The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (18 page)

‘The people of Elvira,’ Dhaniram said, tightening his belt, ‘have their little funny ways, but I could say one thing for them: you don’t have to bribe them twice.’

‘But what about Baksh?’

‘Baksh,’ Dhaniram said, ‘is a damn disgrace to Elvira.’

They went to see Chittaranjan.

*

They found Chittaranjan unruffled, bland, in his home clothes, rocking in his veranda. Obviously he was in the highest spirits.

‘Who say the Spanish ain’t voting?’ Chittaranjan said. And he told them about the five dead puppies in Cordoba. ‘Bright and early those two white woman Witnesses come up on their fancy bike. The Spanish ain’t talk to them, ain’t look at them. The five dead puppies alone remain in the road and the Spanish go inside their house and lock up the door. The white woman had to go away. Who say the Spanish ain’t voting?’

Harbans hid his joy. He didn’t want to tempt fate again.

Dhaniram calculated. ‘We draw up even with Preacher now. Four thousand apiece.’

Chittaranjan rocked. ‘Wait. Watch and see if Preacher don’t lose his deposit.’

Harbans said, ‘Goldsmith, I shoulda tell you this a long time now.’ And he disclosed the sign he had had weeks before: the Witnesses, the black bitch, the engine stalling.

Chittaranjan gave his corrosive titter. ‘You
shoulda
tell me, Mr Harbans. You woulda save both of we a lot of worry. One sign is bad. But when you get
two
signs in one day, is different. They does
cancel out one another. Just as how the dog cancel out the Witnesses.’

Dhaniram wanted Chittaranjan to talk about the row with Baksh. He said, ‘I did always say we could give Preacher the Muslim vote. We could do without Baksh and Baksh son.’

‘Dhaniram,’ Chittaranjan said, ‘you know me. I does say my mind, and who want to vex, let them vex. But you talking like a fool. Those dead puppies in Cordoba, who you think put them there?’

‘Foam?’ Harbans said. ‘Ooh. You mean Foam is still faithful?’

‘But I thought you did have a row with the father, man,’ Dhaniram said.

‘With the father, yes. But not with the son.’ Chittaranjan glanced at Harbans. ‘Is the father who put him up to
try.’

Dhaniram frowned and began to shake his legs, slowly. ‘Don’t like it. Baksh want something more. He got something at the back of his mind.’

Chittaranjan clacked his sabots. ‘Course he got! Baksh ain’t no fool. Baksh have everything calculate already.’

Dhaniram tried once more. He cocked his head to one side and said, ‘I feel I hearing little Nelly walking inside. She ain’t gone to school today?’

Chittaranjan didn’t look at Dhaniram but at Harbans who, his head bent, had gone absent-minded. Chittaranjan said, ‘No school for she today. After all, she practically engage already.’

Harbans didn’t look up.

‘I say,’ Chittaranjan said, slowly, incisively, ‘how you want me to still send Nelly to school, when she practically
engage?’

Harbans woke up. ‘Wouldn’t be right,’ he said hurriedly, ‘especially when the girl practically engage already.’

Chittaranjan looked triumphantly at Dhaniram.

*

The Witnesses stayed away from Cordoba and Elvira.

T
HE CAMPAIGNS BEGAN
to swing.

Preacher made his house-to-house visits. Mr Cuffy preached political sermons on Friday evenings. Lorkhoor blazed through the district.

Chittaranjan revisited Cordoba and won back the votes the Witnesses had seduced. Foam, loyal to Harbans, toured with his loudspeaker van, and neither Baksh nor Mrs Baksh objected. Harichand got orders for posters. Whenever Pundit Dhaniram officiated at a Hindu ceremony he urged his listeners to vote for Harbans.

Mahadeo kept a sharp, panicky eye on Old Sebastian. The man seemed to wilt more and more every day, and Mahadeo was giving him five shillings, sometimes two dollars a week to buy medicines.

Harbans resigned himself to visiting the Hindu sick. Whenever he came to Elvira and saw Mahadeo, he asked first, ‘Well, how much Hindu sick today? And what-and-what is the various entrance fee?’ Mahadeo would take out his little red notebook and say, ‘Mungal not so good today. Two dollars go settle him. Lutchman complaining about a pain in his belly. He got a big family and the whole house have six votes. I think you better give him ten dollars. Five dollars for the least. Ramoutar playing the fool too. But he so ignorant, he can’t even make a X and he bound to spoil his vote. Still, give him a dollar. It go make people feel that you interested.’

