Anila's Journey (7 page)

It was so busy there, every time we went. In the terrible heat of summer it was always a little cooler by the water. We covered our heads and my father held his great umbrella up to shade us. All along the stone ghats were barrows stuffed with mangoes, guavas, green bananas, yams and all kinds of gourds from fat pumpkins to baby potols. There were coconuts mounting like bricks in a temple, and baskets of chilli pods whose heat you could sniff on the salty air. Gunny sacks spilled over with dark betel leaves, green cardamom seeds, papery sticks of cinnamon, shiny nuts of different shades – honey-coloured, bunting and darkest brown. There were piles of huge lopsided jute cushions stuffed with grains, with fat husks spilling out of the loosely sewn seams. Not like my mother's neat sewing! Sometimes we smelt a strong smell that my father said was tobacco, dried brown leaves also packed into sacks. Ropes lay coiled on the polished stones along the edges of the ghats. They looked like brackwater snakes, only thicker
.

There were bamboo cages with ducks and guineas and bantams. I liked to pick up some grain seeds and fling them into the cages but mostly the birds ignored them and did not bend their sad necks down for a snack. pigs and sheep and goats were fenced in or tethered to posts waiting to be harnessed and lowered onto boats: when the men hoisted them into the air in harnesses they kicked like babies, and squealed too. Much further down the river – we did not go so far as it was dangerous – were the great bales of calicos and stuffs waiting to be lifted onto the biggest ships
.

I liked to watch the work on the ghats, and the great-beaked birds that stalked and swooped and stole what they could, the storks and gulls and kites. But my mother was happiest watching the boats
.

The first time we went there, the first picnic I can remember, she was quiet for a long time. Then she pointed at a long stately boat, set deep in the water in front of the ghat
.

“Look, Anila,” she said. “That's a budgerow. My father thought they were the best boats in the world. We would watch them come up the river past our landing. Oh, but he'd love to see these great ships with their own trees on them to hold the sails.”

My father told us that there were much much bigger ships miles further down the river, ships too big to come up to the city waterfront, ships that had travelled all the way from England or from China. Our huge wide river Ganga that he called the Hooghly wasn't deep enough for them
.

He had to settle to his sketch work, even in summer, even when the skin on his face wore the angry rash he called prickly heat. But one year my clever mother cured him of that. She rubbed sandalwood paste on his face. He looked filthy that day, like a madman, but he never suffered from the rash again. After that treatment his face turned a pale gold every year instead as the summers lengthened
.

So, after we had settled on the day's viewing place, he would put on his funny sunhat made of hard tree pith and go off with his scrolls and pens and the flat top to support his papers. We were left to sit on the folded cane seats that he always brought in the buggy. Those times we kept the umbrella. He told the buggy driver to tie up his horse and watch over us so that none of the ghatsmen or boys would bother us. He paid him a little too, to bring us a jar of drinking water. We dipped our scarves in it and tied the damp cottons over our foreheads. You could tell whether it was April, May or June by how quickly they dried out again. But we both kept our eyes busy with the river traffic and somehow that kept us cool too
.

Then, when my father had finished his sketches, he would come back to us with his tiffin box of green cane, bound with leather straps. It was safe with him, he told me, but someone might snatch it from us while we were on our own. Always he made us guess what was in it before he opened it
.

“Mango,” I shouted. “And sugarcane and gur and sweet fish curry and cooked eggs.”

“Duck meat and sweetmeats,” my mother said. “And ginger beer.”

We were rarely wrong because he always brought fruits and a curry of some sort and ginger beer. He bought everything in an English chop-house near the Writers' Building he told us. It sold the kind of Indian foods that the young men liked though he knew we ate very differently at home, plainer meals but spicier, and sweeter too. Sometimes my father brought the bread that he liked himself, pau roti, which we could tear into strips and dip in the curries. Very occasionally the chop-house provided a jungle fowl that one of the other Writers had shot and given away to settle a toddy bill. They were tasty but I always found myself wondering what bird it was that I was eating and so I would not eat much
.

