by Mary Finn
The carriage pulled up outside a white house, which had no gate, even though it lay quite close to the roadway. Instead of tall walls there were bushes that guarded a small lawn, bright green from the rains. The house had a verandah running round its upper storey. I thought how wonderful it would be if we had no gates and no durwan but a viewing place like that where I could watch the world pass by.
Mr Hickey was on the entrance steps to greet us. Unlike us, he had not dressed up and his rough cloth trousers and canvas smock already had spatters of paint on them.
“Welcome, everybody!” he said, and he shook Mr Bristol’s hand. “Now, inside, please.”
We moved into the hall, which was not at all like Mr Bristol’s dark hall. Light streamed though a round window of coloured glass. A stone staircase led out of the hall and at the foot of it stood a very small lady dressed in a dark blue English dress.
She stepped forward and shook my mother’s hand and then took mine. I could feel that her hand was delicate and dry, even in the summer heat. It seemed such a personal thing to do, to take a person’s hand, but I found I did not mind. This lady, who must be Mr Hickey’s daughter, was greeting us in the English manner. But I noticed that she merely bowed her head to Mr Bristol, who was already stretching his neck in every direction. He was quite shameless.
“My dears, you will be stuck with me for some time while my father prepares his worst,” Miss Hickey said to my mother and me. Then she laughed, so that we might know she had made a joke.
She was pale and she had her father’s blue eyes. She wore her straight fine brown hair bundled up into loops on either side of her head, a style I had never seen. When she was not speaking or smiling her mouth had a slight twist that was not at all horrible. I wondered if this was a natural thing or something nervous in her. She was older than my mother, I thought, but I could not really guess what age she might be. I had never met an English lady before.
“You must be Anila,” she said to me. “My goodness, it is a shocking thing to confess, but I have not met anybody of your age since I came to Calcutta and I do so miss my young cousins who have so many interesting things to say at all times. We must have a long chat together during the days when this important business is going on.”
Her eyes were dancing, as my father’s used to. I decided I liked Miss Hickey for her kindly welcome and I smiled back at her. So did my mother, with her rare wide smile that I used think, when I was small, made the birds sing louder. She slipped her arm through mine as she did when we were alone.
I realized then that my mother had been nervous about this meeting because she, too, had never before met an English lady. I think she had expected a different treatment.
“This way, this way,” said Mr Hickey.
He led us to the back of the hall where we stepped into a wide room that faced out onto an open porch. This had the same fat smooth columns that stood in the front of the house. In the distance we could see tall palms that followed the line of the road. Here the light was like water.
In front of the columns, but still in the room, a low day bed had been positioned and spread with a fine rug. Mr Hickey told my mother to sit on it, and to stretch her legs out.
When she was settled, he told her that he would be making an oil sketch that day.
“Next time, there’ll be something to hold,” he said. “An Indian thing. Not to worry, I’ll choose it. And wear the same fine clothes, please. Of course, you know this.”
I could feel Mr Bristol’s pride like a sun ray in the room. He had plumped himself down onto a battered wing chair and of course he had done this without noticing that Miss Hickey was still standing.
Now Mr Hickey set up his canvas on a support with wooden legs so that he did not have to hold it at all. There was a small roughly made table alongside him, with brushes and pots and saucers laid out in no order at all.
Miss Hickey motioned to me to help her draw up a broad stool from the open side of the room so that we might sit together on it.
“My poor music stool,” she said. “It has an idle time of it here, I’m afraid. It has just seen off yet another poor harpsichord with the ague.”
I looked at her, baffled.
“This climate gives the best of instruments the shakes and shivers,” she explained. “As if they were humans. But perhaps you would like to go over and see up close what my father is doing?”
I thanked her and went to stand near Mr Hickey. He was squeezing bright colours from little skin bags onto a piece of fine wood the shape of a water lily leaf. His canvas was already painted all over in a dull clay colour, which shocked me. Why was it not the hopeful white of a page as his drawing had been? And nowhere on his wooden plate of paints could I see the sand and pearl colours of my mother’s skin, or the many different greens that the light made out of her sari and blouse.
He looked round at me and he must have read on my face every doubt I carried. His eyebrows shot up and he blinked his eyes at me twice. I did not know what to say.
“Child,” Mr Hickey said at last. “Painting is alchemy. Matter into beauty. Time into future. Look at the far wall.”
Mr Bristol was frowning at me now but somehow I did not think that his painter friend was offended. I went to stand at the darkened wall and saw what I had not noticed before, a painting of two small girls in white dresses, one with a pink sash, the other with a blue. The younger one held a fruit up to her chubby face, and looked out at me, blue-eyed and yellow-curled. The elder girl had a protective hand on her sister’s shoulder, and, under her fine, fair hair, you could see that she had a sweet little twist to her mouth. An expression unique to her that had been caught in paint and carried into the future.
OTTERS
SUDDENLY CARLEN WAS THE busiest person on our boat. There he would be, coiling ropes and wrapping sails for Madan as if there had never been a sulk. Or else he was sharing fishing lines with Benu and Hari though he still made as if he recognized none of their words.
