Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

“Or moping about.”

  “No.” Dilip was crestfallen.

  “It’s not that I haven’t anything to do. There’s lots to do, I mean, lots to do if you’ve got the open mind. The Labour Government gives you that, that’s one thing.” Roland began to struggle into the abstract nouns of analysis, fuming for words and confirming, perhaps, the theory which asserts that the trouble with one’s vocabulary reflects the trouble with one’s life. Again, came a silence.

  “The train shall be here soon is my presumption.”

  “Though the Labour Government is desperate, just desperate, when it comes to closed doors. They’ve been hell with me. Matter of fact, it was only through me own savvy I got to be a wiper in the first place; no one stuck in for me, don’t kid yourself. But what? It’s only a fourpence ha’penny worth of job anyway, face it, and then when it comes time for the pension cheque? Sweet blow-all, that’s what. I was a milk-roundsman once. It’s just that there’s nothing in milk around here anymore,” complained Roland as he stuck his two thumbs in his mouth and meditatively leaned forward. “Not a bob to be had anywhere, really. What, you’re telling me the navvies are doing a bit of alright? Coo, not bloody likely. Navvies?” he said, rolling forward, then onto his feet. “Nothing there! I wouldn’t touch the ships if I was on me last goddam sice!” Roland suddenly kicked the machine a furious shot and dented it.

  The inconsistency registered. Dilip consulted the Menu: “When a lie is told, who is responsible, the liar or the lie itself?” It was quintessential wisdom, and Dilip’s wide sympathy spread out and enfolded Roland in a total and fraternal absolution.

  “Past drawbacks,” offered Dilip with his own particular sense of direction, “incline to bend one around from his level best, and, instead of reverting ahead, one indeed goes down in the mouth. That is when the game is up.” He shook his head. “It is wretched how you have been treated, truly.”

  “I’d say shitty.”

  Dilip swallowed. “Indeed?”

  “Not that I care. I don’t care, if that’s what they thought I’d do.” Roland folded his hands behind his back and began pacing up and down like a wolf. “But what if it involved other people?”

  “Wital obligations.”

  “Responsibilities.”

  “Dependencies.”

  “Right, right,” Roland snapped, standing still, “like my—”

  “Your—” Dilip was pity-stricken.

  “Well, he’s”—he hesitated—“my uncle.”

  Uncle! Here is this keen chap, Dilip felt, who suffers grievously, trying to manage his mercies, his employments, and to seek findables for an uncle who is doubtless hungerful, wageless, and eating doob on his narrow pallet, while bossman tells him to go whistle on his thumb. He does not thrive. What means this shameful deed? Goodness me, thought he, it is so much poopah.

  Roland reached into his pocket. He was at the tea machine. “It was the sweetheart, you see, who took it on the chin.”

  “Your esteemed wife needed, of course, the monies.”

  “Needed it, earned it really. Earned it and needed it both. She stuck by me when I didn’t have a cripple in my pocket, not a cripple. But, like the poet says, the poor man gets screwed everywhere he turns. Only thing is, chief, she ain’t—”

  Alive, thought Dilip. He was about to hand Roland his suit on the spot, his pocketful of sweaty shillings, and mail him, express, one of the lovely Magok rubies. The Menu, consulted, had often revealed: “Write your prayer on a flag and wave it.”

  “Well, she ain’t the wife. She’s my sweetheart, lives up in Yorkshire, Rose is the name, Rosamund actually, a nice bit of crumpet, you married?”

  “I am still quite unattached.”

  “We seen raw days and sunny ones. There’s a big difference, but you takes them as you finds them.” Roland slapped at his trouser pockets. “Sorry, guv, how about a sixpence for a cup? I’m crackeye without a cup in the morning. Don’t think me the bummie, I just happen to have a ten-bob note and no clinkers.”

  “Oh, of course, yes.”

  “Ta.”

  Dilip gladly gave Roland the coin, rejoicing simultaneously in the words from “The Song of the Adorable One” that had thrummed in his head so often, now, just as it was in his odyssey through India:

  The coin that costs a hundred toils

  That men are wont to cherish

  Beyond their life will, if it be

  Not given to others, perish.

