The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (24 page)

And Baksh added, ‘Don’t let nobody fool you, my good people. Vote the heart. Make your X with a black lead pencil, my good people. A black lead pencil. Not a red pencil or a pen. Do your part. This is the voice of … Baksh.’

The motorcade was well organized. One van alone carried food—
roti, dalpuri
and curried goat. Another carried hard liquor and soft drinks. There were small mishaps. Two or three cars broke down and had to be pushed out of the way. Once the motorcade enthusiastically went beyond Elvira, snarled with the motorcades of other candidates in the next constituency, and when the dust settled Chittaranjan saw that the first half of the motorcade, which contained the candidate, the committee and the loudspeaker van, had got detached from the second half, which carried the food and the liquor.

A long grey van pulled up. It belonged to the Trinidad Film Board, who were shooting scenes for a Colonial Office documentary film about political progress in the colonies, the script of which was to be written, poetically, in London, by a minor British poet. Apart from the driver and an impressive tangle of equipment behind the front seat, the van carried a Negro cameraman dressed for the job: green eyeshade, unlit cigar, wide, brilliant tie, broad-collared shirt open at the neck, sleeves neatly rolled up to mid-forearms. The cameraman chewed his cigar, sizing up Harbans’s diminished motorcade.

Chittaranjan went to him. ‘You drawing photo?’

The cameraman chewed.

‘If is photo you drawing, well, draw out a photo of
we
candidate.’

Harbans smiled wanly at the cameraman.

The cameraman chewed, nodded to his driver and the van moved off.

‘Everybody want bribe these days,’ Chittaranjan said.

He sent Foam off in the loudspeaker van to look for the rest of the motorcade. Foam came upon them parked not far off in a side road near Piarco Airport. The food van had been plundered; the liquor van was being noisily besieged. Harichand was there, Lutchman, Sebastian, Haq, and Rampiari’s husband, moving about easily on a bandaged foot.

Foam broke the party up. All went smoothly after that.

*

Baksh made one last attempt to cause trouble.

It happened after the motorcade, early in the evening, when Harbans was sitting in Chittaranjan’s drawing-room, signing voucher after petrol voucher. He was giving each car six gallons for polling day. Baksh said it wasn’t enough.

Harbans said, ‘Ooh. When that finish, Baksh, come back to me and I go give you another voucher.’

Baksh snorted. ‘Ha! Is
so
you want to fight elections? You mean, when my gas finish, I must put down whatever I doing? Put it down and come running about looking for you? Look for you, for you to give me another voucher? Another voucher for me to go and get more gas? Get gas to go back and take up whatever it was I was doing before I put it down to come running about looking for you …’ He completed the argument again.

The taxi-drivers were drunk and not paying too much attention, and nothing would have come of Baksh’s protests but for a small accident.

Chittaranjan had, at his own expense, got his workmen to make heart-shaped buttons for Harbans’s agents and taxi-drivers to wear on polling day. Shortly after the motorcade Foam came downstairs to distribute the buttons. They were in a shoebox. A taxi-driver at the bottom of the steps tried to grab a handful. The man was drunk and his action was high-spirited, nothing more. But Foam turned nasty; he was thoroughly tired out by all the festivities, first Mr Cuffy’s wake, then the motorcade.

He said, ‘Take your thiefing hand away!’ That was bad enough, but as Foam spoke his temper rose, and he added, ‘I going to make you wait till last for your button.’

When he finally offered, the man declined. ‘I don’t want none.’

‘Come on. Ain’t you was grabbing just now? Take the button.’

‘Not going to take no damn button. All you people running about behaving like some damn civil servant, pushing away people
hand as if people hand dirty.’ He raised his voice: ‘My hand ain’t dirty, you hear. You hearing me good? I is a taxi-driver, but I does bathe every day, you hear. My hand ain’t dirty, you hear.’

A crowd began to gather.

Foam said, ‘Take your button, man.’

The other taxi-drivers were already sporting theirs.

Foam tried to pin the button on the driver’s shirt.

The driver pushed him away and Foam almost fell.

