Anila's Journey

by Mary Finn

  There was surely nothing left in my stomach but something struggled up into my mouth nonetheless and I bent over to retch. No dead person I had seen in my life had looked so terrible. I had known what to do for the person who’d mattered most of all. I’d not been alone then. But this? All I knew was that I could not leave this child’s body to be devoured by birds or worse. Benu would just have to abandon the boat and help me bring it to the river.

  First I had to cover it up in a safe place. I fiddled with the cruel knots that held the body to the tree and the sweet smell crept from its sticky flesh onto my fingers. I moved the child’s arms round to his front. His poor wrists were mangled as if they had been in irons. I thought of how painful it was when blood flowed again after you had been sitting on your hands, hot and darting as if the blood was full of pins and needles. At least he was spared that.

  Then the boy groaned, an animal sound, not human at all. He was alive.

  “I’ll get you some water.”

  Perhaps my dry mouth made me whisper. Perhaps it was the shock of finding out that the boy was alive not dead. But in the silence of that place I could also hear that my voice quavered like an old person’s.

  “Then I’ll get help.”

  I had nothing to use except handfuls of torn grass which I dipped into the tank and pressed to his mouth so he could suck the moisture. It wasn’t enough but at least they made cool compresses too, to soak on his poor sore flesh. I made several journeys until his arms and legs and stomach were covered with the damp green stuff. The peepul tree had hardly any leaves left so it made no shade. The boy had been left there to face the full sun, and even though clouds had gathered since, this cursed place felt like a furnace.

  Tangles of hair hung over his face but he was now trying to toss them back, to see who or what had freed him. I pushed the hair out of his eyes as gently as I could and saw that his face was bruised but not swollen as the rest of him was. The ants had not travelled so high. He looked perhaps seven, I thought, and his eyes were as black and as large as my mother’s.

  “Don’t be afraid, please don’t. We will get you away from here to a safe place, I promise.”

  But even as I spoke these useless words, the fierce light in his eyes went dull and his head again dropped forward. I knew he must have a proper drink though I feared to leave him. And I had to get Benu, or someone else, to help me carry him through the gap in the wall and back to the boat.

  I dashed to the tank one last time, pulled off my trousers and plunged them into the water. They easily covered the little boy and I arranged the dirty head wrap as a pillow under his head. He was released from the tree now but otherwise he looked as poorly as he had done when I had found him.

  I waved my arms to threaten the kites, still horribly hopeful above. Then I ran, pulling down my kurta tunic as far as it would go, which was not enough. If I met anyone now, I could not think what might happen.

  THE CONCH

  I WAS LUCKY. No one had come out from the big brick house since I had arrived and nobody came forward now while I ran past one after another of the small rough houses until I found the main village tank. The road ended at the water’s edge. Beyond the trees there were only the footfall paths that led away to the fields. I heard a buffalo call out from there, furiously, as if it needed to be milked.

  I hated to step inside any of the houses but I had to find a cup. And though they didn’t look different from any small village house, it seemed to me that the sweet sickly smell of the orchard hung inside these dwellings too. Perhaps this was a village where only ants lived now? My stomach turned over at the thought but then the buffalo bellowed again. There was no time to be disgusted. That familiar sound reminded me that real people lived here, and they surely included the boy’s captors. Whatever sorcery had removed them might restore them at any moment.

  Again, I was fortunate – the first house I entered had two things I needed. A brass pot and, underneath it, a dark cotton cloth that I wound like a sari round myself. Even more auspiciously, when I ran to dip the pot in the tank, I almost tripped over a huge conch shell lying in the water grasses. The conch was clean, not dusty or muddy, which meant it had been left there only a short while ago. Who would neglect a valuable conch in this way? Not that I cared who or why, for, if it worked for me, that meant I could call out for Benu without losing the time it would take to run to the boat and back again.

  I had never blown a conch before – no girl does. But I had often seen it done. On our lane, Varsha and Bashanti’s father blew louder calls than anyone in all Calcutta, they had told me proudly. When nobody was watching we would twist our lips as he did and blow rude noises into our hands.

  What a power was in that shell! It turned my breath to thunder. I could surely have blown down the mean houses and walls of this village, if I’d had time. But three blasts were all I allowed myself. Then I threw the conch down by the water’s edge and headed back to the courtyard with my potful of fresh water, striding as fast as I could without spilling any.

  Benu was at the turn of the path when I reached the brick wall. His face was stretched tight from running but it collapsed when he saw me. If he was angry that I had been gone so long I could not detect it. Only his relief.

  “First you disappeared,” he gasped. “I was giving you a little while in case… Then I had to wait till two boats passed… But the conch… I thought they had taken you… that they were going to beat you…”

  “Benu, hurry.”

  I pushed him towards the broken place in the wall, shoved the pot inside and wriggled through once again. I didn’t wait for Benu, I knew he was my shadow.

