Anila's Journey (2 page)

Those things had just vanished but the cherry harpsichord had left its claw marks on the floor, like the sulky monster it was. When the rains came not even Miss Hickey, who was a pretty player, could make music with it.

The walls too, bore traces. All Mr Hickey's paintings, both his own works and his collection, had been taken out of their golden frames and rolled up like rugs. I had helped with that, carefully wrapping the canvases in further rolls of stuffs, so they were safe as babies. Now you could see the different pale shapes on the walls where each picture had hung. But the two paintings I remembered best had never lived in this room at all.

“Anila, stop pacing like a creature in a menagerie!”

Miss Hickey stood up and caught my arm as I passed her again, holding me from my march.

“It seems impossible,” I said to her. “But the drawing work is something I would enjoy. And you are right. I can do things that English girls might not.”

“Child, there is nothing at all to lose by trying. Go and get your drawings collected now so that we may arrange them to best impress this Mr Walker. I am going up now to unpack some of my writing paper to write a testimonial for you. Truly, I feel something might come of this and it makes me feel a little more hopeful about your staying behind in this city of scoundrels. Think, if you can do this work, a recommendation from this gentleman might get you appointed as a drawing mistress, or a proper governess, such a position that I have not found for you.”

That was my Miss Hickey, my dear mashi. For that was what I liked to pretend she was, my aunt, though I had none. She always spoke in long and perfect sentences like a book, unlike anybody else I knew and not at all like her father, whose few words came out in explosions.

There was indeed only one reason why I would not go with them. As long as I had no news of my father, I would believe him to be alive. And if he was alive, he would return to find me. He had promised that, even though it was so long ago now. He knew nothing of the Hickeys or their kind of people, so if I were not in Calcutta how would he find me?

His words had left tracks as deep as the harpsichord's. As faint as the picture frames.

I WANTED TO REMEMBER
the view from my window for ever.

“Why my father never painted this, I cannot begin to think,” Miss Hickey said. “It makes such a fine picture all on its own say-so.”

She stood beside me. Our work was done. My bird paintings were sorted and packed in tissue paper. Even the stitched sketchbooks made from my father's old Company papers were wrapped and put safe into one of the tin-lined drawing cases she had purloined for me. Then, sitting on my stripped bed, Miss Hickey had written her testimonial note.

The garden stretched away down, sloping to the river. Today the river was just a grey line under a huge pale sky. In the new year, when the sky brightened, the water would turn the colour of golden mud. Then, on a late afternoon like this, all the ships and boats on it would look hugged by the water, as if the water was their mother. Today they were just painted puppet ships, gliding past. Even the great ones going downriver had only a baby swell of canvas in their rigging.

We stared until two ships had crossed the window frame from right to left.

“My ship is moored so far downriver,” Miss Hickey said, “it will take I don't know how long to reach her, with all the hazards and shallows.”

She sighed.

Outside the evening crows were shouting.

Anila, my little bird, the crows begin to make dusk before great Surya himself feels tired
.

Our garden was full of trees, over thirty different kinds, Mr Hickey said. Our neighbours grew neat grass instead, for their cricket games and garden parties. Their trees were prisoners in pots. They hid their dhobi washing tanks and their servants' huts behind stands of bamboo. Our garden had its own proud little village surrounded by flowering plants. It had a lily pond and a huge silk cottonwood tree that dropped enough cobweb-soft down every summer to stuff all our pillows and cushions.

But it wasn't always a peaceful place. The tall palmyras and neem trees groaned like devils when the storms came up the river or over the salt marshes. The winds snapped boughs off and threw hard fruits around until the doob grass had holes like bad skin.

Our house did not lie at the fashionable end of Garden Reach, where people kept their own boats to travel to and from the city. The Hickeys did not care to do this for the expense was great, and so our garden was enclosed and separated from the waterside by, first, an iron fence and gate, then by a hedge of red oleanders. Abdul the cook claimed that all this protection was a good thing because, far downstream where we were, ghosts left the river every night. These were the ghosts of drowned people who tried to save themselves again and again until the dawn forced them to slip back under the water.

It was down there at the hedge that Miss Hickey's and my secret lay, so far down I could not see it from my window. The first time I saw the secret, I could not believe how it had escaped me before. I who knew the garden as well as every thieving mynah that came for our prickly plums, our mangoes!

“Well then, Anila,” said Miss Hickey, one afternoon. It was a week or so after our unhappy visit to St John's. “If you are determined to stay here in Calcutta, we shall have to find you a house.”

“A house?”

She was smiling her clever-me monkey smile which told me nothing, but in her garden basket she was carrying a couple of the syce's horse tools. She would say nothing more but hooked that firm little arm through mine and led me all the way down to the oleander hedge. She right-turned us there like soldiers, over to the corner where the greenery was thickest. She put my hand on it and I felt the softer growth. These weeds and fronds were scrambling upwards to cover something.

“Think of the Reverend's unpleasant facial hair trimmings,” Miss Hickey said. “Then we'll have some pleasure in chopping them, don't you think?”

That made me giggle. Most of the growth could be pulled away without cutting, though when I had to slash some vines I thought of dirty snuff-brown whiskers dropping off. But Miss Hickey's words proved clever because as the greens fell away we found bones underneath, though they were neither human nor animal remains.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

What could anybody say to something so perfect?

It was a tiny house made of iron that stood clear of the ground on six legs. Once it had been painted dark blue but now it was mostly rusted. Two boxy steps led up to a tightly closed door. This door had glass fitted into it, very dirty glass, smeared and sticky except at the top where it was cut into odd shapes in jewel colours, greens, ambers, crimsons and deep, deep blues. Tatters of faded cloth hung down in the window frames instead of glass. Six spikes on the pointed roof matched the six legs underneath.

It reminded me of the fat rocket firework that Mr Hickey had brought home during last Kali Puja when the city was ablaze with lights and excitement.

“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.