Even when I returned from bathing in the morning I never found him on his own. If he was preparing our food he would also make certain to be boiling hot water for Mr Walker’s shave and calling out to him in his tent – did he remember this, did he think that, was there ever such a thing. The only person he did not seek out was me. He kept his eyes from me whenever I tried to catch them. Carlen made it clear that, for now, it did not suit him to accept questions from me.
Again I had the terrible dream about my father shrinking to a tiny size and then disappearing from my hand. I tried to think of Mr Walker’s wise words but at night in my dark tent they had no weight.
Now Madan was steering us along the centre of the river because by the banks there were so many smaller boats cutting in and about like dragonflies on the water. As the days passed we saw towns as well as villages and one of these was full of French people, Mr Walker said. Its name was Chandernagar, which means town of the moon. I thought of Garden Reach as we passed by its ghats and wide streets and saw large houses set back from the river, which curved round the town like a young moon growing.
My notebook had a whole navy of ducks now, and owls, darters, geese, swamp hens, egrets and swans. Mr Walker believed our best hope of recording a new species was the little honey-coloured bittern but he also thought the fish owl drawings could be turned into something spectacular when I came to the job of painting.
“Nobody has ever thought to draw a bird in that way before.”
I should have been thrilled by his praise but nothing sat well in me. I kept thinking of what Carlen knew, or claimed he knew, and what I feared from him. As my father shrank in my dream, so Carlen grew giant-sized. And still I could not command his attention.
When the towns lay behind us we began to pass through jade green countryside where cane grew, and dye plants. The boats we met now all had a happy air – their sails were brightly coloured and we heard songs coming over the water from them. Our boat had been silent up to this but now shy Benu began to sing from
his place by the tiller. His was a spring song about a buffalo herder walking by the river, imitating everything he saw on the way, a sweet and funny song. I think we were all proud that the Hera finally had its own music.
The more we journeyed upriver the more I enjoyed my morning bathes because here there were many turns in the banks making miniature coves where the water was quiet. One morning I had found such a place and I was lying on my back drifting, my favourite thing to do in the water. My hair was floating behind me and some bank side herbs were bobbing against my feet.
Then I saw the otters.
A mother otter was leading her babies out of their hole in the bank. She dropped each one close by the water and then returned for the next. There were three in her litter and she held each as a cat does her kittens. They wriggled in her mouth, the furry little babies, and they beat their tiny webbed feet like fists. The babies were still dry but she was as wet as I was.
I did my best to be as still as a stayed stick so that I could see what she was doing and not frighten her. We had spotted these water animals a couple of times already, but only by way of a quick splash and a small dark head swimming away fast. Mr Walker’s eyes had filled with tears the first time.
“I know of no other animal that enjoys its life the way an otter does,” he said. “Eveline and I once saw them making slides in the snow, dashing themselves into the water and coming out to do it over again and again. And these were adults! She said to me once that she would like to be reborn as an otter if the good Lord saw fit to offer those kinds of arrangements in heaven.”
Perhaps this was she. But I could not fetch Mr Walker now. My smallest movement would scatter them.
The mother was showing the babies how it was that she swam. She dived down and when I raised my head from the flat I could just see her dark shape moving in the water, twisting like a large fish. The little otters were like every other kind of baby in the world. They looked up- and downriver, anywhere but at what their mother was trying to teach them. One little fellow tried sitting up on his hind legs and fell over on his back in the reeds but not before I could see that his whiskers and tiny smudge of a nose were like things alive and separate from the rest of him, they quivered so much.
A grey heron passed over us, gliding on its great wings, heading downriver to find a good fishing place. But there was one fish the bird would never find because that hardworking mother otter had found it first. She hauled herself up onto the bank and dropped her catch, still arching itself, in front of her babies.
I saw a strange flash of coloured light bouncing on the water near the otters. But it was a small fishing boat coming downstream that broke up the little scene. The pole man saw me in the shallows and called out a greeting, staring hard at me as he drove his danr down into the water. He saw nothing of the little water family though, for they had disappeared.
How could I tell Mr Walker what he had missed? That was my bother as I came back along the path. But there he was, standing at the prow of our boat, waving, a great beam widening his face.
“Anila, we saw them, did you?” he called out. “The otters? Carlen had the telescope set up, the fortunate fellow, and he spotted them.”
There it was, set up indeed, and truly like the tiny ship’s cannon I had first thought it to be, positioned on a chest with its barrel overshooting the gunwale of the boat. My stomach suddenly felt as if there was a glove of red-hot iron in it, grabbing and poking at me from inside. Was this the first time that Carlen had decided to track me and watch while I bathed? Why, he did not even care now that I knew what he had done. His face was turned my way but there was no acknowledgement there, no pretence, just his steely eyes passing over me and away.
I had to kneel down by the reeds and bend my head over my knees, trying to stop myself being sick.
Mr Walker was out of the boat at once, but he came to a halt some feet away, not wishing to embarrass me, I believe. His voice was all concern.
“Anila, my dear. Hari is getting water. Take your time.”