  The boy’s eyes flickered when I removed the damp covering from him. With Benu on one side and me on the other, we raised him again and let him lean back against the peepul tree. I poured some of the water over his head and face and then put the lip of the pot to his mouth. He drank like a baby then, but in great gulps, swallowing noisily. Benu tried to show him that he should drink slowly. It was no surprise that he vomited, though not food, only white slime that hung in strings over his poor bitten chest. If there were not two of us to hold him up he might have slipped forward and choked.

  The boy’s black eyes moved from my face to Benu’s and back but he said nothing at all while I told Benu how I had found him so cruelly tied up, without a soul on hand in the village to help me or even to tell me what had happened here.

  “This place is dead,” I said, “and yet it feels alive, as if something worse will happen. So we have to move him now he’s had his water and get him to the boat somehow.”

  “And quickly, before these devils come back.” Benu’s gentle face was twisted as he spat the words out. “My father can deal with this. He will know best.”

  It was a difficult passage back to the river. With Benu out front and me behind pushing him, we managed to get the boy through the hole in the wall though we could see that the pressure on his legs and arms caused him horrible pain. What was worse was that he did not seem to understand what had to be done but cried and tried to wriggle away from us and curl up on the grass by the wall. I put my hands to my ears so that I could not hear his pleading. I felt like his torturer and I could see that Benu felt the same.

  In that brief privacy I pulled off the rough sari and struggled again into my damp trousers. I left the cloth and the pot by the crumbling wall, not caring if they were ever to be found again.

  GOOD FORTUNE

  MISS HICKEY HAD SOME sheets of paper and pencils ready for me when our second visit came round. This time Mr Bristol did not come with us, which was a relief to everyone. Even Mr Hickey seemed happier. He was whistling as he gave my mother a little brass image of Lord Ganesha to hold in her hand. This Ganesha held his elephant trunk neatly to the left so that his man’s belly stuck out like a ripe fruit.

  “Found it in the bazaar,” he said. “Appealing little thing.”

  Of course my mother would have preferred to hold a Durga but she took the
little god and positioned him until Mr Hickey said she had got everything just so.

  I was the lucky one of us two. My mother had to sit motionless and stare out at the view from the porch, where our bearers were sitting on the grass, dozing. I was sitting on the floor near her, drawing a picture for Miss Hickey of the bulbul that used to sing near our house on the lane.

  When tea and cake were brought in to us after an hour or so, my mother joined us and told Miss Hickey about my baby drawings on palm leaves.

  “She loves birds, just as I,” she told Miss Hickey in her best English, “but she is like nobody. She makes you to see them for always.”

  When Mr Hickey took up his brush again, Miss Hickey took me out of the room to see the rest of the house.

  “Can you perhaps read English as well as you speak it, child?” she asked me. “For, if so, I have books that you might enjoy.”

  She showed me into a long bright room with comfortable seats and couches. There were pictures hanging everywhere on the yellow walls, piled on top of each other as well as side by side. There were portraits of ladies and gentlemen, soldiers in uniforms and men in black, views of buildings, pictures of fruit and kitchen ornaments. There was even a coloured drawing of Krishna sitting in his tree playing his flute, with the gopis, the herd girls, bathing underneath. All the walls were covered except for one, which was home to a glass-walled bookcase like Mr Bristol’s, only this one was larger.

  I did not know whether to look at the pictures or at the books. Miss Hickey saw me hesitate and she sat on one of the couches and patted it so that I might join her.

  “Tell me about yourself, my dear,” she said. “We can pick books in a while. But I would love to hear about your life here in Calcutta and your lovely mother. I have not managed a great acquaintance with India yet, which I feel is a shame for me, and somehow I think you are just the person who will provide the key.”

  It was a strange business, but in just a little while Miss Hickey had heard from me all about my father and his terrible departure the previous year. I had very little to say about Mr Bristol and our life today. I felt that part of our life was like the road outside, with all its ups and downs on show.

  “My mother does not like to talk about him,” I said. “I truly believe that he will come back, that he loves us. But I worry so much that he will never find us.”

  There were tears in Miss Hickey’s eyes.

  “And you say he is Irish, not English?” she asked. “Did you know that we are Irish too? Surely we must be able to trace some news for you. We shall make enquiries from the Company and if you would prefer that your mother not be told this at first I can understand.”

  Mr Bristol had not mentioned that the Hickeys were Irish. I suppose that he did not think it would mean anything to us. But now I understood why Mr Hickey’s voice had sounded so familiar and so pleasant to me when I first heard it. Miss Hickey’s voice was different. It was light but very clear and chopped, not full of soft endings like my father’s. She finished all her words neatly as if she could see them divided up on a page. Now she spoke again.

  “A daughter and a father are very close,” she said. “My father is like a bear at times but he has a heart of gold and he is a very intelligent and questioning type of person. I would hate to be apart from him now that my dear mother has left us. I have a sister, as you may have guessed, I think –” she smiled – “but she is preparing to be married and lives in London.”

  She stood up and her face was very stern.

  “I feel that I must look after you, Anila,” she said. “You are here for a reason and I will not let any harm come to you. You are in a vulnerable position and you have such abilities and talents that would put the rest of our pampered society here to shame.”

