Anila's Journey

by Mary Finn

  Only Madan had any idea of what he was saying and that was because of his great knowledge of the different people who lived along the river. But even so his great brow furrowed over and over as he tried to piece the child’s halting tale together. It was dark except for the red glow of the fire on the bank by the time we understood what had happened that dreadful day.

  “He has no name, he says, none that he remembers. His master called him Slave.”

  “Oh, Madan, we must find him a name,” I said. “We must think of a proper good name.”

  Madan nodded grimly, but Carlen flinched at my words, I noticed. His hands were clenched tight round the empty clay cup now while Madan was talking but I had seen him touch the soles of the boy’s feet very gently once or twice as if he were a baby.

  The boy did not know how old he was. He was a tribal boy from a place away to the east, the only one of his people to survive a terrible disease. A great landowner, a zamindar, had found the starving boy crawling among the dead bodies of his village people and had taken him back to his own home.

  “But none of the servants there would let him share their space and so the zamindar gave the boy to his own brother, a crazy man.”

  This was the man who lived in the tumbledown brick house with the peepul tree and the fish tank. He ruled over the people in the little hamlet as if he were a rajah. He could be kind, he could be cruel, the boy said. But because he was mad, nobody knew which he would be on any day of the calendar.

  “He might beat the boy in the morning and give him sweet payesh in the afternoon. He made him dig holes in the orchard one day and fill them up again the next.”

  Madan shook his head as he told us these things. But there was worse, he warned us.

  A little girl in the village grew fond of the boy and had asked him to catch a fish for her family. But he had no skill to do this because he was not allowed to mix with the other boys in the village. Instead one morning he took a fish from his master’s tank. The old man had found him standing by the water with the net and the fish still gasping in it. Unfortunately that day – today – was one of the master’s bad days.

  First the master had locked him inside the house and the boy thought he would get away with a beating. The master left and was gone a long while.

  “When he came back,” Madan told us, “he took the boy to the courtyard and tied his arms to the tree. Then he mixed a pot of sugar and hot water and brushed this all over the child with a horse brush. He told him then that he had ordered all the villagers, even the old ones, to the next hamlet, where he had gathered some players to put on a putul naach, a puppet show. They went because they were so afraid of him, even though there was a day’s work to be done.”

  Madan was shaking his head and his voice was a little unsteady.

  “Then he hit the boy in the face and went off on his horse to see the puppets himself. If you had not found him, Miss Anila…”

  “This would not happen where I come from,” Hari muttered. “These are savage people.”

  Benu looked directly at Mr Walker.

  “I would like to kill that man, sahib,” he said. His forehead was knotted and a little vein throbbed in his jaw.

  “And you think you could run from that family’s revenge?” his father said. He glanced quickly at Mr Walker.

  “We must be gone from here before it is light,” he said.

  Mr Walker nodded grimly. “I am of the same opinion, Madan. Indeed, I’m beginning to think we may have journeyed far enough upriver as it is. We have our unknown bird, Anila, or a very good chance of it, at any rate. I’ve seen the salt trade at work. Perhaps this terrible happening is signal enough for us to turn back. We are gone, what is it, nine days, Madan?”

  Madan nodded but said nothing. My heart quickened.

  Mr Walker did not speak for a while. The energy that was such a part of his nature seemed quite absent so that I felt he was almost a stranger. But this night Carlen was also behaving oddly. Perhaps I was too.

  “Poor benighted child,” Mr Walker said at last. “Well, we have rescued him now and so we must race ahead of any consequences. I will not endanger any person here. The man is clearly and cruelly mad and the people are living in terror of him. And I cannot even report him to Fort William because of all the salt depots around here.”

  He hit his knee hard. I knew he felt powerless. I felt it myself but it was so much worse for him, being in command of our journey and yet having to watch this evil deed go free of punishment.

