by Mary Finn
“Carlen’s genius is to be a jack-of-all-trades,” he said in a low voice. “Perhaps he will learn a little more mastery from today’s lesson.”
Madan shrugged. He turned to me again.
“Does Arjun know you are passing by?”
I shook my head.
“I have never met him.”
I could feel tears, hot in my eyes. And I could see through them that Mr Walker was making signs at Madan not to question me further. I knew then he would tell him my story when he got a chance, so that Madan might understand why tomorrow we would sail past my grandfather’s village and not call on him. Would he tell him also that my parents were not married, as he believed? It mattered little. In our society when an Indian girl leaves with a white man her family might be happy at her fortune, but they also understand she cannot ever come back again to be with them. Madan must surely have guessed this already, just by looking at my skin.
But it was all so close. I had not dreamed it would be so close, or that I would ever hear news of my grandfather in this way. For all that his dhotis had kept me warm when I was little, I had not felt his protection in my life since then. Now that he was there, somewhere upriver along the peaceful banks, surely there was some way that I could see him for myself, discover all that my mother came from?
THE HOUSE WITH THE FOUNTAIN
WHEN WE MOVED INTO Mr Bristol’s house it was clear from the beginning that he was an honest man. That is, of course, if you leave out the matter of the story collection he had mentioned. Though he did indeed write things down, he was not really gathering tales from anybody, we had discovered. Which was perhaps just as well, as my mother was in no mood to tell any at that time. But there really was a bag of money. It was all his own, or so it seemed, and it was in the matter of this money that he showed his honesty.
He asked if my mother could read a document and when she said no, she could not, but that I could, he gave me the page that he had written.
“Read it and then you can explain it to your mother,” he said.
It was difficult because there were many words I did not understand but he pronounced them for me and told me their meanings when I asked. I knew that it was useful for me to learn to read such long words. My English had become much weaker since my father had gone away.
Mr Bristol told us that the document was a contract of service. He said that he was known in London as a man of the law who believed in justice and fair play.
“I am against all slavery,” he said. “Some people consider these kinds of arrangements to be a form of slavery. I wish to make it clear that your mother is to be a paid intimate who will receive a small salary that will accrue to her, as well as food and benefits in kind, as long as this household shall last. That she may leave my household at any time and, should that be her choice, she will then receive those monies that have accumulated to her. That you, her dependant, will also receive food and benefits in kind as long as this household shall last. That any child born of this union will be acknowledged as my full dependant to be educated and provided for until its coming of age even in the event of your mother choosing to depart my household.”
And there was more. Mr Bristol asked me to sign my mother’s name to the document.
“But only if she agrees to everything itemized in it,” he said.
Back in our little house in the lane my mother had told me what her dealings with Mr Bristol would be when we moved into his house on Old Court House Street.
“He wants me to be his bibi,” she said. “But I do not love him and he knows that. He does not love me but he finds me beautiful. I shall have to sleep with him when he wants me to. That means there might be a child. But I think he is kind enough in his way. He thinks you are a clever girl. As clever as any English child he knows, he says.”
But still she hung her head when I told her what was in the document.
The house in Old Court House Street had two storeys and a flat roof but apart from the roof it was not like our old house in any way. A tall brick wall ran in front of it, cutting the house and its garden off from the street. You went in and out through green gates that were opened and closed by a durwan, a paid gatekeeper.
The garden was planted with a pomegranate tree and soft springy grass. A straight pebble path led from the gates to the front door. Halfway along the path a large stone bowl sat on the ground with water in it. It was like a tiny tank. Two white fish creatures, also made of stone, reared up in the middle of the bowl. They blew water out of their mouths up into the air where it hung in a fine thread and then fell back into the bowl.
“They’re dolphins,” Mr Bristol told me when I asked him what they were. “The king of France had such dolphins at the palace of Versailles, I’m told.”
My mother told me later that the stone creatures looked nothing like the dolphins she used to see leaping in the river when she was young.
Mr Bristol warned me not to drink the fountain water, that it was not safe. But all the songbirds in the garden came to the bowl to drink and some of them took baths in it, fluffing up their feathers and dipping their faces in the water.
The street beyond the wall was so wide that our lane would have fitted into it about five times over. But I could no longer run outside as I used to on the lane, nor were my mother and I permitted to take a walk together on our own. If I climbed the pomegranate tree I could see the carriages and palanquins hurrying by in the mornings and evenings, and the people parading all day long, but my mother begged me not to do this.
“Mr Bristol will be angry if he sees you up there,” she said. “Please, for my sake, Anila, don’t be so fidgety, stay still and be quiet.”
She used the word ushkush for fidgety, a word that always used to make her laugh when she heard other mothers use it. It was such a funny word, she said, and yet they always sounded so cross when they said it. But she was not laughing now.
So, the only outside life that I saw after that was the top halves of elephants, and those only if they happened to be passing on our side of the street. I could see their eyes, if they were tall elephants, and their painted foreheads and bright cotton headdresses. The mahouts and the people riding tall in the howdahs behind them could see down into our garden and into all the others on Old Court House Street. I envied them their view. The durwan always shouted or shook a stick at me if I went near his gates.
