by Mary Finn
That then was how we finished our Christmas Day picnic on the green. We rode to the river in a carriage, a plain brown one, with two brown ponies pulling it, each of us with a child in our lap, except for poor Anoush who was still sore. Mrs Herbert passed a flask of lemonade around, filling the one cup, which went from child to adult and adult to child. No distinctions were made. That was the kind of good people they were.
FRUITS FOR DURGA
ONE MORNING, AND I cannot say how many days or even weeks she had lain there, my mother got up. She was thin as a twig and her hair hung like dry leaves, unbrushed and without any of its gloss. But even I could see that whatever Hemavati had meant when she talked of good signs, those signs were there that morning.
“Anila!”
She called me to her – I was sweeping the floor and Hemavati and Malati were out – and she hugged me. I was then only as high as her chest but that morning I could feel that I had more weight than she had. She asked me to go to the tank for fresh water. She said that she wanted to wash at home with nobody looking at her.
I ran down the lane to the tank with our biggest jug and dipped it in several times to make it brim over. My mother washed herself all over and her sari clung to her poor bones so that you could count them. Then she took some of Malati’s soapnut for her hair and I ran again for more water.
She came with me then, up the stairs to the roof, to dry out, and also, she told me, so she could breathe good air again. No matter that most of the smells were oven fires and mustard oils burning, and the fresh dung of animals and people. She said she could smell the river on the air and the fragrance of trees.
“Now I must find work,” she said. “But what can I do?”
Before, my mother had earned a few annas in the week by preparing paan for the stallholders on the high road. But that was in addition to what my father gave her and now even if she chopped nuts and rolled leaves all day there would not be enough to live on. Perhaps she could sew more quilts, I thought.
“Hemavati was kind,” I said to her. “She didn’t steal, she gave us things instead.”
“And Malati?” my mother asked.
“Oh, Malati says she is marrying before monsoon, but no one believes her,” I said. “But perhaps she will because she has gone away. We haven’t seen her for quite a while.”
My mother smiled and shook her head. Her beautiful black hair lifted in the warm morning breeze and strands of it crossed her face. I drew them back and saw there were tears in her eyes.
“At least I never said that,” she whispered. “Even if I do put sindur in my hair like a married woman.” Then she laughed until she began to cough.
So I told her about the goats and the girls and Dinesh, about the potter and the palanquin maker’s son. Before, when I had left the house, it was always in my mother’s company. She did not want me running wild on the lane, she said. But Hemavati had told me that my mother feared in case other children would say nasty things, or reject me.
“They won’t do that if you’re tough enough,” she’d said. “I had to learn that for myself when I was not much older than you and just as pretty, I can tell you. Besides everyone on this lane has something to hide. If you can find what it is, what each person’s secret is, then you’ll be the toughest of them all. They will fear to cross you.”
Hemavati made daily life sound so interesting, like the everlasting battles between gods and demons. It really was not like that at all. But I learned one thing. Although the girls’ father was not so happy about the dancers in our house, Bashanti and Varsha themselves thought it must be wonderful to share a house with such exotic people. They envied me that, while I did not envy them their goatkeeping. Was that being tough?
My mother decided to cook a meal to make a thanksgiving to Hemavati for all her care.
“I have a little money hidden,” she said. “You go out and buy for me. I don’t think I will try to walk that far today. Not yet.”
We went downstairs. The statue of Durga was the hiding place, and the money was still there inside her clay body, though my mother was shocked that none of us had thought to put offerings out for the goddess all the time she had been ill.
“Anila, my golden Anila,” she reproached me. “You above all people know that Durga is treasured in our family. What will she think of us? Get some fruit for her and some fragrant leaves too. A garland if there is enough left.”
I ran out again, this time in the other direction, up to the stalls on the high road. When I came back with my basket full of good rice, fresh ginger, chillis and greens, ripe figs and some yellow puretti fruits for Durga, my mother was sitting outside our door talking to Varsha and Bashanti. Already she looked so much better, with colour in her face and even in her poor famished arms, but that was not what surprised me.
It was to see her enjoying the girls round her. I don’t believe she had known their faces before, and certainly not their names. Now she was listening to what they were saying and, yes, even teasing them a little. She looked up at me and drew me down to her lap, gently removing the garland of yellow marigolds that I had placed round my neck.
“Anila, I have made one big decision while you were gone. Varsha and Bashanti tell me they cannot swim and they are afraid of the water. So I am going to teach them and you too, of course, how to swim. The goats can watch! And if anybody else wants to come along, a mother or a child, well that would be very fine too.”
Bashanti was staring at my mother with adoration. Varsha was jigging up and down with such excitement that she didn’t notice that fresh pellets of goat dung were squeezing up between her toes. As well she might feel that way. Even I didn’t know how to swim, though I always loved going down to the washing bank with my mother. But I had never seen her swim before. Only the boys swam.
My mother must have read my thoughts because she said, “I was telling the girls about my father and the life we had on the riverbank with the boats. He taught me to swim when I was much smaller than any of you. All these years in our house I have gone without it and now nothing would give me more pleasure than to show you how to become a fish.”
