot left in his care, makes the reader a sole companion unable to leave until, now the master, pronounces the story ended. It is through him that we learn life is but hoping and hoping, and that through the ministrations of our hands, we may map our way to whatever we yearn for.