Anila's Journey (27 page)

“Little Jonaki,” said Meenakshi proudly. “We nearly lost her to the fever. But look at her now.”

Her name meant firefly. How pretty! I picked Jonaki up and then led my grandfather to meet Mr Walker. They shook hands like Englishmen. But in a moment, Arjun had found Mr Walker's Bangla speech to be an astonishing thing and he called his brother and the other men over to hear it.

“Listen to the sahib,” he said to them. “He is better than any of the storytellers who come to the village.”

Mr Walker smiled at that, with real pleasure. He told a joke about the English that made the men laugh. He ran a hand across his brow to push back his straying hair and just then he looked as he had done the first time I met him. I thought suddenly, this is what he is good at, this is his work, talking easily so that others will chat to him and share their knowledge. He had done so with Madan, with the saltworkers and, long ago, surely this was what he did to win the respect of the horse thief, Carlen.

He had done exactly so with me.

As we began to walk towards Arjun's thatched house, Meenakshi told me what she remembered of my mother.

“I was seven or eight when she left. They were very bad times so Arjun felt she would have a better life with the sahib who loved her. He always feared she would die like her mother. That was a time of famine. It's better now, we do well enough here. Annapurna was always kind to me, she told me stories and sang songs to me. She was a clever person.”

She looked at me curiously.

“All those men! And you are not married? To the sahib? Or that handsome fisherman with you, he looks a suitable boy, are you betrothed?”

My heart jumped. I dared not look round but I hoped Benu was not nearby to hear her, nor his father either. Meenakshi's voice was the kind that carried.

“To Mr Walker? Oh no, Meenakshi, but he is the kindest man in the world. And Benu, why he's no older than I am. You see, I live in the English city now and girls there do not marry so young.”

“And your father, he allows you to travel around in this way with men? Or is he dead too?”

She was a little blunt, perhaps, Meenakshi was. But I told her then some of what I had rehearsed to tell Arjun. It was not indeed so very different from the truth, only in my story there was never a Malati or a Hemavati, never a Mr Bristol, nor any big house in Old Court House Street, only the kindness of our good neighbours the Hickeys after we suffered the mysterious loss of my father, their countryman. My father, who was now to be restored to me, as if in a fairy tale.

But Meenakshi lost the final details of my story because as we ducked our heads and came into Arjun's house she caught sight of her oldest boy with rice in his hand and grains dropped on the clean swept floor. She roared and banished him outside though I begged her not to. I was glad that Manik had done nothing so terrible and I rubbed his head as we settled ourselves on the floor to eat. Arjun insisted I sat beside him. Even the little girls sat, thrilled into silence. Meenakshi would not sit down with such a company of men but she stood close by to hear our stories.

It was a real feast we had, with river shrimps and white fish, rice, spiced vegetables and dal in different colours, bright as paint, with sweet coconut and payesh and lots of creamy milk to pour from neat clay jugs. Mr Walker was given the honour of a bamboo spoon to eat with but he too had a leaf for a plate, like the rest of us. He ate well and looked happy, I thought, and my old uncle had his full attention. From what I could hear both of them were intent on talking about the old tales. They were showing off in their way, I realized, just as the small boys were, all of them trying to capture the eyes of Madan and Benu, the giant boatman and his handsome son.

I told Arjun that I still had my mother's Durga altar, the same one at which she prayed for him, every day of her life. He bowed his head.

“That Durga, I remember it well,” he said slowly. “It was her mother's and, before that, her grandmother's.”

He heard the story of my father then and was shaken. His face changed and in its lines I could see my mother's rare temper gathering like a storm.

“I have never heard of such a thing. A man to forget his family?”

Mr Walker must have had one ear turned in our direction for he leant forward now.

“With respect, sir, Patrick Tandy acted like a hero,” he said to Arjun. He laid out better than I had done, the details of my father's story, the ship, the slaves, the wicked rock that had stolen his memories.

