Anila's Journey (15 page)

She was a tiny person with grey stripes in her hair and a laugh like a magpie. She was not from Calcutta at all, she told us, nor even Bengal, but from the holy city of Kashi, that the English called Benares, far up on the Ganga. Mr Bristol said she was in great demand among the highest society English ladies in the city for making their dresses and costumes
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“In London, she would have her own shop on Bond Street, and dozens of seamstresses working for her,” he said. “Imagine.”

My mother admired her fine stitching and liked to run her fingers up the seams of our brand-new tunics and blouses, marvelling at the smoothness
.

“If you could only learn this trade, Anila,” she said to me, “you need never have a life like mine.”

My mother dreamed of such things for me though I think she knew I would have been like a caged monkey with such work. She had no further dreams for herself, that was clear. Nor stories either. I was the one now who told our old stories over and over, trying to make her smile
.

She attended Mr Bristol as he wished, and not always merely to his bedroom. When he had gentlemen callers to the house, persons from the law courts and the Company, or friends from the hunt, he liked her to be in the room too. She might chop their cigars with a knife, or keep their hookahs, their hubble-bubbles as they called them, watered for smoking. She cut up their tobacco, handed round their drinks, and even offered paan to those who had learned to like the taste. If they took their drinks into Mr Bristol's billiards room, she had to go in there too and pick the coloured balls out of the table nets for them and set them back on its green top
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“That Mr Percy said it's because my hands are smaller than the male servants' hands and not so greasy,” she told me. “He dares say that, whose hands are the filthiest in the city!”

Mr Bristol was kind in his fashion, and respectful to my mother at all times during these occasions, she said. But several of his friends were anything but
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“They are disgusting people,” she said. “They use foul language. They spend a fortune on pomade for their hair but they do not even leave the room to take their toilet. I tell you, they have a great bowl in a corner of the room where they relieve themselves. And this in front of a woman, even if I am only a bibi!”

She was supposed to sprinkle rosewater to take away the smells
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After the first few occasions like that my mother would have weeping fits for days. Later, and this was worse, she would laugh as she told the story over and over, laugh until she was taken over by hiccups and had to gulp for breath. I hated that. She sounded like Hemavati
.

The strange thing was that I knew Hemavati would think our present life was wonderful. That if I could slip away to the lane for an afternoon and tell her about the silken saris, about our airy room, and the garden with the fountain, about all the foods we ate now that were putting flesh back on our bones and gloss in our hair, that Hemavati's eyes would grow huge with wonder, or envy, or both, and that she would not laugh at all
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Of course there was no question of doing that. All I could do to amuse myself was read. Most of the books in Mr Bristol's glass-covered bookshelf were dull law books, bound in leather, which I hated to touch. But there were some cloth-bound books too, mainly travellers' tales, which interested Mr Bristol most, he told me. Of course that reminded me of the lie he had told me by the river but I said nothing. My favourite of these was by a man whose ship had left him in countries ruled by giants, and madmen, and horses who could talk wisely. Mr Bristol told me that the story was all make-believe, that there were no such countries as these and that as far as he was concerned India was the strangest country he had ever travelled in
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I must have looked cross to hear this for I wanted to believe all stories were true. He told me then that I made a face like a thunderclap and I should banish it smartly, for he liked to see sunny faces in his house
.

“
THIS BIRD WILL TAKE
the fish from my hands, clever one!”

Madan was admiring my new drawings. In his hands my large notebook shrank to storybook size but I noticed that he turned the pages over as carefully as a scribe. He paused over a heron that I had taken some time with.

“See how patient he is, this fisher bird. His legs will hold him there till Hanuman throws a bridge across the Ganga.”

Yes, I believed I had captured the heron's secret, as my mother would say, for all the while I was staring at the grey bird it could not see me, nor indeed any of us, as we set about our separate tasks. Benu had steered our boat into a tent of green coolness under a willow tree.

While I drew, Madan and Benu landed fish from the end of the boat, Carlen fried them and Hari laid out scoops of delicious rice for each of us. Mr Walker insisted on his tea then, but the rest of us drank water that Hari had drawn from a tank in a field behind us. Carlen tipped his clay cup back as if he were enjoying the drink, but he said nothing to anyone and stared off into the big sky across the river.

Behind our tree the land stretched away in faded colours, yellow for old mustard, grey where a few empty paddy fields were still flooded and sad without their rice, brown where the fields had had their winter cuttings. There were little islands of trees here and there where the hamlets were and people moved between them like flies on a rope.

“Madan, I will show you another drawing.”

I stepped into the empty cabin and went to the cupboard where my leather case was stored. In among the bird paintings that I had brought along to show Mr Walker that first day was another loose-leaf drawing on thick cream paper. I kept it between boards for safety, wrapped in oilcloth. It was not my drawing.

That is, it was not by my hand. But it belonged to me.

Madan looked at the drawing for a long time. Then he smiled and gave it back to me.

“I don't need this to see that you are very like Annapurna,” he said. “She travelled on this boat once too, with Arjun, when she was just a little one. And I will tell you something. She did not have the fine clothes of that picture but nor did she have these things!”

He pointed to my trousers again and laughed so that his belly shook. But I felt a glow inside me. Madan was pleased with me, I knew; the same way that I was pleased with the kingfishers I saw that morning flashing blue fire; the same way I liked his own great size and his twisted moustaches.

“May I see it, Anila?”

Mr Walker stood up and threw the dregs of his tea over the side of the boat before reaching for the portrait of my mother.

“She is very beautiful,” he said, after a long look. “I can see why you want to keep it by you. I have nothing like this to remember my sister by, alas, for my father was a strict churchman who thought portraiture was the devil's own sorcery.”

