Collected Short Fiction (23 page)

About two months later my mother said, ‘You must come with me next week. We going to see Ganesh Pundit.’

Ganesh Pundit had given up mysticism for a long time. He had taken to politics and was doing very nicely. He was a minister of something or the other in the Government, and I heard people saying that he was in the running for the M.B.E.

We went to his big house in St Clair and we found the great man, not dressed in
dhoti
and
koortah
, as in the mystic days, but in an expensive-looking lounge suit.

He received my mother with a good deal of warmth.

He said, ‘I do what I could do.’

My mother began to cry.

To me Ganesh said, ‘What you want to go abroad to study?’

I said, ‘I don’t want to study anything really. I just want to go away, that’s all.’

Ganesh smiled and said, ‘The Government not giving away that sort of scholarship yet. Only ministers could do what you say. No, you have to study something.’

I said, ‘I never think about it really. Just let me think a little bit.’

Ganesh said, ‘All right. You think a little bit.’

My mother was crying her thanks to Ganesh.

I said, ‘I know what I want to study. Engineering.’ I was thinking about my uncle Bhakcu.

Ganesh laughed and said, ‘What
you
know about engineering?’

I said, ‘Right now, nothing. But I could put my mind to it.’

My mother said, ‘Why don’t you want to take up law?’

I thought of Chittaranjan and his brown suit and I said, ‘No, not law.’

Ganesh said, ‘It have only one scholarship remaining. For drugs.’

I said, ‘But I don’t want to be a druggist. I don’t want to put on a white jacket and sell lipstick to woman.’

Ganesh smiled.

My mother said, ‘You mustn’t mind the boy, Pundit. He will study drugs.’ And to me, ‘You could study anything if you put your mind to it.’

Ganesh said, ‘Think. It mean going to London. It mean seeing snow and seeing the Thames and seeing the big Parliament.’

I said, ‘All right. I go study drugs.’

My mother said, ‘I don’t know what I could do to thank you, Pundit.’

And, crying, she counted out two hundred dollars and gave it to Ganesh. She said, ‘I know it ain’t much, Pundit. But it is all I have. Is a long time I did saving it up.’

Ganesh took the money sadly and he said, ‘You mustn’t let that worry you. You must give only what you can afford.’

My mother kept on crying and in the end even Ganesh broke down.

When my mother saw this, she dried her tears and said, ‘If you only know, Pundit, how worried I is. I have to find so much money for so much thing these days, and I don’t really know how I going to make out.’

Ganesh now stopped crying. My mother began to cry afresh.

This went on for a bit until Ganesh gave back a hundred dollars to my mother. He was sobbing and shaking and he said, ‘Take this and buy some good clothes for the boy.’

I said, ‘Pundit, you is a good man.’

This affected him strongly. He said, ‘Is when you come back from England, with all sort of certificate and paper, a big man and a big druggist, is then I go come round and ask you for what you owe me.’

I told Hat I was going away.

He said, ‘What for? Labouring?’

I said, ‘The Government give me a scholarship to study drugs.’

He said, ‘Is you who wangle that?’

I said, ‘Not me. My mother.’

Eddoes said, ‘Is a good thing. A druggist fellow I know – picking up rubbish for him for years now – this fellow rich like anything. Man, the man just rolling in money.’

The news got to Elias and he took it badly. He came to the gate one evening and shouted, ‘Bribe, bribe. Is all you could do. Bribe.’

My mother shouted back, ‘The only people who does complain about bribe is those who too damn poor to have anything to bribe with.’

In about a month everything was fixed for my departure. The Trinidad Government wrote to the British Consul in New
York about me. The British Consul got to know about me. The Americans gave me a visa after making me swear that I wouldn’t overthrow their government by armed force.

The night before I left, my mother gave a little party. It was something like a wake. People came in looking sad and telling me how much they were going to miss me, and then they forgot about me and attended to the serious business of eating and drinking.