“Only the prayers of your own dear daughter kept him from meeting a hero's death. Her blessings have now restored him to Anila in a way that is closer to enchantment than anything I have heard before in my life. We can only imagine how the poet Kalidasa would have been thrilled to hear such a story told along the great river.”

My grandfather sat still for a moment. Then he nodded. But I could hardly keep from reaching out and clasping Mr Walker's hands inside my own. I had thought him unmoved by Carlen's letter but I was wrong. His pain had been too strong at the time and I had demanded overmuch of him.

“Then you have been alone in the world all this time, my child?” my grandfather asked. He reached forward and ran a finger, ever so gently, down my nose, so that I knew he wished to mark in particular this feature that we, all three generations, shared.

But I had not been alone, of course, and Arjun marvelled then when I told him about the Hickeys and their horses and their great garden going down to the river where the ships ran by, day and night, with the tides from the sea.

“You would see budgerows passing by too,” I told him, remembering what my mother had told me of her father's ambition. “But the ships we could see are taller than the tallest palms and their sails are like fields.”

“Then Annapurna must have thought of me often,” he said, sadly. “We loved boats, the two of us.”

From my bag I took out the drawing of my mother and handed it to my grandfather. There was not much light in the house but I could see Annapurna's beautiful face quite clearly, for Mr Hickey's outlines were strong.

“You hold it in front for me,” he said.

He stared so long at the drawing and so intensely that I thought he was moved beyond speech again. But then he motioned for me to put it away.

“I cannot really see what you are showing me. I know it is there but I cannot say what it is. I think my eyes have been fixed on the river for too long. But don't be upset, child. I see your mother when I look at you.”

FOR ALL THEIR WISH
to make haste, Mr Walker and Madan were happy to let my mother's people keep them from the river until late that same day. More visitors arrived, more people were fed. Meenakshi spun like a top and lost patience with everyone in the household.

Each person had come to look at me, they said, though for some I suspected Meenakshi's food was the bigger attraction. They all said the same things, that my mother had been good and beautiful and that I was full of good fortune to have grown and prospered as I had. Some touched me as if I were a fount of good luck. I gave up trying to remember their names.

All of my own party cleverly extricated themselves from these ceremonies. Once when I walked outside to bid proper farewell to the most ancient of the visitors, I saw Benu on the path talking with a girl of my age, a girl from the village who had not come inside. Shy Benu was talking! Manik was leaning back against his legs, tired for once, and Benu was stroking his hair. He didn't see me or, if he did, he didn't look my way.

I was not sure how I felt about that.

While I was inside being dutiful an important arrangement was under deliberation outside. Meenakshi heard the first noises of the matter from the small children who ran in and out, panting out their news as payment for a few extra morsels. Each time she sent out a wiser and older child to listen and provide us with more details. How I longed to go out myself!

That was how I heard that Manik, our little Manik, was to stay in the house with Arjun.

“Another mouth for me to feed,” Meenakshi grumbled happily. “A real boy for your grandfather to train for his boat. A grandson delivered as a gift from the river herself!”

Mr Walker had hummed and hawed a little about this decision, we heard next. He felt that he should take the boy to the city and have him taught the ways of a scholar, for Manik had shown himself to be a clever child. Or else that Madan himself should take the boy, he said, for the child already loved Benu like a brother.

“But Benu loves him like a brother too!” I blurted out.

Meenakshi narrowed her eyes.

“It is the right choice,” she said. “Look again.”

We stood under the thatch awning for a while then and I saw Manik running along the paths and climbing the mango trees with the other boys, laughing as he went higher than anybody else. Then I knew Arjun's offer was the right one.

“Now I am dadamoshay twice in one day,” Arjun called out when he spotted us. He rubbed his hands in pleasure. “To my own Anila and, as Durga's extra gift, to this little fellow too, though he's not my blood.”