  “Sahib, the English would support the zamindar and his family members anyhow, because they bring in the taxes.” Madan lifted his shoulders and looked round at all of us. “Never mind. Word can be spread along the river. Things can happen. But I believe, as you do, that we should turn back now.”

  There was a silence. Then Carlen spoke.

  “We should call the boy Manik.”

  We all looked at him and I think everyone was showing a different kind of confusion. Madan, Benu and Hari had not expected to hear a child’s pet name in Bangla coming from Carlen’s lips. I was taken aback by the softness in his voice. He stared directly at me as he said the name again.

  “Manik. It means little jewel. Look at him. He knows you saved him.”

  The boy was sitting up now and he had a fistful of our spiced rice halfway to his mouth. His swellings had gone down though you could still see the hateful bite tracks the ants had made over his skin. His thick curly hair, clean now, was tied back with a yellow handkerchief that could only have been Mr Walker’s for I could see an E and a W on it worked in red thread. The boy’s huge eyes took us in, one by one, but they always came back to rest on me.

  “Manik is a perfect name,” said Mr Walker. “Now we should let him sleep, and ourselves too, so that we can leave here before sunup tomorrow. Nine days perhaps, returning – yes, that’s good enough time to meet my dates. Tomorrow we’ll head downriver. And, for sure, we are none of us likely to forget this place.”

  We started for our sleeping places. When I left the boat for my tent Madan was making the boy comfortable in the cabin between himself and Benu. Hari had stayed behind in the cabin too. Carlen was not to be seen but his bedding was spread out on deck.

  I hugged myself in the cool air. Truly I felt hopeful that tomorrow at last I might make a bargain with Carlen – he had been almost friendly to me. But one bother stood between me and my sleep, bone-tired and sore though I was.

  I did not think I was ready to say goodbye to our life on the river.

  THE BOOK OF SURPRISES

  HERONS WOKE ME NEXT MORNING, squabbling and shouting their news to each other, but so early that there was just one thin silver line of light setting out on its journey across the lowest part of the sky. At any other mooring place Madan would have looked around for anything that might disturb our sleep. But he had not noticed the herons’ nests last night.

  Or perhaps he had, I thought. For the birds had certainly got me up before daybreak. Perhaps I should wake everyone?

  I would bathe first. My shoulders still pained me a little and the cool water would be soothing, the live flow like a mother’s hands on my skin, kind Ganga.

  On the boat I saw a small face peering over the gunwale, looking upriver towards me and I waved. The water would be good for Manik too but perhaps it was not safe for him to venture out until we had left this place far behind. I set out to walk to the spot where I had seen the otters.

  “Anila, come back. Now!”

  Mr Walker’s voice had an edge in it. When I reached the tents again, he and Hari, Madan and Benu were standing on the bank. I realized then that they had been up before me but there was no fire, no breakfast. No Carlen.

  “I don’t know where the wretched man has got to, but we will have to leave shortly or goodness knows what wrath we will be facing from that village. Get the tents down and then let everyone get on board, so that we can cast off in an instant.”

  He stared off towards the dark line of trees
that screened the village. Then he gestured towards the fields all around and the river path. But if he were trying to make Carlen appear he had no success.

  “He’s taken my pistol so he must be looking for a hare or a duck or something to vary our diet. He told me he was sick of fish. But now is not the time for such a pastime.”

  Benu wrinkled his nose in disgust at the idea of such flesh-eating. Then he and Hari set to dismantling the tents as best they could, though I noticed that they made very rude work of folding them up. Manik was watching everything from the deck but Madan quickly shooed him into the cabin where the Venetians were tightly closed and he would not be seen.

  When we had packed everything away Madan looked at me. Mr Walker was still on the bank, pacing the length of the boat, back and forward, always looking towards the village. His face was drawn tight over its bones and his hair looked damp, as if the day was already hot which it was not. He looked ill, I thought.

  “I do not think he is gone shooting ducks, do you?”

