Until the mines came, and with them the safety of numbers, nobody from the town was foolhardy enough to venture into the wilderness at the edge of their homes: green, dark, alien, stretching for miles, ending only where the coal mines began. It was useless looking for their remains. Cows and goats disappeared, and sometimes dogs.
There were stories of tigers and jackals drinking together from streams that ran through it over round, grey and brown pebbles. It was well known that leopards wandered its unknown interior. In a story rich in symbols, houses and gardens are raised as a bulwark against creeping jungle, against flooding river, against murderous street mobs. I have a feeling though that I am oversimplifying the plot, and making light of the other dreamers in the story : Amulya the businessman and gardener, the reclusive Kananbala, the grieving Nirmal, the poor relative Meera, the exiled professor from Calcutta, and so on. I like to think of the story as a sort of Indian version of 'Great Expectations' – and indeed you can find between the pages the tale of an orphan boy (Mukunda) educated in the exotic house of an old lady (Larissa Barnum), a house that conceals a past murder and a boy that falls in love with a girl above his station (Bakul). This is most of all a beautiful story about dreams, desires, hopes, longings – if you want, you can call it another atlas of clouds, less gimmicky, more heartfelt as it records the lives of three generations of lonely, almost broken, sad people struggling against a harsh climate and against a rigid social system.
The ophtalmologist asked me once, "Do foreign bodies ever interfere with your vision? Floating black specks?" And I thought, not bodies, houses, and not foreign, ground into my blood. There was a house once whose garden I knew, every last tree, and where the stairs had chipped away and which of the windows would not shut.
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