Anila's Journey (4 page)

See, Anila, see how the giant leans from the sun and stretches his great arms down the high road. Then he reaches out and pokes his fingers and toes into the lanes and under the temple stalls. That's how he stirs them into life. He's tapping at our door, Anila. Wake up!

Some carriages clattered along Chowringhee, heading for the Esplanade. It was the Christmas season but it was too early for the ladies to show themselves and so there were no palanquins abroad yet.

Lots of noisy delivery carts and wagons were rolling by in the other direction, piled up with goods for the houses of Alipore and Garden Reach. I saw a new pianoforte standing up smartly on one, tied down with many ropes. Two small boys in dhotis were sitting on top of it. Their feet just reached the curved keyboard top.

“Anila! Anila!”

Someone was calling out behind me. I turned but my eyes were suddenly full of sun and I could not see for a moment or so who it was. Then I did. Her limp slowed her down, but her smile ran ahead of her like warmth.

It was Anoush.

I waited for my friend to catch up, my back against the smoothness of one of the painted houses.

“Anoush!”

We hugged each other. Anoush had tiny bones like a child. Her amber sari, as usual, was too long for her so she'd folded it over in a double bind. Anoush liked to wear saris even though she had no Indian blood, not a drop. She was Armenian, with pale skin and tiger-coloured eyes under her tight cap of dark hair. Her face was thin and clever but it was never those things merely because it was entirely ruled by her smile.

Like me, Anoush was an orphan, but unlike me, she had not been left the gift of good health by her parents. Her left leg had been shrunken with a disease when she was young and she used a stick to walk in the streets. Anoush worked in Mrs Panossian's shop and I had known her almost as long as I'd known Miss Hickey.

“Are you coming to work at Auntie's?” she asked me now. “Oh, do say yes. I'm going there now, as you may guess,” she said. “And you, if not yes, where are you going, so early?”

“I'll walk with you,” I said. For it was early yet. I told Anoush that I was delivering a testimonial from Miss Hickey in response to a notice in
The Gazette
.

“There is a position for a person who can draw birds, can you believe it? I imagine that only a boy or a man will get the work but I'm going to try.”

“Oh, then you should hide your hair in a boy's silken puggree and wear a long dhoti and tunic,” Anoush giggled. “Not your funny trousers. But I don't think that pretty nose-stud you have today would convince anyone!”

I had forgotten it, though I had scrubbed my face hours since in the dim light. Anoush giggled while I took the stud out and wrapped it with the coins in the bottom of my case.

We left the white and pink and ochre houses of the Esplanade behind us and turned off in the direction of the Bowbazaar, up the small busy streets that led through the old butchers' area. I hated the sounds and the smells around here. But almost immediately we were at the great glassed doors of Mrs Panossian's shop and the waft of roasting coffee beans was in my nose instead. In the window, boys with long irons tumbled the beans over and over in a great iron bucket oven heated from below by a charcoal fire bowl. The rich aroma squeezed out through every gap in the window frames. Behind this morning work I could see the dark shelves that reached right to the ceiling all round the shop.

“I have an idea, Anoush, a plan. For you, too…”

A clatter came from inside, a loud voice. “Anoush!”

“Call in when you are finished and tell me how it goes,” said Anoush, quickly. “You can talk to Auntie then too. Something will work for you, Anila, I'm sure of it.”

She patted my arm, then pushed through the doors and was gone.

BACK AGAIN ON THE ESPLANADE
I dipped between the palkis and the buggies and dodged a holy man covered in ashes who was shuffling along with his eyes closed. The long building ahead that looked like a temple was the Supreme Court. That was where the Asiatick Society did its business, Miss Hickey had told me.

A barrier ran between the building and the pathway and when I found a gate it was locked, with a sentry in a sentry box in front of it. The soldier's hand rested on a musket that stood as upright as he did. Behind him in the box, a large brown dog with matted curly hair was stretched out. The dog opened an eye to look at me and then closed it again.

