The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (5 page)

‘Ramlogan!’ Chittaranjan shouted, his thin voice edged and carrying far. ‘One of these days I going to mash up your arse.’

‘Ha. You go mash up my arse? You ain’t even got nothing to sit down on, and
you
go mash up
my
arse?’

‘Yes, I go do it. I, Chittaranjan, go do it, so help me God!’ He suddenly turned to Foam and Harbans, the fixed smile on his face, and screamed at them: ‘Oh, God! Don’t let that man provoke me, you hear! Don’t let him provoke me!’

Ramlogan left his shop door and walked to the edge of his yard. ‘Come down,’ he invited, with savage amiability. ‘Come down and mash up my arse. Come down and fight. Come down and cut down the breadfruit tree
or
the zaboca tree. Then we go see who is man.’

‘Don’t worry with the man, Pa,’ Nelly Chittaranjan, inside. ‘You don’t see that the man just want you to low-rate yourself?’

Chittaranjan paid no attention.
‘You
is a fighter?’ he challenged.
‘You?
You ever been to Port of Spain? Go to Port of Spain, ask somebody to show you where St Vincent Street is, walk down St Vincent Street, stop at the Supreme Court and ask them about Chittaranjan.
They
go tell you who is the fighter. Supreme Court know
you as
a fighter?’

Ramlogan hesitated. Chittaranjan had been an expert stick-fighter. He hadn’t much of a reach but he made up for that by his nimbleness. And his stick-fighting had often got him into trouble with the police.

Ramlogan couldn’t reply. He put his hands on the wire fence.

‘Take your fat dirty hand offa my fence,’ Chittaranjan snapped. ‘A nasty blow-up shopkeeper like you want to put your hand on my fence?’

‘All right, all right. One day I going to build my own fence, and then
you
don’t touch it, I warning you.’

‘But till then, take your fat dirty hand offa my fence.’

Then, unexpectedly, Ramlogan began to cry. He cried in a painful, belly-shaking way, pumping the tears out. ‘You don’t even want me to touch your fence now.’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his big hairy hand. ‘But you don’t have to be so insultive with it. All right, you ain’t want me. Nobody ain’t want me. The candidate ain’t want me. The three of all-you remain up there complotting against me, and you ain’t want me to put my hand on your fence now.
I
don’t control no votes, so nobody ain’t want me. Just because I don’t control no votes.’ He stopped for breath, and added with spirit: ‘Chittaranjan, the next time one of your wife chickens come in my yard, don’t bother to look for it. Because that night I eating good.’ He became maudlin again: ‘I don’t control no votes. Nobody don’t want me. But everybody chicken think they could just walk in my yard, as if my yard is a republic.’

Sobbing, he retreated to his shop.

Chittaranjan went back to his rocking-chair. ‘Mother arse,’ he said, giving a bite to every consonant. ‘For three years now, since the man come to live in Elvira, he only giving me provocation.’ But Chittaranjan was as poised as before. His face was flushed; but the flush on Chittaranjan’s face was, it seemed, as fixed as the smile.

Night fell.

Chittaranjan said, ‘You go have to start a rum-account with Ramlogan.’ The quarrel might not have been, to judge from Chittaranjan’s calm.

Foam nodded. ‘Only rumshop in Elvira, Mr Harbans.’

Harbans looked down at his hands. ‘I have to buy rum for everybody?’

‘Not
everybody,’
Chittaranjan said.

Harbans changed the subject. ‘What about that traitor Lorkhoor?’

‘Lorkhoor ain’t got no mind,’ Chittaranjan said. ‘But he can’t
worry me. Even supposing Lorkhoor win one thousand Hindu votes for Preacher, that still leave you three thousand Hindu votes. Now, three thousand Hindu votes and one thousand votes—you could depend on
me
for the Spanish votes—that give you four thousand votes.’

‘Don’t forget the thousand Muslim votes,’ Foam boomed.

Chittaranjan acknowledged them distastefully. ‘Make five thousand votes. You can’t lose.’

‘So is only five thousand now, eh?’ Harbans said to Foam. ‘In the lorry you tell me six thousand. I imagine tomorrow you go tell me four thousand and the day after you go tell me three thousand.’

‘Mr Harbans!’ Chittaranjan called. ‘Mr Harbans, you mustn’t talk like that!’

‘Nobody can’t fool me. I
know
this was going to happen. I had a sign.’

‘Five thousand out of eight thousand,’ Chittaranjan said. ‘You can’t lose. Majority of two thousand. Remember, I, Chittaranjan, is for you.’