My mother and I shared a room most of the time, a room on the second storey at the back of the house. Underneath our window, alongside the cookhouse, was a long house where the women servants slept. At least we had not been put there. Sometimes my mother went downstairs to talk to the old ayah, Rupa, but Rupa was a shy woman. She was also loyal to her master.
Mr Bristol’s room was upstairs at the front of the house, and he liked to stand in his window looking out at what was happening in the street outside. From the garden I could see his plump figure framed there. Sometimes he waved to me.
All the windows of the house had shutters and so, even though the windows were tall, some with real glass in them, we could make our room dark and cool in an instant by pulling our shutters closed. When my mother wasn’t there, I liked to play with the shutters, opening and closing them as if they were the gates to an enchanted palace and I the durwan with the key.
We had a wide comfortable bed with linen sheets, and a pillow for each of us, a chest for our clothes and a long mirror that you could tilt up and down. My mother had brought her Durga and the little altar with us and she talked to the goddess even more than before, if that was possible. But there were not so many other mementos remaining from the house on the lane. I had cried when my mother refused to bring the bird quilt with us.
“That is all in the past now,” she said. “We have everything we need here to make us comfortable. Besides as long as Hemavati has it, she will always remember us.”
I knew then that the quilt now reminded her of my father rather than her own father.
Our clothes were new, and,
my mother’s especially, very beautiful, far lovelier than anything we had ever owned. Mr Bristol ordered saris, scarves and shawls from the big bazaar for her, and a dressmaker came to fit us both for sets of stitched clothes. Silks and brocades and fine Dacca muslins for my mother, cottons and one good silk for me. But we would soon be the same size, the dressmaker told us, and then could double up our clothes and be twice as rich.
She was a tiny person with grey stripes in her hair and a laugh like a magpie. She was not from Calcutta at all, she told us, nor even Bengal, but from the holy city of Kashi, that the English called Benares, far up on the Ganga. Mr Bristol said she was in great demand among the highest society English ladies in the city for making their dresses and costumes.
“In London, she would have her own shop on Bond Street, and dozens of seamstresses working for her,” he said. “Imagine.”
My mother admired her fine stitching and liked to run her fingers up the seams of our brand-new tunics and blouses, marvelling at the smoothness.
“If you could only learn this trade, Anila,” she said to me, “you need never have a life like mine.”
My mother dreamed of such things for me though I think she knew I would have been like a caged monkey with such work. She had no further dreams for herself, that was clear. Nor stories either. I was the one now who told our old stories over and over, trying to make her smile.
She attended Mr Bristol as he wished, and not always merely to his bedroom. When he had gentlemen callers to the house, persons from the law courts and the Company, or friends from the hunt, he liked her to be in the room too. She might chop their cigars with a knife, or keep their hookahs, their hubble-bubbles as they called them, watered for smoking. She cut up their tobacco, handed round their drinks, and even offered paan to those who had learned to like the taste. If they took their drinks into Mr Bristol’s billiards room, she had to go in there too and pick the coloured balls out of the table nets for them and set them back on its green top.
“That Mr Percy said it’s because my hands are smaller than the male servants’ hands and not so greasy,” she told me. “He dares say that, whose hands are the filthiest in the city!”
Mr Bristol was kind in his fashion, and respectful to my mother at all times during these occasions, she said. But several of his friends were anything but.
“They are disgusting people,” she said. “They use foul language. They spend a fortune on pomade for their hair but they do not even leave the room to take their toilet. I tell you, they have a great bowl in a corner of the room where they relieve themselves. And this in front of a woman, even if I am only a bibi!”
She was supposed to sprinkle rosewater to take away the smells.
After the first few occasions like that my mother would have weeping fits for days. Later, and this was worse, she would laugh as she told the story over and over, laugh until she was taken over by hiccups and had to gulp for breath. I hated that. She sounded like Hemavati.
The strange thing was that I knew Hemavati would think our present life was wonderful. That if I could slip away to the lane for an afternoon and tell her about the silken saris, about our airy room, and the garden with the fountain, about all the foods we ate now that were putting flesh back on our bones and gloss in our hair, that Hemavati’s eyes would grow huge with wonder, or envy, or both, and that she would not laugh at all.
Of course there was no question of doing that. All I could do to amuse myself was read. Most of the books in Mr Bristol’s glass-covered bookshelf were dull law books, bound in leather, which I hated to touch. But there were some cloth-bound books too, mainly travellers’ tales, which interested Mr Bristol most, he told me. Of course that reminded me of the lie he had told me by the river but I said nothing. My favourite of these was by a man whose ship had left him in countries ruled by giants, and madmen, and horses who could talk wisely. Mr Bristol told me that the story was all make-believe, that there were no such countries as these and that as far as he was concerned India was the strangest country he had ever travelled in.
I must have looked cross to hear this for I wanted to believe all stories were true. He told me then that I made a face like a thunderclap and I should banish it smartly, for he liked to see sunny faces in his house.