Laura kissed me on the cheek and gave me a medallion of St Christopher. She asked me to wear it around my neck. I promised that I would and I put the medallion in my pocket. I don’t know what happened to it. Mrs Bhakcu gave me a sixpenny piece which she said she had had specially consecrated. It didn’t look different from other sixpenny pieces and I suppose I spent it. Titus Hoyt forgave me everything and brought me Volume Two of the Everyman edition of Tennyson. Eddoes gave me a wallet which he swore was practically new. Boyee and Errol gave me nothing. Hat gave me a carton of cigarettes. He said, ‘I know you say you ain’t smoking again. But take this, just in case you change your mind.’ The result was that I began smoking again.

Uncle Bhakcu spent the night fixing the van which was to take me to the airport next morning. From time to time I ran out and begged him to take it easy. He said he thought the carburettor was playing the fool.

Next morning Bhakcu got up early and was at it again. We had planned to leave at eight, but at ten to, Bhakcu was still tinkering. My mother was in a panic and Mrs Bhakcu was growing impatient.

Bhakcu was underneath the car, whistling a couplet from the
Ramayana
. He came out, laughed, and said, ‘You getting frighten, eh?’

Presently we were all ready. Bhakcu had done little damage to the engine and it still worked. My bags were taken to the van and I was ready to leave the house for the last time.

My mother said, ‘Wait.’

She placed a brass jar of milk in the middle of the gateway.

I cannot understand, even now, how it happened. The gateway was wide, big enough for a car, and the jar, about four inches wide, was in the middle. I thought I was walking at the edge of the gateway, far away from the jar. And yet I kicked the jar over.

My mother’s face fell.

I said, ‘Is a bad sign?’

She didn’t answer.

Bhakcu was blowing the horn.

We got into the van and Bhakcu drove away, down Miguel Street and up Wrightson Road to South Quay. I didn’t look out of the windows.

My mother was crying. She said, ‘I know I not going to ever see you in Miguel Street again.’

I said, ‘Why? Because I knock the milk down?’

She didn’t reply, still crying for the spilt milk.

Only when we had left Port of Spain and the suburbs I looked outside. It was a clear, hot day. Men and women were working in rice-fields. Some children were bathing under a stand-pipe at the side of the road.

We got to Piarco in good time, and at this stage I began wishing I had never got the scholarship. The airport lounge frightened me. Fat Americans were drinking strange drinks at the bar. American women, wearing haughty sun-glasses, raised their voices whenever they spoke. They all looked too rich, too comfortable.

Then the news came, in Spanish and English. Flight 206 had been delayed for six hours.

I said to my mother, ‘Let we go back to Port of Spain.’

I had to be with those people in the lounge soon anyway, and I wanted to put off the moment.

And back in Miguel Street the first person I saw was Hat. He was strolling flat-footedly back from the Café, with a paper under his arm. I waved and shouted at him.

All he said was, ‘I thought you was in the air by this time.’

I was disappointed. Not only by Hat’s cool reception. Disappointed because although I had been away, destined to be gone for good, everything was going on just as before, with nothing to indicate my absence.

I looked at the overturned brass jar in the gateway and I said to my mother, ‘So this mean I was never going to come back here, eh?’

She laughed and looked happy.

So I had my last lunch at home, with my mother and Uncle Bhakcu and his wife. Then back along the hot road to Piarco where the plane was waiting. I recognized one of the customs’ officers, and he didn’t check my baggage.

The announcement came, a cold, casual thing.

I embraced my mother.

I said to Bhakcu, ‘Uncle Bhak, I didn’t want to tell you before, but I think I hear your tappet knocking.’

His eyes shone.

I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.

I NEVER KNEW
her real name and it is quite likely that she did have one, though I never heard her called anything but Gold Teeth. She did, indeed, have gold teeth. She had sixteen of them. She had married early and she had married well, and shortly after her marriage she exchanged her perfectly sound teeth for gold ones, to announce to the world that her husband was a man of substance.

