Singh roused himself from his reverie. ‘You frighten young master? Like you too believe in ghosts?’
‘Let’s go from here.’
‘In a minute, young master. I want to have a rest. Remember I been up from sunrise.’
The dogs settled at his feet panting, tongues drooping from their mouths. Imperceptively, the wind, which all morning had fanned through the grass, died away. The sun climbed higher; the day’s heat coalesced. A faint roar of water was borne to them through the trees. The air was dank and acrid.
‘You know what I would do if this place was mine? And if I had the money that is?’ He screwed up his eyes, staring into the white, shimmering heat of the clearing. ‘I would make this into a flower garden. I would plant all kinds of flowers and trees people never hear of before. Orchids especially. They is the prettiest kind of flower. And I would build a little house where the hut is now because that is the nicest spot for a house being so high up. Nothing too fancy, you understand. Something cool and shady where I could sit in the afternoon and look at my garden. I would never want to stir from here then.’ Singh, laughing softly, waved his hands and brushed away the dream. ‘That will never happen though. Not here. If you turn your back for one minute – well you yourself see what does happen. Maybe that was why the Scotsman leave. It was too much hard work. Maybe is easier in Scotland.’
His expression hardened. He drew a wavering circle in the dust with his finger, enclosing a long column of brown ants moving in steady procession past the log. Viciously, he ground his boots into the middle of the column and watched the survivors scurry in crazed disarray. Wilbert stared at the dead and dying ants.
‘Ants is funny things,’ Singh went on absently, stirring the dust with a twig he had picked up. ‘These fellas you see here for instance, they have a nest right under this log. Sometimes when it get too hot – I don’t like the heat – I does come and sit here for hours just watching them carry a tiny piece of leaf somewhere. They don’t pay no attention to me. And yet, in a second, I could kill every last mother’s son of them.’ He bowed his head low to the ground, watching the ants. ‘Is like that with anything anybody try to do. It always have something that bigger than you. Like what the jungle do to that place we just see. What it do there is just like what I do to the ants. No difference.’ Singh smiled. ‘As the master you will be able to do exactly the same to me one day. You could throw me out of here – do anything you want. But, it also have something bigger than you. Except we don’t know what it is as yet. That is why you have to be careful. That is why you should try and get a profession. To protect yourself. Remember, young master, what Julian Bholai going to be. You should try and …’
‘Don’t call me young master, Singh. And don’t talk about Julian Bholai.’ Wilbert rose from the log.
Slapping his thighs, Singh erupted into a bout of prolonged, mocking laughter. ‘Why you don’t want to talk about Julian Bholai? The young master is a real little tiger when you get him angry. I better watch out.’
‘Don’t call me young master, Singh. I don’t like it.’
‘That is exactly what you is all the same. The young master. Next to you, I is like one of them ants. Like them all I could do is bite. But you …’
‘Leave me alone, Singh.’ Wilbert had raised his voice. ‘I do nothing to you.’ The fiery smell of the day burned in his nostrils.
‘Be sensible young master. Face the facts. Who else but the young master would slap me? You should be proud …’
There was a muffled explosion somewhere deep inside Wilbert’s head. The heat and fire seemed to be drawn out of the day and sucked into him. That scarecrow face, thick-lipped and with holes for eyes, leered at him. The world went black and fathomless. When he came to, Singh was crouched low over him and his head was pillowed on a bundle of grass and dried leaves.
‘Is only the heat,’ Singh murmured in his ear. ‘Only the heat.’ He fanned Wilbert with his shirt which he had taken off. The sarcasm and mockery had disappeared and in their stead had come something approximating to dread and concern. The sound of water filtering through the trees, though choked and distant, cooled the day. Wilbert closed his eyes and listened to it.
‘How long I been like this Singh?’
‘Five minutes. If that. Even I feeling the heat more than usual today.’
‘Is that the river you was telling me about, Singh?’ Wilbert tried to raise his head but Singh would not let him.
