The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (22 page)

On the evening of the Saturday before the election Mahadeo noted that Sebastian was not at home. His vigil would be over in two days; he couldn’t risk anything happening now. He went straight to Ramlogan’s rumshop. It was full of the Saturday night crowd, merrier
than usual because they still had rum vouchers; in two days they would have to start paying for their rum again. The floor was wet—the floors of rumshops are always wet. Ramlogan was busy, happy. Mahadeo forced his way through to the bench where Haq and Sebastian normally sat. He caught bits of election gossip.

‘The British Government don’t want Harbans to win this election.’

‘They going to spoil all the poor people votes once they get them inside the Warden Office. Lights going out all over the place.’

‘No, I not going to bet you, but I still have a funny feeling that Baksh going to win.’

‘When Harbans done with this election, he done with Elvira, I telling all-you.’

‘Chittaranjan in for one big shock when this election over, you hear.’

Mahadeo saw Haq, overshadowed by the standing drinkers and looking lost, fierce, but content.

‘Where Sebastian?’

Rampiari’s husband, his right foot emphatically bandaged, put his big hand on Mahadeo’s shoulder. ‘Sebastian! I never see a old man get so young so quick.’

Somebody else said, ‘Take my word. Sebastian going to dead in harness.’

‘Haq, you see Sebastian?’

‘Nasty old man. Don’t want to see him.’

Rampiari’s husband said, ‘Yes. In harness.’

‘This ain’t no joke, you know. Where Sebastian?’

‘At home. By you. Go back and see after your wife, Mahadeo boy.’

‘Two three years from now some Negro child running down Elvira main road calling Mahadeo Pa.’

‘All-you ain’t see Sebastian? Ramlogan!’

‘Mahadeo, who the arse you think you is to shout at me like that? A man only got two hands.’

‘Where Sebastian?’

‘He take up a little drink and he gone long time.’

‘For oysters.’

Mahadeo ran out of the shop, dazed by worry and the smell of rum. He ran back to Sebastian’s hut. It was dead, lightless. No Sebastian. He made his way in the dark through the high grass to the latrine at the back of the yard. The heavy grey door—it came from one of the dismantled American Army buildings at Docksite in Port of Spain and heaven knows how Sebastian had got hold of it—the door was open. In the dark the latrine smell seemed to have grown in strength many times over. Mahadeo lit a match. No Sebastian. The hole was too small for Sebastian to have fallen in. He ran back to the road.

‘Mahadeo, choose.’

It was Preacher, smelling of sweat and looking somewhat bedraggled.

‘You see Sebastian?’

‘The stone or the Bible?’

‘The stone, man. The Bible. Anything. You see Sebastian?’

‘Take the stone and kill me one time.’

‘Let me go, man, Preacher. I got one dead on my hands already.’ Then Mahadeo paused. ‘Sebastian choose tonight?’

‘Like Cawfee.’

‘Aha! I did always believe that Cawfee was putting him up to everything. Let me
go,
man, Preacher, otherwise I going to hit you for true with the stone, you know.’

Mahadeo was released. On his way to Mr Cuffy’s he passed a crowd on Chittaranjan’s terrace, taxi-drivers waiting for instructions about the motorcade tomorrow. They were drinking and getting noisy. Mahadeo looked up and saw the light from Chittaranjan’s drawing-room. He knew he should have been there, discussing the final election plans with Harbans and the rest of the committee. Guiltily he hurried away.

There was no light in Mr Cuffy’s house. Normally at this time
Mr Cuffy sat in his small veranda reading the Bible by the light of an oil-lamp, ready to say ‘Good night’ to disciples who greeted him from the road.

Mahadeo passed and repassed the house.

‘Mr Mahadeo.’

It was Lutchman. Mahadeo couldn’t make him out right away because Lutchman wore a hat with the brim most decidedly turned down, as protection against the dew. Lutchman lived in the house with six votes. He was one of the earliest Hindus to report sick to Mahadeo. He had been succoured.

Mahadeo remembered. ‘How the pain in your belly?’

‘A lil bit better, Mr Mahadeo. One of the boys gone and fall sick now.’

‘He fall sick a lil too late. Election is the day after tomorrow.’

Lutchman laughed, but didn’t give up. ‘You waiting for somebody, Mr Mahadeo?’

‘You see Sebastian?’

Lutchman buttoned up his shirt and screwed down his hat more firmly. He held the brim over his ears. ‘He sick too?’

‘You meet anybody these days who
ain’t
sick?’

‘Is a sort of flu,’ Lutchman said.

There was a coughing and a spluttering behind them.

Mahadeo started, ready to move off.

Lutchman said, ‘Look him there.’

A cigarette glowed in Mr Cuffy’s dark veranda.

