Only some of the minor characters are exempt, it would seem, from this fatiguing pattern; and that might be because we don’t know enough about them. Those who perform these cameos are drawn delicately, and they possess an almost spirit-like mysteriousness that the main characters never have. One such bit-player in Fireflies is Sadhu, whom we discover momentarily in the decaying house that a spinster among the Khoja sisters, Indrani, has withdrawn to:
At some point, she had taken under her wing an ageing Indian peasant, a decrepit old man of about seventy […] He lived in a tiny cubby-hole (formerly a broom cupboard) on the ground floor. Here, he slept on a collection of rags which Indrani had made up for him as a mattress. On the floor next to his bed were the scattered instruments of his existence.
The only living thing of any kind in either novel that is entirely and transcendentally blameless is the dog that Mrs Lutchman acquires after her husband’s death and names Rover. Almost inadvertently, Naipaul turns it into one of modern fiction’s most unwittingly engaging creatures; despite the optimistic ‘Beware of the Dog’ sign that Mrs Lutchman puts up, the narrator informs us that ‘Rover’s meekness was almost legendary. It was a well-known fact that he only barked at strangers from behind the safety of the closed gate. The moment they entered […] he either licked joyfully at them or, tucking his tail between his legs, retreated with an ineffectual snarl […]’ When Mrs Lutchman begins to visit the newly-formed Hindu League, and returns with the customary prasad, or sacred offerings, everyone finds it inedible except Rover, who ‘fell upon it with a joy that never diminished […] “You is a real little Hindu,” she would say, watching his tail wag as he buried his head in the paper bag. “A real little Hindu.”’ This is one of the relatively few allusions Shiva Naipaul permits himself to the land of his ancestors, particularly to the dog Dharma (‘faith’ or ‘calling’) in the epic, the Mahabharata, who mysteriously follows Yudhishthir as he journeys into the afterlife. By inserting this sly and subterranean reference, Naipaul reminds us that his story of unjust dispensations and abortive plans is, in its way, no less farreaching in its scope than an epic might be.
Children aren’t exempt either. The world of childish desire, dashed hopes, rivalry, manipulation, sex and play is evoked with marvellous precision and intelligence in The Chip-Chip Gatherers. But the book – while it can often be hilarious – isn’t a comedy or by any means a celebration, as books about beginnings can be. Unlike James Joyce’s first novel, or D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, or even Biswas, where memory is not only transformative but forgiving – and those books themselves delighted records of encountering the world and words for the first time – Shiva Naipaul’s novel is an assessment of how shaky beginnings are, and how they don’t contain (as character was supposed to) any inkling of how the future will turn out. The latter, again, seems dependant on fate, luck and inexplicable inner demons: not some fatal flaw, not the gods (since there don’t seem to be any, despite shrines, portents and pictures on the wall), but something more intractable. Fate favours some, and doesn’t others; but we can’t be sure, in these novels, if the protagonist is the favoured one or the one who is being cast aside. It’s the democratic but unnatural workings of destiny that complicate our sense, until late into the novels, as to who their central characters are: for a long time, everyone’s future seems to hang in the balance. In Fireflies, fate gives to Mrs Lutchman the dubious benefit of outliving her husband and watching her sons fail or disappear; and so, almost reluctantly, she becomes the novel’s principal figure, carrying, literally, the burden of its narrative. In The Chip-Chip Gatherers, it’s young Julian Bholai whom fate favours, by gifting him a scholarship to study medicine in England; but, eventually, it’s the patriarch and businessman Egbert Ramsaran’s son, Wilbert, who’s had a more advantageous birth but who’s less bright, less handsome, less lucky, whom Shiva Naipaul decides will take the novel to its bleak, unresolved, but pulsating conclusion. In this way, Naipaul makes his protagonists mythic, in the sense that they’re characters who have been assigned a task which only we, from the outside, realise is at once unheroic and stupendous – the curious and distracting task of living.
In writing his first two novels, Shiva Naipaul stubbornly, and surely unexpectedly, produced two masterpieces. I use that near-meaningless term to mean works that impeccably adhere to the most difficult of literary conventions while also uniquely subverting and exceeding them. This makes reading his fiction an experience for which reading about it can’t be any kind of substitute. His feeling for perfection and its passing is very much his own; he should be on our bookshelves for giving us a region of the world and the imagination that very few other writers have with such skill and eloquence, such comic mischief and pain.
