Anila's Journey (6 page)

He stood up. All at once he had so much energy that he crackled.

“But I must leave you now. I have an engagement. What I propose, if it is agreeable to you, is that you and I take a walk in the city Gardens tomorrow morning. Bring your paper and pens. Then we can discuss how we might proceed and whether this might be at all a proper arrangement. But certainly on the evidence of these pages I cannot imagine I will find your equal in all of Bengal.”

He paused at the door.

“Ask Mr Minch for directions. He's not as dour as he looks. And come early.”

“
BUT ANILA, HOW CAN
you think Mrs Pan will ever agree to your plan? It's quite impossible. She will be so cross she won't want to look at you again. Then you'll never ever have any work here.”

It was dinner-time. The white city had closed its doors and shutters and gone back to sleep. There was nobody in Mrs Panossian's huge shop room except myself and Anoush so she felt free to come out from behind her counter. She stood beside me, biting her lip.

She had heard my story of meeting Mr Walker, and the birds and Mr Minch and the green china teapot, and she was pleased for me. Then she'd tried on my ring. It fitted her slender third finger perfectly and she turned the arms and heart out as I did.

“Fancy man, where are you hiding?” she giggled when I told her what that meant.

“If it was from anybody but Miss Hickey I would give it to you, I promise.”

She laughed and squeezed my arm and put the ring back on my little finger.

Then I told her about my idea.

“Just for the English Christmas, Anoush, you must come and stay with me. My little garden house will hold two string beds, I know it will. We can have our own holiday with nobody beckoning and you need not have to clean up and mind children when you should be free. We could even walk abroad in the evenings like two ladies.”

“Like two ladies,” said Anoush slowly. Her dark eyes were huge as a baby's.

We both knew that that was just my talk. Ladies did not walk abroad in the evenings on their own. But I had lived for years in a house that had no men in it and it seemed entirely possible to me that I should do that again. Poor Anoush had no idea that there might be such a world.

She was kin to Mrs Panossian, she called her Auntie, but there was no bedroom for Anoush above the shop. She lodged with a tea merchant's family. Every morning she had to dress and feed their children, pick up her bedroll from the floor and put it away, and then make her way to the shop. She felt trapped, I knew that.

Why, even standing inside Panossian's store was like being inside a giant coffee bean. There was the glorious smell, yes, from the coffee roasting oven. But more than that, everything that belonged inside the shop was dark brown: the shelves, the drawers, the thick overjackets or long pinafore aprons that the assistants had to wear over their clothes. Even the glass jars of preserves seemed stuffed with dark things: sugared plums, browned peaches, berries, juniper fruit. I thought of the bazaars in our city where fruits were huge and bright and tumbling over each other, ready to grow again where they fell. Was everything in Europe so very dull coloured, so small?

Yet Miss Hickey loved this shop. And coming here with her, after all, was how I came to know Anoush.

“Mrs Pan would never let me leave the Seropins. They pay her a little so I can get Vard, Liza and Mariam up and out in the morning and back to bed at night. And help Vard with his letters.”

“Oh, Anoush. That is such an injustice. For all that you do, you earn that money, not Mrs Pan.”

“But a free bed and free meals – and to get all this arranged for an unmarriageable orphan? That's what Madame would say from the top of her high mountain of fruit and coffee beans. How I'd love to…”

Anoush stopped speaking and swiftly moved back behind the counter. She picked up a piece of madras cloth from underneath it and started rubbing down the wood.

“Well, my dear Anila. And are you buying something or did you come to call on me? I believe the Hickey household left Calcutta today, am I correct?”

Mrs Panossian's voice had a high pitch, like a child's. Somehow it was a little menacing to hear this sound coming from a body that was anything but a child's. She had enormous bosoms and her face was pale and moon-shaped. Anoush said she was proud of her tiny feet but I thought they looked badly on her, as if a doll maker had run out of stuff at the end of his task. She always wore a bonnet with white streamers and a bow on its top and her dresses were black bombazine. Yet Mrs Pan never looked hot or bothered, never the smallest bit
loolally
. That was what Miss Hickey called English ladies who became strange in the heat and dust of India.

