by Mary Finn
I took a deep breath. I could not afford to have Mrs Pan as my enemy.
“It’s just a little place that Miss Hickey arranged for me. She wanted me to be safe until I became settled in a position. I would dearly love to have Anoush there for English Christmas Day, so that she can have a holiday too. And I have money left to me to buy some festival food in your store, Mrs Panossian.”
I looked sideways. Anoush was approaching us, her face flushed.
“Oh, Auntie,” she said. “Just this once. Please?”
Mrs Panossian looked from one of us to the other. Then the door opened and its bell pinged. Two bearers approached the counter with a long list and Anoush moved away to serve them.
“You are too close with your story, girl,” Mrs Panossian said to me. “You must tell me whereabouts in the city you are staying.”
“It’s in Garden Reach,” I said, looking straight at her. She would probably have sent a boy after me anyway, her curiosity was so roused. Mrs Panossian was not one to leave questions sticking in her head overnight like hairpins.
“It’s in a little garden tea house that Miss Hickey saw restored for me. I shall not be there for long at any rate. I hope to have news of my position tomorrow. But the day after that is the English Christmas Day.”
Mrs Panossian raised her eyebrows at that, as well she might.
I hardly knew why Christmas mattered so much to me. As the Reverend suspected, and Mrs Pan knew, I had not been baptized. My mother’s devotions still beat in me like a pulse and I truly loved the way our gods were close to us, with all their adventures and their moods. From them came the music and colours and excitements of our puja festivals in the misty season. Miss Hickey never made any difficulties for me. But she believed that I should go to church services with her nevertheless.
“It will help you, Anila,” she’d said. “People will assume you are one of us. For myself, I am only interested in the kindness suggested to us by religion, not in its show.”
So I went, and they were dreary affairs, those services, with ladies and gentlemen pressed into their pews like sticks of cane in a box. The rector climbed into a little tower and talked to us about God’s mercy until our teeth hurt. The only service I liked was Christmas.
“Very well then,” said Mrs Panossian at last. Her high voice had something in it I could not quite make out. It was hardly a smile because her face was still.
“But my Anoush must be back with us for the day after the holy feast.”
Poor Anoush was still reaching up and pulling things out of drawers but I was sure she had heard the good news because she was smiling at the bearers as if they were not one but two Krishnas come to visit. Then Gabriel, the old shop boy, came through the door at the back of the shop with his brown coat bursting open after his lunch and Mrs Panossian told him to help Anoush with the big order. The doorbell pinged again. More customers.
“You run along now, Anila,” she said. “Tomorrow night you can come back for Anoush. I’ll tell her the news myself.”
STORIES AND TRINKETS
MY FATHER DID NOT really care to spend time in our house down the lane. He wished he could afford better and he was unhappy about Malati and Hemavati in many ways. Most of all, I think, because they were so different from my mother, who would never have danced for strangers, whose voice was gentle, who was little more than a girl.
“That hyena,” he called Hemavati. Poor Malati and her soldier, he thought them stupid.
But they bothered him, more simply, because they were there all the time, or most of the time anyway. He wanted us to have our own house but he could not yet pay for one on his own, he told my mother, even though he had got a promotion in the Company. Houses in the English part of the city were very expensive. She would have lived in a bamboo house with a thatched roof but he would not have that. So she had to share, that we might have bricks round us and a firm flat roof over our heads.
In monsoon we stayed indoors when my father called, even though my mother and I were both itching to run out into the lane and stand under the rains, laughing until we were soaked through. He could not understand this. He never travelled out during that season without his tall black umbrella and even though it was so warm, he would button up his jacket in the rains.
“This is what we do in Ireland,” he said sternly when we teased him. “You can catch a chill from the damp even in summer. My poor brother died from a summer chill.”
So we stayed in our corner of the house, behind the screen. My mother cooked for her little family which she loved to do. She liked the way my father would not eat until she joined us, though she told me this would not be approved in her village.