Mahadeo whispered, ‘Sebastian, is you?’

There was some more coughing.

‘He smoking,’ Mahadeo said angrily. ‘Picking up all sort of vice in his old age.’

Lutchman said, ‘He can’t be all that sick if he smoking. Is a funny thing, you know, Mr Mahadeo, but I could always tell when
I
going to fall sick. I does find it hard to smoke. The moment that happen I does say, “Lutchman, boy, it look like you going to fall sick soon.” True, you know, Mr Mahadeo.’

‘Sebastian!’

‘These days I can’t even take a tiny little pull at a cigarette, man.’

Sebastian came into the road and Mahadeo knocked the cigarette from his hand.

Then Sebastian spoke.

‘Dead,’ Sebastian said. ‘Dead as a cockroach.’ He said it with a sort of neutral relish.

Mahadeo was confused by fear and joy.

‘Dead?’ Lutchman uncorked his hat.

Sebastian spoke again. ‘Put back your hat on. You going to catch cold.’

‘As a cockroach?’ Mahadeo said.

‘As a cockroach.’

The three men went into the lightless house. Mahadeo lit a match and they found the oil-lamp on a corner shelf. They lit that. The floorboards were worm-eaten and unreliable, patched here and there with the boards from a Red Cow condensed milk box. The pea-green walls were hung with framed religious pictures and requests to God, in Gothic letters, to look after the house.

Mr Cuffy sat in a morris chair as though he were posing for a photographer who specialized in relaxed attitudes. His head was slightly thrown back, his eyes were open but unstaring, his knees far apart, his right hand in his lap, his left on the arm of the chair.

‘As a cockroach,’ Sebastian said. He lifted the left hand and let it drop.

Lutchman, his hat in his hand, wandered about the tiny drawing-room like a tourist in a church. ‘Old Cawfee Bible, man. Eh! Mr Mahadeo, look. Cawfee in technicolor, man.’ He pointed to a framed photograph of a young Negro boy looking a little lost among a multitude of potted palms and fluted columns. It was a tinted black and white photograph. The palms were all tinted green; the columns were each a different colour; the boy’s suit was brown, the tie red; and the face, untinted, black.

Mahadeo wasn’t looking. It overwhelmed him just to be in Mr Cuffy’s house. He felt triumph, shame, relief and awe. Then the shame and the awe went, leaving him exhausted but cool.

‘Lutchman.’

‘Mr Mahadeo.’

‘Stay here with Sebastian. Don’t let him go nowhere. Preacher mustn’t get to know about Cawfee right now.’

He hurried over to Chittaranjan’s, pushed his way through the drunken taxi-drivers on the terrace and went up the red steps. He saw Baksh at the top. Baksh was saying, with unconvincing dignity, ‘Is not
you
I come to see, Goldsmith, but Mr Harbans.’

Mahadeo followed Baksh and Chittaranjan into the drawing-room. Harbans was there with his committee. Foam was sitting at the polished cedar table, looking at a very wide sheet which contained all the committee’s dispositions for polling day: the names of agents and their polling stations, agents inside the stations and agents outside; taxis, their owners, their drivers, their stations.

Mahadeo said, ‘Goldsmith, I have to see you right away.’

Chittaranjan, honouring the occasion by wearing his visiting outfit (minus the hat) at home, looked at Mahadeo with surprise and some contempt.

‘Pussonal,’ Mahadeo insisted.

Chittaranjan felt the force of Mahadeo’s eyes. He led him to the back veranda.

Baksh said, ‘Mr Harbans, answer me this frank: if I go up, ain’t I just making the Muslims and them waste their good good vote?’

Dhaniram said, ‘Ach! You could keep the Muslim vote.’

‘I know,’ Baksh said. ‘You ain’t want the Muslim vote
now.
But you think it would look nice? When next election come round, and you
ain’t
want the Muslim to waste their vote, what you going to do then?’

Harbans said,
‘Next
election? This is the fust and last election I fighting in Elvira.’

Foam studied his chart. He wasn’t going to take any part in the discussion.

Baksh knew he was pushing things too far. But he knew he was safe because Foam was there. Otherwise he stood a good chance of being beaten up. Not by Harbans or Dhaniram or Chittaranjan, but by helpers. He could hear the din from Ramlogan’s shop next door: the curses and the quarrels, swift to flare up, swift to die down. He could hear the taxi-drivers downstairs, drunk and getting drunker; they were making a row about petrol for the motorcade tomorrow.

Baksh said, ‘If the Muslims vote for Preacher, it going to make a little trouble for you, Mr Harbans. You is a old man and I ain’t want to trouble you. But is the only proper thing to do.’