“Yes, Mrs Panossian. Miss Hickey left for Madras on the morning tide.”

“And you, Anila, where are you staying? Have you decided to be sensible and come and work here with your little friend? I can always use a hard worker and I pay a fair wage.”

She turned her head like an owl, to see what Anoush was doing, but clever Anoush was still polishing, her head facing towards the windows.

“You are very kind,” I said. “I think I shall have a position soon but it is not going to be for long.”

Before she could take another run at her questions I decided to be brave.

“Mrs Panossian – I have a place to stay just for now and what I wonder is, do you think Anoush could be free from her lodgings to spend Christmas Day there with me? Just one day and night? Or perhaps two?”

Anoush's head was so low down it was practically polishing the counter on its own. Even the shop seemed to be holding its breath in the moment that followed my plea.

“A place of your own? And where would that be, child? For I could not send my own kin to a place that might compromise her, you know.”

Her small round eyes bore into me. The words were cruel but I do not think she actually meant to be so. She was being plain. I guessed what she thought – that I had somehow returned to live again in the little house of long ago, with Malati and Hemavati. Mrs Panossian knew all about that part of my life and I wished she did not.

I took a deep breath. I could not afford to have Mrs Pan as my enemy.

“It's just a little place that Miss Hickey arranged for me. She wanted me to be safe until I became settled in a position. I would dearly love to have Anoush there for English Christmas Day, so that she can have a holiday too. And I have money left to me to buy some festival food in your store, Mrs Panossian.”

I looked sideways. Anoush was approaching us, her face flushed.

“Oh, Auntie,” she said. “Just this once. Please?”

Mrs Panossian looked from one of us to the other. Then the door opened and its bell pinged. Two bearers approached the counter with a long list and Anoush moved away to serve them.

“You are too close with your story, girl,” Mrs Panossian said to me. “You must tell me whereabouts in the city you are staying.”

“It's in Garden Reach,” I said, looking straight at her. She would probably have sent a boy after me anyway, her curiosity was so roused. Mrs Panossian was not one to leave questions sticking in her head overnight like hairpins.

“It's in a little garden tea house that Miss Hickey saw restored for me. I shall not be there for long at any rate. I hope to have news of my position tomorrow. But the day after that is the English Christmas Day.”

Mrs Panossian raised her eyebrows at that, as well she might.

I hardly knew why Christmas mattered so much to me. As the Reverend suspected, and Mrs Pan knew, I had not been baptized. My mother's devotions still beat in me like a pulse and I truly loved the way our gods were close to us, with all their adventures and their moods. From them came the music and colours and excitements of our puja festivals in the misty season. Miss Hickey never made any difficulties for me. But she believed that I should go to church services with her nevertheless.

“It will help you, Anila,” she'd said. “People will assume you are one of us. For myself, I am only interested in the kindness suggested to us by religion, not in its show.”

So I went, and they were dreary affairs, those services, with ladies and gentlemen pressed into their pews like sticks of cane in a box. The rector climbed into a little tower and talked to us about God's mercy until our teeth hurt. The only service I liked was Christmas.

“Very well then,” said Mrs Panossian at last. Her high voice had something in it I could not quite make out. It was hardly a smile because her face was still.

“But my Anoush must be back with us for the day after the holy feast.”

Poor Anoush was still reaching up and pulling things out of drawers but I was sure she had heard the good news because she was smiling at the bearers as if they were not one but two Krishnas come to visit. Then Gabriel, the old shop boy, came through the door at the back of the shop with his brown coat bursting open after his lunch and Mrs Panossian told him to help Anoush with the big order. The doorbell pinged again. More customers.

“You run along now, Anila,” she said. “Tomorrow night you can come back for Anoush. I'll tell her the news myself.”