His face was set hard as he said this. I passed him the heron sketch then, in case it might cheer him. Though of course a heron was not a new bird to any of us.

“You could bring this to the Royal Society in London, Anila,” he said when he had finished his scrutiny, “and they would find it fit to hang it on their walls. I'm very pleased with you.”

He held the page up so that Benu and Hari could see it. Hari nodded his head gravely.

“I remember what you tell us, sahib,” he said. “We must all be looking for the great birds for Miss Anila tomorrow and every day we are on the river.”

Benu was looking at my heron as if a star had fallen out of the sky onto the page. I reached for a piece of drawing paper from my case, sketched a quick copy for him, signed it, and put it into his hands, along with the black crayon. He blushed but folded the margins of the page to make a frame round the bird and kept it in the flat of his hand, looking at it.

I returned my two precious drawings to the cabin and when I came out on deck again, though it was only a few moments, the sun had dipped down below the far side of the river and Mr Walker was making arrangement for our sleeping quarters.

“Anila, you shall choose. Would you care for a fine soldier's tent all to yourself? I should be nearby in a similar one and the men would stay together on board. Or you might prefer to take the salon to yourself, pull the blinds down and construct your own apartment. In that case Carlen will take the tent and the others will stretch out on the deck. It is a fine arrangement either way, this beautiful night.”

“Oh, I choose the tent!”

“I thought you might. Well, it's no elegant affair, take my word. But we'll steal some of the cushions from the cabin while Madan looks the other way.”

Madan pretended to look fearsome but it was Carlen whose face was the study as he and Hari wrestled the lengths of canvas and poles off the boat and across to a flat mound that Mr Walker declared was dry as a biscuit.

I hadn't thought when I spoke but I realized that Carlen now had another reason to vent spite on me, whatever his first cause might be. His face told me that he had wanted the favour of being set apart from everyone else, there with Mr Walker on that little mound.

When he had finished his work with the poles and the ropes my little tent was standing up with a sharp gable on it. I thanked him though the words stuck in my throat and I hoped his scratched hand was hurting him. But he said nothing, just walked away back to the boat, his fair hair catching the light the stars threw down. There was no moonlight, only the black moon with a tiny moonbaby in her arms, ready for sleep herself.

I stepped into the tent and pulled the flaps across. Inside it was dark, though gradually I could make out a glow cast by the remains of our cooking fire. It was not tall enough for me to stand up but it felt safe and dry and cosy. Like something an animal would make if it had hands, I thought, a clever bear or a lion.

I spread the cushions and arranged the rugs that Carlen had thrown into a corner. It was quite cool now, cooler than it had been any of the nights I had spent in my little iron house. I supposed that the city, with all its palaces and houses and people, drew lots of heat away from the sun and kept it for later, like gold in a bank. Here we had just the river and the flat fields stretching away for ever. No wonder then that every night the sun would roll itself away underneath, as fast as a billiard ball.

“Are you warm enough, Anila? Have you enough of the rugs from the boat? The city is a warmer place you know. It's the same the world over.”

Mr Walker must have been reading my mind. I heard him clear his throat outside the tent and then he beat on the canvas softly. I untied the ropes that bound my tent closed and there he was, hunkered down to speak with me. He looked anxious.

“I'm very fine, truly. I have my shawl too. Only one thing would be better and that would be for Anoush to be here with us.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, that would be splendid indeed. But now, you must have no fears about wolves or tigers or such. There is none of them here. And any jackals that you might expect to find, well they'll get an unfriendly welcome if they dare stick a snout too close.”

He patted his belt and I saw he had a pistol. This time even I, who could not tell a firearm from an optical instrument, was certain of that.

“Good night, Anila.”

He started up but I called him back.

“Mr Walker. What Madan said about my grandfather and the village. I know we are travelling upriver as fast as we can. But do you think that on our way back, perhaps…”

I stopped. For what could be done?

“Of course, Anila. As for what may be the best plan when that time comes, let us leave it to Madan to be the judge. I have more confidence in him after a day's travel than I have in many of my more tested acquaintances. I wish you a fine sleep now, and no fears.”

Perhaps I might have thought more about those jackals, or about which charms we might use to flush out a bird with no name for Mr Walker's sister, or indeed how I might teach Carlen civil manners or else avoid him. But after I lay down on the soft cushions and began to hear some of the familiar rushes and dashes of small water creatures close by, I forgot it all.

WE HAD BEEN ALMOST
a whole season – winter – in Mr Bristol's house when our life began to change again. This time, it was no event, no sudden decision, that overturned everything. It was simply feelings that boiled up and over like water in a pot. They began with me and my worries
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“Ma, if my father comes back as he promised, how will he find us here? Please, can we go back to the lane and tell Hemavati and Malati about this house so that he will know where we are?”

I had been asking my mother the same thing, over and over, for weeks, though I was smart enough to say it in different ways at different times
.

I was becoming a pest. But truly I felt that we had been dropped into a hole and been covered over so that my father would never find us. He had only stepped out of our lives, I thought, and one day, whenever he could, he would step back in again. All that was required was that he know where to come
.

At first my mother would say very little in reply, except sensible things. She said, “Your father told us his ship spent more than half a year coming from England to Calcutta. It's not much longer than that since he left, is it? He will still be on the ship.”

“But they can send letters, Ma, from wherever they stop. He probably has sent us one already, from Africa.”

My mother had no place in her heart for letters from Africa or Spain or Ireland or any of the places my father had told us about. She closed her face like a shutter and she shushed me, saying she was tired. Or another time she might say that she was doing her best for both of us and that it was for my sake that she had chosen to come here and live with Mr Bristol
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