Amit Chaudhuri, 2012
Chapter One
1
Egbert Ramsaran kept cows. In itself, there was nothing strange about this: most of the people who lived in the neighbourhood reared a few domestic animals. What was strange, however, was that Egbert Ramsaran had no real need of his cows. In keeping them, he disobeyed an unwritten though very powerful law: that the rich man, outgrowing his peasant status, bought his milk from others. It was a symbol of progress, practical, moral and aesthetic. His son was accosted on the street by the neighbours. ‘But Mister Wilbert, tell me why your father does keep he own cow for? Why he so stubborn and hard-hearted for? Like it have something wrong with other people cow? You want to tell me that with all that money he have, he still too stingy to buy milk from we?’
The young boy had no ready answer and, instead – for no reason they could quite fathom – he gave them money. These acts of charity pleased Wilbert. The mingled feelings of guilt and power which accompanied them were not wholly unwelcome. As for the recipients, they never refused these unsolicited handouts. ‘I glad to see you not the same man as your father,’ they said pocketing the paltry gift. ‘You have a heart. You have a conscience.’ He was too young to understand that what they were in fact saying was: ‘At bottom you is the same sonofabitch as your father. Only more foolish to be giving away good money like that.’
It was a common occurrence for the animals in the neighbourhood to bring traffic to a halt on their way to and from the field where they were allowed to pasture – particularly late in the afternoon on their return journey home. They maundered with uncanny preference down the middle of the road, trailing broken bits of rope looped loosely round their necks and looking about them with indifferent vacuity, staring with their rounded, bulbous eyes. Occasionally, their steps would falter and they wandered across to the sides of the road – momentarily freeing the blocked stream of traffic – and nibbled idly at the weeds growing on the verge before returning to their more customary path.
There were other animals as well which marched along the road in stately procession: a flock of goats and three old, yellow-fleeced sheep. The owner of the sheep – if there were such a person – never declared himself. This irritated Egbert Ramsaran. By not declaring himself, their putative owner opened himself to the charge of highhandedness and this could not be tolerated. ‘If I ever lay my hands on the sonofabitch who own those blasted sheep …’ The sentence ended in a stream of imprecation and the threat remained tantalizingly undisclosed. He made numerous enquiries but to no avail; with the consequent worsening of his temper and multiplication of invective.
If by chance his front gate had been left open (a rare over-sight), the animals would come strolling into what he euphemistically described as ‘the garden’, in reality an extension of the verge: succulent grasses and weeds of all varieties flourished there. This drove him wild and he would hurl whatever came to hand – stones, bottles, tins – at the intruders, and this too would be accompanied by a chorus of piping invective. For his own cows, let it be known, were kept distinct and separate from these others. They were the aristocrats among the animals in the neighbourhood; they were not markedly different to look at from their hated colleagues who trod in single file down the
middle of the road. They were as unkempt and as emaciated as the latter. But, they were Egbert Ramsaran’s cows and, as such, they possessed certain very special privileges.
They had their own pasture. Egbert Ramsaran owned a sizable field adjacent to his house. It was as big as a football pitch and fenced in from the road by tall, rusted sheets of galvanized iron. Access to it lay through a gate opening into the yard behind the house. His cows, therefore, never used the public highway and they became, like the field which was exclusively theirs, objects of mystery. The field was bordered at the back by the Victoria river, at this point no more than a narrow, boulder-strewn water course edged with trees and polluted by the cows and the refuse dumped into it. It was possible to circumvent the fence and approach the field by following the course of the stream which, in the dry season, was barely a foot deep. To discourage curiosity, Egbert Ramsaran had erected a notice-board warning trespassers of the dire penalties they would incur if they were foolhardy enough to venture on to his property. The river itself was public property and he could not legally prevent people going to and fro as they pleased. Egbert Ramsaran had little time to squander on legal niceties. Not averse to exceeding his rights, it was one of his favourite pastimes to install himself at the kitchen window with a rifle and fire above the heads of those who were rash enough to stop and stare. Few things caused him greater amusement than the ensuing panic.
