A Way in the World (2 page)

“A brown woman was sitting at a desk, and on the dusty
wall—dust catching on the unevenness of the plastered rubble wall—were Information Office posters from England. The Tower of London, the English countryside.

“I said, ‘They tell me I could find Mr. Side here.’

“ ‘He over there, across the road,’ the woman at the desk said.

“I crossed the road. As always at this time of day, the asphalt was soft and black, as black as the oil-stained concrete floor of the big shed of a garage where the Parry buses were. The building I entered was a modern one, with grey-washed decorated concrete blocks mimicking chipped stone. It was a very clean and plain kind of place, like a doctor’s office.

“I said to the girl sitting at the table, ‘Mr. Side?’

“She said, ‘Go right in.’

“I went through to the inner room, and there I could hardly believe what I saw. A dark Indian man was doing things with his fingers to a dead body on a table or slab in front of him. I had gone to Parry’s Funeral Parlour. It was a famous place; it advertised every day on the radio with organ music. I suppose Leonard Side was dressing the body. ‘Dressing’—I just knew the word. I had had no idea what it meant. I was too frightened and shocked to say anything. I ran out of the room, and the front room, and got out into the open again. The man ran out after me, calling in a soft voice, ‘Miss, Miss.’

“And really he was quite a good-looking man, in spite of the hairy fingers I had seen dressing the dead body on the table. He was very pleased to be asked to judge the girls’ flower competition. He even said he wanted to give the first prize. He said that if we allowed him he would make a special posy. And he did, too. A little posy of pink rosebuds. Our May Day fair was a great success.

“A year passed. Fair time came again, and I had to go again and look for Leonard Side. This time I wasn’t going to forget: I wasn’t going to the funeral parlour. The only place
I was going to meet Leonard Side was the Women’s Association. I went there late one afternoon after school, about five. The little Spanish-style house was full of women, and in the inside room Leonard Side was doing things with dough, using those hairy fingers to knead dough. Using those fingers to work in a little more milk, then a little more butter.

“He was teaching the women how to make bread and cake. After he had finished doing the dough, he began to teach them how to ice a cake, forcing with those hairy fingers coloured icing out of the special cones or moulds he had. He pressed on and then into the moulds with his hairy fingers, and out came a pink or green rosebud or a flower, which he then fixed with icing-flecked fingers on to the soft iced cake. The women said ooh and aah, and he, very happy with his audience and his work, worked on, like a magician.

“But I didn’t like seeing those fingers doing this kind of work, and I liked it less when, at the end, with those same fingers he offered the women little things he had iced, to eat on the spot, as a treat. He liked offering these little treats. They were offered almost like a wafer in church, and the women, concentrating, ate and tasted with a similar kind of respect.

“The third year came. This time I thought I wouldn’t go to Parry’s Corner to meet Leonard Side. I thought I would go to his house instead. I had found out where he lived. He lived in St. James, quite near where I lived. That was a surprise: that he should have been so close, living that life, and I shouldn’t have known.

“I went after school. I was wearing a slender black skirt and a white shirty top and I was carrying a bag with school books. I blew the horn when I stopped. A woman came out to the front gallery, bright in the afternoon light, and she said, ‘Come right in.’ Just like that, as though she knew me.

“When I went up the steps to the front gallery she said, ‘Come in, Doctor. Poor Lenny. He so sick, Doctor.’

“Doctor—that was because of the car and blowing the horn, and the bag, and the clothes I was wearing. I thought I would explain later, and I followed her through this little old St. James wood house to the back room. There I found Leonard Side, very sick and trembling, but dressed for a meeting with the doctor. He was in a shiny brass fourposter bed with a flowered canopy, and he was in green silk pyjamas. His little hairy fingers were resting on the satin or silk spread he was using as a coverlet. He had laid himself out with great care, and the coverlet was folded back neatly.