Harbans’s rum-account with Ramlogan rose steeply. But Ramlogan maintained to all the drinkers that he was impartial. ‘Once this election bacchanal over,’ he said, ‘I have to live with everybody, no matter who they vote for.’ Chittaranjan never went inside the shop.
He and Foam devised rum-vouchers that could be exchanged only at Ramlogan’s. Harichand printed the vouchers.

And, secure in the cocoa-house, Tiger began to flourish.

*

But Baksh was doing nothing at all about the election. The thousand Muslim voters of Elvira looked to him in vain for a lead. He wasn’t campaigning for Preacher and he wasn’t campaigning against Harbans. He remained in his shop and sewed dozens of khaki shirts, working with a new, sullen concentration. He refused to talk about the election, refused almost to talk at all. This sudden reticence won him a lot of attention and respect in Ramlogan’s rumshop. But if he didn’t talk much, his actions were larger. He brought down his thick glass heavily on the counter; he smacked his lips and twisted his face as though the puncheon rum tasted like castor oil; he spat copiously and belched often, bending forward, blowing out his cheeks and rubbing his belly, like one who suffers. When people asked him about the election he only gave an odd, ironic little smile. Altogether he behaved like a deep man with a deep secret.

This finally annoyed Mrs Baksh. ‘You have everybody laughing at you. When this election nonsense did first begin, you ain’t ask nobody, you ain’t look right, you ain’t look left, you jump in. Now, when everybody washing their foot and jumping in, you remaining quiet, sitting on your fat tail like a hatching fowl.’

‘Well, all right I ain’t doing nothing. What you want me to do? You think I would let two shot of cheap grog fool me? Look, is not for my sake I worrying, you know. If I trying to make anything outa this election, is for you and the children, you hear, not for me.’

Mrs Baksh would say with scorn, ‘Even little Foam bringing home seventy-five dollars when the month end.’

Baksh’s silent inactivity worried Harbans and his committee as much as Preacher’s silent campaigning.

Messages from Baksh were always reaching the committee.

Some were boastful. ‘Baksh say he just got to walk around Elvira
one
time, saying all that he know, and everybody going to forget Harbans.’

Some were cryptic. ‘Baksh say
he
ain’t got to do nothing to make Harbans lose. Harbans doing that hisself.’

Some were threatening. ‘Baksh say Harbans could do what he want before the elections, but Harbans going to lose the election on election day itself.’

But Baksh himself did nothing.

Chittaranjan alone refused to be alarmed. He said, ‘Baksh ain’t no fool. Baksh know what he want. And the sad thing is that he going to get what he want. But
we
mustn’t make the fust move. We would be low-rating weself if we do that.’

*

Foam wasn’t happy about two things.

He would have liked to confess to Chittaranjan that it was he who had run over the clean-necked chicken; but he just didn’t have the courage. Then there was Nelly. He felt especially guilty about her. Chittaranjan had taken her out of school and stopped her going anywhere; she remained in the house all day.

Perhaps Foam would have confessed about the chicken if Chittaranjan had been at all cool towards him; but Chittaranjan showed himself surprisingly, increasingly amiable. He encouraged Foam to visit the Big House and gave him many sweet drinks. Only, Mrs Chittaranjan did the honours now; not Nelly. Foam responded by making it clear that he wasn’t interested in Nelly. He said, often and irrelevantly, that he couldn’t understand why people got married, that he wasn’t interested in marriage at all, hardly interested in girls even. Chittaranjan seemed to approve. ‘Well, what happen between your father and me ain’t have nothing to do with you.’

Then, when Chittaranjan thought he had proved to everyone in Elvira that Nelly’s honour was safe; that Foam was a good boy whom
he trusted absolutely; that Baksh was the envious troublemaker; then he sent Nelly off to Port of Spain, to stay with his brother, the barrister.

He was a lonely man after that. Outside, canvassing in his visiting outfit, he was the powerful goldsmith, the great controller of votes. But at home, in his torn khaki trousers, patched shirt and sabots, Foam knew him as a sad humiliated man. He never rushed to the veranda wall to shout at Ramlogan. He heard his chickens being shooed and struck and made to squeal in Ramlogan’s yard, and he did nothing.

When Foam was in the Big House one day, a breadfruit and three over-ripe zabocas fell on the roof. Foam waited. Chittaranjan kept on rocking and pretended he hadn’t heard.

Foam decided to confess

He said, ‘Goldsmith, that clean-neck fowl …’

‘Oh, that.’ Chittaranjan waved a hand, anxious to dismiss the subject. ‘That cook and eat long time now. Didn’t have no disease you know.’