“Sir, I have to deliver a letter to Mr Edward Walker,” I said.

Minutes seemed to pass before the soldier moved his eyes from the far distance to my face. But he said nothing. Behind him the dog sighed like a human.

I held the letter up so that he could see the address in Miss Hickey's fine script.

He said nothing but suddenly put two fingers of his left hand into his mouth and whistled as loudly as a boy with a fat blade of river grass. Behind him two men ran forward and pulled on the spears of the gates. They made an opening that was just wide enough for me.

“First door at the river end of the building, then ask,” he said. “You're in luck. Mr Walker has just come back to us since yesterday. He woke up old Curly Dundas here this morning first thing, remembered to bring him a buttered bit from his breakfast, as he always does. He's a good sort, Mr Walker.”

I made to move but he spoke again and jabbed his thumb at my hand.

“Your ring. Where did you get it?” he asked.

Did he think I had stolen it? I caught a breath.

“It is a gift from my guardian. She is an Irish lady.”

“Yes,” he said. “She must be, to have a Claddagh ring.”

He reached into a pocket of his uniform jacket and took out a ring just like mine but twice, no, three times as big.

“It's no good to me in the heat over here,” he said. “The fingers swell up so I can't wear it. I have this from my sweetheart back home. But look. You should turn yours round with the hands and heart facing in. Wearing it out like that means that you've got a fancy man – and you're a bit young for that, aren't you?”

I blushed. But he was being kind so I thanked him and smiled my best smile at him. He slammed his heels together and straightened up and then his eyes returned again to the fascinating space ahead. I felt encouraged by this encounter. But I wondered. If the soldier had not seen the ring with its hands and heart facing out to him, perhaps he might not have been so helpful. I would leave it facing out for now. For luck.

Yet what had he meant about Mr Walker returning?
The Gazette
had said:
returning to Calcutta in January
. That was at least nine days away. I had thought to leave my letter at the right door and then make my way back to Mrs Panossian's store. I wanted a quiet word with Anoush.

But perhaps this was luck too.

I went past the sturdy passageway arches of the great courthouse. The last door was open. It led into an enormous hallway floored with black and white slabs. A stairway curved in two directions, an elegant shape like the hands in my ring. A single flight then vanished to the dark floors upstairs.

“Yes?”

A man stepped out from a room on the right of the hall. I had never seen anybody who really looked white before. Most English people were pink or red though some turned quite yellow under our sun. But this man's face was as white as a shirt. He was dressed completely in black and a huge bundle of keys hung from his belt.

“I was told to ask for Mr Edward Walker, sahib,” I said. “I have an important letter for him.”

He picked the letter from my hand and held it out far from his face, squinting at Miss Hickey's clear writing.

“Give it here,” he said. “Mr Walker arrived back unexpectedly in Calcutta yesterday, it is true, but I have not seen him yet so I imagine he is resting from his journey at his home. Go along, then. It's safe with me.”

Until I had spoken with the soldier, this was just what I had been expecting, that I would leave the letter with somebody in charge and go on my way. But now I was disappointed.

“But I thought, sir,” I said, “well, it's just that the sentry soldier seemed to think Mr Walker was here today, and I would very much like to hand this letter over myself because of its nature.”

The man was staring at me with his forehead puckered in a puzzle. I knew he was trying to make a place for me in his divisions of people. I could almost see the wheels of his brain turning over like the wheels in a timepiece.

Here is a girl who looks half-bred but she speaks English well enough. She must have an education of some sort. She's got strange clothes, she must not have a mother who shows her the proper ways. People noticed these things first. Then there was usually a division, just as there was in the stairs ahead, in the way they behaved towards me. One way went: the unfortunate child, I'll hear her story out. The other way went: she's got right little airs, this one, for what she is.

I could always tell when this last was the conclusion. It mostly led to a poor outcome for me.

