Anila's Journey (14 page)

“I can speak your language as well as you can,” I said to him. “Can you speak mine?”

He laughed.

“Jabber's no language, whatever foolishness the master has swallowed down with his whisky.”

He reached forward then and, before I could twist away from him, he thrust his hand under my poor paper shield and squeezed my right breast through the thin cotton tunic. As if it were a fruit in a bag. As if it were his to handle. I managed to scratch the back of his hand before he took it away. But he laughed and held his hand to his mouth, licking the cut as if his own blood were a food.

“How old are you, anyway? Fourteen by the feel, I'd say. Nigh on fifteen. Or maybe you rice-eaters never grow anything better than that. Tell me, is that so, my black kitten?”

He laughed and made paws of his hands, pushing them at my face.

All the air had left my lungs. I couldn't speak.

“And that's no dress at all. I've known Indian dark-women, more than a few, I can tell you, and they'd not dream of getting themselves up in kit like that. What class of a creature are you, anyway? Down my way we'd call you a hinny.”

He moved away then, abruptly, going forward so swiftly that I knew even before I looked up that someone was coming. My body blazed like a dirty torch as Mr Walker came towards me. “Dirty”, like the word hinny, whatever it meant, lodged now in my brain.

“Anila, come forward with me and talk to Madan. I think he may have some news for you.”

He picked up my notebook and read out the same words that Carlen had chosen. But he said them beautifully in his deep rich voice.

“Belly white, Anila? Is that English belly white, as in our pale skins?”

He laughed but I knew he was mocking himself, not me. I could not even force a laugh myself, but I felt my blood flowing again and the jags in my stomach grew less painful.

“It's the white a buffalo can be underneath,”

I could hear the dullness in my own voice. I tried to cover with a cough and said more than I needed to.

“That makes it not really white at all but a creamy grey with brown mixed in.”

Mr Walker's eyebrows shot up. Should I tell him what had happened? I doubted I could find the words. Not in Bangla, not in English.

“Ah,” was all he said.

Madan looked up as we came forward into his little domain of ropes and canvas. Carlen was there too, hands busy, but his eyes were all for the passing crafts on the river. I kept him severely out of my glance.

“Sahib tells me your mother grew up on the river,” Madan said. “Where was that?”

I told him the name of the village. He threw his rope across to Carlen and came to my side.

“We pass there tomorrow,” he said. “She really grew up by the river?”

What else would come to trouble my poor stomach this day? I clutched it to ease the sudden shock and stared down into the water. Tomorrow I would be passing my grandfather's village. Yet I didn't know whether he was alive or dead.

When I looked at him Madan had a strange expression.

“Yes, her father was a boatman,” I told him. “She lived there until she was fourteen. There were just the two of them and she helped him with the work like a son.”

Now he was staring at me like a person does who has met you once a long time ago and is trying to remember your name.

“Was your mother's name Annapurna, whose father was Arjun?” he asked, at last.

My legs and hands were shaking and I was glad to sit down, on a cask. I laid my notebook down on the deck but when I saw there was water puddling near it I picked it up again. My throat had closed itself off so I could hardly whisper back to him.

“Yes.”

Madan beamed, obviously satisfied with his good memory.

“I know Arjun,” he said. “But I never knew that he had a granddaughter. We knew Annapurna had married an Englishman. Many young men wept tears into the river that year, I can tell you. So, that's the way, is it? Well, Arjun is a good man, a very good man.”

There was a roar from the back of the boat, from Benu. Quickly Madan pushed Carlen to one side and dragged hard on one of the short ropes he held loose. The sail tilted sharp towards the centre, as we skimmed along just inches away from the branch of an old willow that had fallen over and stretched itself far out over the river. Another flat boat was coming down the river and the men on board laughed rudely at us for our near escape.

Madan turned his broad back to them. He looked at Carlen.

“You are no boatman,” he said quietly, and this was worse, somehow, than his roar. Carlen's skin flushed red, even his hands, I noticed. I wished he was gone. Back to the city, back to England, anywhere but on our boat. I did not want this man to hear another word about my mother. That was what had taken his attention from the ropes, I was sure of it.

“Carlen, the afternoon is well advanced. I think we shall eat soon,” Mr Walker said. “Will you take care of things in the cabin?”

He looked anxious, I thought, for all that he was the master here. When Carlen moved away inside, he spread his hands and sighed.

“Carlen's genius is to be a jack-of-all-trades,” he said in a low voice. “Perhaps he will learn a little more mastery from today's lesson.”

Madan shrugged. He turned to me again.

“Does Arjun know you are passing by?”

I shook my head.

“I have never met him.”

I could feel tears, hot in my eyes. And I could see through them that Mr Walker was making signs at Madan not to question me further. I knew then he would tell him my story when he got a chance, so that Madan might understand why tomorrow we would sail past my grandfather's village and not call on him. Would he tell him also that my parents were not married, as he believed? It mattered little. In our society when an Indian girl leaves with a white man her family might be happy at her fortune, but they also understand she cannot ever come back again to be with them. Madan must surely have guessed this already, just by looking at my skin.

But it was all so close. I had not dreamed it would be so close, or that I would ever hear news of my grandfather in this way. For all that his dhotis had kept me warm when I was little, I had not felt his protection in my life since then. Now that he was there, somewhere upriver along the peaceful banks, surely there was some way that I could see him for myself, discover all that my mother came from?

