The Chip-Chip Gatherers

by Shiva Naipaul

  Circumstances made it relatively easy for her to endure her exile. Her physical unattractiveness had put her beyond the reach of temptation. The evidence was there in the photographs taken on her wedding day. She was a tall, gangling and sallow-complexioned woman. Her eyes were large and expressionless and her arms fell awkwardly on the sari she was wearing. It was as if the various parts of her body had been joined together artificially, like a puppet’s. The impression conveyed in those photographs was that of a bloodless, boneless creature on whom the sun had never shone.

  Egbert Ramsaran’s marriage obeyed the logic of his own capriciousness. Nothing positive or altruistic could have driven him to embark on it. He was twelve years older than Rani and famous in his youth for having a taste for robust women. It was common knowledge too that he had an illegitimate son, Singh (the product of one of his fleeting liaisons in Port-of-Spain during the early days), about whom little was known for certain except that he was of mixed blood and lived by himself on an estate Egbert Ramsaran had bought in Central Trinidad – some said for the sole purpose of getting rid of Singh. From all angles, it was an unlikely match; especially for such a man. But these doubts were quickly stifled. It was the pride of Rani’s family to see one of the red and black trucks of the Ramsaran Transport Company (he did not have a car) parked in front of their hut on a Sunday morning. Rani’s mother, Basdai, was delirious with joy. ‘Imagine.’ she exclaimed, ‘a man like Egbert Ramsaran for a son-in-law. I can’t believe it. Is a miracle.’ She was right. It did verge on the miraculous. His wealth, even if it had not opened every door to him, must have opened a sufficient number to make it seem inevitable that he would marry into one of the richer, less finicky Port-of-Spain or San Fernando Indian families. There would always be a ready supply of parents quite willing to sell their surplus daughters into marriage and who would have been as delighted as Rani’s family to see a truck of the Ramsaran Transport Company parked in their paved driveways on a Sunday morning.

  What a disappointment he must have proved to these last! He used to chuckle when he described how he turned down all their invitations to Sunday lunch. His having taken instead a poor and ill-featured girl, getting on in years, from the village of his birth lent itself to a fine interpretation of his motives. Basdai – if one were to judge by her vociferous assertions – was among the firmest believers in his fine intentions. Egbert Ramsaran saw Rani only once before he proposed to her parents. They did not hesitate to accept on their bewildered daughter’s behalf. Four successive Sundays he courted between the hours of ten and twelve in the morning. On the fifth, he was married. ‘Once that man make up his mind to do something,’ it was said, ‘nothing in the world could stop him.’ As if in punishment for what he had done to his daughter, Rani’s father collapsed suddenly in the canefields and died a week after the marriage.

  From the beginning they had slept in separate bedrooms except on Friday evenings when they shared the same bed. Basdai was pleasantly surprised and tremendously relieved when her daughter became pregnant: she was nervous about Rani’s performance, sexual and otherwise. Unhappily, Wilbert’s birth had done little to allay her fears. The delivery had been prolonged and complications had set in. Rani had been left considerably weakened by it. For several weeks afterwards she was ill and unable to nurse the baby and her sisters, despairing, took the child, as it were, to their bosoms: they, unhampered by their sister’s inabilities, had been blessed with a prodigious fertility and had been called to the rescue by Basdai. Plump and healthy, they nursed the baby through the first tenuous weeks of its life. They never allowed Rani to forget her grave misdemeanour and the credit she had accrued during the months of her pregnancy was swiftly dissipated. Long afterwards, when Wilbert had grown up, his aunts seized every opportunity to remind him of the service they had performed on his behalf.

  There were anxious sighs – but not out of concern for Rani’s health – when she became pregnant a second time; and there were groans when she miscarried. Basdai descended on the house wailing. ‘What she feel she have a belly for?’ she grieved inconsolably. ‘Is just plain stubbornness, if you ask me. She was always stubborn – even as a child. Never liked doing what anybody tell she. She was too great and own-way for that. What so hard about making a baby? It have women making baby all the time all over the world. Look at me. Look at my two other daughters. They don’t stop making baby – is why God give them bellies. What wrong with she that she have to be different from them?’ Rani was never forgiven for this betrayal. There were bosoms pining for further service to Egbert Ramsaran; service they were denied by one woman’s malicious obstinacy.