There were other reasons why this field exercised so powerful a fascination on the minds of his neighbours. For a start, there was the bull which roamed there. Originally, it might have been acquired for purposes of procreation but, if this had once been the case, it had long since ceased to be of primary importance. No calf had ever been born of it. Partly through its mere association with its owner and partly through assiduous propaganda, it had come to be credited with great ferocity and malevolence. The bull held its neighbours in thrall. It was a more secure barrier against their depredations than any fence or barrage of rifle-shot could be.
The field had a further use beyond that of pasturage. It was the graveyard for the trucks of the Ramsaran Transport Company (the sole enterprise of any stature in the area) which had come to the end of their useful lives. It was one of Egbert Ramsaran’s inexplicable quirks that he refused to sell them to the scrap merchants. Salvage of any sort was strictly forbidden. Once they had been brought to the field, they were allowed to rust and fall to pieces slowly – ritually one might say – in the sun and rain. Their disintegrating skeletons scattered at random over its surface, resembled the dried, washed-out bones of a colony of prehistoric monsters.
The field was a fertile source of nightmare for his young son. During the day, while his father was away at work (at a time when Wilbert was not yet old enough to be sent to school) he would sometimes draw a chair up to the kitchen window which gave a conveniently panoramic view of the field. From it he could see the raggle-taggle herd lazing hunched together in a group among the rusting, decaying hulks and flicking their dirty tails at the swarms of flies and other insects. The bull would not usually be immediately visible. As if under instructions from his father, it held itself rigidly aloof from the lesser creatures with whom it found itself forced to live, preferring to lurk in the shadow of the fence and moving with the sun. Indeed, the animal’s nervelessness was perhaps its most striking characteristic. It never broke into a trot or, come to that, betrayed any urge to activity that went beyond the strictly utilitarian. ‘Don’t let that fool you,’ his father was in the habit of saying to him, ‘the day he look you straight in the eye is the day he will eat you up. So you better watch out!’
Thus, to the young boy, the bull’s very nervelessness seemed a threat; a premonition of the vengeance it had stored up within its breast for the unfortunate one who should catch its eye. Ultimately, it monopolized his childish nightmares. There was a recurring one. He would be standing alone, in the pitch dark, near the gate leading into the field, tempting the bull to see him. Every succeeding moment found him more sensible of the needless danger in which he had placed himself but, even so, unwilling and unable to withdraw to safety. He would wake with a loud cry which invariably brought his mother rushing into the room. Frequently, she would stay there cradling him ineffectually for what remained of the night, falling asleep herself, her head resting on his shoulder.
In the evening, the herd returned through the gate, leaving the bull to his solitary meditations. The row of cowsheds had been built not many yards from the house and the rich, sweet odour of the cows spread lushly over all its rooms. And there were the flies. They were everywhere. It was one of the marvels of the place no visitor would fail to remark on. Their chief place of repose was the dining table. Poised delicately on his chair, the dishes of food arranged neatly about him (he took his meals alone), Egbert Ramsaran would gaze solemnly at the assembled hordes as if he were gathering his energies in order to deliver a stirring oration to the mutlitudes come to hear him. Picking up a spoon, he would bang it with sudden vehemence on his plate – he broke many in this fashion. The flies rose in a black, obedient cloud to the ceiling and circled balletically round the naked electric light-bulb before descending to carpet the surface of the table once again. Having expressed his disapproval, he ignored them. The flies in his house were as natural a part of the scenery as the furniture.
By the time he was thirty, Egbert Ramsaran was already considered a rich man. The gaunt, fortress-like building in Victoria which housed the offices and workshops of the Ramsaran Transport Company was a monument to his achievement in the space of a few short years. He was spoken of with wonder and respect – if not affection. It was impossible not to wonder at and have respect for a man who had risen to such tangible prominence in the business world out of what seemed to be absolutely nothing.