  Rose, he thought, rose: a flower. The common cipher for beauty, it was a beautiful name. That was something to cherish beyond one’s life. It happened to be the case that Dilip had had no experience with women whatsoever, even in India. But now he thought of his sisters, Pushpa and Premila: catchwords, casual as birds, that came to him smelling of attar of hibiscus and warm wind. Pushpa, too, meant flower; Premila, the odour of bougainvillaea. And for an Indian, he knew, there existed one special relationship above all others, closer than mother, father, wife, or brother; this was the sacral communion one had with one’s sister. It was true all over India. And I am twice-blessed, thought Dilip, in this mystical joinery.

  Once again, as if by a miracle, he harked back to a vision, a déjà vu which elevated his spirit like long-forgotten music: it was the family house at Dum Dum, covered with white tapestry, and, here and there, the rosewood tables, intricately carved, that stood gracefully on low, hard thakats or wooden platforms, holding Benares trays piled high with jasmines. In the courtyard, Pushpa, drawing circles in the dust with her toe, sat near the sissoo tree while Premila worked her hair: a thin braid of three to six hairs was plaited along the hairline to outline the forehead, while the rest of the hair was pulled into dozens of narrow braids and finally woven into a thick braid reaching to the waist. Somewhere, someone was playing a sarod. The girls laughed softly, glittering in tinselled mulls and strings of jade beads. Puberty came early in the high humidity, and often, because of their beauty, his sisters were sought out by the Rajput princes, the flower of the aristocracy, and they would all sit in the courtyard that was festooned with moist vines and enjoy their meals of stuffed parathas and bowls of saffron pilao, delicately serving themselves with the left hand, and ritually eating with only the right. It was a beautiful, beautiful memory, stolen from him as a child—and, if the truth be told, not really in perfect congruity with the small picture now forming itself uppermost in his mind: notably, a first-draft preconception of a certain Missahib Bunn, her sweatshirt gorged with tennis balls and her old wooden racquet raised in a scold, hopping around a net in her sexagenarian bloomers and whiffling at a white rubber ball in crooked, cantankerous swipes. Tennis was termed sportive, he knew, but all hard striking and hitting motions he felt somehow useless. Contact was always a byword for lunacy.

  Crack! Roland had slugged the tea machine, splintering in a rippling splat one of the slots of glass.

  “Sods! Isn’t that just like them? Take your last hog and send you half-cocked to Land’s End.” He whacked it again. “Blast!”

  Merciful me, thought Dilip, his body has a mind of its own.

  “Perhaps another coin would release the tea. Unlikely, may I surmise, it is fully out of its commission?”

  “Now that may be correct, see?” Roland fished into his pockets. “But, well, how are we going to find out, you and I?” Dilip proudly produced a coin.

  “Use this one.”

  “Ah, yes!”

  “No doubt the other coin had a chip in it.”

  “A chip?”

  “A little crink.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “A tick, perhaps, in the milled edge of the coin.”

  “A tick, yes,” Roland agreed, nodding. “Now that’s better. Yes, many a coin does have a tick in her. They make them like that, minting them, I mean. Chip? That’s coming it a bit strong. Stop looking at your watch. I had a coin with a tick in her once, and it was enough to drive me out of my rubbers. Useless: tea, underground, fags—you couldn’t get a thing
with it.” Roland looked around him, then sidled up to Dilip and whispered. “But, you know, people do make use of them; they use them”—again, he looked around—“for slugs!”

  “Slugs?”

  “Dicky coins,” said Roland. “Blacks use them. Sorryaboutthat. Anyway—”

  “No, you see, I am—”

  “Listen. They shove them in, see? Sometimes they use wire and sometimes rubber gum. You just looked at your watch again. Using wire”—Roland stooped theatrically, nailing Dilip with his eye— “using wire, they tie it round the coin or, see, or make a hole and slip the wire through, and then they lower it into the, well, the fag machine, for instance. They dip it in s-l-o-w-l-y. Then, ripitoutquick.” He snapped his fingers. “A pack of fags, as the poet says, gratis.”

  “Remarkable and wonderful.” Dilip checked his watch.

  “The rubber gum takes more—” Roland tapped his temple. “Now look: with the rubber gum, they press that onto the coin. Do you have any with you?”

  “Coin?”

  “Rubber gum.”

  “No rubber gum.”

  “The coin then.”