‘And the only proper thing for
you
to do is to make haste and haul your tail away.’ It was Chittaranjan, returning to the drawing-room. ‘Dhaniram, at long last we could use your plan. Cawfee dead.’

‘Aha! What I did tell you?’ Dhaniram was so excited he lit a cigarette. ‘One Negro was bound to dead before elections. You in luck, Mr Harbans. Lorkhoor going away tonight. And tonight self you get a chance to start paying the Negroes
their
entrance fee.’

Harbans was too stupefied by his good fortune to react.

‘Wake,’ Dhaniram said. ‘Coffee.
We
coffee. Ha! Coffee for Cawfee. Coffee, rum, biscuits.’

Chittaranjan remained poised. ‘Foam, take the van and run down to Chaguanas and get Tanwing to come up here with a nice coffin and a icebox and everything else. And telephone Radio Trinidad so they could have the news out at ten o’clock. You could make up the wordings yourself. Dhaniram, go home and get your daughter-in-law to make a lot of coffee and bring it back here.’

‘How I go
bring
back a lot of coffee here?’

‘Is a point. Foam, when you come back, go and pick up the coffee from Dhaniram place. Nelly mother going to make some more.’

Baksh saw it was no use threatening to sell out to Preacher now. He said, ‘Funny how people does sit down and dead, eh? Since I was
a boy so high in short pants I seeing Cawfee sitting down in his house, repairing shoe. All sorta shoe. Black shoe, brown shoe, two-tone shoe, high-heel, wedge-heel.’ Baksh became elegiac: ‘I remember one day, when I was a boy, taking a shoe to Cawfee. Heel was dropping off. One of those rubber heels. I take it to Cawfee and he tack back the heel for me. I offer him six cents but he ain’t take it.’

No one listened. Foam was folding up his election chart in a business-like way. Dhaniram was buckling his belt, ready to go and see about the coffee. Harbans was still bemused. Mahadeo, relieved, exhausted, didn’t care.

‘He ain’t take it,’ Baksh repeated.

Chittaranjan said, ‘Mahadeo, you better go and keep a sharp eye on the house. I going to talk to those taxi-drivers. We go want them for the funeral. I think it would be better to have the funeral before the motorcade.’

Mahadeo went back to Mr Cuffy’s house.

Sebastian was sitting in a morris chair, leaning forward and grimacing.

Lutchman said, ‘Sebastian ain’t too well, Mr Mahadeo. Just now, just before you come, he take in with one belly pain. He sick.’

‘Serve him damn right. And let me tell you one thing, Sebastian. If
you
dead, nobody not going to bury you, you hear.’

Sebastian only grimaced.

Lutchman said, ‘Food and everything spread out in the kitchen, you know, Mr Mahadeo. Nothing ain’t touch. Mr Cawfee,’ Lutchman said, feeling for the words, ‘get call away rather sudden.’

Sebastian straightened his face and got up. He stood in front of the tinted photograph. He said, ‘I did know Cawfee when he take out that photo. Always going to Sunday School.’ Abruptly his voice was touched with pathos. ‘They use to give out cakes and sweet drinks. Then he get take up with this shoemaking.’

They sat and waited until they heard a van stop outside. Foam, Chittaranjan, the D.M.O. and Tanwing came in. The D.M.O. was a
young Indian with a handsome dissipated face. He hadn’t forgotten his association with England and continued to wear a Harris tweed jacket, despite the heat.

Foam asked, ‘You going to cut him up, Doctor?’

The D.M.O. pursed his lips and didn’t reply. He did two things. He took off Mr Cuffy’s stout black boots, said, ‘Good boots,’ turned up Mr Cuffy’s right eyelid, then closed both eyes.

‘Heart,’ he said, and filled the form.

‘Was that self I did think,’ Lutchman said.

Tanwing, the undertaker, was pleased by the D.M.O’s dispatch, though nothing showed on his face. Tanwing was an effervescent little Chinese who had revolutionized burial in Central Trinidad. He had a big bright shop in Chaguanas with a bright show window. In the window he had coffins of many sizes and many woods, plain and polished, with silver handles or without any handles at all, with glass windows on the lid through which you could look at the face of the deceased, or without these windows. Every coffin had its price tag, sometimes with a hint like: ‘The same in cyp, $73.00.’ There were also tombstones, with tags like this: ‘The same with kerbs, $127.00.’ The slogan of Tanwing’s was Economy with Refinement; because of the former he had abandoned horse-drawn hearses for motor ones. Refined economy paid. Tanwing was able to sponsor a weekly fifteen-minute programme on Radio Trinidad. The other programme of this sort was a hushed, reverent thing called ‘The Sunshine Hour’. Tanwing gave his audience fifteen lively minutes of songs from many lands on gramophone records, and called his programme ‘Faraway Places’.