Anila's Journey Read online

  “Look at it,” Miss Hickey said. “All those sharp points and the glass lozenges and trefoils. Somebody pined for a Gothic fancy on the banks of the Hooghly and so here we have it.”

  “But nobody has ever had tea here, have they?”

  “Well, not us anyway, dear, not in all the time we’ve been here. I let it go, there was so much else to be doing here. But this little house might be a godsend to you, Anila, if you do not find a position before my father and I leave.”

  My dear and proper Miss Hickey was saying such a thing about a house that looked like a firework?

  She told me then that she had asked the syce to let loose his pet mongooses around the bottom of the garden so that the area should be free of snakes.

  “Zakar will be staying on here as horseman, you know, so that should be a consideration for you. He’s no stranger and I believe he has a good heart.”

  I thought about glum silent Zakar, who loved horses more than humans, and I wondered.

  Miss Hickey took a key from her drawstring waist purse. It could not have belonged to any other building but the little blue house because the top of the key was shaped into points just like the roof. She fitted it and it turned easily.

  We stepped in.

  Something skidded by us and out the door and there was a scurry that we couldn’t quite follow in the halflight. I jumped back but Miss Hickey just poked her head outside again and said quite calmly, “That will be one of the mongooses. It must have taken up abode here.”

  I was not so certain myself that it had been a mongoose though the little creatures do move close to the earth, and fast, in just that way. I hoped it was, and nothing worse. But I was trying to understand what was happening under our feet. The iron floor seemed to be heaving. Miss Hickey made a disgusted noise and stamped her little slippered feet down like a horse.

  “The place is teeming with insects,” she said. “Take care they don’t go up your legs.”

  Now that my eyes were used to the twilight inside I could see that the floor was crossed over and over with highways of ants and beetles, fleeing our feet. A spider the size of a lemon skittered into a corner. There was a strong smell of mice but I supposed the mongoose had taken care of that job already.

  “Well, indeed, it’s not exactly the garden house of Eden, is it?” said Miss Hickey. “I shall have to send Zakar on a little expedition down here tomorrow. But look – what pretty drapes these were once.”

  On the torn strips of brocade you could still make out flowering trees, swallows and ladies and gentlemen in strange costumes crossing little humped bridges.

  “I had a bedroom made up with chinoiserie like this when I was a girl in Dublin,” she said, almost as if to herself. “It tells a story of two lovers. Do you see them there?” She laid a finger on one of the lady figures but the stuff came apart in her hand and crumbled, just like Mr Hickey’s dried tobacco when he crushed it to fill his pipe. She dropped it.

  “As you see, Anila, it’s not perfect. But for a bolthole you could do worse. Nobody comes down here from the house and the oleanders conceal it.”

  “And I can sneak fresh water from the well in the garden.”

  She looked at me and her mouth suddenly twisted

  “Oh, child,” she said. “Do you really, really believe that your father will ever return to Calcutta? Else all this –” and she gestured around with her hands – “makes no sense, you know, and you should continue to be with us.”

  I could say nothing because my throat was dammed with a lump. There was such weight and certainty in Miss Hickey’s kindness. I made as if to shrug my shoulders but she reached out her arms and embraced me. It was a very perfect action because neither of us could see whether the other was weeping, and that was fine with me.

  “Promise me just this thing, child,” she said, letting me go at last. “You must follow us down to Madras within the half-year if your efforts to discover news of your father prove fruitless. Or at any time if your situation here gets parlous. I will leave a fiduciary note at the shipping offices for this very purpose.”

  All I could do was nod.

  We left the little tea house then, locked the door, covered up our secret again with some of the Reverend’s chopped green whiskers. Let him do some work for me, I thought. We went back to the house and set down again to the work of packing and labelling the best house goods and setting others aside for the servants.

  But that evening Zakar was called into the house. He stood stiffly to attention in the pantry, smelling of horses, his stormy brows meeting in a line across his face. Miss Hickey told him what she wanted done at the bottom of the garden.

  “Remember, silent actions breed the biggest rupees,” she warned him at the finish.

  Miss Hickey normally spoke quite well in Bangla, our beautiful language that the English call Bengali. But that evening I wondered if she knew that her warning words to Zakar sounded like something a dacoit might say in a fairy tale. I tried to picture tiny Miss Hickey as a thieving brigand holding a dagger. The strange thing was that it was not impossible to imagine this.

  I quickly explained to Zakar that Miss Hickey considered that he was bound to secrecy. About cleaning and outfitting my little house, and above all about my presence there. For this he would be paid. But he had understood, he told me. And then, when he was leaving the room, he winked at me, an unmistakeable wink under his black caterpillar brow. Zakar!

  We were all dacoits in our separate ways, I thought. Miss Hickey with her fierce words and her belief that I could live like Mr Robinson Crusoe. Zakar with his thundery wink. And there I was now too, with my den down by the riverside.

  Now, weeks later, looking down from my window, I knew exactly what was inside the little iron house. We had hung fresh curtains all round the window frames. They were not at all pretty ones as the China patterned drapes must once have been. They were made of heavy oilcloth to give me some protection from the elements and were a murky green to blend in with the oleanders. The floor was spread with clean rushes and there was a small round of woven coir matting laid on top of them. A string bed hung high off the ground from two of the iron supports, a red satin cushion from the salon making it bright as a bird’s breast.