The sickness passed after all. I could not take breakfast however and while Madan, Carlen and Mr Walker prepared for another trip to another salt depot I went into the cabin to lie down, away from the sun. Benu was on deck, watching out for the most part, but from time to time I heard loud splashes and knew he was swimming. He called out sometimes too, to boats passing, and to my ears he sounded then just like my old friend Dinesh. I wondered where Dinesh was now and what work he had found and whether he remembered the day the boat with the Englishmen came up our creek.
THE BOY
WHEN I WOKE I knew that something was different. Outside, the light was thick and yellow, even languid. Mr Hickey would call it sulphurous but my mother would have thought of wild cats or jackals. Clouds the colour of mud were flocking round the sun. Perhaps a storm was coming, though it was not the season.
Benu had abandoned his fishing. He was sitting on deck with his crayon and some sketch paper I had given him but he blushed as I came near him and covered his work.
“No good,” he said.
But I had seen that he was not drawing birds. He was copying letters, the ornate gilt letters that spelled H-E-R-A. My glimpse told me that his copy was close but I knew he would prefer if I said nothing.
“Benu, I feel as if I can’t breathe. I must walk somewhere. Will you come? Perhaps as far as that village?”
I pointed to where a track led from the river path to a small village screened by its bamboos and tall palms, a place the same as dozens we had passed yesterday and the days before.
Just like my grandfather’s village. My mother’s first home.
“I cannot leave the boat,” Benu said. “My father has left me to mind all that we have.”
He stretched his arms out, one reaching fore, one aft.
Of course. How stupid I was.
“Then, I’ll just go that way myself.”
Benu’s forehead creased just like his father’s.
“It is not safe for you,” he said.
“Perhaps on the way then I’ll just find another neem tree to climb. One with an eagle in it this time – that will protect me!”
But he didn’t laugh and shook his head, his frown unchanged, as I left.
It felt so good to walk, even under the heavy clouds, that it was a while before I realized what was different about this place. Here nobody was working in the fields, not one person, and there was no sign of any human presence, unless you wished to count the huts ahead. Over them the kites were circling, ever so surely.
“When the kite builds, look to lesser linen.”
Whenever birds stole pieces of the dhobi’s laundry work Miss Hickey would say that verse of her beloved Shakespeare. But here there were no linens drying, no saris stretched like ribbons on the earth, just as there had been no women to scrub them by the water.
I thought for a moment of my mother’s stories of enchantments, where people were shaped into wayside rocks or locked away to moan in the clefts of trees until the right person happened along to release them. But Mr Walker’s account of the salt taxes was fresher in my mind. Perhaps these village people had gone to work in the outlaw salt tanks, where even the small hands of children might be needed.
The first of the houses was a pukka house, brick-built unlike the others, and it had a high wall round it, also of brick, that seemed to be sheltering a garden or a courtyard. A narrow grassy path led alongside this wall and from the other side I could hear all the insects of late afternoon buzzing. A black fly landed on my neck, then another larger one and they did not shift even when I shook my head in irritation. I had to slap them away.
I looked towards the smaller houses. There was nobody at all abroad in the village, not even a child. Not a goat. Not a dog to bark at me, the stranger.
I felt as if a rough pestle was grinding away in my stomach. But with no people around, surely there was nothing to fear. Except that I might not find the drink I now realized I wanted very badly.
>
Just where a tall old mango tree hung over the courtyard wall there was a gap at the bottom like a giant mousehole, with all the broken bricks lying where they had fallen. A small lizard lay motionless on one of them but he shot into a crack as I bent down and peered through the hole. Beyond looked green and promising.
On the other side, I straightened up. I was in a courtyard orchard. It was entirely overgrown but you could still trace the elegant brick paths that lay under the weeds and broken stones, and imagine the way the fruit trees must have looked when they were young and clipped and cared for. In the centre of the courtyard a long deep fish tank was set, a tank that seemed to be properly maintained, unlike the trees. Its water looked fresh enough for drinking and as I came up to it I heard a fish plop down into the water after a jump, and then saw the ripples spreading where it had landed.
Further on, past the tank, a wizened peepul tree stood in front of the old house. I thought I saw some drinking gourds lying at its foot and made my way to it.
But my eyes had deceived me.
A boy was tied to the tree. He was sitting on the ground, his back pressed up against the trunk, and his head was slumped down over his chest. All he had on was a filthy torn dhoti, for whoever had done this had used his own thin head wrap to tie him. He was a boy, but it was hard to say more than that about him, not even his age or his true size, because his body was so swollen. His arms and legs were like great soft vegetables and his belly looked like a full water bag, only it was angry and sore. There was a smell of something sweet, something disgusting, all around.
I felt a stinging pain on my own foot and looked down. That was when I saw the ants, the lines of red ants that were marching away from the boy as if he were a city and they the soldiers who had ransacked it. I called out in disgust and stamped my foot but they kept coming.
The boy did not stir at that, did not lift his head to see where such disturbance came from. I looked up in despair and saw the kites again, flapping their wings and making plays earthwards as if they meant to land. That sight made me sure the boy was dead.