MY FATHER DID NOT
really care to spend time in our house down the lane. He wished he could afford better and he was unhappy about Malati and Hemavati in many ways. Most of all, I think, because they were so different from my mother, who would never have danced for strangers, whose voice was gentle, who was little more than a girl
.

“That hyena,” he called Hemavati. Poor Malati and her soldier, he thought them stupid
.

But they bothered him, more simply, because they were there all the time, or most of the time anyway. He wanted us to have our own house but he could not yet pay for one on his own, he told my mother, even though he had got a promotion in the Company. Houses in the English part of the city were very expensive. She would have lived in a bamboo house with a thatched roof but he would not have that. So she had to share, that we might have bricks round us and a firm flat roof over our heads
.

In monsoon we stayed indoors when my father called, even though my mother and I were both itching to run out into the lane and stand under the rains, laughing until we were soaked through. He could not understand this. He never travelled out during that season without his tall black umbrella and even though it was so warm, he would button up his jacket in the rains
.

“This is what we do in Ireland,” he said sternly when we teased him. “You can catch a chill from the damp even in summer. My poor brother died from a summer chill.”

So we stayed in our corner of the house, behind the screen. My mother cooked for her little family which she loved to do. She liked the way my father would not eat until she joined us, though she told me this would not be approved in her village
.

One year during monsoon when I was four or five my father decided to teach me to read. It was a long business that continued over many afternoons
.

“Ask your mother for a story,” he would say. She would tell me a story – about the squirrel who helped King Rama build a bridge to rescue his stolen wife, about Hanuman the monkey god and his daring monkey army, about the golden birds of Ayodhya. No matter if food was smoking or rice was sticking in the pot, she had stories
.

I had to tell him the story in English. Then he would take out the pages he had brought with him and start to write the story down. He was clever because he made the written-down story mostly of very simple words, and he drew pictures alongside the words that looked difficult. Then he got me to read the story back as he had written it. When I could do that, he wrote me out a picture key
.

“This is your alphabet,” he said. “Your ABC. You must learn to write as well as you can draw, Anila. Practise.”

He told me some stories too but he did not have my mother's gift for relating them. My favourite was the story of the great flood and the animals that were saved. Together we drew a picture of the ark filled with all the creatures I knew: mongooses, elephants, horses, toddy cats, monkeys, storks, vultures, parakeets, bulbuls. Two of everything. My father added a couple of black river shrimps sitting in a bowl of water and waving their long feelers through one of the ark's windows. I tried to make my Noah look like the vendor of sweets who came down our lane, a kind man who gave us children his broken crumbs
.

When we had eaten our meal, and my father had gone back to his lodgings with his umbrella over his head like a storm cloud, I folded the alphabet key and put it into my peacock-feather bowl. Then my mother and I rushed out into the rain with our dishes to wash them off, and ourselves too. We never caught a chill
.

But I did learn to read and write because of monsoon
.

The rest of the year, we left the house when my father visited. Unless Malati and Hemavati were both away, of course, but that was rare enough
.

On his special drawing days, he brought a buggy to the top of the lane and walked to our door and dipped his head in
.

“Anna and Anila – we're going on a picnic! Come along, quickly, before the horse bolts!”

He always said that though the poor buggy horses were too slow and too stupid to dream that they could ever do anything so exciting
.

Then my mother would turn quite pink and she rushed to dip a cloth in the water bowl. She rubbed my face and hands, then her own, and dipped a finger into her jar of red sindur, to rub some of the vermilion powder into her hair parting
.

“We're ready!” she said. And she sounded like a child. Her voice sounded, even in my ears, like mine
.

We went up the lane and my father lifted me into the buggy and then handed my mother up, as if she was an English lady getting into a carriage. When I was little I sat on my father's knee. Later I sat on the tiffin box he had packed and brought with him for our picnic. The buggy driver flicked his whip and the horse and buggy trundled towards the city. Then we looked out for the turnings that led to the loading ghats where the ships were supplied with goods
.