The taxi-driver addressed his audience: ‘They want to use people car, but they don’t want to give people no button. I ask for one little button and the man push away my hand and practically threaten to beat me up. Giving button to everybody. Everybody. And when he come to me, passing me. I is a dog? My name is Rex? I does go bow-wow-wow? Well, I is
not
a dog, and my name
ain’t
Rex, and I ain’t taking no damn button.’

Foam’s tactics were wrong. He tried to be reasonable. He said, ‘I threaten to beat you up? Or you mean that you try to grab the whole shoebox of button?’

The driver laughed. He turned his back on Foam and walked away, the taxi-drivers making a path for him; then he turned and walked back to Foam and the ring of taxi-drivers closed again. ‘Is so all you people does get on. So much money all-you spend for this election and now, on the second to-last night, all-you start offending people and start getting insultive and pussonal.’

Foam continued to be reasonable. ‘I was insultive?’

But nobody was listening.

Another taxi-driver was saying, ‘And today, when they was sharing out food, I ain’t even get a little smell. When I go and ask, they tell me it finish. When I go and ask for a little shot of grog, they drive me away. Harbans spending a lot of money, but is the people that helping him out who going to be responsible if he lose the election. I mean, man, no food, no grog. Things like that don’t sound nice when you say it outside.’

And then came this talk about petrol.

‘Six gallons ain’t enough,’ Baksh said.

Somebody else said, ‘You know how much they giving taxi-drivers in Port of Spain? Thirty dollars a day. And then in addition too besides, they fulling up your tank for you, you hear. And it have good good roads in Port of Spain that not going to lick up your car.’

That at once made matters worse.

Chittaranjan, Mahadeo and Harbans were upstairs, besieged by more taxi-drivers. Harbans was filling in petrol vouchers as Chittaranjan called out the amount, the number of the taxi, the name of the driver. They were not using the cedar dining-table; it was too good for that; Chittaranjan had brought out the large kitchen table, spread it over with newspapers and jammed it, like a counter, in the doorway between the drawing-room and the veranda. The drivers pressed around the table, waiting for Harbans to fill in and sign their vouchers. Mahadeo was trying to keep some order among the drivers, fruitlessly. They shouted, they cursed, laughed, complained; their shoes grated and screeched on the tiled floor. Harbans filled in and signed, filled in and signed, in a daze, not looking up.

Through all the press Chittaranjan sensed that something was wrong downstairs, and he sent Mahadeo to see what was happening. Mahadeo came back with the news that unless the men were given at least ten gallons of petrol they were going to go on strike the next day.

The taxi-drivers around the table took up the cry.

‘Ten gallons, man. I got a big American car. No English matchbox. I does only do fifteen miles to the gallon. Six gallons is like nothing to my car, man.’

‘In Port of Spain they fulling up your tank for you.’

‘Let Harbans watch out. He think he only saving two gallons of gas. If he ain’t careful he saving hisself the trouble of going up to Port of Spain every Friday afternoon to sit down in that Legislative Council.’

Not even Chittaranjan’s authority could quell the unrest.

‘Mahadeo,’ Chittaranjan called. ‘Go down and tell them that they
going to get their ten gallons. Those that get six tell them to come up for another voucher.’

Harbans didn’t stop to think.

Chittaranjan just whispered to him, ‘Ten gallons. Driver name Rapooch. He taxi number is HT 3217.’

And Harbans wrote, and wrote. If he stopped to think he felt he would break down and cry. His wrinkled hand perspired and shook; it had never done so much writing at one time.

Mahadeo went downstairs and spread the healing word.

*

Elvira was stirring before dawn. A fine low mist lay over the hills, promising a hot, thundery day. As the darkness waned the mist lifted, copying the contours of the land, and thinned, layer by layer. Every tree was distinct. Soon the sun would be out, the mist would go, the trees would become an opaque green tangle, and polling would begin.

Polling was to begin at seven; but the fun began before that. The Elvira Estate had given its workers the day off; so had the Public Works Department. Chittaranjan gave his two workmen the day off and put on a clean shirt. Baksh gave himself the day off. He rose early and went straight off to start celebrating with Rampiari’s husband and the others. As soon as he was up Foam went over to Chittaranjan’s. Harbans was there already. Harbans had wanted to spend the night in Elvira, but Chittaranjan had advised him not to, considering the irreverent mood of the taxi-drivers.