One year during monsoon when I was four or five my father decided to teach me to read. It was a long business that continued over many afternoons.
“Ask your mother for a story,” he would say. She would tell me a story – about the squirrel who helped King Rama build a bridge to rescue his stolen wife, about Hanuman the monkey god and his daring monkey army, about the golden birds of Ayodhya. No matter if food was smoking or rice was sticking in the pot, she had stories.
I had to tell him the story in English. Then he would take out the pages he had brought with him and start to write the story down. He was clever because he made the written-down story mostly of very simple words, and he drew pictures alongside the words that looked difficult. Then he got me to read the story back as he had written it. When I could do that, he wrote me out a picture key.
“This is your alphabet,” he said. “Your ABC. You must learn to write as well as you can draw, Anila. Practise.”
He told me some stories too but he did not have my mother’s gift for relating them. My favourite was the story of the great flood and the animals that were saved. Together we drew a picture of the ark filled with all the creatures I knew: mongooses, elephants, horses, toddy cats, monkeys, storks, vultures, parakeets, bulbuls. Two of everything. My father added a couple of black river shrimps sitting in a bowl of water and waving their long feelers through one of the ark’s windows. I tried to make my Noah look like the vendor of sweets who came down our lane, a kind man who gave us children his broken crumbs.
When we had eaten our meal, and my father had gone back to his lodgings with his umbrella over his head like a storm cloud, I folded the alphabet key and put it into my peacock-feather bowl. Then my mother and I rushed out into the rain with our dishes to wash them off, and ourselves too. We never caught a chill.
But I did learn to read and write because of monsoon.
The rest of the year, we left the house when my father visited. Unless Malati and Hemavati were both away, of course, but that was rare enough.
On his special drawing days, he brought a buggy to the top of the lane and walked to our door and dipped his head in.
“Anna and Anila – we’re going on a picnic! Come along, quickly, before the horse bolts!”
He always said that though the poor buggy horses were too slow and too stupid to dream that they could ever do anything so exciting.
Then my mother would turn quite pink and she rushed to dip a cloth in the water bowl. She rubbed my face and hands, then her own, and dipped a finger into her jar of red sindur, to rub some of the vermilion powder into her hair parting.
“We’re ready!” she said. And she sounded like a child. Her voice sounded, even in my ears, like mine.
We went up the lane and my father lifted me into the buggy and then handed my mother up, as if she was an English lady getting into a carriage. When I was little I sat on my father’s knee. Later I sat on the tiffin box he had packed and brought with him for our picnic. The buggy driver flicked his whip and the horse and buggy trundled towards the city. Then we looked out for the turnings that led to the loading ghats where the ships were supplied with goods.
It was so busy there, every time we went. In the terrible heat of summer it was always a little cooler by the water. We covered our heads and my father held his great u
mbrella up to shade us. All along the stone ghats were barrows stuffed with mangoes, guavas, green bananas, yams and all kinds of gourds from fat pumpkins to baby potols. There were coconuts mounting like bricks in a temple, and baskets of chilli pods whose heat you could sniff on the salty air. Gunny sacks spilled over with dark betel leaves, green cardamom seeds, papery sticks of cinnamon, shiny nuts of different shades – honey-coloured, bunting and darkest brown. There were piles of huge lopsided jute cushions stuffed with grains, with fat husks spilling out of the loosely sewn seams. Not like my mother’s neat sewing! Sometimes we smelt a strong smell that my father said was tobacco, dried brown leaves also packed into sacks. Ropes lay coiled on the polished stones along the edges of the ghats. They looked like brackwater snakes, only thicker.
There were bamboo cages with ducks and guineas and bantams. I liked to pick up some grain seeds and fling them into the cages but mostly the birds ignored them and did not bend their sad necks down for a snack. pigs and sheep and goats were fenced in or tethered to posts waiting to be harnessed and lowered onto boats: when the men hoisted them into the air in harnesses they kicked like babies, and squealed too. Much further down the river – we did not go so far as it was dangerous – were the great bales of calicos and stuffs waiting to be lifted onto the biggest ships.