She made a twisting-fish gesture and the girls collapsed in giggles. She told them to go home and ask their mother’s permission.
“Tell all the mothers to come too,” she said. “If they don’t want to swim they can do their washing. They can do both, tell them!”
She said it would be some days before she felt able but that I would come and let them know when. They skipped off then, like little goats themselves, and we went inside to prepare the feast. Only Hemavati and ourselves were there to eat because once again there was no sign of Malati. She had never been gone from us for so long before. Perhaps she really had got married before the monsoons.
I thought then that my mother had learned to become tough. It was a different way of being tough from the way Hemavati had proposed and to me it seemed a much better way. When we started making our trips down to the little creek I soon discovered the joys of learning to belong in the water. In a little while Bashanti, for one, excelled even my mother at swimming. I think it was because she was always competing against Dinesh, her cousin.
But at that time what I liked most of all was this: that my mother could wake up and shine like a sun again after such a darkness. Knowing that she was able to do that, even once, even for a short time, always gives me hope now when it’s hope I’m searching for. As for herself, she said it all came about because Durga was watching over her, anxiously waiting for the only person in the house who would provide her with gifts of flower petals and fruit.
HERA
“ISN’T THIS A BEAUTY?”
Mr Walker was almost whispering, as English people do in churches. But we were in his carriage, clattering along the fine street surfaces, heading for the boat that waited for us north of the city.
I looked at what he was holding up, a gun, a golden gun, like a smaller brother of the guns you might see poking out through the sides of s
ome of the ships on the river. It was made of brass, a fat barrel of brass. I could see no beauty in it except that it was shiny, and small too, at least for a gun, and that it had its own neat brown case.
“Are you going to shoot birds with it?”
He looked at me as if I were mad.
“This is a Gregorian telescope, Anila, one of the finest of its kind. You will love the power that this will add to your perceptions of the world. When we are on the boat I will show you how it brings the most faraway thing close, even the moon and the stars.”
If only the barrel could work that magic on my father, I thought, then I would be impressed. No, what I preferred to trust was in the large tin box at my feet.
Mr Walker had been busy around the city suppliers since I had seen him last.
When I came from the ferry stop that morning, as early as I could be, he was outside in the street helping two men load his goods onto the roof of the carriage. All manner of bulky items were piled up there and the men were on top, laying them out and tying them down. Mr Walker waved at me and straightaway went inside his house, shouting out for Chandra. The fair-haired Englishman did not stop his knot-making to look at me as I came close, but the little dark-skinned bearer beamed at me from the top of the carriage.
“I am Hari. Sahib’s man. Give me your bags.”
I lifted up my canvas bag with my clothes and my combs but I patted Mr Hickey’s case to show him that I was keeping that one to myself.
Mr Walker and Chandra came out of the house. Chandra was carrying a neat tin case sized like a card-table top.
“Show Anila her box of tricks.”
Chandra opened the lid for me and I gasped. Inside, the box was divided into portions. One had coloured chalks, another pencils and crayons, and a long narrow section held a number of brushes, each one tipped with gleaming fur. The centre portion had dear little watercolour cakes set into it like pendant jewels: emerald, ruby, topaz, jet, as well as every other shade a bird’s plumage might demand. The box lid was hollow and there were a couple of large notebooks strapped into it, tied safe with crossed leather straps.
“Now you will make more fine pictures of Balor,” said Chandra. His smile was a fierce one, for he had no teeth in front, but his eyes made such fine nets of crinkles you had to smile back at him.
“Even Mr Hickey has nothing like this, so perfect to travel with,” I said to Mr Walker. “I have never had such fine things of my own to work with. Oh, thank you, thank you.”
I felt eyes on me and turned. The fair man was kneeling on the carriage roof, looking down over us. He had a rope in one hand, a stubby knife in the other. I caught his glance but he did not look away, and continued to stare boldly, at my new present, at my face and hair, at my trousers. His eyes were blue as the sky above and his skin clear and clean as a child’s. He waited until I closed the box and then reached his legs over the guard rail and jumped down, slightly brushing me as he stepped past. The knife was still in his hand.
“Anila, this is Carlen,” Mr Walker said. “He’s been storming Fort William for me these past days, finding all our provisions. He has much experience in making camp so we’ll be in good hands.”
Carlen put his knife into his belt holder and nodded his head, but did not bother to notice me further now that his feet were on the ground. For my part, I had never seen a grown English person with such smooth fair hair. It was clipped in layers, neat as feathers, and shaped round his ears. He wore brown kerseymere breeches and a clean white vest, no jacket but a waistcoat with many pockets. He wore these things as ifthey were a hide he had been born with; they moved on him like muscles.
“Your maps, sir,” he said to Mr Walker. “You’ll want them inside?”
He went into the house and came out with a leather case like mine, which he placed inside on a seat. When everything was packed inside the carriage, or on the roof tied down, Carlen checked the harness and traces, taking his time. He stood in front of the two black horses and spoke to them as if to encourage them, stroking their muzzles. Then he swung himself up to the roof again and sat beside the driver, who glared at him. Hari stood on the step at the back and Chandra waited anxiously while Mr Walker and I stepped into the carriage. He waved until we had gone down the street and turned right onto Chowringhee, heading north.