  Dilip gave Roland a two-shilling piece. “See? So they press the gum on the bob, see, then—ha, ha, then!—you press a string on the gum, underneath, tight, firm, making sure it’s stuck proper, and when you’re going to phone up, well, say, Shepherd’s Bush, you shove the coin in and just as quickly yank it out.” Roland stepped back proudly and waved his hand expansively. “And you bloody well talk to Shepherd’s Bush that day, dearie, rest assured of that fact. You did it again.”

  “What?”

  “Looked at your watch. It gets me up.”

  “My train shall arrive soon?”

  “It will, it will. And it will have you in Brighton in ten bleeding shakes. But you’re going to get me up, you keep looking at the watch, see? So don’t.” Roland pocketed the two shillings as a perquisite and dropped the sixpence into the slot. He waited.

  “That coin didn’t fetch me tea, either!” The observation, anyone’s, was followed by three consecutive lacerating kicks, Roland’s. “Goddam it all, now!”

  “Yes, it failed!” Roland brayed. “What else do you think it did? Right up the ruddy spout!” He dove to the back of the machine and, ferro flammaque, furiously pulled at the wires; the flex was ripped from the plug in a shower of sparks and a puff of smoke. The machine went dead.

  “The machine went dead.”

  “Perished utterly?”

  “Dead, boy, dead!”

  Dilip held a finger to the tip of his nose.

  “Perhaps I could apply myself,” Dilip offered magnanimously and took off his suit jacket. He crawled behind the machine and once there, breech presentation, he mumbled happily in his work. “I do believe this machine is controlled by a series circuit. The box here should properly be transcalent, and if I unplugged it in order to—leep! it is hot as a trotter!—let me see, if I gain access ...”

  “Goddam thievery. My last six.”

  “... then, with lady luck, there might be found an open or a broken circuit, forbidding the path of the current which may be overloading. Wait! We must examine the series resonance where the maximum current in the circuit has its capacitance and inductance in series. Such is the crisis we are facing.”

  “Pirates.”

  “And yet possibly, however,” said Dilip, fumbling, his little feet showing out like paramecia, “there is, touch wood, a built-in circuit breaker automatically interrupting the flow of current when, indeed, the very current of which I speak becomes disconcertingly excessive. No! That is hubbub and bangle! This is a parallel circuit, as I first suspected. The positive poles or terminals are connected in one conductor, perhaps outside of the train station, and if that is of course the case—sorry, sir, may I trouble you and ask if you are possessing a knife?”

  “A knife? What do you mean?”

  “Zip, zip.”

  “Oh, in other words, a knife. No, now that’s something, isn’t it? Oh, I know I should have, but I just do not have a knife on me.”

  “That is acceptable anyway, sir. Any digging tool will suffice. I will employ the clasp of my tie, so as to”—Dilip draped himself full, almost overturned, behind the machine, gritting his teeth—“so as to wrench around a screw that should make the machine yield the tea you initially wanted.” The sound of little pecks were heard. Suddenly, the machine jumped into a smooth hum.

  “Do you hear those noises?”

  “Those noises?”

  Dilip peeped out, his nose smudged. “These noises.”

  “Ah, these noises! Now, that’s a different story. I hear them very well. Perfectly, in fact.”

  Quickly, Dilip disappeared again. “The breakthrough should be made,” came a muffled voice. “Place a coin in when I tell you to do so, if you would be so kind.”

  “Well, that’s just it, I haven’t—”

  “Now, sir!” The voice again. “Dip it!”

  “I don’t have, look, I don’t—”

  “Now!”

  The goddam fool, thought Roland. “I don’t have a bleeding hog to do it with!”

  A pindrop silence.

  Slowly, two eyes were to be perceived from the side of the machine; a face followed, blushing like a red winegum. “Goodness me, I thought formerly you enjoyed a shilling, or a sixpence. No?”

  “None!”

  “Even a bitty one?”

  “Never none!” screeched Roland, a wildly indignant mode of exculpation in which grammar was sacrificed to emphasis.

  “Oh, I am entirely at fault,” replied Dilip, reappearing. “Consequently, I have merely left you in a flurry of wishful thinking.”

  Dilip again scooted behind the machine. And, again, Roland flipped a shiny new coin.

  “Set?” sighed Roland.

  “In one blink of a moment, my friend.”

  A whoosh of exasperated disgust from Roland ended in a curse involving someone’s mother and an unusually inventive dog.