Then there was my father. For all that he had done in error, nonetheless I heard that I must bring him back to the village where he had found my mother. Mr Walker's words had taken root and my father was now a hero who would receive a welcome proper to his kind.

That was easy to say, I thought. I would not think about such a plan until I had found him.

The shadows were lengthening along the path to the river when Arjun finally came inside again and took my hand.

“I have a gift for you, Anila. Come with me.”

“I want Anila to come on her own,” he said firmly then, for the children were clamouring to follow us. And then, politely, he dismissed Mr Walker too. “It will not be for long, sahib, for I know you are keen now to make good time.”

He drew me out then into his little garden and I looked left where the river ran, and then right, up the winding path to the village houses. That was a much larger place than the miserable collection of huts where we had found Manik. It was full of life too. Men and women were working and sitting and talking, in the fields, outside the houses, under the trees, by the water. Human voices were carried on the air like birdsong, though there was plenty of that too because koels and hoopoes were calling from the trees and, as I looked up, a rope of geese passing high overhead snorted like pigs. Somewhere nearby there must be a field that had nothing but white flowers in it in autumn, the field of kash where my mother used to lie and look up at all the birds that had stories for her.

But I knew that I could not live here.

Perhaps if I were Manik's age, or even the age I was when Mr Bristol had come boating up the creek all those years ago. But I had been changed too much by all that had happened to me in the city and by all the people I had met. Now there were oils and varnishes mixed into my life, plum-cake and Christmas songs, music on a keyboard and bound books on shelves. Even the city's busy streets made a beat in my head, and the river that flowed past the white palaces was so very different from this one. The sight of ships heading south into the far world lifted my spirits. This world had stories much stranger than my own, this world that had swallowed up my father.

I will never know if, that day, Arjun had been tempted to break tradition and ask that I, rather than Manik, stay in his home. If he had been, he was also surely watching my face and reading my mind. He never spoke of it and I was glad for I would not have hurt him for the world.

“Your mother and your father, they loved each other? For all that they were so different?”

I looked at him, surprised.

“Oh, yes, they did.”

“And that is why, perhaps, she died, even though there was plenty of food and a strong roof and even her own lovely baby one with her. She could not understand why your father did not come back.”

He was puzzling it out for himself, I could see. He felt responsible for he had let her go with my father in the first place. My heart twisted as I saw the story he was making, reading it across his eyes, his brow, his mouth, as well as in his words. It was not a rightful story because he did not know all the circumstances.

He took my hand as we stepped past a cropped prickly hedge and down into a wide water meadow. There were a few buffaloes here but nothing else I could see, except some tall herons in the distance where the meadow turned to marsh. Or were they herons?

“Look, my girl, this is what I want you to see. Watch them as we move close.”

And as we did, I saw that the birds were not herons at all. Nor storks, which was my second thought, but a common city stork had none of this bird's slender grace and beauty. Its body was grey and grey-white and made a curve down over its delicate pink legs so that the bird's form was like a beautiful letter from the Persian books. Its head was a deep rose colour under a grey cap.

My grandfather pointed towards a group of four or five.

“They are this year's young ones,” he said. “See how their heads are still pale and how they drop their feathers as Jonaki will lose her curls.”

There were fifteen birds in all.

Arjun stopped me when we were still a distance away. From the side of his mouth he made a strange call, high-pitched but soothing nonetheless. Then something extraordinary happened. As if they were dancers, the adult birds started to perform for us. First, they stretched their long necks to the sky as if they were saluting Surya. Then they formed pairs, bowed to each other and began to bend and sway in dainty steps.

I had to hold my mouth to stop my exclamations and my fingers tingled to draw what I saw. But the birds broke up their magic circle when one of the young birds who was not dancing decided it was time to sit down. He made it such a slow business, as if trying to remember the instructions for folding himself up, that his parents came away from the others to watch over him. They bent over and linked their necks to his when he finally sat as if they were proud of his work. I thought how lucky he was to have them.