  Even as Madan was saying the words my heart dropped down. He was right of course. The passion that had seized Carlen yesterday at the sight of poor tortured Manik had not been content to busy itself in caring for him. He had gone now to avenge the cruelty in the way he best understood. That left all of us now in some danger surely but that was not what had shaken me.

  “Oh, Madan, Carlen knows where my father is but he won’t tell me. And now he’s gone.”

  I hadn’t meant to say this to anyone but it was impossible to keep silent now. I pushed past Madan and his neatly wound ropes, jumped up on the rim of the boat and ran to Mr Walker.

  “Mr Walker, Carlen has gone to kill that man. You must know that if I do. But I need to talk to him! We must go after him, please, please. Or I’ll go myself.”

  I started away then for he was not answering me. He was too shocked. But he reached out as I tried to run and grabbed my wrist, so tightly round the bones that it hurt and he pulled me back until he could hold me there in front of him. Then he crouched down so that his face was on a level with my own. His eyes looked sore, like green fruits cut open too early. Or else they were angry. I wasn’t sure which.

  “Anila, you will get back on that boat now. With me. We are leaving directly. Carlen knows we are starting back downriver today. He’s clever enough to be able to find us when he gets this madness out of his mind. If he does, that is.”

  He marched me over to where Madan was waiting to take me back though I was crying out all manner of things that nobody could understand. But when Benu swung the tiller and brought us out into the centre of the river and we felt the strength of the current now bearing us back the way we had come, I stopped babbling.

  All of us are borne along on the great river, Anila, even the birds that fly above it and never touch it.

  I sat there hunched on a coil of ropes, looking in no direction. Nobody paid me any heed either, though I was certain that Madan had passed on my desperate words to Mr Walker as they sat closeted in the cabin, leaving Hari to tend the ropes.

  I felt a touch on my arm, the slightest touch, as if a feather had fallen out of the sky. Manik was kneeling beside me. He had placed one hand on my arm and he was stroking it there, forward and back, forward and back.

  “Anila,” he said. And then, “Manik takes away the hurt. Like you did.”

  I put my hand on top of his and we stayed like that for a little while. Behind us Benu began a song and the day filled with one thing after another, with heat and light and the noises of the river and her boats, with smells of morning cooking carried on the breeze, with the jewel colours of saris stretched out to dry by the banks. Women were walking the river paths with damp washing piled up on their heads and at times you could see their water bodies marching along underneath them where the water was still.

  Some called out to us and one bold girl shook her bangles at Benu. I could hear his blush in the way he sang his next words. This made me smile, despite every bad thing.

  “Will you get my bag, Manik?” I asked, for I would not go inside the cabin.

  He came back clutching my flat drawings case looking like a tiny runner, like one of the fleet-footed boys and men who carry mails and messages around the city. I showed him some of my birds and his eyes grew larger. When he saw the owl he laid a finger on the paper and then put it to his mouth as reverently as if it were an image of the goddess Kali herself he had touched.

  “You must tell me if you see a bird you don’t know, Manik. Do you understand? Any strange bird at all, so that I may put it down on the paper here.”

  Manik nodded solemnly though I had no notion whether he understood me or not.

  And then, just to make it more confusing for him, I started to draw, not any bird at all, but the otters of yesterday morning.

  In truth I found this work much more difficult than drawing a bird and I didn’t know why. Feathers are just as dainty and intricate as fur, and probably more so. I think perhaps it may be that birds make shapes that are complicated but they all come from the same Book of Shapes. So, if you learn that, as my father did with his buildings, you can draw them all, with practice. But an animal is like a human. There are too many surprises under its skin and all over its face. Mr Hickey said that humans were a never-ending Book of Surprises when you came to draw them. But he had trained with that Book and I had not. I felt my otters lacked life.

  At last Mr Walker and Madan came out of the cabin.

  “Anila, will you come inside with me, please?”

  Madan laid a huge hand on Manik’s head as he passed us.