I liked to watch the work on the ghats, and the great-beaked birds that stalked and swooped and stole what they could, the storks and gulls and kites. But my mother was happiest watching the boats.
The first time we went there, the first picnic I can remember, she was quiet for a long time. Then she pointed at a long stately boat, set deep in the water in front of the ghat.
“Look, Anila,” she said. “That’s a budgerow. My father thought they were the best boats in the world. We would watch them come up the river past our landing. Oh, but he’d love to see these great ships with their own trees on them to hold the sails.”
My father told us that there were much much bigger ships miles further down the river, ships too big to come up to the city waterfront, ships that had travelled all the way from England or from China. Our huge wide river Ganga that he called the Hooghly wasn’t deep enough for them.
He had to settle to his sketch work, even in summer, even when the skin on his face wore the angry rash he called prickly heat. But one year my clever mother cured him of that. She rubbed sandalwood paste on his face. He looked filthy that day, like a madman, but he never suffered from the rash again. After that treatment his face turned a pale gold every year instead as the summers lengthened.
So, after we had settled on the day’s viewing place, he would put on his funny sunhat made of hard tree pith and go off with his scrolls and pens and the flat top to support his papers. We were left to sit on the folded cane seats that he always brought in the buggy. Those times we kept the umbrella. He told the buggy driver to tie up his horse and watch over us so that none of the ghatsmen or boys would bother us. He paid him a little too, to bring us a jar of drinking water. We dipped our scarves in it and tied the damp cottons over our foreheads. You could tell whether it was April, May or June by how quickly they dried out again. But we both kept our eyes busy with the river traffic and somehow that kept us cool too.
Then, when my father had finished his sketches, he would come back to us with his tiffin box of green cane, bound with leather straps. It was safe with him, he told me, but someone might snatch it from us while we were on our own. Always he made us guess what was in it before he opened it.
“Mango,” I shouted. “And sugarcane and gur and sweet fish curry and cooked eggs.”
“Duck meat and sweetmeats,” my mother said. “And ginger beer.”
We were rarely wrong because he always brought fruits and a curry of some sort and ginger beer. He bought everything in an English chop-house near the Writers’ Building he told us. It sold the kind of Indian foods that the young men liked though he knew we ate very differently at home, plainer meals but spicier, and sweeter too. Sometimes my father brought the bread that he liked himself, pau roti, which we could tear into strips and dip in the curries. Very occasionally the chop-house provided a jungle fowl that one of the other Writers had shot and given away to settle a toddy bill. They were tasty but I always found myself wondering what bird it was that I was eating and so I would not eat much.
But Papa always slipped in something special that we could never guess. That was because it wasn’t something to eat. It was a present for each of us, something small enough to fit in the box.
Trinket time, my father called this part of our picnic. My favourite gift was a kite shaped like a fantastic beast. “It’s a Chinese dragon,” he said. It flew as fast and fierce as a fighter kite even though it was not much bigger than my father’s hand. It had a blue face and a smile and paper hair that hung down like a holy man’s.
My mother got soap and tiny pieces of silk. Or shells, silver and pink and blue, with pearly entrance chambers. He told us they came from islands far away to the south. I got coloured papers and threads and, once, a sand timer.
“That’s one minute of your life,” my father explained, as the sand ran from one end of the waspy glass to the other. I kept it in my feather bowl but one morning it was gone.
SECRETS
MR WALKER’S HOUSE HAD a red door with a brass knocker shaped like a fist. It made a booming echo like a big festival drum and I shrank down into myself. What if I had woken the whole street of Englishmen up?
But not this silent house, it seemed. I was about to try again, just a tap this time, when the door opened a crack and a little man in a dhoti, dark-skinned and old, scanned me up and down. Then he reached out a hand to pull me inside.
