Anila's Journey (10 page)

Mr Walker told us that he admired Mrs Panossian's clever mind.

“This plum-cake is proof. She takes care to stock every item that will remind us northern strangers of our home cooking, our childhoods and our festive occasions.”

He looked lost for a moment. I was certain that he was thinking of feasts with his sister Eveline.

Anoush had lost her shyness with Mr Walker.

“Will you be very glad to go back to England?” she asked. “Mrs Pan says that all the English people become homesick after a while in Calcutta.”

He laughed.

“I have a lot of work to keep me busy. And I'm not English, I'm a Scot. But to answer your question, Anoush. I
must
go back to London to deliver my reports and findings in person. It's not a question of wanting to. However, if the outcome there is good, well that would mean I will be able to return to Calcutta again. So that is the real question I think about – do I want to come back to India? And the answer is yes. Definitely yes.”

Anoush beamed at him.

“And do English people really think our birds are so important that they will send you back to find more of them?”

Anoush admired my drawings but she had no interest in birds or trees. She always wanted me to draw people instead. Practise on me, she'd laugh, and then she'd pose like a dancer, or a haughty salon lady. I truly doubted that she knew a stork from a crow.

“Goodness, no,” Mr Walker said. “The birds are all my own hobby-horse. No, my work here has been to find good teachers and writers of Indian languages. Not just Bengali, you know. There are many different languages spoken from Madras all the way to the great mountains in the north and it would be a fine thing to set up a school for Indian studies here in the city, at Fort William. My task in London will be to convince people of this.”

All this day in his company and I had not known this!

Mr Walker looked over at me before I could fix my face.

“One of the reasons I was so pleased to discover Anila is that she is not only a fine artist but she speaks both Bengali and English. And so very well. Now I was so taken with all this genius that I believed her to be a mind-reader also. Anila, I believe I neglected to tell you my true business here. I apologize.”

What could I say? Anoush laughed and gave me a dig with her elbow.

“But I can speak three languages, Mr Walker! Armenian, Bangla and English. You must offer me a job too!”

He chuckled and stood up, then wished us a good night and a good holiday. He said he would expect me at his house two days after Christmas. Then he fished about in his coat pockets and laid some cowries and some small coins down on my bag.

“Take this small money, Anila, so you can take a palki or a boat to the city. You and Anoush both.”

He paused then, framed in the doorway. Like a sentry, I thought, except that he was outside and we were in.

“Anila, I freely admit that tonight at any rate, the attractions of your little house surpass all its insecurities. My grandmother also had a little summerhouse, as near to the river as this is, and though we were not allowed to, my sister and I would sneak out and spend a summer's night there, watching for otters and getting up with the dawn.”

He gave a little knock to the roof, for luck, he said, and then he was away, striding into the darkness of the garden. Anoush and I settled into our beds to tell our stories of the day. But I know I had not got even as far as Mr Crocker and his leechy eyes before we both drifted into sleep.

I never found out what the bats did that night to get into or out of my little house.

IN THE MIDDLE OF
bad times people sometimes surprise you. It was not cheery Malati who was kindest to us in the fearful weeks after my father left Calcutta. Or at least we supposed he had, because he had not called on us again and it was the month when the great Indiamen ships were at their busiest, taking the quick winds for Europe. He had taken his passage, my mother was sure of it
.

No, it was Hemavati who bought food for us at the stalls, using her own small supply of money. She sat beside my mother as if she were her very own mashi, washed her, and made her eat and drink a little each day
.

“Annapurna, you must take this,” she would say, forcing my mother to sit up and pressing a cup of fresh ghol drink up to her mouth as if she were a baby. “Take it for the child's sake but take it for yourself too, for your strength.”

The rest of the time however, beginning a week or so after that cursed picnic, my mother lay on the bed, not seeing any of us but playing terrible scenes over in her mind, dreaming bad dreams with her eyes open. We knew this because she would call out words, though these made no sense to us. She did not have a fever, her forehead was not hot or cold, but otherwise she had all the signs of wasting. I woke up beside her every morning and she was just as she had been the night before, turned on her hip, bony as a dog on the high road. My mother who had been softness itself!

Hemavati had taken the screen away from round our bed so she could watch my mother for signs
.

“Good or bad signs,” she shrugged when Malati asked what she meant. “There's always a time when the person you're watching over decides which it is to be.”

Every morning Hemavati made me go outside and find company with other children in the lane
.

“Help them with their chores,” she said. “You are too much on your own now but you're no tiger. Not yet, anyway.”

I didn't know what she meant. But it was good, somehow, to leave the little brick house that was full of sadness and make my way down the rutted path in search of something else. Our lane joined one of the great old roads into the city but it was a noisy busy world of its own. My father always said that when he stepped off the road he was stepping into an India that his fellow Writers never knew was there
.

On the lane there was only one other strong house like ours, which was owned by a palanquin builder and his sons. Long clean planks of wood were always lined up against the front walls of this house. Round the back, where the earth was covered with wood dust and chippings, the boys hammered and sawed all day long, turning the longwood into the box-carriages without wheels that the English had come to love. They lined the most expensive ones with pith to keep the worst of the sun's heat away from the passengers. The smells of wood and paint escaped onto the lane. The paint smell I especially liked. It went up my nose like oven smoke
.

I loved to slip into the yard and watch the eldest son painting the finished palanquins. He had a fine talent, I thought, able to fill in, using just a thin brush, fruit and vines or chains of tiny elephants or monkeys. Sometimes he simply drew the plainer decorations and lines that you would find picked out in stone on the big buildings in the city. He knew I was watching but he let me be. I think he liked an audience. I always hoped he would give me an old paint pot but he never did
.

