A Different Sky by Meira Chand Page B

a man who came from such frugal beginnings could now own a biscuit factory and be called an Imperialist seemed a strange achievement. Raj thought with trepidation about his own life and what the futuremight hold. Although so much was already behind him, the way ahead lay uncharted. The events of the afternoon reminded him that life was precarious. He knew then that he must always keep small goals before him, like stepping stones stretching into the distance to whatever destination awaited him.
    Raj began tidying the newspapers and old bags kept on the counter for wrapping purchases, and stared out of the open front of Manikam’s shop on to Serangoon Road. The light was fading fast and the clunk of milk churns being washed was heard from a nearby dairy; dogs barked, cows mooed, goats bleated and babies cried. Stewed all day beneath the sun, the stench of animal excrement, rotting vegetables and fish bones enveloped the road as always. As evening approached the aroma of frying onions and spices thickened the air. When Raj first arrived on this road the proximity of these familiar smells had comforted him, as did the dark skins of people like himself.
    Across the road from Manikam’s, Subramanium the parrot astrologer still sat at his stall beneath the shady colonnade called the five-foot way, chopping chillies for his birds. As Raj watched he opened a rusted tobacco tin to retrieve a few swatted flies for his parrots, adding them to the chillies he fed the birds to improve their intelligence. He was a tall man with a thin neck and a stained white dhoti , strands of grey hair pushed through the holes in his vest. In the cages his parrots scratched for seeds and grumbled.
    â€˜These are good parrots. Not all parrots are good for fortune telling,’ Subramanium always said. When a customer stopped, Subrimanium at once picked up a pack of dog-eared cards depicting Indian deities and opened the cage for a parrot to emerge. Strutting about in an ungainly dance the creature cocked its head flirtatiously whenever a fortune had to be told. Subramanium fanned out the cards on the tabletop and the bird dipped its head to choose one, picking it up in its beak.
    Subramanium had been the first person Raj met on Serangoon Road and he still retained the aura of a mentor. When the long sea journey from India was over and Raj set foot again on firm land, the enormity of what lay ahead had come down upon him for the first time. Not only his village but also the whole great land of India was lost to him over the momentous swell of the sea. He had lived his life in a village, a group of mud-walled huts about a well; a few hundredyards this way or that and the place ended. There was nothing then but the land, stretching dry and brown and endless to the horizon. Everything had been all right until the fever came and killed his mother and his brother. Within a year the fever returned to take his father, leaving Raj, his seven-year-old sister Leila, and their grandmother. A neighbour bought his father’s dry goods stall. Raj accepted the money he was given, knowing no way to bargain for more.
    He was old enough to work but there was nothing for him in the village. The scouts who sometimes came to recruit labour for the faraway places said he was too young for their kind of work. They came on a decorated cart beating a drum as if on their way to a festival. They gave a fistful of silver to the families of men who went with them. One of the scouts, sympathetic to Raj’s plight, explained how he could go to the faraway places by himself, and return to his village a rich man. He described the large towns of Penang and Ipoh and Singapore, and how men had only to arrive there for wealth to fall into their hands; they returned to their villages with enough money to build a temple and acquire a bride.
    The man helped Raj buy a ticket to Calcutta with the money from the sale of his father’s stall and also a passage on a boat. Raj had