Read Online Anila's Journey by Mary Finn - Free Book Online

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
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    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
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    â€œMango,” I shouted. “And sugarcane and gur and sweet fish curry and cooked eggs.”
    â€œDuck 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
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    â€œThat’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
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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.
    â€œQuickly, 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.
    â€œSit 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