Free Anila's Journey by Mary Finn Page A

was too young before but you see all this time I have done nothing to find news of my father, though Miss Hickey did try at the beginning. When he left he promised to return and I know that only something serious could have prevented this.”
    Mr Walker had made a sympathetic noise to that but he did not enquire further. That was all.
    Now we came alongside the Gardens’ landing beach and everybody stood up at the same time so that the boat started to tip over slightly. Some of the ladies squealed. They had to be lifted out by their gentlemen and placed onto the sand, where they smoothed down their big skirts and made silly faces. I jumped out, splashing my slippers in the water. It felt wonderful.
    Mr Walker and I walked up the pebble path towards the thick planting of trees that faced the river. Parakeets and drongos dashed from one high branch to another, shouting in excitement. I saw a flash of blue that was so light and airy it seemed to come from a dream. I had never seen such a colour on a bird before, not even on a kingfisher.
    â€œA flycatcher, surely,” Mr Walker said. “But not one I know.”
    There was a bench beside the path and I sat down and took out my notebook and pencil. Mr Walker continued up the path and out of my sight. I think he wished to leave me to work in peace. Or perhaps he was curious about what I might choose to draw, left to myself.
    The Gardens seemed to be one big bazaar for birds. There were rollers and hoopoes, different from the ones I knew. Two koels were having a singing competition, one pitching his notes higher than the other. I could see a woodpecker resting on a branch, fat and redbreasted, digesting his feed.
    I saw the flycatcher again, a tiny perfect shape. I wrote “Malati’s Radha sari” and “peacock eyes” beside my sketch. That would remind me how to bring the little bird’s beautiful colour to the page.
    As if to say I was on the right track, a peacock stepped out of the bushes near my bench, and spread his tail for me. Away behind him, another of his kind shrieked.
    I loved the mad, sad sound of peacocks. My mother had hated it, though she liked to help me gather up their dropped tail feathers.
    In our village there was a boy who was cruel to peacocks. He tore their feathers from them, even from the hens. He drowned one day and all the night that followed the peacocks screamed for joy
.
    I started to draw some of the trees too. Many had strange shapes and colours and I had never seen them before, but there were plenty of common neems and acacias.
    â€œCome this way, when you are ready, Anila.”
    Mr Walker had come back and now stood in front of me, looking down at my open page filled with tree shapes and branches.
    â€œAnila, you are a true artist,” he said, “and I am not. So – while you have been so engaged I have done an even more important task. I have arranged something for us to eat.”
    He took my materials although they were not heavy and we set out. The plantation had swallowed up all the great-skirted ladies and their husbands, it seemed, for we met none of our fellow passengers.
    Mr Walker told me that the Gardens were not very old.
    â€œBut in India all plants grow fast in the heat and the rains. If this were the king’s gardens outside London you and I would still be taller than many a tree the same age as these. Look at that banyan.”
    I stepped over to the tree. Like all banyans it had sent down shoots from its own body into the ground. But this was an odd one, for they were forming a perfect ring.
    â€œThis is a clever tree,” I said to Mr Walker.
    Then I saw what he had arranged inside the circle and I had to laugh.
    One of the garden boys had laid out some food for us, on a log, in among the pillars of the banyan. He stood there beaming at me, standing guard over some roti, palm fruit slices, shells with cordial in them, just a little of everything. There was a cloth spread