“Go on your way, girl,” he said. “Whatever this is, it hardly concerns you, and I'll have some words with that sentry about his loose tongue. Mr Walker is not to be bothered…”

“Who's talking about me being bothered? I'm always being bothered, Mr Minch, and uncomfortably often it's by your good self.”

The deep voice was coming from the dark at the top of the stairs.

“Send the young lady up to my room since she's good enough to arrive in person.”

The man in black stood back and made me a mock bow. There was no expression in his face, though, and he vanished back into his room without a further word.

I started up the left arm of the stairs. Then the voice boomed out again.

“And bring some tea up, Mr Minch, please.”

MY FATHER WORKED FOR
the East India Company. He was a Writer. The Company had lots and lots of Writers, young men like my father who travelled in ships all the way from the river in faraway London to the river in Calcutta. My father was only eighteen that morning he met my mother on the riverbank. He was not much more than a boy, just four years older than she was
.

A Writer was not a poet or a storyteller. A Writer was a clerk. Or a scrivener, my father said. That was a word with a thin, mean feel to it. Writer sounded better, I thought. Every thing that the Company officers did or owned, the Writers wrote down
.

“Cottons and silks, spices and diamonds. Fresh minted rupees. Horses and camels and elephants. Pinnaces and palaces and palanquins. Soldiers and sailors. Princes, merchants, farmers, weavers and bearers. Battles and burnings. Spies!”

He loved to sing all these things out for me and then hiss the last word in my ear like a snake
.

Everything that happened in India was on a page somewhere in the Writers' Building, my father told us. For a long time I thought there were magic books in my father's workplace from which, if you took them down and opened them, tiny elephants would march and princes would stumble out, searching in their pockets for their diamonds
.

“We came all the way across the world to make our fortunes,” my father told me when I was old enough to understand a story that didn't have birds or princesses in it. “But I am the only one of the Company to have found the best of all fortunes.”

He meant my mother and me. His face was glowing and happy and he squeezed us tight in his arms. I always felt excited when he came from his Writer's lodgings in the city to our little house, which was not so often, not more than once a week, and sometimes not even that. When I thought he was coming I would go up on the roof to wait so that I would see him turn in at the top of our lane. Then I would shout to him
.

“Papa!”

That is what he liked me to call him. His name was Patrick Tandy. He had amazing eyes, for one was green and one was blue. Like a lucky cat, he said, but for a long while I believed all white people had eyes of two colours. He had light brown hair that was fine and straight, unlike our wavy black hair. My mother liked to cut and trim it for him, which she did as well as any of the expensive hairdressers in the city, he told us. I liked to rub my face against his cheeks before he shaved. He called this rub a chinchopper because of his bristles. It made us both giggle
.

My father worked so hard, sitting at a long table with all the other Writers, he told us, copying neatly with his pen, until his eyes and his hand hurt. He showed me the blisters on his first finger, his writing finger. I would kiss them. Then my mother would rub them with neem oil, to soften the skin
.

The blistered finger was also his drawing finger. Because he could draw so well, the Company paid him extra to make plans of new buildings and warehouses they wanted to raise down beyond the river landing places, the ghats. He saved this money, he told us, so that one day we might all live together in our own house
.

But, for all his drawings, my father never did make a painting of my mother. I can remember how he tried to. He would take us away from the house and we would walk down the lanes quite a way until he found a tree he liked. He liked willow, he liked tamarind. They made a fine canopy, he said, and my mother would look like a queen resting on a journey
.

“Tamarinds are dangerous,” my mother said. “Ghosts live in them. And they make people tell lies.”

But she sat down, happy to be with my father, happy to be away from the house. Out of his big camel bag – that's what he called it – he took everything he needed. He set my mother on a fold-up stool and fixed her arms and her head and draped her sari just so. Sometimes he brought along a beautiful purple scarf for her head and shoulders. He never left it with her when we went home again but always put it back in the bag and took it away. He was afraid Hemavati would steal it
.