“Quickly, quickly,” he said in Bangla. “But you should have come while it was still dark. Now they will say all those bad things about the master. Come.”
He led me along a gloomy passageway.
“Sit there.” He pushed me onto a chair that I could hardly see and then vanished through a doorway on the left. It had no door, just a thick red curtain hung from a pole. I could smell food now, something smoky and something else milky, sweet. I had eaten nothing yet and I had been up for hours, since long before light.
How long was the walk from Garden Reach? As long as I was foolish, I would have to say, for every step was on my own account. When I reached my little house last night I had my ten gold mohurs but no small pieces, nothing for a boat ride until Mrs Panossian should be my banker. So when I woke I took Anoush’s advice even though she’d intended it for a joke. I tied my hair up in a head wrap as a man does and I wore a dark tunic over my twill trousers. Again I strapped my case of drawing things safe over my chest, with my money wrapped inside it. When I stepped out along the river path, I felt invisible, like a boy on an errand.
For all that, I was glad it had grown rosy when I came to the beginnings of the city and the long street they called Burial Ground Road. Not because of all the English people who lay dead in a field there under sad grey slabs of stone. I did not fear their ghosts. But further up that swampy road there were dacoits. Everyone talked about them, those real dacoits with murdering blades. By then, though, the sun was up and all the early wagons out with it, and horses and riders too, galloping by the green open space of the maidan.
“Anila! What an early riser you are.”
Mr Walker pushed his way past the red curtain. He was dressed in a shirt and breeches, no jacket. I had to struggle with my smile, for he looked just like a heron, long-legged, stooped and spike-haired, and like a heron his colours were grey-blue and grey.
“Come and have something to eat with me. You can have a second breakfast.”
Breakfast! I followed him through the doorway, past the curtain that smelled of ink and smoke, men’s smells.
This room was light, with walls of creamy pink, and it looked onto a small walled garden. Through an open window red hibiscus flowers and white climbing roses pushed into the room and tumbled around a little table spread wi
th plates and dishes. Mr Walker pulled out a chair for me and we sat down. The little man scurried out again, muttering.
The dishes on the table held fish and rice, curds, preserves, nuts, persimmons and some round rough cakes.
“Have an oatmeal cake,” Mr Walker said. “They’re Scottish. Chandra makes them to my grandmother’s receipt, as best he can. I would prefer to breakfast outside, but then Balor would be jealous of the garden birds.”
Who was Balor?
Mr Walker smiled and pointed to the top of a bookcase behind me. He kept his finger stretched out. I had hardly begun to figure the grey shape up there for what it was when it suddenly changed its size, took off from its pinnacle and landed in a flurry of feathers on Mr Walker’s finger. Great black beak, black claws firmly folded round a hand.
The huge grey parrot waddled sideways along Mr Walker’s hand, walked up his arm and kissed him on the mouth with the top of its head. I laughed and so did the bird, a booming deep laugh. This must be Mr Walker’s laugh which I hadn’t heard yet.
“Put your elbow on the table and let your fingers touch mine,” Mr Walker said.
The bird came down his arm, crossed over and then I could feel the sensitive feet travelling fast up my arm. He was on my shoulder. I felt a tug and my head wrap was loosed, picked up and tossed onto the floor.
Now it was Mr Walker’s turn to laugh and I could feel the parrot thrum with pleasure.
“Balor likes hair,” he said. “I think he must have been a barber in a past life. If we don’t stop him he’ll have your braid unpicked in the same way he deals with my poor coiff.”
He tapped his chair back and Balor waddled down my arm again and hopped up.
“I bought him in a street market in Spain, years ago, when he was much more of a street urchin. He’s blind in one eye – if you look carefully at him, you’ll see that. He can speak, like most educated parrots, but I cannot discover what his native language is. He refuses to speak English. Or Bangla, though Chandra claims that he says puja prayers. I called him Balor after an evil one-eyed god from Ireland, your father’s country. Eat, Anila.”