  What might I say to that? But I told Miss Hickey that my mother was also full of talent and abilities, and that she was just as good a storyteller as the Mr Swift who wrote books. Only she was shy in company and her stories were all in Bengali.

  “Bless you, child, I know that is true. That is, I believe you. We are all wonderful creatures if we only have the good earth to root us and the space to blossom.”

  She forgot about the books for a moment then, and took me out to her garden, which I thought was much more pleasant than Mr Bristol’s neat one, especially because you could see the broad river at the end of it, beyond a roughly cut hedge. On the water you could see ships and boats of every size. I thought how I would never be bored if I could only live in such a house.

  A mynah with a crooked tail landed on the grass very close to us and Miss Hickey scolded him for refusing his breakfast of oatmeal that morning. He set his head to one side and seemed to be listening.

  She took me back into the salon again.

  “Did you know the other lady?” she asked. “The other Indian lady that my father painted some years ago?”

  I said that we had only heard about her, that Mr Bristol did not bring my mother round to meet his friends in their houses.

  “We never meet ladies, only gentlemen,” I said. “But the dressmaker from Benares tells us news about them sometimes.”

  Her little face twitched at that. She did not say, in the way Mr Bristol had made sure to, that my mother was more beautiful. Instead, she told me the other bibi’s name and where she lived. She was a Mussulman, I heard, and had worked as a sweeper before the English gentlemen had noticed her fine face. I could see that this bibi was someone Miss Hickey had liked and felt for, someone she had spoken with, someone who was much more than a fine painting on a wall and money in her father’s pocket.

  She was at her bookcase now, picking books down and flicking through them, returning them to the shelves.

  “It’s so difficult to pick a book for someone,” she said over her shoulder, “and my father has collected quite a few unfortunate ones.”

  I would have preferred to look for myself but I knew she was determined to make a choice for me so I stayed still and stared at the pictures.

  “I think you might enjoy these, Anila.” Miss Hickey put three books into my hands.

  “The Natural History of Birds, Intended for the Amusement and Instruction of Children, By Samuel Galton,” I read.

  She beamed at me. “Of course the birds in it are the birds of England for the most part, I am sure.”

  “The Female,” and I stopped. “I don’t know this word.”

  “Quixote,” she said, pronouncing the strange word as quicksot. “A brave but foolish knight-at-arms in an old story from Spain and the lady in the book you are holding is his equal of today. And this last one is Aesop’s Fables, very old folk stories from the Greek. The animals and birds in them are as human as ourselves, as devious and as cunning. Your dear mother might enjoy hearing some of those.”

  When we returned at last to the painting room my mother was standing up, stretching her arms out in relief. She gave me the little Ganesha to hold and I rubbed his belly for luck, before putting him down on Mr Hickey’s table of brushes and paints. The painting was secure on its support, and seemed larger than I remembered from the last time. Or perhaps it looked that way because so much had happened on its surface since then.

  Mr Hickey had conjured up my mother just as she had sat, with her arms and her head turned in a graceful way. Every shot and glimmer of her green silks seemed to move as they did in life. He had found the glossy black for her hair, and had worked life into that also, so that you could believe her braid would toss any moment if a breeze came past the pillars on the porch. Her skin, for which I had not believed he would ever find the colours, looked as alive as if there was blood under it.

  But he had not yet filled in her face, nor the silver jewellery she wore, and she had no feet. There was no wall behind her and the couch was a shape merely, and went without its fine rug. Lord Ganesha had yet to appear though my mother’s right hand was clearly settled round something. I hoped it was our good fortune.

  NAMES

  FOR ALL HIS GREAT SI
ZE, Madan had a touch as gentle as my mother’s. He and Mr Walker laid the boy out on some cushions in the cabin and Madan produced a jar of dark neem oil from one of his cupboards.

  “You did well to cool him with the water,” he said to me, his huge hands spreading the salve over the boy’s limbs and belly. “You probably saved his life.”

  Benu had told them everything, or almost everything. My parched throat hurt me and after answering a few questions I felt too weary to speak further. But when I mentioned to Madan that the buffaloes had been calling to be milked he at once left the cabin to stand on deck and stare in the direction of the village. It was dark by then but when he came back inside he reported that there were no fires there yet, no sounds.

  We stood around awkwardly, watching Madan’s ministry, all of us, that is, except Carlen. He was on the bank fiddling with his fire, but this time I knew he was not being callous.

  When Benu and I had stumbled back to our mooring place with the boy, Carlen had been the first to meet us. His face went paler than ever, if that was possible, when he saw the child, and I thought for a moment that he was going to be as sick as he had made me that morning. But no, he came forward and lifted the boy from us as if he weighed no more than an infant. He held him and rubbed his back gently, as if he had a very young baby in his arms. Then he carried him on board the boat.

  Now he came in with a clay cup and I could smell his telltale mint in the steam rising from it.

  “Get the boy to drink this,” he said to Madan. “It will cool him on his inside too; it heals.”

  Madan saw to it that the boy took a few small sips. He was sitting up now, and we put a blanket round his shoulders, for there was the fear that his fever would give way to a deadly cold. He spoke some words but they were so jumbled we did not understand him.