  Miss Hickey had instructed Habdi, the kitchen boy, to find a clay oven in the bazaar and a basketful of charcoal and good firewood. When he looked confused she told him she wanted an oven just in case her ship should lack its own.

  The only smells inside the tea house now came from the oleanders and, fresh on the breeze, the waterweeds and the river itself. I had placed my mother’s little Durga altar on one of the windowsills. For years the old clay goddess had sat on my bedroom sill and had shared my high view of the river. I thought she deserved to have no less in her new home. There was also a tiffin box with some cooked dal, a bag of rice, some eggs and a jar of English arrowroot biscuits. That was all, until I should carry down my bag of clothes and the drawings from the bedroom. I would sleep there tonight. Miss Hickey had insisted on that.

  “So then at least I will know the first chapter of your new story,” she said. But her tone was dull, not keen.

  MY MOTHER

  MY MOTHER WAS PURE BENGALI, not half and half like I am. She was very beautiful. When we used to walk together down the lanes behind the houses, the birds sang louder. That is what I thought then. I was little and she laughed when I first said this to her. That night she told me one of her bird stories, about a bird that had no songs at all. It was the raven, who lost his singing voice when a demon locked him in a mine for nine hundred years, but his bravery never left him.

  However, it was not only birds who thought my mother was special. My father followed her one day – this is before I was born – and asked if he could paint her. Of course she said no. She was a boatman’s daughter and he should not even be seeing her as he walked by that morning when she was casting off the ropes for her father. He should have passed on by. He should not be there. He should not look at he
r. He should never talk to her. So he had to go away and think again. He came back a week later and told her father, my grandfather, that he had bought her a house.

  She was fourteen then. Her father said she should go, that her life would be better. Without a mother, brothers or sisters, she would be on her own when he died. He feared famine more than anything and girls and women were the first to perish in famines. He had no money to have her married to anybody, even though she was so lovely. She said that the day she left him the tears in his eyes were like the river in monsoon, overflowing and unstoppable. She could see her red sari in his tears, her mother’s bride sari he had kept for her. But she was not a bride.

  Annapurna was her name, but my father called her Anna. Or rani, or queen. He liked those words for her but he was no king himself, no rajah. He was an Irishman and he never married her because it was impossible for somebody like him to marry an Indian woman. I found out later that that was not true but such was the story they told me, both of them at different times and in their different ways. And in their different languages. My father spoke to me only in English. My mother always spoke Bangla to me. She said English was like dry meal in her mouth, though she knew it well enough by then.

  She called me Anila, which means the never-ending blue of the sky. My father thought the name sounded like “little Anna” so he was happy with it too.

  I called her Ma or Mago. To her I was minnow, pearl, pipit – whatever small thing she was thinking about. She loved me and she was always gentle with me. What made her sad beyond everything else was that she could never go upriver with me to show me to her father, who still lived, she supposed, in their old cane house by the river. That was impossible. She had left that world behind.

  It was not quite true that my father had bought a house for her. Many things about my father were not quite the way he said they were. But I think that he believed they would work out to his plan in the end, that perhaps the gods would respond eventually to the click of his fingers. Of course they did not; they laughed.

  The little house was there, yes, down a lane near an old temple on the high road leading towards the bazaar area of the city. That was where I was born. I can remember the house. It was square, with a pink wash over thin bricks held together with pukka mix, and a roof that you reached by steps at the back. A flame-blossomed gulmohar tree stood across from it. When it was in flower its petals would fall in front of our door and when we came out it seemed that someone had scattered bright Holi colours just for us. But the day my mother arrived there with my father, dressed in red, and, surely, her heart beating with fear and hope, she discovered that she had to share her house with two other women. My father had rented the space from a man he knew. It was really a very little house, with only one room that the other women had already divided with screens, so they were not best pleased by my mother’s arrival. And then she was so beautiful.

  The two women were Malati and Hemavati. Like my mother, they were bibis – Indian women who belonged to white men. But unlike her, they were dancing girls and much older than fourteen. Malati was kind enough. When I could crawl she let me play with her anklets. My mother told me that I loved to shake them and make their hundreds of tiny bells lift our dull room into paradise for a moment. But the anklets were too heavy for me to lift out of the brass box where Malati kept her costume and clothes and I would have to flop down onto the floor again. Every time this happened my mouth would make a disappointed O, my mother told me. She had to run to pick me up before I cried.

  “Then I would take you out to listen to the birds instead,” she told me. “You tried to talk back to them. You made a very good little pigeon!”

  When Malati danced she told stories with her feet and hands and smile – not with words, like my mother’s stories. I loved her dances. She must have loved them too because she did not mind that her audience was just a little girl clapping her pudsey hands together. Or that the floor she danced on was not made of marble, just earth with reed mats to cover it. Or that she was hungry, or that there was shouting outside in the lane. Hers were love stories. Malati’s man was a soldier, handsome enough in his rough red coat, but I don’t think he understood her stories.

