by Mary Finn
Thomas Hickey Esq. and Miss Helena Hickey…
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.
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.
THE RING
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 a
n 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
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 he
r 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.
When she was sitting perfectly, just like a rani on her throne, he told her not to move.
I was little then so I had to stay beside her or him and not wander out of sight. If it was a tamarind tree I walked round it and stared up, looking for the ghosts. I could see ants and beetles walking up the trunk. I could see leaves shaking in the breeze, turning their backs and dancing. Once I saw a small spotted owl, asleep on a branch, close to the top of a tall tree beside the tamarind. But I saw no ghosts.
“Stay still, Anila,” my father said. “You’re distracting me. When you’re a big girl I’ll paint your picture too.”
So I came and sat on the ground beside him on his picnic stool. He had sheets of light-blue paper, held together by a pin that rested on a stiff square of leather. His pencil strokes were very fast. I watched my mother appear, always her body first, turned just the way he had placed her. The folds of her dress he drew like folds in cream when it’s whipped. Then her neck, slender as a stem. He left her feet and her arms until last. On the page they grew on her and held her together. But her lovely face, that was the difficult part.
I looked at my mother, who was only feet away, and at my paper mother. The face I touched every day was soft and full and its eyes were merry, sad, dreamy, different things that I could see with my own baby eyes. The mother on the page had a thin face that would not fatten or, some days, a fuller face that, no matter what my father did with the little cross-strokes of his pencil, he could not slim down into the face that we were looking at. Her paper eyes remained dark, with no lights in them.
“I can draw anything, any palace, any shopfront, any redcoat with his sabre and pistol,” he said to me one day, “but your mother escapes me.”
He sighed. “Maybe the tamarind ghost takes your mother’s soul away from me while she sits under his tree,” he said. That frightened me, and my mother scolded him.