  “There’s a lad whose fingers will tie the neatest knots,” he said. “Come and learn to be a boatman, Manik.”

  I put my otters into the case and followed Mr Walker into the cabin. The air was fusty but neither of us was inclined to open the Venetians and Mr Walker had closed the door firmly behind me.

  “First this, Anila. We are stopping at the next big ghat, which is quite close now. Madan will send some men he knows there back to that cursed village to find out what they may. So, what we will do there is wait. Now you must tell me what on earth it was that disturbed you in such a shocking manner this morning.”

  I told him then, and it was the greatest relief to tell him everything, right down to the loss of my tiny ring, which no longer felt important.

  “I believed him, Mr Walker, because how else could he know such a detail as that about my father? But then he closed down his whole person, his mouth, his ears, his eyes. It was as if he wanted me to suffer more. And I would have given him all my money, my paints, everything, to find out where he saw my father, and when. For he may still be in that place.”

  Mr Walker had put his head in his hands very soon after I began my story. When I finished he stayed like that for a few moments and then stood up and began to pace the floor just as he had paced the riverbank, though here his head was skimming the roof of the cabin. He looked as white as his very own Mr Minch.

  “I cannot explain what exactly was in Carlen’s mind when he was treating you in such a vile fashion. My best estimate is that he was very jealous of your position here, of your talent, of your very appealing spirit, so that he wanted to fashion his little power of exposition into a kind of torture. There is nothing to be said by way of excuse. Nothing. But let me tell you everything I know about the man himself so that you may understand his nature a little better.”

  Carlen was a foundling child, Mr Walker told me, who had been abandoned by the gates of a stables in the eastern side of England.

  “He showed me the country there one time. It was as flat and full of rivers and creeks as Bengal itself, Anila.”

  The stable people had raised him, but very roughly. They’d given him only the one name, Carlen, to do service for everybody else’s two names. I remembered then how yesterday Carlen had had freely betrayed one of his own secrets, the good knowledge he had of Bangla, in order to bestow a fitting name on little Manik.

  “T
hey beat him, they did worse. When he was eleven or so he ran away and learned to live on his wits.”

  Carlen was a young horse thief when Mr Walker met him first, a most dangerous trade because such thieves were always hanged when caught.

  “I was spending my grandmother’s good money in inns and on horses when I came down to Cambridge but I had no sense of what I was doing, and certainly had no skill for it. For some reason Carlen took pity on me when one of his own gang of scalpers was about to despatch me after robbing me. That was our introduction and it has always given me a duty towards him. In many ways he is a remarkable person though you will hardly credit that, Anila.”

  Certainly I would refuse to do that! But at that moment I was trying to picture serious, kindly Mr Walker in the alehouses and cockpits that he described and that was an impossible thing. He seemed to know what I was thinking.

  “I was full of hatred then myself, for the loss of my sister and my part in that, for my father and his unyielding nature. It took me quite a while to settle, to become a lover of books, of knowledge.”

  “And birds?”

  He smiled sadly.

  “I had that always, you see, from my sister Eveline.”

  Outside Madan roared and we felt the clunk of the tiller behind and the shift underneath us as the boat tilted for the bank.

  Mr Walker sat down, as abruptly as a child.

  “Here we shall wait, Anila. Let us pray that the news they bear is good.”

  THE PAINTING

  “A CAPITAL JOB, HICKEY!”

  Those were the words Mr Bristol used when the big day came and he was invited to have first sight of my mother’s finished portrait. They were the same words he used with his gentlemen friends when their deals worked out, or their law cases were won.

  For weeks, Mr Hickey had become coy about his work, as we had been warned he would.

  “He’ll turn it to the wall so you cannot peek, and he will become very short if you ask him anything about it,” Miss Hickey told me. “You must humour him, for that is his way always, to wish to surprise the patron above all. And to be honest, Anila, quite apart from that, I think you make him nervous with the questions you ask.”