  Hemavati was different. Hemavati was more light-skinned than my mother, with high cheekbones. She was from the mountains, far away to the north. We found it difficult to understand her at times, her speech was so throaty and different. Hemavati told us that she had been taken away from her home by temple dancers when she was about nine. It was hard to know when Hemavati was telling the truth. She stole kajal from Malati to paint her eyes, and paan from my mother, who used to chop the nuts, roll them in lime paste, wrap them in dark betel and sell them to the traders on the high road. And, before I learned to hide them, she stole chalks and pencils from me. She threw stones at the baby monkeys who came in the windows, as eager to steal as she was. Nobody else did this.

  Hemavati would stroke my hair, and braid it when I grew older, but she would never neglect to pull it hard and painfully before she finished. If I lay down beside her when my mother was with my father, she pinched my arms and stove her dark dirty nails into my skin. I learned not to cry around Hemavati. Once when my mother was away with my father Hemavati pressed chilli seeds into my tears and rubbed them back into my eyes. I could not see for two days. But for those two days, Hemavati herself could not stop crying. She ran to the watermelon seller and brought back two slices for me and stroked me gently while I sucked them, my eyes stuck together tight and my body shaking.

  Hemavati’s two children were dead, my mother told me, and she could not have any more. Her man was a sailor, a merchantman, but he stopped coming to her when I was a baby. Some said he had drowned. Malati said he had probably found another girl, a girl who smiled. Hemavati went to dance in the river taverns at night and sometimes she did not come back for a day or more, which was like a holiday for us. But she never saw her man again or, if she did, she did not tell us.

  “There are plenty of men who are foolish with their money,” she said. “Better many fools than one.”

  That was the harsh way Hemavati spoke.

  If my mother was disappointed in the house, in the lie my father had told, she kept it to herself all the years we lived there. She cleaned and swept our corner every day and took our sheet outside into the air and shook it so that it flapped like a heron. Then she brought it back in and stretched it so that it was neat and tight on the bed. She plumped up the two small silk feather pillows, one for her and one for me. They were my father’s gift.

  Our quilt was one my mother had begun to make as a child, and she was so very proud of it. Its top and bottom layers were old white saris as fine to the touch as a queen’s muslin. Its warmth and its thickness came from the inner layers of old cotton, my grandfather’s dhotis. All the layers were sewn together with silk threads and so was the band of birds down the centre. A peacock with his proud tail, a golden woodpecker and a fantastic purple dove lay on top of us every night. The dove had a gold ring in his beak.

  When I grew a little older the quilt seemed to shrink and so she added another length to it. She stuffed that piece with a rectangle of blanket that she bought from a wandering kambulia for a few coins and a smile. On top of those new layers my clever mother fashioned a darter from green and grey threads. No one could call this final fellow a dainty bird but his long neck stretched over the end of our bed and it seemed as if he were fishing from the floor.

  “See how your good grandfather made sure to keep us both warm,” she would say on winter nights when we snuggled together and kept the edges of the quilt wrapped tightly round and under us.

  By the bed we had a green basket shaped like a bowl and there she kept the big bright feathers I collected on our walks.

  “Your altar,” she told me. But she had her own altar as well, for her Durga made of clay. This little goddess she had brought with her from her father’s house. Durga stood on our trunk inside a cave my mother had fashioned
with palm fronds. Every day she was given fresh peepul or tulsi leaves or some frangipani, and some papaya or coconut that my mother cut carefully into pieces as small as a baby’s fingernail.

  Our screen was made of cane wood and my father was begged to bring pins so that she could stick my pictures to it. My first pictures were made on palm leaves, but after a while my father liked to bring me ruined ledgers that his Company no longer had use for. There were always pages left blank that I could work on. He brought me chalks and pencils too, and one birthday, my last with him, a pen with a fine nib and a bottle of the blackest ink.

  Hemavati never found that.

  THE CITY

  WE WERE AS BRAVE as it was possible to be next morning, at dawn, Miss Hickey and I. We met halfway, she coming down the garden, I ascending.

  “We are like men meeting for a duel, Anila,” she said, “and if I could win the encounter I would bear you away with me now.”

  I could not look at her or she would have won our duel in that moment.

  “Tell me everything as we walk. The palki has come.”

  She asked me how my new bed was and I told her it was light and comfortable, which indeed it was, like an infant’s cradle swinging in the air. She asked if it had been noisy in the garden in the darkness and I told her that I loved to hear the owls close at hand and after them the early birds. These things were true.

  When I dreamt, my father stood on a rock on the river path, peering over into the garden. But as I reached out for him he grew smaller, small as a stork, then shrank flat like a lizard. I thought he was in my hand, but when I gasped myself awake it was only the stable iron, hot as flesh where I gripped it.

  Now, finally, it was time.

  At the front of the house Miss Hickey and I looked at each other’s tired eyes and that was that. A quick embrace and a velvet something pushed into my hand, a God bless you, sweet girl. Then she stepped into the waiting palanquin. The four bearers raised her tiny weight up on their poles and she was gone down the Reach at a trot.