The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (13 page)

Foam gave his speech everything. ‘People of Elvira, vote for the only honourable man fit to become an Honourable Member of the Legislative Council of Trinidad and Tobago. Vote for Mr Surujpat Harbans, popularly known to all and sundry as Pat Harbans. Mr Harbans is your popular candidate. Mr Harbans will leave no stones unturned to work on your behalf. People of Elvira, this is the voice of Foreman Baksh, popularly known to all and sundry as Foam, this is the voice of Foam Baksh asking you—not begging you or imploring you or beseeching you or entreating you—but asking you and telling you to vote for the honourable and popular candidate, Mr Pat Harbans. Mr Harbans will leave no stones unturned to help you.’ There was a pause. ‘But you must put him in fust.’

Then Lorkhoor spoke and Foam, honourably, remained silent. Lorkhoor said, in his irritating educated voice, ‘Ladies and gentlemen
of the fair constituency of Elvira, renowned in song and story, this is the voice of the renowned and ever popular Lorkhoor. Lork-hoor humbly urges every man, woman and child to vote for Mr Thomas, well known to you all as Preacher. Preacher will leave no stone unturned to help you. I repeat, ladies and gentlemen, no
stone
unturned.’

The vans were about to cross. Foam, remembering Lorkhoor’s taunt the evening before, leaned out and shouted, ‘Yaah! We going to bury Preacher! And he won’t have nobody to preach at his funeral.’

Lorkhoor shouted back, ‘When you bury him, make sure to leave no stone unturned.’

The vans crossed. Lorkhoor shouted, ‘Foreman Baksh, why not speak English for a change?’

‘Put money where your mouth is,’ Foam retorted, although he knew that the words had no relevance to their present exchange. And as he spoke those words he pulled a little to the right to avoid Lorkhoor’s van, felt a bump on his radiator, heard a short, fading cackle, and knew that he had damaged some lesser creature. He waited for the shouts and abuse from the owner. But there was nothing. He looked back quickly. It was a chicken, one of Chittaranjan’s, or rather, Mrs Chittiranjan’s. He drove on.

*

That happened just after noon. Less than three hours later a breadfruit from Ramlogan’s tree dropped so hard on Chittaranjan’s roof that the framed picture of King George V and Mahatma Gandhi in the drawing-room fell.

Chittaranjan rushed to the kitchen window, pushed aside his wife from the enamel sink where she was scouring pots and pans with blue soap and ashes, and shot some elaborate Hindi curses at Ramlogan’s backyard.

Ramlogan didn’t retaliate, didn’t even put his head out of his window.

Mrs Chittaranjan sighed.

Chittaranjan turned to her. ‘You see how that man Ramlogan provoking me? You see?’

Mrs Chittaranjan, ash-smeared pot and ashy rag in hand, sighed again.

‘You see or you ain’t see?’

‘I see.’

Chittaranjan was moved to further anger by his wife’s calm. He put his head out of the Demerara window and cursed long and loud, still in Hindi.

Ramlogan didn’t reply.

Chittaranjan was at a loss. He spoke to Mrs Chittaranjan. ‘A good good picture. You can’t just walk in a shop and get a picture like that every day, you know. Remember how much time I spend passe-partouting it?’

‘Well, man, it have one consolation. The picture ain’t break.’

‘How you mean? It
coulda
break. Nothing in this house ain’t safe with that man breadfruit dropping all over the place.’

‘No, man. Why you don’t go and hang back the picture up?’

‘Hang it back up? Me, hang it back up? Look,
you
don’t start provoking me now, you hear. I ain’t know what I do so, for everybody to give me all this provocation all the time.’

‘But, man, Ramlogan
ain’t
provoking you today. The breadfruit fall, is true. But breadfruit ain’t have a mind. Breadfruit don’t stop and study and say, “I think I go fall today and knock down the picture of Mahatma Gandhi.” ’

‘Stop giving me provocation!’

‘And Ramlogan, for all the bad cuss you cuss him, he ain’t even come out to answer you back.’

‘Ain’t come out! You know why he ain’t come out? You know?’ And running to the window, he shouted his own answer: ‘Is because he ain’t no fighter. You know who is the fighter? I, Chittaranjan, is the fighter.’ He shook his short scrawny arms and beat on the enamel sink. Then he pulled in his head and faced Mrs Chittaranjan. ‘My name in the Supreme Court for fighting. Not any stupid old Naparoni
Petty Civil—ha!—but
Supreme
Court.’ He sat on the paint-spotted kitchen stool and said ruminatively, ‘I is like that. Supreme Court or nothing.’ He chuckled. ‘Well, if Ramlogan go on like this, Supreme Court going to hear from me again, that is all.’ He spoke with rueful pride.