‘This Lorkhoor is a damn traitor!’ Harbans exclaimed finally. He became calmer. He looked at Foam and Chittaranjan, smiled and began to coo: ‘I sorry, Goldsmith. I sorry, Foam. I was just getting a little down-couraged, that is all.’

‘Election fever,’ Foam said. ‘I know how it is.’

They settled other matters. Chittaranjan accepted the need for a committee, and they decided who were to be members of it. It pleased Harbans to see Chittaranjan growing less frigid towards Foam. At length he broke the news that Foam was the campaign manager. Chittaranjan took it well. It was not a post he coveted, because it was a paid post; everything he did for Harbans, he did only out of the goodness of his heart.

Before they left, Chittaranjan said, ‘I coming up to Port of Spain to see that doctor son you have. I
like
ambitious children.’

‘He
want
to see you too, Goldsmith.’

Foam and Harbans got into the Dodge.

A small oil lamp burned in Ramlogan’s gloomy shop and the man himself was eating his dinner from an enamel plate on the counter.

‘Wave to him,’ Foam said.

Ramlogan waved back. ‘Right, boss!’ He was surprisingly cheerful.

‘Funny man,’ Harbans said, driving off.

‘He always ready to play brave brave, but you never know when he going to start crying,’ Foam said. ‘He lonely really. Wife dead long time. Daughters don’t come to see him.’

*

This time there was no waving and shouting. The youths sitting on the culverts and the half-naked children still straying about were dazzled by the headlights of the Dodge and recognized Harbans only when he had passed. Harbans drove warily. It was Friday evening and the main road was busy. The drinking was to begin soon at Ramlogan’s rumshop; the other Friday evening excitement, Mr Cuffy’s sermon, had already begun.

Foam pointed out Mr Cuffy’s house. A gas lamp in the small rickety veranda lit up Mr Cuffy, an old Negro in a tight blue suit, thumping a Bible; and lit up Mr Cuffy’s congregation in the yard below, a reverent Negro group with many women. The rumble of the Dodge obliterated Mr Cuffy’s words, but his gestures were impassioned.

‘Mr Cawfee is Preacher right hand man,’ Foam said. ‘Not one of those Negro people there going to vote for you, Mr Harbans.’

‘Traitors! Elvira just full of traitors.’

Mr Cuffy and his congregation passed out of sight.

Harbans, thinking of the white women, the black bitch, the loudspeaker van, the seventy-five dollars a month, the rum-account with Ramlogan, the treachery of Lorkhoor, saw defeat and humiliation everywhere.

And then Foam shouted, ‘Look, Mr Harbans! Preacher.’

Harbans saw. A tall Negro with high frizzy hair, long frizzy beard, long white robe; haloed in the light of the headlamps; walking briskly at the edge of the road, stamping his staff, the hem of his robe dancing above sandalled feet. They saw him leave the road, go across a yard, saw him knock; and as they drove past, saw the door opened for him.

‘That is
all
he doing,’ Foam said. ‘Walking brisk brisk from door to door and knocking and going in and coming out and walking brisk brisk again.’

‘What he does talk about when he go in?’

‘Nobody ain’t know, Mr Harbans. Nobody does tell.’

They stopped at Baksh’s house and Foam got off.

‘We go have the first committee meeting some time next week, Mr Harbans. It going to give you a encouragement.’

But Foam’s hand was still on the door.

‘Ooh, I was forgetting.’ Harbans dipped into his hip pocket. ‘Something. Nothing much, but is a beginning.’

‘Is a encouragement,’ Foam said, taking the note.

Harbans drove out of Elvira, past the abandoned cocoa-house, past Cordoba, up Elvira Hill, down Elvira Hill. At the bottom of the hill his headlights picked out the two white women on their bicycles.

‘It don’t mean nothing,’ Harbans said to himself. ‘I mustn’t get down-couraged. It don’t mean nothing at all.’

If he only knew, his troubles hadn’t started.

I
N SPITE OF WHAT HE HAD SAID
to Harbans in the lorry about going up for the County Council, Foam hadn’t been thinking of going into politics at all. But when Lorkhoor had suddenly begun to campaign for Preacher, Foam announced that he was going to campaign for Harbans. Mrs Baksh objected. But Baksh said, ‘It going to be a good experience for the boy.’ Baksh had already agreed to support Harbans for two thousand dollars. Foam, however, wanted to do some loudspeaking, like Lorkhoor; and Baksh himself had been talking for some time in Ramlogan’s rumshop about the money to be made out of a loudspeaker. So when Harbans came that afternoon, Baksh hadn’t said a word about the two thousand dollars but had asked instead for a loudspeaker van and for Foam to be campaign manager.

