Anila's Journey by Mary Finn Page A

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
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    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
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    â€œThis 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
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    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
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    â€œAsk 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
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    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
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    â€œThis 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
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    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
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    But I did learn to read and write because of monsoon
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    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
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    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
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    â€œAnna 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
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    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