  After this failure, Rani was no longer summoned to the bedroom on Friday evenings and the marriage ceased, all but formally, to exist. Still, she did not surrender without a struggle. She continued to bathe and prepare herself specially on Friday afternoons, making herself presentable and sweet-smelling. At the hour enshrined by custom, she approached her husband’s resolutely locked door. She would knock timidly, again and again. ‘Bap, Bap,’ she called, ‘I come to see you now. Don’t hide from me like that. Open the door and let me in. I come to see you now.’ The knocking persisted, timid but determined. ‘Bap, nap, is me. Rani. Don’t hide from me like that. I come to see you now. Open the door and let me in.’ Knock. Knock. Knock. The sound drifted bleakly through the otherwise silent house. ‘Bap? What you playing you not hearing me for? Why you playing like that for? I come to see you now. Let me in.’ Unanswered, that voice rose and fell and rose again.

  The silence would be abruptly shattered by a high-pitched, screamed imprecation. ‘Why the hell you calling me Bap? I is not your father. Get out of here and leave me in peace, you no-good, childless slut of a woman. Get out! Get out!’ His piping voice, like a kettle on the boil neglected for too long, swept through the darkness; and, to complete the harmony, there was that other rolling beneath it and complementing it. ‘Bap, Bap, T make myself all nice and fresh for you. Just as you like. Let me in and you will see how nice and fresh I make myself. Just for you. Just for you.’ The melancholy tones faded away, absorbed into the silence and the darkness. There would be a clatter as of someone stumbling and falling. The door had opened and he was hitting her and Rani’s voice petered out into barely audible, controlled yelps of pain. Then the yelps disintegrated into unsteady, jerking whimpers and the door slammed shut, cutting off the torrent of her husband’s obscenities.

  For what appeared to be an eternity, she would remain crumpled against the locked door, her fingernails clawing the unresponsive wood, crying softly, though she no longer begged to be let in. Months passed in this fashion: the Friday baths, the perfumes, the journey through the dark and silent house, the vain knockings on the door, the voice rising, falling and rising again, Egbert Ramsaran’s hoarse, piping imprecations, the slaps and subdued yelps of pain. Taken together, they seemed to form the indispensable elements of some hideous and ineluctable rite that had to be performed weekly. Came one Friday and Rani did not bathe and perfume herself. She had given up.

  It was to silence she surrendered. She went as before to her son’s room on those nights when his sleep was disturbed by his nightmares about the bull. But there was a strange and unfathomable vacancy in her eyes and her caresses and words of comfort were stilted and mechanical. ‘Is nothing,’ she would murmur. ‘Is nothing at all. Only a bad dream. You shouldn’t let a dream frighten you. What would your father say if he was to hear some foolish dream frighten you? Eh?’ Her fingers explored his cheeks, kneading them. ‘Is nothing. Nothing at all. Only a bad dream.’ Dressed in a loose white cotton nightdress with an absurdly feminine ribbon of pink velvet drawn through loops in the collar and tied in a quaint bow at the front, her drawn, sallow face indistinct in the greyish twilight, she bent low over him, stroking his hair and forehead with those slightly swollen fingers. Her breath was warm and dry on his cheeks. Yet, her eyes never sought his, shying away from any direct contact, and there was something inescapably imperson
al and remote in these attempts to solace someone other than herself whose need was so much greater.

  No one could fail to notice the silence that gripped her. It was a sheath covering her. She glided noiselessly about the house, her gaze fixed on the ground. She stood interminably in front of the stove, cooking and looking out of the big kitchen window at the field where the dead, decaying bones of the Ramsaran Transport Company lay bleached in the unrelenting sun; and the cows grazed idly, flicking their tails at the hordes of flies; and the bull skulked nervelessly in the shadow of the fence. She boiled – endlessly boiled – pots of milk. She took up her station there in the hot kitchen with green and yellow tiles, her hair plaited in one thick plait, her back straight and immobile, watching the milk bubble and froth in the big enamel pots and stirring it with a bent metal spoon that burnt her fingers. Together with the milk, her life, little by little and day by day, boiled away inside that steaming kitchen.