Mr Walker must have been disappointed with the welcome I gave to his telescope for now he reached for the leather case.
“I’ll show you where we are going,” he said.
I had seen maps before, for sometimes my father had used them while he was drawing up his plans for this or that building, but I didn’t understand how they worked. Maps were not pictures of anything I could recognize. I looked down now at the one Mr Walker had taken out and opened up. I saw a shape like a large piece of ginger root with a dark line snaking up to the top of the page to meet a thicker black line travelling across it.
“This is Mr Rennell’s masterpiece,” he said proudly, smoothing out the sheet. “A map maker who knows India the way the eagles do. The rest of us are only worms on the ground.”
He placed his finger on the thick black line.
“Look, this is the Ganga rising to Benares,” he said. “And this here is our Hooghly, which as you know is really just another branch of the great river. And this,” he planted his finger on top of the ginger root, “is the Sunderbans, as jungly a place as anyone could wish for. Hari is from that region and I had my own adventure there last year. I tell you, Anila, we would surely come upon the giant bird from the Persian tales and more like it if we were to travel downriver to the Sunderbans. But unfortunately the place is full of tigers and crocodiles and we’d need a shooting party. So, we’re going up the Hooghly instead and we’ll see what rare creatures may be waiting for us along the riverbanks. If any.”
“Is Carlen good at finding birds? Did he shoot the birds that you have at the courthouse?”
I thought of Carlen sitting on top, as easy-limbed as a monkey in a tree, his blue eyes sure to be fixing on everything we passed, no matter how the coach swayed and rattled. Now that we had begun to leave the good city streets behind our way was full of holes and wheel ruts. We could hear poor Hari groaning from time to time as a wheel dropped down into one and bumped out again.
Mr Walker laughed.
“You’re set on guns today, Anila. No, Carlen is a countryman all right but he has no proper feeling for any beast other than a horse. My birds… well, let’s just say I acquired them before I knew better. People knew I was looking for this one and that one, and there’d be a knock at my door one day, a hand stretched out to relieve me of considerable quantities of annas, and another poor bird taken out of life’s reckoning. I learned to keep my mouth shut.”
The buildings we were passing now were ever more rickety and when we brushed against their thatched roofs they felt like rags. On the streets people were rushing, pushing and pulling things, and shouting. Our house on the lane could not be far distant, I thought, but I could not figure where it lay. Then at last we were following the river over quiet soil where tal trees and feathery bamboos ran alongside us.
We drew up alongside some bamboo houses grouped in a huddle and set back from the water. The houses actually looked like boats, at least like some of the boats tied up at the riverbank. These were lean as knives with messy thatch dropping down over them like wigs on Englishmen. One was different.
“It’s not hard to guess which one is your boat,” I said to Mr Walker. He laughed.
“We should be comfortable on her because she’s made for these waters,” he said. “She’s like a very small budgerow. And we can take sail or scull, depending on conditions.”
Small? The boat was almost as long as our salon in Garden Reach, though of course it was not so wide. It seemed to have an entire room sitting on its deck, the walls made of glass windows on all sides, all topped with a flat roof of dark wood. There was a green paint trim all round the boat and it had a name written on its side in gold, an Eng
lish name, I thought. Hera.
Men and boys came running from the houses when our carriage rattled to a stop. They swarmed over the carriage, clambering over each other to reach the bags and things on top. The horses shifted sideways with fright and whickered as we rocked. Carlen stopped the climbers with a roar, his hands raised against them.
“Stay down and catch what I throw,” he shouted at them in English.
Mr Walker and I stepped down from the carriage with our own precious bags. I lifted the painting case carefully from the floor and gripped it tight. I shook my head at the boys who came towards us, their hands out to seize whatever they could. Behind them I saw the smallest boy of all running for the boat with my canvas bag on his head as if it had no weight.
A dark man dressed only in a long dhoti came from the biggest of the bamboo houses and walked towards us. He wore no head wrap, and had no hair at all on his head, but lots on his face, thick eyebrows and a pair of curled moustaches that he obviously took good care of. His scalp gleamed like a well-oiled egg. He was taller than Mr Walker, taller than Carlen, and he stood in front of us as strong and steady as a tree coming out of the earth. I had never seen anybody like him.
Then he smiled.
“Sahib, I am Madan, your boatman. Your man, the other sahib there, he came some days ago and said make ready everything and I do. We can leave now, whenever you like.”
Mr Walker took a linen cloth from his trousers pocket and wiped his brow. Already his hair was beginning to escape from its pigtail in its usual way but this didn’t seem to bother him. He spoke in Bangla.
“Excellent, Madan. Your companions are myself, my drawing assistant here, Miss Anila Tandy, my manservant, Carlen, whom you’ve met already, and my bearer, Hari. We are a very small company as you see. And how many do you bring on board yourself?”
“Just my son, sahib,” said Madan. He pointed at one of the taller boys on board the boat but his back was to us. “Benu is a good boatman too, and very quiet. Your sahib said you did not want many men so that you may see all the birds you want, in peace.”