‘Yes. That is the river I was telling you about. I going to take you there. But you must rest a little longer. I sure you wouldn’t want the blood to rush like that to your head again.’ He forced his head back gently on to the pillow of grass and leaves and fanned his face. For some minutes, they remained as they were. The sky was an unrelenting blue, flecked with whiffs of high, white cloud. There was not a breath of wind. Singh, squatting, rocked backward and forward on his heels fanning Wilbert with his shirt. The two dogs slept and the forest around them slept, the leaves of the trees limp and motionless. Leaning forward, Singh peered into Wilbert’s face. ‘How you feeling now?’ He assisted him to his feet. ‘You sure you feeling strong enough to walk?’
‘Yes. Yes.’ Wilbert pushed him away irritably.
Stepping back, Singh regarded him with a faint air of irony. His compassion was weakening again. He kicked the dogs awake and hoisted the gun on to his shoulders. Without another word, he stalked across the clearing and disappeared into the thick bush, heading towards the sound of the river. The dogs, fully restored to life, leapt on ahead of him through the crackling grass. There was not the slightest indication of a path but Singh moved with arrogant assurance, looking back at Wilbert from time to time. The sun, to begin with, had shone directly into their eyes but, as they descended, it gradually disappeared over the crowns of the trees.
They slid stumbling over jutting roots, through a green, subaqueous gloom of tangled undergrowth and slim grey trunks banded with creeper. The sound of the river, somewhere below them, grew louder and the air became cooler and moister. For the last few yards, they scrambled among some rocks and big boulders, holding to the festooned tree-trunks for support. Apart from the water’s distant applause, everything was hushed. Wilbert squirmed his way between the slippery boulders down to where Singh stood, head thrown back and arms akimbo. The dogs had disappeared.
‘There,’ Singh said quietly, extending an arm but not looking at Wilbert. ‘This river is the boundary of the estate on this side.’ The river, brown and slow-flowing in the sunlight, wound its way in a leisurely loop beneath them, uncoiling itself with a lank lethargy as if it too were affected by the heat of the day. It lay in a deep, steep-sided ravine about forty feet across, gouged out of the flaking rock. Elongated tongues of greyish sand and gravel were visible here and there. A profusion of fern flourished in the niches between the rock and lianas trailed in the water from the branches of overhanging trees. Lower down, there were clumps of bamboo. The balisier, like many-branched candelabra, flamed redly on the opposite slope. Singh and Wilbert slid down to the gravelly bank and followed the loop of the stream. They could hear the dogs barking now. Soon they came to an amphitheatre of rock fed by a stretch of low rapids over which the water foamed and spluttered. The dogs greeted them with happy barks. Singh cursed and they skulked away. Then he took off his clothes and advised Wilbert to follow suit. ‘I’ll teach you how to swim,’ he said. ‘Is nothing to it at all.’
After the heat, the water was icy to the touch and Singh, when he had swum, lay naked on the warm rock, face downwards. He appeared to have fallen asleep. Wilbert sought the sole shaded refuge and watched him. Again he thought of him as trusting, vulnerable and innocent; a creature crucified on the burning rock. Singh sat up and turned to look at him.
‘I would like to travel far, far away from here,’ he said. ‘So far that even if I wanted to I could never come back.’
Wilbert was sufficiently astonished by this declaration to smile.
‘And what about y
our flower garden?’ he asked.
Singh gestured irritably. ‘Forget the flower garden. As I said, it would never work here.’
‘Where would you go?’
‘Is all right for you to laugh,’ Singh replied. He rested his chin on his knees. ‘But you don’t know how much I hate this place. I didn’t choose to live here. I had no say in the matter.’ Then he added slowly and deliberately, ‘I think I hate it more than anything in the world. I hate it even more than I hate …’ He checked himself. ‘Never mind.’ He gazed with a shudder of revulsion at the yellow, sun-covered rock and the unrestrained masses of vegetation cascading down the slopes of the ravine. He had been set down in this place to run wild – like a pig. And, like a pig, he had run wild. The heat and the vegetation had washed in torrents over him and had drowned him. ‘I would like to go somewhere cold,’ he said. ‘Somewhere very cold. Somewhere with ice and snow. Go to Greenland and live like the Eskimos and forget about all this.’
‘You might get tired of all that snow and you mightn’t like the cold at all.’