“There were crepe-paper flowers in a brass vase on a thin-legged side table or vase-stand, and there were satiny cushions and big bows on two simple cane-bottomed bentwood chairs. I knew at once that a lot of that satin and silk had come from the funeral parlour, and was material for the coffins and the laying out of the bodies.

“He was a Mohammedan, everyone knew. But he was so much a man of his job—laying out Christian bodies, though nobody thought of it quite like that—that in that bedroom of his he even had a framed picture of Christ in Majesty, radiating light and gold, and lifting a finger of blessing.

“The picture was centrally placed above the door and leaned forward so much that the blessing of the finger would have seemed aimed at the man on the bed. I knew that the picture wasn’t there for the religion alone: it was also for the beauty, the colours, the gold, the long wavy hair of Christ. And I believe I was more shocked than when I saw him dressing the body and later when I saw him using the same fingers to knead dough and then to squeeze out the terrible little blobs of icing.

“It was late afternoon, warm still, and through the open window came the smell of the cesspits of St. James, the cesspits of those dirt yards with the separate little wood houses, two or three to a lot, with runnels of filth from the latrines runnels that ran green and shiny and then dried away in I
dirt; with the discoloured stones where people put out their washing to bleach; with irregular little areas where the earth was mounded up with dust and sand and gravel, and where fruit trees and little shrubs grew, creating the effect not of gardens but of little patches of waste ground where things grew haphazardly.

“When I looked at those hairy fingers on the coverlet and thought about the house and the woman who had called me in—his mother—I wondered about his life and felt sorry and frightened for him. He was sick now; he wanted help. I didn’t have the heart to talk to him about the girls and the May Day fair, and I left the house and never saw him again.

“It was his idea of beauty that upset me, I suppose. That idea of beauty had taken him to the job in the funeral parlour, and had got him to deck Out his bedroom in the extravagant way he had. That idea of beauty—mixing roses and flowers and nice things to eat with the idea of making the dead human body beautiful too—was contrary to my own idea. The mixing of things upset me. It didn’t upset him. I had thought something like that the very first time I had seen him, when he had left his dead body and run out after me to the street, saying, ‘Miss, Miss,’ as though he couldn’t understand why I was leaving.

“He was like so many of the Indian men you see on the streets in St. James, slender fellows in narrow-waisted trousers and open-necked shirts. Ordinary, even with the good looks. But he had that special idea of beauty.

“That idea of beauty, surprising as it was, was not a secret. Many people would have known about it—like the junior teacher who had brought his name up at the staff meeting, and then didn’t know how to describe him. He would have been used to people treating him in a special way: the women in the classes clapping him, other people mocking him or scorning him, and people like me running away from him because he frightened us. He frightened me because I
felt his feeling for beauty was like an illness; as though some unfamiliar, deforming virus had passed through his simple mother to him, and was even then—he was in his mid-thirties—something neither of them had begun to understand.”

THIS WAS
what I heard, and the teacher couldn’t tell me what had happened to Leonard Side; she had never thought to ask. Perhaps he had joined the great migration to England or the United States. I wondered whether in that other place Leonard Side had come to some understanding of his nature; or whether the thing that had frightened the teacher had, when the time of revelation came, also frightened Leonard Side.

He knew he was a Mohammedan, in spite of the picture of Christ in his bedroom. But he would have had almost no idea of where he or his ancestors had come from. He wouldn’t have guessed that the name Side might have been a version of Say ed, and that his grandfather or great-grandfather might have come from a Shia Muslim group in India. From Lucknow, perhaps; there was even a street in St. James called Lucknow Street. All Leonard Side would have known of himself and his ancestors would have been what he had awakened to in his mother’s house in St. James. In that he was like the rest of us.

With learning now I can tell you more or less how we all came to be where we were. I can tell you that the Amerindian name for that land of St. James would have been Cumucurapo, which the early travellers from Europe turned to Conquerabo or Conquerabia. I can look at the vegetation and tell you what was there when Columbus came and what was imported later. I can reconstruct the plantations that were laid out on that area of St. James. The recorded history of the place is short, three centuries of depopulation followed by two centuries of resettlement. The documents of the resettlement
are available in the city, in the Registrar-General’s Office. While the documents last we can hunt up the story of every strip of occupied land.