He had been born in the Settlement, which was not deemed worthy of mention on even the larger maps of the island. The mapmakers did not acknowledge its existence and it can hardly have existed in the minds of its unfortunate inhabitants. The eye shied away from focusing on the mean huts and houses clinging despairingly to the curves of the narrow main road which wound its way to distant places like Port-of-Spain and San Fernando. No hill broke the monotony of that flat landscape divided into neat rectangles of sugarcane stretching unbroken to the horizon. Where there was no sugarcane it meant normally that the land was swampy and good for nothing. Nothing grew there but a reddish-green grass with long blades. In the wet season when hardly a day went by without its heavy, thundery showers of rain and the big, grey clouds came rolling in at noonday over the acres of sugarcane, the uncultivated land around the village became an extension of the swamp and the yards were lakes of squelching, yellow mud. In the dry season, the earth was caked hard and scorched by the sun and the swamp grass stunned into a brown and withered dormancy. The sugarcane alone flourished in that intractable environment: a bright, burning green offensive to the eye seeking escape from its limiting and limitless horizons.
Yet it was from precisely this unpromising background that Egbert Ramsaran had emerged; much like the first adventurous sea-creature who had crawled out of the primeval waters and taken to the land. He was a different species from those around him; a mutant in whom implacable urges had been implanted. The Settlement watched with astonishment as he painstakingly taught himself to read and write and perform elementary arithmetical calculations, labouring over the appropriate primers until late in the night. Eventually astonishment turned to amusement and he was treated as a ‘character’. They dubbed him ‘the Professor’. ‘Professor!’ they would call after him, ‘what are you going to do with all that book-learning? You going to water the sugarcane with it?’ They roared with laughter. ‘Laugh,’ he retorted furiously, ‘that don’t bother me. But the day going to come when I’ll show you who’s boss.’ ‘We waiting, Professor,’ they replied, ‘we waiting.’ He refused to share in the work of the fields. ‘That is for slaves,’ he said, ‘and I is no slave.’
Egbert Ramsaran had vir
tually no friends in the village. He had two brothers but they were considerably younger than he was. His closest acquaintance was Vishnu Bholai, a boy of roughly his own age, who was his admiring disciple, though he could hardly compete with Egbert Ramsaran whose single-minded determination and harshness both impressed and unnerved him. Vishnu nurtured hopes of being a lawyer, an ambition he dared disclose only to his friend, ‘It have more money in business,’ Egbert said. ‘The money don’t bother me all that much,’ Vishnu replied. ‘I like the law for its own sake. Once I have enough clothes to wear and food to eat – and a wife and family – I will be the happiest man on this earth.’ Egbert was scornful. ‘Food to eat and clothes to wear! I want more than food to eat and clothes to wear, believe me! I want money. I want to be rich. To be powerful. Not to take orders from any sonofabitch. That is what I want. I going to show all of them who does laugh at me what a real boss is. I going to make them bleed before I finish with them.’ He stared with a shudder of disgust at the canefields and the mean huts. ‘Money don’t always make you happy,’ Vishnu Bholai objected mildly. ‘Happiness!’ Egbert Ramsaran was almost shouting. ‘Is not happiness I’m after. I don’t give a damn for it. What the hell is happiness? Anybody could be happy. Ask any of these slaves who does live here and they will tell you how happy they is. They will say they is the happiest people on the face of this earth. Happy to be slaves! Happy to be living at the bottom of a dungheap! Well, let me tell you once and for all, I not interested in happiness. I don’t want to be happy at the bottom of a dungheap. I would kill myself first.’ Vishnu Bholai was penitent. ‘Listen,’ Egbert Ramsaran said, gripping him firmly by the shoulder, ‘if you want to get anywhere, you have to forget about this happiness nonsense. You have to forget about having a nice wife and family. You have to be hard like steel to succeed. You understand that? You have to be prepared to do anything to get what you want.’ ‘Anything?’ ‘Anything,’ Egbert Ramsaran repeated. ‘You would even murder?’ Egbert Ramsaran smiled. ‘If is necessary – yes. If you was to stand in my way, I wouldn’t hesitate to murder you.’ Vishnu Bholai did not doubt him. ‘Keep away from the Professor,’ Vishnu was warned. ‘He going to hang from the end of a rope one of these days.’ Vishnu suspected they were not far from the truth; but he was the victim of a potent spell not easy to shake off.
The Chip-Chip Gatherers Page 2