HOW DO YOU MAP LOVE?

The next section traces the lives of her children — Nirmal, a widowed archaeologist whose impossible relationship with a young widow, Meera, is one of the most affecting parts in the novel. But the book’s central characters are Bakul, Nirmal’s daughter (who prefers to think of herself as a foundling), and the orphaned Mukunda who her grandfather had taken in. The unspoken oppressions of the age press in, just as later, a priest casts Mukunda out of the puja room, uncertain of his caste.
Mukunda, “awkward, lanky, easy to upset”, who lives on the family’s scraps, feels his lot lightened after Mrs Barnum takes him under her wing, unconventionally tutoring him and opening up her library, which he makes his way through with indiscriminate diligence. His other great sustenance is his friendship with Bakul — like Heathcliff and Catherine, they wander the town, they “had populated Songarh with their own secret places and people. To them it throbbed with magic and meanings which only the two of them could share”. Until they are separated and Mukunda is dispatched to Calcutta, and where he wends his middling way through life, resolutely shutting away the image of his childhood companion, until years later, his work forces him to return and confront the very people who had taken him in.

An Atlas of Impossible Longing is a subtle book, keenly observed and prettily written, though it rarely soars above. There are some wonderful moments, like Kananbala’s complicity and bond with Mrs Barnum, her one irresponsible jaunt rendered meaningless by the disaster that strikes her family — “her act of what had looked like desperate rebellion, her drunkenness, her ruined velvet slippers, all went unremarked”. Nirmal, in particular, with his inconsistent kindliness, is a remarkable character.
But all too often, An Atlas of Impossible Longing reads like a Katha prize story — virtuously weighted down to the time and place it is set in. It feels like a novel reconstructed from other novels, fictional associations — the romance of the railway, the crusty benevolent old neighbour, the mutinous orphan, the love that cannot be denied, the waters that will rise and flood.

Which is not to say that it feels the least bit laboured, or that the novel is about George Eliot or Dickens or Hardy getting a Songarh spin. The novel succeeds remarkably in anchoring the same abiding themes in its own quiet way. But it’s exactly the kind of book that calls up Henry James’ dead-on formulation, “I liked all of it, except the whole thing.”