The rivalry between Foam and Lorkhoor began when Teacher Francis, the new headmaster of the Elvira Government School, formed the Elvira Social and Debating Club. Teacher Francis was a young red-skinned Negro who dazzled Elvira with his sharp city dress: sharkskin zoot suit, hot tie knotted below an open collar, two-toned shoes. He was young for a headmaster, but to be a headmaster in Elvira was to be damned by the Trinidad Education Department. (Teacher Francis had been so damned for parading his agnosticism in a Port of Spain school. He had drawn a shapeless outline on the blackboard and asked his class, ‘Tell me, eh. That soul you does hear so much about, it look like that, or what?’ One boy had been outraged. The boy’s father complained to the Director of Education and Teacher Francis was damned to Elvira.) He formed the Elvira Social and Debating Club to encourage things of the mind. The idea
was new and the response was big. Lorkhoor quickly became the star of the club. It was Lorkhoor who wrote most of the poems and stories which were read to the club, and one of Lorkhoor’s poems had even been printed on the leader page of the
Trinidad Sentinel,
in the special type the
Sentinel
reserves for poetry and the Biblical quotation at the bottom of the leader:

In all the discussions, political and religious—Teacher Francis was still hot on religion—Lorkhoor shone and didn’t allow Foam or anyone else to shine. Teacher Francis always backed up Lorkhoor; between them they turned the club into a place where they could show off before an audience. They made jokes and puns that went over the heads of nearly everyone else. One day Teacher Francis said, ‘People like you and me, Lorkhoor, are two and far between.’ Lorkhoor alone roared. At the next meeting Lorkhoor began a review of a film: ‘The points in this film are two and far between—the beginning and the end.’ People stopped coming to the club; those who came, came to drink—there were always two or three people in Elvira who were having a row with Ramlogan the rumshop owner—and the club broke up.

Teacher Francis and Lorkhoor remained thick. Teacher Francis felt Lorkhoor understood him. He said Lorkhoor was a born writer and he was always sending off letters on Lorkhoor’s behalf to the
Sentinel
and the
Guardian
and the
Gazette.
So far nothing had come of that.

And then Foam was really cut up when Lorkhoor got that job advertising for the cinemas from a loudspeaker van. It was Foam who had heard of the job first, from Harichand the printer, a man of many contacts. Foam applied and had practically got the job when Lorkhoor, supported by Teacher Francis, stepped in. Lorkhoor pointed out that Foam was too young for a driving permit (which
was true); that Foam’s English wasn’t very good (which was true). Lorkhoor pointed out that he, Lorkhoor, had a driving permit (which was true); and his English was faultless (which was an understatement). Lorkhoor got the job and said it was a degradation. But while he drove about Central Trinidad in his loudspeaker van, speaking faultless English to his heart’s content, Foam had to remain in Elvira, an apprentice in his father’s shop. Foam hated the stuffy dark shop, hated the eternal tacking, which was all he was allowed to do, hated Elvira, at moments almost hated his family.

He never forgave Lorkhoor. The job, which Lorkhoor called a degradation, was his by rights; he would have given anything to get it. And now the election gave him the next best thing. It gave him a loudspeaker of his own and took him out of the shop. He worked not so much for the victory of Harbans and the defeat of Preacher, as for the humiliation of Lorkhoor and Teacher Francis.

*

Even before the committee met, Foam set to work. He got a pot of red paint from Chittaranjan and went around Elvira painting culverts, telegraph poles and tree-trunks with the enthusiastic slogan,
VOTE HARBANS OR DIE
!

Mrs Baksh didn’t like it at all. ‘Nobody ain’t listening to me,’ she said. ‘Everybody just washing their foot and jumping in this democracy business. But I promising you, for all the sweet it begin sweet, it going to end damn sour.’

She softened a little when the loudspeaker and the van came, but she still made it clear that she didn’t approve. All Elvira knew about the van—it was another example of Baksh’s depth—and Mrs Baksh was frightened by the very size of her fortune. She was tempting fate, inviting the evil eye.

Nobody else saw it that way. The little Bakshes clustered around the van while Foam and Baksh made arrangements for lodging it. To get the van into the yard they had to pull down part of the rotting wooden fence and build a bridge over the gutter. Some poorer people
and their children came to watch. Baksh and Foam stopped talking; frowned and concentrated and spat, as though the van was just a big bother. And though it wasn’t strictly necessary then, they put up the loudspeaker on the van. They spread a gunny sack on the hood, placed the loudspeaker on it and tied it down to the bumper with four lengths of rope.