‘Shoulda say this before, but was me who kill it. Knock it down with the loudspeaking van.’

Chittaranjan paused, just perceptibly, in his rocking; a look of surprise, relief passed over his face; then he rocked again. When he spoke he didn’t look at Foam. ‘All right, you kill it right enough. But who did want to see it dead?’

Foam didn’t answer.

Chittaranjan waved a tired hand towards Ramlogan’s yard. ‘He. He wanted to see it dead. If the chicken dead now and eat, that not on your conscience.’

Foam didn’t follow the reasoning; but it pleased him to see Chittaranjan look a little less oppressed. A little less grieved.

Foam said, ‘It did grieve Ramlogan like anything to see it dead. He tell Pa so the day after. Is what he tell Pa and is what Pa tell me. Ramlogan say he did know the chicken from the time it hatch, and he
did watch it grow up. He say it was like a child to him, and when it dead it was a pussonal loss.’

Chittaranjan looked even less grieved.

*

The big quarrel, coming after three years of intermittently explosive hostility, had in fact purged Chittaranjan of much of his animosity towards Ramlogan. He had never been sure that it was Ramlogan who had killed the chicken; but coming upon it so soon after discovering Tiger in the cupboard, he had felt that he had to do something right away. Now he realized the enormity of his accusation. Ramlogan had, justly, got the better of him in that quarrel; and would always get the better of him in any future quarrel: Nelly’s dishonour was a more devastating argument than his ownership of the fence or his appearance in the Supreme Court.

He had had his fill of enmity. He wanted to change his relationship with the man. He called Mrs Chittaranjan and said, ‘That breadfruit that fall, and those three zaboca, pick them up and put them in the basket I bring back from San Fernando and take them over to Ramlogan.’

Mrs Chittaranjan didn’t show surprise. She was beyond it.

She packed the fruit in the basket and took it across. Ramlogan’s shop was open. It was early morning and there were no customers.

Ramlogan was reading the
Sentinel,
his large hairy head down, his large hairy hands pressing on the chipped and greasy counter. When he saw Mrs Chittaranjan he went on reading with an air of absorption, reading and saying, ‘Hm!’ and scratching his head, aromatic with Canadian Healing Oil. In truth, he was deeply moved and trying to hide it. He too was ripe for reconciliation. He had always wanted to wound Chittaranjan; but now that he had, he regretted it. He knew he had gone too far when he attacked the honour of the man’s daughter; he felt ashamed.

‘Ah,
maharajin,
’ he said at last, looking up and smoothing out the
Sentinel
on the counter.

Mrs Chittaranjan placed the basket of fruit on the counter and pulled her veil decorously over her forehead.

‘Breadfruit,’ Ramlogan said, as though he had never seen the fruit before. ‘Breadfruit, man. And zaboca, eh? Zaboca. One, two, three zaboca.’ He pressed a zaboca with a thick forefinger. ‘Ripe too.’

Mrs Chittaranjan said, ‘He send it.’

‘It have nothing I like better than a good zaboca and bread. Nothing better.’

‘Yes, it nice,’ Mrs Chittaranjan said.

‘Nice like anything.’

‘He send it. He tell me to take up the breadfruit and the three zaboca and bring it for you in this basket.’

Ramlogan passed a hand over the basket. ‘Nice basket.’

‘He bring it from San Fernando.’

Ramlogan turned the basket around on the greasy counter. ‘Very nice basket,’ he said. ‘It make by the blind?’

‘He say I have to bring back the basket.’

Ramlogan emptied the basket, hugging the fruit to his breast. Mrs Chittaranjan saw the basket empty, saw the fruit in a cluster against Ramlogan’s dirty shirt. Then she saw the cluster jog and heave and heave and jog.

Ramlogan was crying.

Mrs Chittaranjan began to cry in sympathy.

‘We is bad people,
maharajin,’
Ramlogan sobbed.

Mrs Chittaranjan pressed a corner of her veil over her eyes. ‘It have some good in everybody.’

Ramlogan clutched the fruit to his breast and shook his head so violently that tears fell on the breadfruit. ‘No, no,
maharajin,
we is more bad than good.’ He shook down some more tears and lifted his head to the sooty galvanized-iron roof. ‘God, I is asking You. Tell me why we is bad.’

Mrs Chittaranjan stopped crying and took the basket off the counter. ‘He waiting for me.’

Ramlogan brought his head down. ‘He waiting?’

She nodded.

Ramlogan ran with the fruit to the back room and then followed Mrs Chittaranjan out of the shop.