‘Man, you know you only talking.’ Mrs Chittaranjan was being provocative again.

Chittaranjan pursed and unpursed his lips. ‘Only talking, eh?’

But he was quite subdued. Ramlogan’s perverse silence had put him out. He sat smiling, frowning, his sabots on the cross-bar of the stool, his small sharp shoulders hunched up, the palms of his small bony hands pressing hard on the edges of the seat.

Mrs Chittaranjan returned to her pans. She scoured; the ash grated; she sang the song from
Jhoola.

Chittaranjan said, slowly, ‘Going to fix him up. Fix him good and proper. Going to put something on him. Something good.’

The singing stopped. ‘No, man. You mustn’t talk so.
Obeah
and magic is not a nice thing to put on anybody.’

‘Nah, don’t stop me, I begging you. Don’t stop me. I can’t bear
any
more provocation again.’

‘Man, why you don’t go and hang back the picture up?’

‘Put something on him before
he
put something on we.’

Mrs Chittaranjan looked perturbed.

Chittaranjan saw. He drove home his point. ‘Somebody try to put something on Baksh day before yesterday. Dog. Was big big in the night and next morning was tiny tiny. So high.’

‘You
see the dog?’

‘You laughing. But I telling you, man, we got to put something on him before he put something on we. And it ain’t we alone we got to think about. What about little Nalini?’

‘Nelly, man? Little Nelly?’

His wife’s anxiety calmed Chittaranjan. He got up from the stool. ‘Going to hang back the picture up,’ he announced.

He clattered down the wooden back steps in his sabots and went
to the little dark cupboard behind the shop. In this cupboard he kept all sorts of things: pails and basins for his jewellery work, ladders and shears and carpenter’s tools, paint-tins and brushes, tins full of bent nails he had collected from the concrete casings when his house was being built. There was no light in the cupboard—that was part of his economy. But he knew where everything was. He knew where the hammer was and where the nail-tin was.

When he opened the door a strong smell met his nostrils. ‘That white lime growing rotten like hell,’ he said. He felt for the hammer, found it. He felt for the nail-tin. His fingers touched something hard and fur-lined. Then something slimy passed over his hand. Then something took up the loose flesh at the bottom of his little finger and gave it a sharp little nip.

Chittaranjan bolted.

One sabot was missing when he stood breathless against the kitchen door.

‘Man,’ he said at last. ‘Man, dog.’

‘Dog?’

‘Yes, man.’

‘Downstairs?’

‘Yes, man. Store-room. Lock up in the store-room.’

Mrs Chittaranjan nearly screamed.

‘Just like the one Baksh say he see, man. They send it away but it come back. To we, man, to we.’

*

Ramlogan had heard the breadfruit fall and heard all the subsequent curses from Chittaranjan. But he didn’t reply because a visitor had just brought him important news.

The visitor was Haq.

Haq had come at about half past two, gone around to that side of Ramlogan’s yard which was hidden from Chittaranjan’s, and beaten on the gate. The gate answered well: it was entirely made up of tin
advertisements for Dr Kellogg’s Asthma Remedy, enamelled in yellow and black.

Ramlogan shouted: ‘Go away. I know who you is. And I know who send you. You is a police and your wife sick and you want some brandy really bad for she sake, and you go beg and I go sell and you go lock me up. And I know is Chittaranjan who send you. Go away.’

Chittaranjan had indeed caught Ramlogan like that once.

Haq drummed again. ‘I is not a police. I is Haq. Haq.’

‘Haq,’ came the reply, ‘haul your black arse away from my shop. You not getting nothing on trust. And too besides, is closing time.’

Haq didn’t go away.

At length Ramlogan came out, smelling of Canadian Healing Oil, and unchained the gate. He had been having his siesta. He was wearing a pair of dirty white pants that showed how his fat legs shook when he walked, and a dirty white vest with many holes. And he was in his slippers: dirty canvas shoes open at the little toes, with the heels crushed flat.

‘What the hell you want, black Haq?’

Haq put his face close up to Ramlogan’s unshaved chin. ‘When you hear me! When you hear me!’

Ramlogan pushed him away. ‘You ain’t bound and ’bliged to spit on me when you talk.’

Haq didn’t seem to mind. ‘When you hear,’ he twittered, his lower lip wet and shining. ‘Just wait until you hear. It not going to be black Haq then.’

Ramlogan was striding ahead, flinging out his legs, shaking and jellying from his shoulders to his knees.