Mahadeo, according to Chittaranjan, was behaving even at that early hour in an entirely shameless way. He was drunk and, what was worse, drinking with the enemy.

Chittaranjan, his hat on, his shirt hanging nice and clean on him, said, ‘I did feel like lifting up my hand and giving Mahadeo one good clout with my elbow. I meet him drinking with some good-for-nothing and I say, “Why for you drinking with these good-for-nothing, Mahadeo?” I did expect a straight answer. But the man drunk too
bad, man. He tell me he drinking with them because he want to find out which way the wind blowing.’

*

At seven, or thereabouts, the polling stations opened. Presently there were queues. Agents sat on the roots of trees still cool with dew, ticking off names on duplicated electoral lists, giving cards to voters, instructing the forgetful in the art of making an X. ‘No, old man, they ain’t want two X.’ ‘Ah,
maharajin,
it ain’t a scorpion they want you to draw. Is a X. Look …’ ‘No, man. They ain’t want you to vote for
everybody.
You just put your little X by the heart. Do your part, man.’ ‘You want to kill him or what? Not
inside
the heart, man.’

*

Foam’s job was to see that the organization worked smoothly. He had to see that the food van made regular rounds; officially, this was to feed agents and other accredited representatives, but many other people were to benefit. He had to make periodic tours of the polling stations to see that no one played the fool.

At ten o’clock Foam reported: ‘They staggering the voting at the school.’

‘Staggering?’

‘Taking six seven minutes over one vote.’

Chittaranjan said, ‘I did always feel that man was going to make trouble. You better go and see him, Mr Harbans.’

Harbans knew what that meant.

He went to the school, Teacher Francis’s domain, but now in the holidays without Teacher Francis, who was in Port of Spain.

There was a long complaining queue.

Foam said, ‘A lot of people leave because they didn’t want to stand up all this time.’

The clerk, a cheerful young Negro, greeted Harbans with unabashed warmth. ‘Is a big big day for you today, Mr Harbans.’

‘Ooh, I hear you having a little trouble here.’

‘People ain’t even know their own name, Mr Harbans.’

‘But ain’t they got a number?’

The clerk didn’t stop smiling. ‘I ain’t want to know their number. Want to know their name.’

‘Ooh. And when they tell you their name, you spend a long long time finding out whether they on the list, and then sometimes you does ask them to spell out their name? Let we look at the election regulations together.’

The clerk brightened.

From his hip pocket Harbans pulled out an orange pamphlet folded in two. He opened it so that only he and the clerk could see what was inside. It was a ten-dollar note.

The clerk said, ‘Hm. I see what you mean. My mistake. Just leave these regulations here, Mr Harbans.’

Foam was still anxious. ‘You can’t be too careful in this place. In Trinidad you can’t say anybody win election until they draw their first pay. We have to follow the ballot-boxes back to the Warden Office, otherwise you don’t know what sort of chicanery they not going to try.’

For that task he and Chittaranjan had chosen men of tried criminality.

One man asked, ‘You want me take my cutlass, Goldsmith?’

‘I don’t want you to land yourself in the Supreme Court again,’ Chittaranjan said. ‘Just take a good stick.’

*

Dhaniram stayed at home all morning. With no
doolahin
about, he had to empty his wife’s spitting-cup; he had to cook for her; he had to lift her from her bed, make the bed, and put her back on it. He had no time to think about the election, yet when he went to Chittaranjan’s he announced, ‘Things going good good for you up Cordoba way, Mr Harbans. I spend the whole morning there.’

Chittaranjan barely widened his smile. ‘Is a funny thing that you didn’t see Foam. Foam going around everywhere all morning.’

Dhaniram changed the subject. ‘I too break up by the
doolahin
and Lorkhoor.’ He did indeed look ravaged; his skin was yellower, his eyes smaller, redder, without a twinkle.

But he was going to get no sympathy from Harbans. Foam’s reports from the polling stations had convinced Harbans that he had practically won the election.

He kept making little jokes with Chittaranjan and Dhaniram.

‘I wonder what colour the cheque going to be.’

Chittaranjan couldn’t enter into the spirit of the game. ‘I don’t think they does pay members of the Legislative Council by cheque. I think you does get a sorta voucher. You got to cash it at the Treasury.’