Even without her gold teeth my aunt would have been noticeable. She was short, scarcely five foot, and she was very fat. If you saw her in silhouette you would have found it difficult to know whether she was facing you or whether she was looking sideways.

She ate little and prayed much. Her family being Hindu, and her husband being a pundit, she, too, was an orthodox Hindu. Of Hinduism she knew little apart from the ceremonies and the taboos, and this was enough for her. Gold Teeth saw God as a Power, and religious ritual as a means of harnessing that Power for great practical good, her good.

I may have given the impression that Gold Teeth prayed because she wanted to be less fat. The fact was that Gold Teeth had no children and she was almost forty. It was her childlessness, not her fat, that oppressed her, and she prayed for the curse to be removed. She was willing to try any means – any ritual, any prayer – in order to trap and channel the supernatural Power.

And so it was that she began to indulge in surreptitious Christian practices.

She was living at the time in a country village called Cunupia, in County Caroni. Here the Canadian Mission had long waged war against the Indian heathen, and saved many. But Gold Teeth stood firm. The Minister of Cunupia expended his Presbyterian piety on her; so did the headmaster of the Mission school. But all in vain. At no time was Gold Teeth persuaded even to think about being converted. The idea horrified her. Her father had been in his day one of the best-known Hindu pundits, and even now her husband’s fame as a pundit, as a man who could read
and write Sanskrit, had spread far beyond Cunupia. She was in no doubt whatsoever that Hindus were the best people in the world, and that Hinduism was a superior religion. She was willing to select, modify and incorporate alien eccentricities into her worship; but to abjure her own faith – never!

Presbyterianism was not the only danger the good Hindu had to face in Cunupia. Besides, of course, the ever-present threat of open Muslim aggression, the Catholics were to be reckoned with. Their pamphlets were everywhere and it was hard to avoid them. In them Gold Teeth read of novenas and rosaries, of squads of saints and angels. These were things she understood and could even sympathize with, and they encouraged her to seek further. She read of the mysteries and the miracles, of penances and indulgences. Her scepticism sagged, and yielded to a quickening, if reluctant, enthusiasm.

One morning she took the train for the County town of Chaguanas, three miles, two stations and twenty minutes away. The Church of St Philip and St James in Chaguanas stands imposingly at the end of the Caroni Savannah Road, and although Gold Teeth knew Chaguanas well, all she knew of the church was that it had a clock, at which she had glanced on her way to the railway station nearby. She had hitherto been far more interested in the drab ochre-washed edifice opposite, which was the police station.

She carried herself into the churchyard, awed by her own temerity, feeling like an explorer in a land of cannibals. To her relief, the church was empty. It was not as terrifying as she had expected. In the gilt and images and the resplendent cloths she found much that reminded her of her Hindu temple. Her eyes caught a discreet sign:
CANDLES TWO CENTS EACH
. She undid the knot in the end of her veil, where she kept her money, took out three cents, popped them into the box, picked up a candle and muttered a prayer in Hindustani. A brief moment of elation gave way to a sense of guilt, and she was suddenly anxious to get away from the church as fast as her weight would let her.

She took a bus home, and hid the candle in her chest of drawers. She had half feared that her husband’s Brahminical flair for clairvoyance would have uncovered the reason for her trip to Chaguanas. When after four days, which she spent in an ecstasy of prayer, her husband had mentioned nothing, Gold Teeth thought it safe to burn the candle. She burned it secretly at night,
before her Hindu images, and sent up, as she thought, prayers of double efficacy.

Every day her religious schizophrenia grew, and presently she began wearing a crucifix. Neither her husband nor her neighbours knew she did so. The chain was lost in the billows of fat around her neck, and the crucifix was itself buried in the valley of her gargantuan breasts. Later she acquired two holy pictures, one of the Virgin Mary, the other of the crucifixion, and took care to conceal them from her husband. The prayers she offered to these Christian things filled her with new hope and buoyancy. She became an addict of Christianity.