CAMPING
“THIS BIRD WILL TAKE the fish from my hands, clever one!”
Madan was admiring my new drawings. In his hands my large notebook shrank to storybook size but I noticed that he turned the pages over as carefully as a scribe. He paused over a heron that I had taken some time with.
“See how patient he is, this fisher bird. His legs will hold him there till Hanuman throws a bridge across the Ganga.”
Yes, I believed I had captured the heron’s secret, as my mother would say, for all the while I was staring at the grey bird it could not see me, nor indeed any of us, as we set about our separate tasks. Benu had steered our boat into a tent of green coolness under a willow tree.
While I drew, Madan and Benu landed fish from the end of the boat, Carlen fried them and Hari laid out scoops of delicious rice for each of us. Mr Walker insisted on his tea then, but the rest of us drank water that Hari had drawn from a tank in a field behind us. Carlen tipped his clay cup back as if he were enjoying the drink, but he said nothing to anyone and stared off into the big sky across the river.
Behind our tree the land stretched away in faded colours, yellow for old mustard, grey where a few empty paddy fields were still flooded and sad without their rice, brown where the fields had had their winter cuttings. There were little islands of trees here and there where the hamlets were and people moved between them like flies on a rope.
“Madan, I will show you another drawing.”
I stepped into the empty cabin and went to the cupboard where my leather case was stored. In among the bird paintings that I had brought along to show Mr Walker that first day was another loose-leaf drawing on thick cream paper. I kept it between boards for safety, wrapped in oilcloth. It was not my drawing.
That is, it was not by my hand. But it belonged to me.
Madan looked at the drawing for a long time. Then he smiled and gave it back to me.
“I don’t need this to see that you are very like Annapurna,” he said. “She travelled on this boat once too, with Arjun, when she was just a little one. And I will tell you something. She did not have the fine clothes of that picture but nor did she have these things!”
He pointed to my trousers again and laughed so that his belly shook. But I felt a glow inside me. Madan was pleased with me, I knew; the same way that I was pleased with the kingfishers I saw that morning flashing blue fire; the same way I liked his own great size and his twisted moustaches.
“May I see it, Anila?”
Mr Walker stood up and threw the dregs of his tea over the side of the boat before reaching for the portrait of my mother.
“She is very beautiful,” he said, after a long look. “I can see why you want to keep it by you. I have nothing like this to remember my sister by, alas, for my father was a strict churchman who thought portraiture was the devil’s own sorcery.”
His face was set hard as he said this. I passed him the heron sketch then, in case it might cheer him. Though of course a heron was not a new bird to any of us.
“You could bring this to the Royal Society in London, Anila,” he said when he had finished his scrutiny, “and they would find it fit to hang it on their walls. I’m very pleased with you.”
He held the page up so that Benu and Hari could see it. Hari nodded his head gravely.
“I remember what you tell us, sahib,” he said. “We must all be looking for the great birds for Miss Anila tomorrow and every day we are on the river.”
Benu was looking at my heron as if a star had fallen out of the sky onto the page. I reached for a piece of drawing paper from my case, sketched a quick copy for him, signed it, and put it into his hands, along with the black crayon. He blushed but folded the margins of the page to
make a frame round the bird and kept it in the flat of his hand, looking at it.
I returned my two precious drawings to the cabin and when I came out on deck again, though it was only a few moments, the sun had dipped down below the far side of the river and Mr Walker was making arrangement for our sleeping quarters.
“Anila, you shall choose. Would you care for a fine soldier’s tent all to yourself? I should be nearby in a similar one and the men would stay together on board. Or you might prefer to take the salon to yourself, pull the blinds down and construct your own apartment. In that case Carlen will take the tent and the others will stretch out on the deck. It is a fine arrangement either way, this beautiful night.”
“Oh, I choose the tent!”
“I thought you might. Well, it’s no elegant affair, take my word. But we’ll steal some of the cushions from the cabin while Madan looks the other way.”
Madan pretended to look fearsome but it was Carlen whose face was the study as he and Hari wrestled the lengths of canvas and poles off the boat and across to a flat mound that Mr Walker declared was dry as a biscuit.
I hadn’t thought when I spoke but I realized that Carlen now had another reason to vent spite on me, whatever his first cause might be. His face told me that he had wanted the favour of being set apart from everyone else, there with Mr Walker on that little mound.
When he had finished his work with the poles and the ropes my little tent was standing up with a sharp gable on it. I thanked him though the words stuck in my throat and I hoped his scratched hand was hurting him. But he said nothing, just walked away back to the boat, his fair hair catching the light the stars threw down. There was no moonlight, only the black moon with a tiny moonbaby in her arms, ready for sleep herself.
I stepped into the tent and pulled the flaps across. Inside it was dark, though gradually I could make out a glow cast by the remains of our cooking fire. It was not tall enough for me to stand up but it felt safe and dry and cosy. Like something an animal would make if it had hands, I thought, a clever bear or a lion.
