Egbert Ramsaran’s parents soon came to regard their eldest son as a burden on their slender resources; and, even worse – a dangerous liability. It was like living with an unexploded time-bomb. His father summoned up the courage to deliver an ultimatum. ‘You don’t do a stroke of work,’ he complained. ‘But the man who don’t work shouldn’t want to eat either. You is just an extra hungry mouth. The devil does always manage to find work for people like you in the end. I think the time come for we to marry you off. A wife and children might knock some sense into that head of yours. Either that or you must leave here and find out how to butter your own bread.’ Egbert Ramsaran exercised his choice. ‘I will learn how to butter my own bread,’ he said. ‘And not only that,’ he added. He went to see Vishnu Bholai the same night. ‘They throwing me out,’ he announced. ‘Pack what clothes you have and come with me. Or better still, come exactly as you is and don’t take anything. We’ll show these slaves what’s what.’ Vishnu baulked. ‘Why you in such a hurry? Let we talk it over in the morning.’ ‘I have nothing to talk over,’ Egbert Ramsaran replied, ‘you will never get to be a lawyer if you stay here.’ ‘Let we wait until the morning come,’ Vishnu urged, ‘then we will decide.’ ‘Until the morning come!’ Egbert laughed hollowly. ‘The morning will never come if … you have to decide now if you coming with me.’ He squinted at Vishnu. ‘You prefer to stay here and go on being a slave like the rest of them?’
Vishnu Bholai shuffled nervously, avoiding his friend’s insistent stare. ‘What will we do in Port-of-Spain?’ he asked. ‘Where will we go? Where will we sleep? I don’t know anybody there. I couldn’t leave home just like that …’ Vishnu kicked at the stones underfoot. ‘Talk!’ Egbert Ramsaran said, ‘that’s all it ever was with you. Talk and nothing more. You don’t want to be a lawyer.’ ‘I do want to be a lawyer,’ Vishnu pleaded. ‘I do. I do. But I can’t leave home just like that in the middle of the night. I can’t.’ ‘You lying!’ Egbert Ramsaran shouted. ‘This is your last chance. If you don’t come with me now is the end between me and you.’ The wind rustled over the canefields, a bending, ruffling presence in the thick darkness. ‘Don’t take on so.’ Vishnu clutched at his sleeve. ‘It could wait for the morning. Is no hurry. You don’t have to take on so.’ Egbert Ramsaran shoved him aside roughly. ‘You lying! You was lying to me all the time. Deep down you is a born slave just like the rest of them. You prefer to stay here and rot.’ Vishnu cowered, shielding his face with his hands. ‘I never say I would run away with you,’ he murmured. Egbert Ramsaran slapped him hard across the mouth. ‘Liar!’ he hissed. Vishnu whimpered. He was trembling. ‘Don’t hit me again. I begging you not to hit me again. I never lied to you. Never.’ His helplessness enraged Egbert. He slapped him again; and again. ‘How you ever going to get to be a lawyer, eh? How? You think God will come down from heaven one day and tap you on the head? Well, let me tell you, God don’t know about the Settlement. Nobody ever tell him about it.’ He grasped Vishnu’s shirt collar and rocked him back and forth with a violence bordering on ecstasy. ‘God never hear about us,’ he hissed. ‘Nobody ever bother to tell him. You will end up cutting cane. You will end up a slave if you stay here and don’t come with me.’ Vishnu’s tears flowed unhindered down his cheeks. ‘I sorry. I truly sorry that I can’t come with you.’ At last Egbert let him go. Vishnu dried his wet cheeks and watched him walk away. He ran after him. ‘In the morning … in the morning …’ Egbert Ramsaran walked steadily on, not deigning to pay him the slightest attention.