  After her fall from favour – if she ever had been in favour – Rani did not use the sitting-room. She appeared there to clean and to serve tea to whoever might require it; neither more nor less. The house, in which Egbert Ramsaran was only minimally interested in any case, reflected the aridity of her life. In the mornings she polished and shone in the sitting-room; in the afternoons, she scoured and scrubbed the bare floorboards in the rest of the house; in the evening, after she had prepared the food and waited on her husband at the table, she did what washing there was to be done. She went to bed punctually at ten and was up at five. To impress her servant’s status upon her, she was given one free day every week. Egbert Ramsaran had perversely insisted on this. ‘I don’t want your family to think I overworking you,’ he said. She put up a mild resistance. ‘But I is your wife, Bap. You don’t have to give me days off.’ ‘You! My wife! You might be that boy’s mother’ (pointing at Wilbert) ‘but as for being my wife … I thought you would have get that idea out of your head by now.’ Thus it came about that Rani had every Sunday to herself.

  To the public gaze, her most outstanding characteristic must have been her characterlessness. Even when she was physically present, there was an air of invisibility surrounding her. She was dry and impersonal, part of the lustreless texture of the house. Her skin – so pale! – had a kind of unhealthy transparency, like cloudy plastic; or wax. But, on Sunday afternoons, Rani blossomed in the privacy of her bedroom at the back of the house. Then, she indulged her passion for collecting stamps. She had started her collection in the early days of her spinsterhood when she had been banished out of sight by her family. Having sprung out of hopelessness and despair, it had come to be intimately associated with them and it was natural that it should be revived now.

  She had three albums with differently coloured covers: red, black and brown. These she kept wrapped in cellophane at the top of her wardrobe. It was only in connection with them she exerted anything akin to authority, permitting no one to touch the albums but herself. Whenever letters arrived for her husband, she would scrutinize each stamp very carefully. Anything from Europe excited her. But her excitement was firmly controlled. She would simply raise and lower her eyebrows in quick succession and, resting the letters on a saucer, carry them to her husband’s room. Egbert Ramsaran read his letters with the same slow, cautious deliberation he brought to his detective novels. Her greatest fear was that he might tear the stamps. Torn stamps, as she informed Wilbert in a burst of confidence, had absolutely no value. ‘And who is to say that the stamp he tear mightn’t be very valuable. Worth hundreds of dollars!’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘Just think of that.’

  Despite this, she was not a discriminating collector. Every stamp, no matter how common and no matter how many of them she already had, was grist to her mill. She retained scores of Trinidad one-cent stamps and was terribly upset if one of them got torn or misplaced, treating each with the same care she devoted to her rarer specimens. Sunday afternoons were her time for sticking them into the albums. She sat on the edge of the bed, gingerly balancing on her lap a chipped white saucer filled with water in which the scraps of envelope with stamp attached floated. Beside her on the bed were the three albums and, scattered round her feet, piles of envelopes waiting to be plucked of their treasures. She worked with studied concentration for two or three hours, worriedly attentive to any sign of her husband’s encroaching presence: she did not want him to find out what she did with her ‘free time’ in case it should occur to him to disapprove. Although she never explicitly asked Wilbert to keep silent about it, they did have a tacit agreement and avoided talking about her hobby when he was around.

  Her bedroom, unlike the rest of the house, bore the stamp – so to speak – of her personality. There was the pleasant smell of old but scrupulously clean clothes; the tiny clay and brass ornaments cluttering the dresser; the coloured prints of Hindu deities pinned to the wall; the photograph, in awkward juxtaposition to them, of skiers racing down the slopes of a Swiss mountain, which she had cut from a magazine; the worn rug with the fold across the centre which she tried never to step on. It was a curious collection of odds and ends, for the most part relics of childhood, and it was never added to. Neither did she throw anything away. If one of the clay ornaments got broken, she simply kept the pieces. Her room and its furnishings were a final and complete expression of the nonsense her life had been.