They went to the room behind the shop. Here Ramlogan cooked, ate and slept. It was a long narrow room, just the size of the rumshop.
Trinidad Sentinels
covered the walls and sheltered many cockroaches. The one window was closed; the air was hot, and heavy with the sweet smell of Canadian Healing Oil.

Ramlogan said grumpily, ‘You wake up a man when a man was
catching a little sleep, man,’ and he lay down on his rumpled bed—a mattress thrown over some new planks—scratching easily and indiscriminately. He yawned.

Haq leaned his stick against the rum crates in a corner and eased himself into the sugar-sack hammock hanging diagonally across the room.

Ramlogan yawned and scratched. ‘Before you start, Haq, remember one thing. No trust. Remember, no trust.’

He pointed to the only picture on his walls, a coloured diptych. In one panel Haq saw the wise man who had never given credit, plump—though not so plump as Ramlogan—and laughing and counting what looked like a fortune. In the other panel the incorrigible creditor, wizened, haggard, was biting his nails in front of an empty money chest. Ramlogan had a copy of this picture in his shop as well.

‘In God we trust, as the saying goes,’ Ramlogan glozed. ‘In man we bust.
As
the saying goes.’

‘I ain’t come to beg,’ Haq said. ‘If you ain’t want to hear what I have to say, I could just get up and walk out, you know.’

But he made no move to go.

He talked.

Ramlogan listened. And as he listened, his peevishness turned into delight. He rolled on his dirty bed and kicked up his fat legs. ‘Oh, God, You is good. You is really good. Was this self I been waiting and praying for, for a long long time. Ha! So Chittaranjan is the fighter, eh? He in the Supreme Court for fighting, eh? Now we go show this Supreme Court fighter!’

Then the breadfruit fell. Then Chittaranjan cursed.

Haq waited. Ramlogan did nothing.

‘Go on and tell him now,’ Haq urged. ‘Answer him back.’

‘It could wait.’ And Ramlogan began to sing: ‘It could wait-ait, it could-ould wait-ait.’

He stopped singing and they both listened to Chittaranjan cursing. Ramlogan slapped his belly. Haq giggled.

‘Let we just remain quiet like a chu’ch and listen to
all
that he
have to say,’ Ramlogan said. He clasped his hands over his belly, looked up at the sooty corrugated-iron ceiling, smiled and shut his eyes.

Chittaranjan paused. All that could be heard in Ramlogan’s room was the whisking of cockroaches behind the
Trinidad Sentinels
on the wall.

Chittaranjan began again.

‘He talking brave, eh, Haq? Let him wait. Haq, you black, but you is a good good friend.’

Haq was about to speak, but Ramlogan stopped him: ‘Let we
well
listen.’

They listened until there was nothing more to listen to.

Haq said, ‘Ramlogan, you is my good good friend too. You is the only Hindu I could call that.’

Ramlogan sat up and his feet fumbled for the degraded canvas shoes.

‘I is a old man, Ramlogan. My shop don’t pay, like yours. People ain’t buying sweet drink as how they use to. I is a widow too. Just like you. But I ain’t have your strength.’

‘All of we have to get old, Haq.’

‘That boy Foam say he going to send me to hospital.’

‘Foam only full of mouth, like his father.’

‘He did beg and beg me not to tell nobody. Wasn’t for
my
sake I break my word.’

Ramlogan stood up, stretched, and passed his big hairy hands over his big hairy belly. He walked over to the rum crates and took out a quarter bottle.

‘A good Muslim like you shouldn’t drink, you know, Haq.’

Haq looked angrily from the quarter bottle to Ramlogan. ‘I is a
very
old man.’

‘And because you is very old, you want to take over my shop?’ Ramlogan put back the bottle of rum. ‘You done owing me more than thirty dollars which I know these eyes of mine never even going to smell again.’

It was true. Haq had caught Ramlogan when Ramlogan was new in Elvira.

Haq said, ‘Is so it does happen when you get old. Give me.’

He took the rum, dolefully, and hid it in an inside pocket of his loose serge jacket. ‘Sometimes, eh, Ramlogan, I could drop in by you for a little chat, like in the days when you did fust come to Elvira?’

Ramlogan nodded. ‘You is a bad Muslim, Haq, and you is a bad drinker.’

Haq struggled to rise from his hammock. ‘I is a old man.’

Ramlogan hurried him outside and chained the gate after him.

Haq came out well pleased, but trying hard to look dejected, to fool the two workmen in Chittaranjan’s yard. They weren’t looking at him; they were staring in astonishment at something he hadn’t seen. He kept his eyes on the ground and fumbled with his jacket to make sure that his rum was safe. He limped a few paces; then, knowing that people would suspect equally if he appeared too dejected, he looked up.