The other houses were thatch over bamboo, or mud houses. Some of the mud houses were splashed with indigo dye and I thought they were beautiful, blue like jheel water on a thundery day. Monsoons were hard on these houses though, ones that were not pukka-built like ours. In bad years some were swept away by the rising waters and people had to splash down the lane, up to their knees in the brown floodwater, in a desperate search for their cushions and beds, boxes and ovens. Once from our roof, I was thrilled to see a swan float past with its big black feet on an English table top
.

“Goddess Saraswati will be proud to see her faithful friend on a royal raft,” my mother had said when I told her. But that was long ago
.

Everybody worked outside. Women came from the bazaar with huge baskets of rice, bananas or mangoes to sell, balancing these fat pyramids ever so delicately on their heads. They each had a place to sit and sell, a chosen tree that was their destination. But for us children, it was their slow walk down the lane that was important. If they put a foot down carelessly a fruit might topple off its pile. It didn't often happen but when it did those hardworking women could do nothing but shout after us when we snatched the fruit from the ditch and ran
.

“Devils get you, little thieves!”

A Mussulman tailor sat on a rug next door to our house, a quiet hunched little man whose needle flashed faster than a slant of rain. He kept hens and a cock, the only ones at our end of the lane. The cock called him to prayers every morning but everyone else nearby also had to rub their eyes in the darkness when that fellow hopped up on the dung pile to shout. I admired the bird, his bright colours and the bossy walk he had. He thought he was a maharajah
.

On the other side was a potter who made large brown earthenware water pots that were fired and then sold in the bazaar. He had left his own district and people whispered that it was because of a murder. At any rate he lived on his own. He shouted when children came near his row of pots and we were afraid of him. The clay he used smelled quite strong, as if it had been freshly scooped from the river. But if you could lay hands on a piece of the soft dark stuff that had fallen in the grass you could make little animals and birds and leave them to bake in the sun. So we dared his shouts
.

My usual companions were Varsha and Bashanti, who were sisters, and Dinesh, their cousin. The girls' father kept three goats in their little yard and their job was to see that the animals got safe feeding during the day and rice water from those who would give it in the evenings. We wandered after them, keeping them out of houses but all the time watching everything that happened in the lane, collecting stories to bring home. I was desperate to make my mother smile again but even a cackle from Hemavati was a reward
.

I told them about boys who left dirty footprints on newly washed clothes spread to dry on the ground and the rocks by the water. I told them about the sadhu, the holy man dressed only in a string, who stood on one leg under the peepul tree for a whole day until sunset came. He kept his heavy matted hair off his shoulders with a trident that looked sharp enough to kill, yet a tailorbird had landed on it and picked straws from his head. I told them how Bashanti's father beat her when she tied nutshells round her ankles and started dancing outside her house. I even told lies about the monkeys, just to keep Hemavati happy. These were little brown monkeys, smaller than cats, that lived in the ruined temple up by the roadside. They took turns swarming down one lane after another. I told her about babies bitten and pots of rice carried off into the trees. But really the monkeys were like children, like us. The harm they did was very little and most people felt they were lucky creatures. I thought they liked to see what we were doing just as much as we liked to watch them
.

I soon noticed that Dinesh made his own journeys, ones that were not mapped out by goats. Every day he went past the last house and beyond, heading for wherever there might be stands of trees left, away from the lanes. His job was to gather neem and tulsi twigs and other leaves for the apothecaries in the bazaar. Dinesh had the most beautiful white teeth I had ever seen. This, he told us, was because he cleaned his teeth with the very thinnest neem twigs. He gave me some for myself
.

My teeth were fine, I thought, but I envied Dinesh his long walks by the river channels. He would see birds, I thought, though he never mentioned them and I was too shy to ask him what else he saw besides trees
.

I was getting tired of the goats and of never leaving the lane. I missed the trips my mother and I used to make, and not only the ones we shared with my father. Sometimes I went round the back of our house before Varsha and Bashanti had left their yard to come along towards ours, and I climbed the steps to our roof. I could hear Hemavati shouting through the open door at them
.

“She's gone, ages ago! That one rises early!”

Kneeling so that I was hidden from below, I could see all the way up the lane. It was here that I used to wait for my father's visits. Underneath, I knew the two girls would trudge along by the sluice ditches, after the goats-with-no-names. There would be washing and cooking and babies to watch but I had a taste for something different, something further away
.

Those mornings, when I saw Hemavati leave to go up to the stalls, I would come down again and slip back inside the house. I sat beside my mother on the bed, and stroked her arms or her hair, glad to have her to myself. I would take out my book of stories, written in my father's clear hand, and read her one. They were all her own stories, of course, but now she was taking no pleasure in them, none that I could see anyway
.

I was just a child. I thought that if my mother stirred, and was herself again, then surely our life would soon fit back into the picture I could recognize, with everything in the correct proportions. The people who used to be big – my father, my mother – would be their proper size again, not shrunken, not invisible
.

And Hemavati? That was a difficult question. Hemavati had turned into a larger person than I had thought she was. I would have to find a new place for her in our picture
.

But did I believe then that my father was gone? Not truly, not yet
.

“
HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!
”

At first I thought the choir was singing out Miss Hickey's word, loolally, which did not seem right for church. But no, all the little boys who were standing in front of the altar stalls had their mouths open on a lovelier word, a word that sounded like birdsong. The boys were dressed in loose white lace kurtas and long red skirts. They looked like little Christian angels and their high voices sounded like my mother when she sang panchali or her father's boat song.