‘How you know what I would like and wouldn’t like?’ The blood flooded his face and he bit on his lower lip. ‘I would never get tired of it. Not me.’ He juggled his head obstinately. ‘I could sit for hours fishing through a hole in the ice – just like I does sit for hours watching them ants carry a little piece of leaf.’
‘Where you learn all this, Singh?’
Singh darkened with sudden embarrassment. ‘I see it in a picture,’ he admitted sheepishly. ‘A long time ago in Port-of-Spain. That’s how the Eskimos does fish. Through a hole in the ice.’ He gave way to a musing silence, his chin still resting on his knees. The shadows of the trees stretched out blackly across the water in which the orange clouds of the setting sun were reflected. ‘Come,’ he said suddenly, rising to his feet. ‘Enough of this nonsense. Is getting dark and time for we to be getting back.’
They returned to the hut through the gathering gloom.
The visit lasted a week and the invitation was never repeated. Singh seemed anxious to forget it and turned aside every reference to it. He was more cold and aloof to Wilbert than he had ever been. As for Wilbert, the estate was no more a real place than it had ever been; and Singh himself no less a threat. The visit had merely provided him with a landscape: he became inseparable from images of intolerable heat, prolific vegetation and ruin. He remained one of the dark faces governing Wilbert’s childhood. The innate fear and revulsion he had always felt did not lessen. It simply ceased to be arbitrary and gained shape and coherence. Some things are never expressly told one. There are bits and pieces of information which gradually seep into the consciousness. It was like that with Singh and his connection with him. No one ever told him Singh was also his father’s child. Slowly, and without any deliberate effort on Wilbert’s part, the realization took shape.
Chapter Three
1
All morning it had been raining steadily and the sky was black with gust-driven cloud. It was Sunday and Rani was sitting on the edge of the bed, an album opened on her lap and the envelopes arranged in neat piles about her feet. The rain sprayed against the misted windows. The sky flurried with lightning and shortly after there was a tremendous crash of thunder, rattling the ornaments on the dresser. She looked up eagerly when Wilbert came into the room.
‘You call me?’ He seemed put out and annoyed.
She jerked her head quickly up and down. ‘Why don’t you sit with me a little this afternoon? Eh? Like you used to do?’ Thick lines of rain slanted against the window-panes and the wind tore through the trees. ‘The rain,’ she explained haltingly, staring at the stamps. Her swollen fingers rested lifelessly on the album. ‘Only till the rain stop.’ She was coaxing. ‘After that you could go.’ Lightning, blue and instant, flashed on the ceiling and the thunder crashed swiftly in its wake. The room shook and two of the clay ornaments fell off the dresser and shattered. She collected the pieces and held them in her hand. Wilbert went and pressed his face up against the cold glass of the window. When the wind gusted especially hard, she would turn and look at him, shivering a little as she did so. Wilbert walked to the door and stood there with his hand on the knob.
‘I coming back soon,’ he said. ‘I just going out to the front to have a look. I won’t stay long.’
She did not try to stop him and he went out. When he had gone, she gazed at the spot where his breath had condensed on the window-pane.
The swollen Victoria river had burst its banks and brown tides of fast-flowing water had inundated the road at the front of the house. Branches, tins, bottles and pieces of wood bobbed and staggered on the surface. The field was a lake reflecting the black sky and the cows were huddled together in a group near the galvanized iron fence, miserable and wet. Wilbert saw the bull, drenched and haggard, flicking its tail across its haunches. It no longer frightened him. The water had invaded the front ‘garden’ and licked the bottom step of the verandah. Some boys were splashing in the flood. The rain sprayed stingingly into Wilbert’s face as he listened to their shouts and laughter and to the wind ripping at the roof. He returned to his mother’s room.
Rani did not hear him open the door and come in. Her chin propped on her hands, she was staring at the ceiling. The angle at which she held herself was unfamiliar to her son. There was an air of expectancy about it; of tension.
‘I come back.’
‘Oh! Is you!’ She jumped up, startled.