But Papa always slipped in something special that we could never guess. That was because it wasn't something to eat. It was a present for each of us, something small enough to fit in the box
.

Trinket time, my father called this part of our picnic. My favourite gift was a kite shaped like a fantastic beast. “It's a Chinese dragon,” he said. It flew as fast and fierce as a fighter kite even though it was not much bigger than my father's hand. It had a blue face and a smile and paper hair that hung down like a holy man's
.

My mother got soap and tiny pieces of silk. Or shells, silver and pink and blue, with pearly entrance chambers. He told us they came from islands far away to the south. I got coloured papers and threads and, once, a sand timer
.

“That's one minute of your life,” my father explained, as the sand ran from one end of the waspy glass to the other. I kept it in my feather bowl but one morning it was gone
.

MR WALKER'S HOUSE HAD
a red door with a brass knocker shaped like a fist. It made a booming echo like a big festival drum and I shrank down into myself. What if I had woken the whole street of Englishmen up?

But not this silent house, it seemed. I was about to try again, just a tap this time, when the door opened a crack and a little man in a dhoti, dark-skinned and old, scanned me up and down. Then he reached out a hand to pull me inside.

“Quickly, quickly,” he said in Bangla. “But you should have come while it was still dark. Now they will say all those bad things about the master. Come.”

He led me along a gloomy passageway.

“Sit there.” He pushed me onto a chair that I could hardly see and then vanished through a doorway on the left. It had no door, just a thick red curtain hung from a pole. I could smell food now, something smoky and something else milky, sweet. I had eaten nothing yet and I had been up for hours, since long before light.

How long was the walk from Garden Reach? As long as I was foolish, I would have to say, for every step was on my own account. When I reached my little house last night I had my ten gold mohurs but no small pieces, nothing for a boat ride until Mrs Panossian should be my banker. So when I woke I took Anoush's advice even though she'd intended it for a joke. I tied my hair up in a head wrap as a man does and I wore a dark tunic over my twill trousers. Again I strapped my case of drawing things safe over my chest, with my money wrapped inside it. When I stepped out along the river path, I felt invisible, like a boy on an errand.

For all that, I was glad it had grown rosy when I came to the beginnings of the city and the long street they called Burial Ground Road. Not because of all the English people who lay dead in a field there under sad grey slabs of stone. I did not fear their ghosts. But further up that swampy road there were dacoits. Everyone talked about them, those real dacoits with murdering blades. By then, though, the sun was up and all the early wagons out with it, and horses and riders too, galloping by the green open space of the maidan.

“Anila! What an early riser you are.”

Mr Walker pushed his way past the red curtain. He was dressed in a shirt and breeches, no jacket. I had to struggle with my smile, for he looked just like a heron, long-legged, stooped and spike-haired, and like a heron his colours were grey-blue and grey.

“Come and have something to eat with me. You can have a second breakfast.”

Breakfast! I followed him through the doorway, past the curtain that smelled of ink and smoke, men's smells.

This room was light, with walls of creamy pink, and it looked onto a small walled garden. Through an open window red hibiscus flowers and white climbing roses pushed into the room and tumbled around a little table spread with plates and dishes. Mr Walker pulled out a chair for me and we sat down. The little man scurried out again, muttering.

The dishes on the table held fish and rice, curds, preserves, nuts, persimmons and some round rough cakes.

“Have an oatmeal cake,” Mr Walker said. “They're Scottish. Chandra makes them to my grandmother's receipt, as best he can. I would prefer to breakfast outside, but then Balor would be jealous of the garden birds.”

Who was Balor?

Mr Walker smiled and pointed to the top of a bookcase behind me. He kept his finger stretched out. I had hardly begun to figure the grey shape up there for what it was when it suddenly changed its size, took off from its pinnacle and landed in a flurry of feathers on Mr Walker's finger. Great black beak, black claws firmly folded round a hand.