It was in Port-of-Spain that he became a convert to Presbyterianism and sloughed off the name of Ashok which his parents had given him and adopted Egbert in its stead. Religious enlightenment had not determined the change: it was an integral part of his campaign and the motives behind it were severely practical. ‘Egbert is a name nobody could laugh at and is easier for people to pronounce. That is all that concern me.’ He became very angry if anyone called him Ashok. What he did in Port-of-Spain no one was certain. From time to time, dutiful son that he was, he returned to the Settlement bringing with him gifts of cigarettes and whisky and brandy which he gave to his parents. They were sensible enough to accept whatever was offered; and discreet enough not to press him too closely as to the source of these things. The vast majority of the Settlement, not benefiting from his largesse, was inclined to be less than tolerant. ‘Smuggling from Venezuela,’ they told his parents mournfully. ‘That’s what the Professor is. A smuggler. If we was you we wouldn’t take none of them whisky and cigarettes he does bring. No matter how innocent you say you is, that kind of thing could land you in big, big trouble.’ The Ramsarans were not unduly perturbed by these dire forebodings: they were secretly proud of their son’s apparent success. ‘If he was a smuggler,’ they replied, ‘the police would have catch up with him a long time ago. Ashok – I mean Egbert – does work very hard.’ ‘You shouldn’t let that fool you,’ was the answer. ‘Them police and them a lot smarter than you think. They collecting evidence. And one day bright and early they going to come and cart him away in one of them vans with iron bars. He will be swinging from the end of a rope before you could blink.’ Vishnu Bholai contributed his portion of the lament. ‘Receiving stolen goods is one of the worst crimes you could commit,’ he intoned. ‘The law takes a very serious view of that.’
The police did nothing and Egbert Ramsaran continued to flourish. When his father died, he gave him a decent burial, paying all the expenses of the funeral. It was also at about this time that the flow of whisky and cigarettes stopped and his career entered its final phase. The Settlement gawked the day he drove a brand new lorry into the village. On its red and black doors there appeared for the first time in neat white lettering, ‘Ramsaran Transport Company’. Egbert Ramsaran, propped negligently against the bonnet, gazed disdainfully at them. ‘This is only a beginning,’ he said. Over the following months he acquired a second; and a third. One truck seemed to spawn another. It was a startling progress and soon the Ramsaran Transport Company could lay claim to at least a dozen trucks and the Settlement abandoned its hostility to lavish a fearful respect on the man who had flouted their prophecies of doom. He replaced his mother’s mud hut with a modest brick dwelling and when she died he gave her too a decent burial, paying all the expenses of the funeral. ‘Now it have no more reason for me to come here,’ he said as a funeral oration. ‘I spend the first seventeen years of my life here and, believe me, that was more than sufficient. If I come here again, it will only be to do one thing.’ He scrutinized his mute audience. ‘That will be to burn it down to the ground. From now on all you have to come to me.’
It was in Victoria he elected to establish the seat of his empire and raised the gaunt fortress of a building which together with the red and black trucks were the irrefutable and concrete expression of his achievement. The headquarters of the Ramsaran Transport Company bestrode the Eastern Main Road out of Port-of-Spain as it unravelled itself through the small town. It was the chief building of the place and its most common point of reference. Everything revolved around the ‘depot’ – as it was designated, since everything could be located as being to the right or left of the ‘depot’; or to the back or front of the ‘depot’. Around and about it, Victoria had anchored itself. Ultimately, the ‘depot’ became a virtual abstraction, like the lines of longitude and latitude on a map. Here in Victoria, Egbert Ramsaran reigned supreme and unquestioned.
He did not associate with the rich. There were no parties or extravagant entertainments. Neither did he go to other people’s parties or extravagant entertainments: he shunned all contact that went beyond the normal course of business. ‘A waste of time,’ he said. ‘Small talk is not for me. If I had spend all my time in small talk I would never have reach where I is today.’ If a colleague wished to do business with him, he was invited to the depot: he was never invited to his home. He very rarely travelled outside Victoria once he had settled there permanently. His life moved along narrow rails and he swerved for nothing.