She did not speak after this, resuming her examination of the album on her lap. Throughout the day the radio had been issuing hurricane warnings. But the weather grew no worse. The hurricane had veered, missing the island in its sweep northward. By nightfall, the wind had died away into weak and ephemeral gusts and there were many breaks in the driven cloud. The rain lessened. Rani shed her air of tense expectancy. She sat on the bed hunched over the stamp album, limp and flaccid – a punctured balloon. The rain became lighter; a gentle drizzle. Then it stopped altogether. The night was fresh and clear and the moon had a washed, watery brightness. Streaks of tattered cloud hung like rags in the sky.
‘I could go now?’
Wilbert went to the door and opened it. She raised her head and looked at him. She had been crying. The world had not been destroyed after all. She had been deprived of the greatest excitement life would have given her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You could go now. It was very kind of you to stay with me. You could go now and tell your father I’ll have his food ready for him soon.’
Rani’s death seemed little more than an empty formality; the final ratification of a condition long existing. Yet, in death, she acquired a substance and reality which she had lacked in life. It was her true fulfilment. For Wilbert, it was an immense relief. It was not that he had not pitied her (though he could not love her – she was too ghostly to provoke so positive an emotion) but pity was, in the end, swamped by the extremity of her suffering. Like everyone else, he had grown accustomed and inured to it. He could not help her. Pain was the very stuff of her existence and he was powerless before it. Remove it, and there might be nothing left. While she lived, she was a vacuum round which people skirted, afraid of being sucked in. So, like everyone else, he had rejected her thereby completing the injustice.
Inwardly he had begun to blame her for the awfulness of her life. He had become increasingly short and sharp with her, discouraging her displays of tenderness which, he succeeded in convincing himself, were designed to do no more than lure him into the vacuum. The Sunday afternoon of the abortive hurricane was the first time he had been in her room for many months. He had been doing his best to avoid entering it and Rani had not complained. She accepted his betrayal as she had accepted all those other betrayals of which her life had been compounded. It was as if those Sunday afternoons with her son had never existed.
During the last months of her life, Rani shrank further and further into some impregnable part of herself. She continued to boil the endless pots of milk, sta
nding interminably in front of the stove and stirring the bubbling, frothing liquid with the bent metal spoon that burnt her fingers; she continued to sweep and scrub and polish; and she continued to serve her husband his food in silence, a daily witness to the ritual banging of the spoon on his plate and the cloud of flies ascending to circle balletically around the naked electric lightbulb. She was receptive to suffering in a way that most people are not. Her dark eyes, deep-set in the recesses of a cadaverous face, gazed out blankly at the world and did not question the origin or purpose of that suffering. She had no standard of happiness against which to judge it.
In these last years, there was only one dramatic change: she took to wearing glasses. They were round and gold-rimmed, and, if not her most sentimentally precious, they were certainly her most expensive possession. She had saved up for them out of the monthly ‘allowance’ her husband had given her. ‘Real twenty-two carat gold she gone and buy,’ he exclaimed. ‘Is why she family never get anywhere. All slaves is the same. Never-see-come-see – that’s what they is.’
Egbert Ramsaran was disturbed by his wife’s new acquisition: it reminded him of her presence. Her eyes, magnified to almost twice their normal size by the thick lenses, stared out from behind them and loomed at him, weak, wandering and jelly-like. He read into them accusation and resentment which she was not capable of intending. But he was not to know this, and he forbade her from wearing them in his presence. Basdai could scarcely contain herself when she learned of her daughter’s doings. She believed pride and vanity alone could account for it: it was a piece of flagrant effrontery. ‘Imagine doing a thing like that at she age! Treating money like it was water. Mind, I not saying she shouldn’t have glasses if she really need them – though I must say I have my doubts about that. But, leaving that aside, you seriously want me to believe’ (and here Basdai was so overwhelmed by the audacity Rani had displayed that she spluttered into guttural incredulity and had to cough and thump her chest) ‘… you seriously want me to believe that at she age she need gold glasses? She can’t even make baby and she want gold’ (another round of coughing and thumping) ‘… and she want gold glasses?’ Then Rani lost most of her teeth. ‘I suppose she going to fill up she mouth with gold teeth now,’ Basdai said. She was disappointed. Rani contented herself with simple false teeth which she kept in a tumbler on her dressing-table.
The Chip-Chip Gatherers Page 8