  “Now!”

  Roland slapped it in. The coin clinked, down flipped the cup, and an uberous flow of tea splashed down smoothly, on perfect cue, filling it to the brim in whorls of smoke.

  “Ha, ha,” proclaimed Roland, with the ratiocinative wink of Dupin, “then it was the, ah ...” He wiggled his little finger.

  “Parallel circuit, yes it was.”

  “That’s what I thought, but it’s a damn shame we have to knock our arses off just to get a cuppa. They should manage these things a sight better if they expect my business, the bleeders.” Dilip put on his coat.

  Roland then sat down on the bench and slurped an inch of tea from the cup, his satisfaction affected in clucks and sips—an onomatopoeia of digestive noises indicative of a renovation attributable solely to that sweet, warm brew, the absence of which, in England, is a synonym for death in the popular mind and the potential de-fuelization of an entire island. That Roland had three-fourths of the cup in his mouth struck Dilip as curious, for in India the Hindu never drank directly from his vessel; instead, he tilted his head back and simply poured away. Similarly, in smoking the hookah: his father, he remembered, had always curved his fingers themselves into a tube and drew the smoke up through his hand. England, India—two abstract nouns, really. Countries, Dilip thought, should be named for, called by, and defined as verbs. Verbs alone not only classify, but indicate behaviour, and it was the behaviour of people, and of countries, that made them different. He consulted the Menu: “The legume at home is always a nut abroad.” It was so wery, wery true.

  “Tea,” Roland smacked his lips, leaned back and yawned, “was invented here. England. It’s the leaves, you know. Homegrown. Did you know that?”

  “Actually,” said Dilip, smiling, “it is carted over from Orient. Importedly.”

  Roland sat around. “What?”

  “Tea plant is mailed here.”

  “I was thinking of coffee.” Roland fished for a crumb in his tooth.

  “A
h,” Dilip replied again, “in the century of the eighteenth grabb after grabb from Andhra Pradesh in India sailed to here loaded to their wery teeth in most pungent of coffees.

  “It don’t matter, does it? It don’t matter. Don’t try to get the argue, lovey. My point was, we need a good drink here, for the rain. It puts you right, see? We have more rain here than anywhere else in the world is why. We love it, rain.”

  It was a game. Dilip could see that.

  “Assam,” Dilip giggled, prepared with his little prank, “is wettest place in whole world—420 inches a year, to London’s 26.” He bounced with free fun.

  It was a shoulder-charge; Roland back-pedalled only to be ungraciously bumped upside down inside the penalty area. Fans were leaving. The shirty bastard, thought Roland.

  “Rain,” sneered Roland. “Or sun. Where’s the real difference? The real difference.”

  “Three and one-half hours of sunlight, daily awerage in Great Britain.”

  “ ’Sright, mate. Which is bloody huge, goes right up to Scotland. Mountains. Seas.”

  O glee! thought Dilip. He loved the academic gavotte. “You must be knowing, India is eighteen times larger than Britain. We are one-fifth of world population. Mountains. Seas. And deserts!”

  Advantage interviewee; interviewer to serve.

  “Shakespeare.”

  “Kalidasa.”

  Roland’s nose whitened. “God Save the Queen!” he shouted. It was a periodic rather than competitive remark of Roland’s and there, he felt, was an end to it. He lighted a cigarette. But Dilip, mistakenly, thought the game continued and named his national anthem. “Jana, Mana, Gana,” he said, clicking his heels with delight. Now, Roland’s face grew dark as the Doncaster pits.

  “Buckingham Palace!”

  “Taj Mahal!”

  Dilip, his voice raised in naïve, bubbly excitement, actually hated to be so correct. But it was always the best of his humble replies, he thought with innocent joy, for the entire world, surely, was in total agreement about the beauty of the Taj: marble lace walls gracefully curving up into perfect onion-shaped peaks in luminous soapstone, carnelian, and jade mosaics, all rising beyond a reflecting pool trimmed about with perfumed grisleas, acacias, dhaks, and sals. For all its grandeur, its pomp, Dilip knew, Buckingham Palace looked like a small tuppeny loaf of rye, or a rather sad Leicester cheese. Then, all of a sudden—with absolutely no hint of a warning—Roland exploded from his seat, howling: “Power! Battle! War!”