WHEN WE MOVED INTO
Mr Bristol's house it was clear from the beginning that he was an honest man. That is, of course, if you leave out the matter of the story collection he had mentioned. Though he did indeed write things down, he was not really gathering tales from anybody, we had discovered. Which was perhaps just as well, as my mother was in no mood to tell any at that time. But there really was a bag of money. It was all his own, or so it seemed, and it was in the matter of this money that he showed his honesty
.

He asked if my mother could read a document and when she said no, she could not, but that I could, he gave me the page that he had written
.

“Read it and then you can explain it to your mother,” he said
.

It was difficult because there were many words I did not understand but he pronounced them for me and told me their meanings when I asked. I knew that it was useful for me to learn to read such long words. My English had become much weaker since my father had gone away
.

Mr Bristol told us that the document was a contract of service. He said that he was known in London as a man of the law who believed in justice and fair play
.

“I am against all slavery,” he said. “Some people consider these kinds of arrangements to be a form of slavery. I wish to make it clear that your mother is to be a paid intimate who will receive a small salary that will accrue to her, as well as food and benefits in kind, as long as this household shall last. That she may leave my household at any time and, should that be her choice, she will then receive those monies that have accumulated to her. That you, her dependant, will also receive food and benefits in kind as long as this household shall last. That any child born of this union will be acknowledged as my full dependant to be educated and provided for until its coming of age even in the event of your mother choosing to depart my household.”

And there was more. Mr Bristol asked me to sign my mother's name to the document
.

“But only if she agrees to everything itemized in it,” he said
.

Back in our little house in the lane my mother had told me what her dealings with Mr Bristol would be when we moved into his house on Old Court House Street
.

“He wants me to be his bibi,” she said. “But I do not love him and he knows that. He does not love me but he finds me beautiful. I shall have to sleep with him when he wants me to. That means there might be a child. But I think he is kind enough in his way. He thinks you are a clever girl. As clever as any English child he knows, he says.”

But still she hung her head when I told her what was in the document
.

The house in Old Court House Street had two storeys and a flat roof but apart from the roof it was not like our old house in any way. A tall brick wall ran in front of it, cutting the house and its garden off from the street. You went in and out through green gates that were opened and closed by a durwan, a paid gatekeeper
.

The garden was planted with a pomegranate tree and soft springy grass. A straight pebble path led from the gates to the front door. Halfway along the path a large stone bowl sat on the ground with water in it. It was like a tiny tank. Two white fish creatures, also made of stone, reared up in the middle of the bowl. They blew water out of their mouths up into the air where it hung in a fine thread and then fell back into the bowl
.

“They're dolphins,” Mr Bristol told me when I asked him what they were. “The king of France had such dolphins at the palace of Versailles, I'm told.”

My mother told me later that the stone creatures looked nothing like the dolphins she used to see leaping in the river when she was young
.

Mr Bristol warned me not to drink the fountain water, that it was not safe. But all the songbirds in the garden came to the bowl to drink and some of them took baths in it, fluffing up their feathers and dipping their faces in the water
.

The street beyond the wall was so wide that our lane would have fitted into it about five times over. But I could no longer run outside as I used to on the lane, nor were my mother and I permitted to take a walk together on our own. If I climbed the pomegranate tree I could see the carriages and palanquins hurrying by in the mornings and evenings, and the people parading all day long, but my mother begged me not to do this
.

“Mr Bristol will be angry if he sees you up there,” she said. “Please, for my sake, Anila, don't be so fidgety, stay still and be quiet.”

She used the word ushkush for fidgety, a word that always used to make her laugh when she heard other mothers use it. It was such a funny word, she said, and yet they always sounded so cross when they said it. But she was not laughing now
.

So, the only outside life that I saw after that was the top halves of elephants, and those only if they happened to be passing on our side of the street. I could see their eyes, if they were tall elephants, and their painted foreheads and bright cotton headdresses. The mahouts and the people riding tall in the howdahs behind them could see down into our garden and into all the others on Old Court House Street. I envied them their view. The durwan always shouted or shook a stick at me if I went near his gates
.

My mother and I shared a room most of the time, a room on the second storey at the back of the house. Underneath our window, alongside the cookhouse, was a long house where the women servants slept. At least we had not been put there. Sometimes my mother went downstairs to talk to the old ayah, Rupa, but Rupa was a shy woman. She was also loyal to her master
.

Mr Bristol's room was upstairs at the front of the house, and he liked to stand in his window looking out at what was happening in the street outside. From the garden I could see his plump figure framed there. Sometimes he waved to me
.

All the windows of the house had shutters and so, even though the windows were tall, some with real glass in them, we could make our room dark and cool in an instant by pulling our shutters closed. When my mother wasn't there, I liked to play with the shutters, opening and closing them as if they were the gates to an enchanted palace and I the durwan with the key
.

We had a wide comfortable bed with linen sheets, and a pillow for each of us, a chest for our clothes and a long mirror that you could tilt up and down. My mother had brought her Durga and the little altar with us and she talked to the goddess even more than before, if that was possible. But there were not so many other mementos remaining from the house on the lane. I had cried when my mother refused to bring the bird quilt with us
.

“That is all in the past now,” she said. “We have everything we need here to make us comfortable. Besides as long as Hemavati has it, she will always remember us.”

I knew then that the quilt now reminded her of my father rather than her own father
.

Our clothes were new, and, my mother's especially, very beautiful, far lovelier than anything we had ever owned. Mr Bristol ordered saris, scarves and shawls from the big bazaar for her, and a dressmaker came to fit us both for sets of stitched clothes. Silks and brocades and fine Dacca muslins for my mother, cottons and one good silk for me. But we would soon be the same size, the dressmaker told us, and then could double up our clothes and be twice as rich
.