/>
He was a small, wiry man. His hair had turned grey relatively early on and there was a smooth, glistening bald patch on the crown of his head. This combined with a sharp, prominent nose and a pair of penetrating, deepset eyes lent him an air of ferocious distinction. In later years he sprouted a moustache – looked after with fanatical care – which suited him. His lips were pinched and thin and his voice escaped through them like steam through the apertures of a whistling kettle. The analogy held in more ways than one. His voice was high and piping and querulous and the longer he talked (it made little difference whether the conversation excited him or not), the more high and piping and querulous did it become. He walked with a jaunty, hopping stride.
He had a shameless pride in his physical strength; a pride reinforced by the smallness of his build. ‘Don’t let my shortness fool you,’ he was in the habit of saying. ‘Some of the greatest men in the world was short.’ He was addicted to showing off his muscles in public. On the slightest pretext he would roll up his shirtsleeves and flex his biceps for the benefit of some startled visitor to the house, challenging him to do better. Few of them ever could. The satisfaction these displays afforded him never diminished. And, after the display, there was the homily. ‘The most important duty a man have in this world is to keep himself strong and healthy and in trim. How you think I manage to get where I is today?’
His day began and ended with exercises. He kept in his bedroom an impressive array of muscle-building apparatus which he allowed no one to touch but himself. In his passion for exercising was revealed another of his quirks of character. Despite his much vaunted enthusiasm for the well-being of the body, he never actively encouraged other people to follow his example. The well-being of the body which he lauded was the well-being of his own body. While eager to demonstrate the results of his exertions, the exertions themselves he surrounded in secrecy. He considered it an invasion of privacy to set eyes on him during the periods he set aside for his exercise and it was a prohibition strictly enforced. When he was asked – much of the time out of politeness, but he did not recognize this – about the techniques he employed, he betrayed a reticence the true import of which none could fail to understand: his preoccupation with health, universal as it pretended to be, began and ended with himself. Not only was he not interested in the health of his fellows: he was positively displeased if they decided to tread too zealously in his footsteps.
There was a further contradiction in his behaviour when it came to the ‘health and strength’ obsession. He hated doctors and the medical profession in general; part of a larger hatred of all professional people. To his son he said: ‘I don’t want you to get any funny ideas in your head about going away to study this or that. Your job is to look after the business when I die and to do that all you have to know is how to add and subtract. Don’t try any of this doctor and lawyer funny business on me. If you come with any of that stupidness to me, I’ll cut you off without a penny. Bear that in mind.’
If his wife, Rani, had the temerity to suggest that – perhaps – it would not be such a bad idea if he had a ‘check-up’, he would turn on her in a fury. ‘When I want your advice, woman, and God forbid that I should ever need it, I’ll ask you for it. What’s all this damn foolishness I hear about me going for a check-up, eh? You think I’m stupid enough to go and throw myself in the hands of some swindling quack of a doctor? I would never have get where I is today if I was such a big fool. Take a good look at this, woman, and hold your tongue.’ He would roll up his shirtsleeves and flex his muscles. ‘Yes, Bap,’ she would reply. ‘Everybody know how big and strong your muscles is. But it have other things apart from muscles inside your body. You should look after those too.’ This roused him to an even greater pitch of fury and, having no suitable arguments to combat the observation, he would most probably end the matter by striking her. It came to the point where the mere mention of the word ‘check-up’ was sufficient to send him into a towering rage. Finally, its use was banned altogether.
His contempt for doctors ended by throwing him into the clutches of the manufacturers of patent medicines. He had, to his disgust, an abnormally delicate digestion. Few foods were bland enough for it and he suffered interminable agonies. He had a medicine cupboard installed above the head of his bed. This he crammed with different brands of what were essentially the same medicines. There were blue bottles, brown bottles, green bottles, little square tins, little round tins, pills wrapped in shining silver paper, pills wrapped in cellophane. The strong, musty odour emanating from it competed with the odour of the cowsheds. Naturally, his wife and son had to act as if neither his indigestion nor the medicine cupboard existed. He had banished the word illness from his vocabulary – if not from his life.