I can give you that historical bird’s eye view. But I cannot really explain the mystery of Leonard Side’s inheritance. Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings. I might say that an ancestor of Leonard Side’s came from the dancing groups of Lucknow, the lewd men who painted their faces and tried to live like women. But that would only be a fragment of his inheritance, a fragment of the truth. We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

ON MY
seventeenth birthday I became an acting second-class clerk in the Registrar-General’s Department. It was a filling-in job, between leaving school and going away to England, to the university; and it was one of the most hopeful times in my life. The Registrar-General’s Department was in the Red House, in St. Vincent Street. This was one of the first streets I had got to know in Port of Spain.

I was a country boy, and still am in my heart of hearts. Only a country boy could have loved the town as I did when I came to it. This was in 1938 or 1939. I loved everything about the town that was not like the country. I liked the paved cambered streets and even the open kerbside gutters: every morning, after they had done their sweeping and gathering, the street-cleaners opened the water hydrants and flooded the gutters with fresh, clear water. I liked the pavements. Many of the houses had decorative fences of a particular style, with a big carriage or cart-gate at the side, usually of corrugated iron, and an elegant small gate in the middle, leading to the front door. These front gates were of stiff patterned wire within a tubular frame and with a metal arabesque at the top. Sometimes they had a bell. I liked the way the pavements dipped outside the big side gates (to let in the
carts or cars to the yards, though very few people had cars). I liked the street lamps; the squares with their trees and paved paths and benches; the routine of the town day, from the street-cleaners’ brooms in the early morning, to the newspaper being thrown onto the front steps, to the horse-drawn ice-cart in the middle of the morning. Port of Spain was small, really, with less than a hundred thousand people. But to me it was a big town, and quite complete.

My father was my guide to the city in the very early days. One Sunday afternoon he took me to the city centre and walked me down two or three of the principal streets. Sunday was such a quiet day that you could—for the sake of doing something unusual—get off the pavement and walk in the street itself. Frederick Street was the street of the big stores. More interesting to me was St. Vincent Street. At the lower end, near the harbour, it was the street of the newspapers, the
Trinidad Guardian
and the
Port of Spain Gazette,
facing one another. My father worked for the
Guardian.
It was the more important and more modern paper. From the pavement you could see the new machines, the big rollers, the big unwinding ribbons of newsprint, and you could get the warm smell of machines and paper and printing ink. So, almost as soon as I had come to the city, this new excitement, of paper and ink and urgent printing, was given to me.

Later I got to know the higher or upper parts of the street. The tailor who made trousers for me had his shop in St. Vincent Street. My father took me there one day. The tailor’s name was Nazaralli Baksh. His shop faced west and was shaded from the afternoon sun by a white canvas blind hanging vertically over the pavement. His name was painted on this blind. He was a small, slender Indian man, standing some way inside his shop, perhaps because of the sun. He had a fined-down face, with dark shining eyes set in darker sockets, and with his thin hair brushed back flat: a severe man, friendly to my father, but more matter of fact with me than I expected
adults to be. I expected adults who had been properly introduced to me to be a little awed by me, and my “brightness.” The thin tape measure hanging round Nazaralli Baksh’s neck was like part of the severity of his appearance.

I don’t know how good his tailoring was; but this introduction made him the man I thought of as “the tailor.” I thought of no one else as a tailor in quite this way; every other tailor in Port of Spain seemed to me counterfeit. I understood at some stage that he was a Mohammedan. This didn’t at first make him less close; but then, with Indian independence, and the religious partition of the sub-continent, the idea of difference began to attach to him, though I never stopped going to him for my clothes. It was Nazaralli Baksh who made the clothes I took with me when I went away to England.