The huge grey parrot waddled sideways along Mr Walker's hand, walked up his arm and kissed him on the mouth with the top of its head. I laughed and so did the bird, a booming deep laugh. This must be Mr Walker's laugh which I hadn't heard yet.

“Put your elbow on the table and let your fingers touch mine,” Mr Walker said.

The bird came down his arm, crossed over and then I could feel the sensitive feet travelling fast up my arm. He was on my shoulder. I felt a tug and my head wrap was loosed, picked up and tossed onto the floor.

Now it was Mr Walker's turn to laugh and I could feel the parrot thrum with pleasure.

“Balor likes hair,” he said. “I think he must have been a barber in a past life. If we don't stop him he'll have your braid unpicked in the same way he deals with my poor coiff.”

He tapped his chair back and Balor waddled down my arm again and hopped up.

“I bought him in a street market in Spain, years ago, when he was much more of a street urchin. He's blind in one eye – if you look carefully at him, you'll see that. He can speak, like most educated parrots, but I cannot discover what his native language is. He refuses to speak English. Or Bangla, though Chandra claims that he says puja prayers. I called him Balor after an evil one-eyed god from Ireland, your father's country. Eat, Anila.”

I took a cake. Mr Walker reached over and cut it in two for me and spread it with butter and a dark fruit jelly from a pot. I took some fish too, and some rice. He poured tea for me and then a cup for himself. We drank in silence until I began to fear that I had seemed too greedy, too starved. A Hemavati at her worst.

“I'll draw Balor for you.”

Balor cocked his head when I said his name. He watched the pencil in my hand as it moved over the paper. But only with the good eye of course. The other he kept turned away so that I had to draw him in profile, that vain bird.

“My mother used to say that all birds have a secret,” I said. “She didn't believe I could find out what their secrets were by watching them and drawing them.”

“How, then?”

“She said the secrets were found in the stories people passed on. But there were lots of birds that we had no stories for so my father and I would get cross with her about her reasoning.” Quickly I looked away and began to shade in Balor's wing feathers. Purple-grey, black-grey, silver-grey. Water grey.

Little one, tell Malati why the poorest grey pigeon wears jewel colours round her neck. She might put your story into her dance
.

“Those are the very kind I'm looking for, Anila.” Mr Walker laid his hands, palms up, on the table. “The birds with no stories because nobody has noted them down. Let me tell you this. The reason I want to journey upriver, up the Ganga, is to find a bird with no name.”

I did not understand him.

“A magical bird?”

“No, Anila. I am explaining it badly. I mean no name that we Europeans know for of course all creatures have been named by somebody, by their nearest neighbours.”

He told me then that if we found such a bird – a new
species
, he called it – he wanted more than anything to name it after his sister. He sounded shy, almost, when he said this.

“Eveline was my twin. She died when she was just sixteen, of a chill. We had been swimming in the Tay – that's a river near my grandmother's place – but it was too early in the year and we should have been cannier. It was my notion, of course. She was ever so much more learned than I, so much more promising. Every day of my life I miss her.”

A chill
.

“Sometimes she ransacked my wardrobe and dressed herself in much the way that you dress, I've noticed. Once she passed herself off as me to my father and went with him to Sunday Meeting, riding my horse. That was how like we were then, though she was finer looking.”

He cleared his throat.

“Have you heard of Mr Linnaeus? Perhaps your father might have known of him?”

“Was he a Writer?”

Mr Walker smiled and shook his head. He reached for my drawing and turned it round.

“This is the very spit of that rascal parrot. We'll give it to Chandra and he'll forget his grizzling and be your friend for life.”

There was a boom on the front door, a worse din than I'd imagined when I was outside. And, straightaway, a similar monstrous noise sounded in the room, just as loud. Balor flew up to his high perch and looked down at us, his beak half open and his purple tongue curled round itself. He looked as pleased as a child that has learned to take its first step.

Mr Walker groaned.