Anila's Journey (3 page)

“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 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
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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 her. 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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“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
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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
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Hemavati never found that
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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.

She had written the Madras address yet again for me – this was the third version I had. She had stuffed it into the velvet purse, wrapped round ten gold mohur coins and a small gold ring. This last was such a miniature I guessed it had belonged to Miss Hickey when she was a child. I had never seen it before. Two golden hands met and clasped over a heart of gold with a little crown sitting on top of them all. I slipped it onto the little finger of my left hand, the only one that could wear so small a ring. It gave me comfort to have such a precious token of affection.

Miss Hickey had left a breakfast out for me, prepared by her own hand. But all I could take was a sweet wafer and a glass of water for my stomach was dancing with nerves. I took these into the salon so I could sit down and check again my drawings and my testimonial for this bird lover of Calcutta, Mr Edward Walker.

There was no mirror left in the house but my dress was spruce and clean. I knew that. Miss Hickey had said nothing ill about it. I wore my best turquoise scarf, my blue tunic and a green shawl – for the river might be cold – and under these the trousers of white twill that I had fashioned myself. My slippers were blue brocade. All my precious belongings were inside Mr Hickey's case and I had lengthened its strap so it fitted over my shoulders like a soldier's kitbag. I touched it and felt a little stronger. Perhaps soldiers found their courage in such ways too.

I walked out the front entrance of the house and down the route that Miss Hickey had already taken, to the landing stage. But she had set sail south. I was waiting for a humble ferry-boat to take me upriver to the city.

When it pulled alongside, the early pedlars scrambled off with their bazaar baskets on their backs, calling out like crows. The clerks got on then, all black bags and silence. Some looked at me curiously. I just handed my piece to the boatman and watched the riverbank fall away as we cut along by the Reach and past the great fort.

Our destination was the Esplanade, in the English part of the city. Mr Hickey had told me that in London, Calcutta was called the city of the white palaces, as a snare to catch speculators. But it was true that the ghat where we landed was fit for a palace, with smooth wide steps that the coolies swept clean of everything, even of water.

I had never been up and about the wide streets so early before. Underfoot the street bricks were only half warm, half awake. But further upriver at this hour I knew the giant was already at work.