He liked reading popular accounts of the Second World War. He had filled several scrapbooks with newspaper cuttings about it and, in his rare tender moods, he would show them to his son, praising his own industry in having collected them. ‘That was a time,’ he mused, fingering the fragile, yellowing newsprint. ‘Men was men then. It have nothing like war to make a man out of a boy. Even from a stupid place like Trinidad you had people going out to fight. If I had had the chance I too …’ He clucked his tongue. His only other reading was detective stories. He bought one of these every week. A slow, plodding reader, he lingered days over even the quite short ones, always on the lookout for inconsistencies in the plot. He never discovered any and this annoyed him. It spoiled his pleasure. He read in bed, a thin cotton sheet drawn up to his neck, and, when he finished a book, he would toss it scathingly under the bed to join the scores of its rejected companions gathering dust.
If by friendship is understood a capacity for affection, intimacy and respect, then it becomes obvious that Egbert Ramsaran was incapable of friendship. His relationship with Vishnu Bholai had been the nearest he had approached to anything like it. He had never fully forgiven Vishnu for his desertion and the lapse of years had not done much to soften his scorn and rancour. He had relented to the extent of allowing Vishnu Bholai access to his house, but these visits parodied everything friendship ought to have been. Vishnu Bholai had fallen too far behind in the race for them to be comfortable in each other’s company. The proprietor of the Settlement’s only grocery had to bow to the proprietor of the Ramsaran Transport Company. Their meetings were sad, formal affairs wracked by guilt and inferiority on the one side and arrogance and conceit on the other. To compensate, Vishnu Bholai talked volubly of his wife and how rich her family was; and of his son Julian and the worldly success that was assuredly to be his. Egbert Ramsaran gave an exhibition of his physical prowess. ‘You must come and visit me,’ Vishnu Bholai said when he got up to leave, ‘the wife always saying how she dying to meet you.’ Egbert Ramsaran was adamant in his refusals. ‘You know I does hardly stir from this place,’ he replied equably, ‘and you know how I feel about the Settlement. If your wife want to meet me, bring she here with you the next time you come.’ Vishnu Bholai smiled. ‘Even if you don’t come to visit we,’ he countered, ‘you could let Wilbert come. Julian is about his age and the two of them could play together.’ Egbert Ramsaran would have none of that either. ‘If you want Julian and Wilbert to play together, let Julian come here. I have nothing against that.’ Each of their encounters floundered to this impasse and the matter remained unresolved.
Another very infrequent visitor to the house was Egbert Ramsaran’s youngest brother, who was generally known as ‘Chinese’ because he had deserted the good Indian wife bestowed on him and taken a Chinese woman as mistress. Egbert, fulfilling his family duties, had settled a fairly sizeable sum of money on him which he had promptly squandered – much to the disgust of his brother who had thereafter stubbornly refused later requests for assistance. Chinese was spendthrift and irresponsible. He was inseparable from the odour of rum and tobacco and even when sober he tended – perhaps out of habit – to sway unsteadily on his feet. In all things he was the opposite of his brother. He was feckless to the point of st
upidity and bereft of any kind of sustained resolution.
It was amazing how he had ever managed to do anything so positive as desert his wife. That one act of rebellion had apparently used up his limited supply of energy and it was inertia alone which kept him faithful to his mistress. He had a childish charm capable of disarming most of the people with whom he came into contact – his brother being the notable exception. ‘That,’ Egbert Ramsaran solemnly informed his son, ‘is how I could have been if I hadn’t set my mind early on. And that is what you could turn out to be if you don’t set your mind.’ When Chinese contracted a mild form of diabetes, Egbert Ramsaran could scarcely conceal his satisfaction. ‘if you had listened to me and taken care of your health, none of this would have gone and happen. At your age it’s a disgrace. I can’t say I feel sorry for you.’ Chinese was not in the least downcast. He merely shrugged and laughed.
The Chip-Chip Gatherers Page 3