  Chapter Two

  1

  Singh came to the house in Victoria about once a month, bringing with him sacks filled with fruit from the estate which Egbert Ramsaran owned in Central Trinidad. He would dump the sacks carelessly on the kitchen floor. ‘Oranges,’ he said. Or: ‘Mangoes.’ Rani would immediately tear open the sacks and proceed to sort the fruit. Singh, propped up against the sill of the big kitchen window and drying the shining beads of sweat on his forehead, watched her. He smiled with a wry and gentle contempt. His conversation with her followed a set pattern.

  ‘And how is the master these days?’

  ‘He been very well, thank God.’

  ‘He still doing his exercises?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. And you. How have you been?’ He looked searchingly into her tired face.

  ‘I been very well too, Singh. Thank God.’

  He grinned at her, his gold teeth flashing. ‘I bring some more stamps for you to put in your album.’ Unbuttoning the flap of his shirt pocket, he flourished before her some Trinidad one-cent stamps.

  ‘Thank you, Singh. It was very kind of you to remember me. God will bless you.’

  Singh half-laughed and half-grimaced. ‘I hope so.’ He turned to Wilbert next. ‘And how has the little master been doing this month?’ He did not usually wait for an answer, but delving – this time into one of his trouser pockets – would bring forth some crudely carved wooden toy he had made with his penknife. His favourite was a human face, elongated out of all proportion, with thick Negroid lips and round, black holes for eyes. Executed without charm, it was, in its odd way, rather frightening. ‘I carve this specially for you,’ he would say, thrusting it close to Wilbert’s face. ‘You like it? Specially for you I make it. It wasn’t easy – take me days.’ A peculiar intensity invaded his expression. If Wilbert tried to take hold of it, he would tighten his grip. Then, abruptly, he would erupt into a bout of high pitched laughter and, loosening his grip, allow Wilbert to have it.

  Singh was in his middle twenties. He was very dark and stockily built and his face had not rid itself of the ravages of adolescence. It was scarred and pitted with craters. When he laughed his gums were exposed and one saw his crooked, yellowing teeth, like those of an old man. Singh laughed a great deal but there was something mocking and furtive in his laughter. It did not inspire trust. His laughter was just that shade too loud, too ringing and too ready; and it was interspersed with those briefly glimpsed flashes of ferocity – instantly suppressed and converted into brittle merriment – when the blood darkened his rough face and he bit hard on his twitching lower lip.

  From early on,
Wilbert had recognized that Singh occupied a significant place in their lives. It would never have occurred to him to give Singh the half-rotten fruit he used to dole out among the clients. He exuded an authority of his own. Singh did not cringe in front of his father. He could be sullen and mildly defiant. On the other hand, it was possible to detect in Egbert Ramsaran a desire to placate him; not to contradict him; not to lose his temper.

  After the fruit had been sorted, Rani prepared him a cup of tea.

  ‘Go and tell your father Singh come,’ she said to Wilbert.

  When Egbert Ramsaran came into the kitchen he glanced briefly at Singh. There would be an embarrassing silence. Singh was never the first to break it.

  ‘How is everything on the estate?’ He did not look directly at Singh.

  ‘The same.’

  ‘You have everything you need down there?’

  Singh nodded. ‘Everything.’

  Egbert Ramsaran handed him the twenty-dollar bill he had been holding in his clenched fist: Singh’s monthly allowance. Singh folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. He did not thank him. There was another embarrassing silence. Egbert Ramsaran stared at the fruit Rani had sorted into neat heaps.

  ‘What you bring for we this week?’

  ‘Mangoes.’

  Silence.

  ‘If you ever want anything extra …’

  ‘I’ll ask,’ Singh said.

  ‘Well … that’s it for now … when you going back?’

  ‘When I finish my cup of tea.’