Circles of Life

Anuradha Roy, a publisher based mostly in New Delhi, sets her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, during the Indian subcontinent’s most momentous years. Between 1907, when the novel opens, and its conclusion circa 1956, the subcontinent saw the struggle for independence and tragedy of partition. But these impinge on Roy’s tale of private lives subtly, almost as noises offstage — for the novel is above all a love story.

It opens with a first-person voice describing a sepia photograph. This voice then disappears from the novel until, in the final part of the book, it breathtakingly reclaims the narrative: “I am Mukunda. This is my story.” Much of the book is organized in this cyclical way.

The tale begins in the town of Songarh, where factory owner Amulya rescues Mukunda, the illegitimate baby of an employee’s son, and puts him in an orphanage, taking on the responsibility for the boy’s upkeep. Meanwhile, Nirmal, Amulya’s younger son, legitimately fathers a daughter, Bakul, whose mother dies during childbirth. Mukunda is later brought home from the orphanage to work as a houseboy, and he and Bakul become close childhood companions. The family naturally disapproves and separates them at adolescence, but they reunite in adulthood and become lovers. By that time, everybody’s lives have changed irreversibly.

As well as an epic romance, this is a story of homes, homelessness and what it means to be an outsider. In several instances in the novel, the ownership or loss of home and property opens the way for events of crucial emotional significance. “Home is where one starts from,” wrote T.S. Eliot. But Roy’s novel upends that idea with infinitely sympathetic elegance: What if home is something that you make rather than what you are given?

Written with a soaring yet impeccably balanced lyricism, Roy’s prose does not hit a single wrong note. Here, for example, is the stasis at the very heart of the tumult that is love: “The rushes had stopped nodding, the breeze had stopped blowing through our hair, the stream had stopped flowing, the curdled clouds had stopped drifting overhead, the bird had stopped its call, the two children on the opposite bank had frozen in mid-gesture.”

There is a quality to this book that is often absent from the contemporary novel. Let’s call it grace.