The Chip-Chip Gatherers

by Shiva Naipaul

  It was one of Mr Bholai’s fondest dreams that his son and Wilbert Ramsaran would become the closest of friends and bring to fruition in a later generation what the earlier generation had failed to achieve. To promote this, he had put himself to extra expense, sending Julian unnecessary miles to school every day. He was prompted partly by sentiment; and partly by the hope that some of what he conceived of as the Ramsaran magic might rub off inadvertently on his son and thus on himself. But, so far, he had reaped few rewards either tangible or intangible; and Mr Bholai was beginning to think his policy a failure.

  ‘Did you see Wilbert today?’ he would ask his son on his return from school.

  ‘No,’ Julian replied.

  ‘But how come? The school not that big.’

  ‘All the same I didn’t see him.’ These sessions irritated Julian.

  ‘You don’t have to bite my head off for just asking you a simple question,’ Mr Bholai said mournfully. ‘Still, I expect the two of you is good friends?’

  Julian was evasive. ‘He in a different class from me, you know.’

  ‘That shouldn’t stop you from being good friends.’

  ‘He older than me,’ Julian said.

  ‘What difference that make? It doesn’t stop you from being friends.’

  ‘It make a lot of difference,’ Julian said.

  Mr Bholai threw up his hands and sighed. I don’t understand you boys at all. At your age I was the best of friends with his father. The best of friends the two of we was. Why don’t you invite Wilbert to come and spend some time here? That way you will get to know him better. Ask him the next time you see him.’ It was just possible that where he had failed Julian might succeed.

  Julian promised he would ask but he never did so. Mr Bholai’s exasperation deepened. Meanwhile, he intensified his own efforts and, on his occasional unhappy visits to the house in Victoria, continued to plague Egbert Ramsaran with his requests for Wilbert to come and spend some time with them in the Settlement. And, as before, Egbert Ramsaran had continued to refuse his permission. ‘Let Julian come here,’ he said, ‘if you so anxious for the two of them to be friends.’ Mr Bholai would have been willing to compromise. Unfortunately, his wife was constructed of sterner stuff and she vetoed the suggestion in no uncertain manner. ‘If Egbert Ramsaran too proud and great to send his son to we,’ she said, ‘I see no reason on earth why I shouldn’t be twice as proud and great as he – considering who my family is – and not send my son to he. He have a lot of cheek, if you ask me. Who he think he is? Is not as if Julian is a beggar. He have his cousins to spend time with in San Fernando and they just as rich as Wilbert Ramsaran – and better brought up too. You should have more self-respect, Bholai, and not send your child all over the place as if he is a beggar.’ She glared at him. ‘You quite right, Moon,’ Mr Bholai admitted. ‘You quite right.’

  Buffeted by these gales of disapproval, Mr Bholai was sorely tempted to give up his quest and let matters take their assigned course. But then Rani’s death had intervened and the changes it had wrought in Egbert Ramsaran were not lost on him. Like the clients, like Basdai, he seized on the opportunities it presented and renewed his overtures.

  ‘I know what you after,’ Egbert Ramsaran said affably.

  ‘Eh?’ Mr Bholai laughed: it was the most positive reaction he had ever been able to arouse. ‘I not after anything. All I saying is that it would be nice for Julian and Wilbert to keep each other company.’

  ‘Is not Wilbert and Julian keeping each other company I worried about. Before I know what happening you going to be having Wilbert married off to one of your girls …’

  Mr Bholai protested.

  ‘I not going to allow that, Bholai. You was always more of a schemer and trickster than anything else. Is why you never get very far. You just don’t do anything in a straightforward way.’

  ‘You not being fair to me, Egbert. The girls hardly old enough to think about such a thing.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Egbert Ramsaran said, still affable.

  ‘Is good for Wilbert to associate with children of his own age. Let him come – for a week.’

  I’ll think about it,’ Egbert Ramsaran said. ‘Come and see me next week.’

  Mr Bholai was heartened. He returned the following week.

  ‘If Wilbert want to go, I have no objection. Is up to him though.’

  Wilbert had no alternative but to agree. There was Mr Bholai, standing a few feet away from him, rubbing his hands and beaming delightedly.

  ‘It would be so good for Julian having you there. You could never tell what mischief those boys in the Settlement will lead him into. The people there jealous of him real bad.’

  For Mr Bholai, it was a signal triumph.

  No one was more provoked or made more indignant by Sushila’s audacity in going to live in Victoria than Mrs Bholai. She regarded it as a personal injury and insult. She remembered that last flaunting procession with Sita along the main road when she had had to tug Julian back from the verandah railings. The news of Sushila’s success spread gleefully through the village by Basdai – and less gleefully by Phulo – had incited her to such a pitch of violent fury that it ended by reducing her to a state of near collapse. Her children were forbidden from mentioning the names of mother and daughter – for, in Mrs Bholai’s mind, Sita shared to the full her mother’s evil intentions. ‘If I hear you mention the name of that woman or she daughter,’ Mrs Bholai threatened her children, ‘I going to break every hand and foot in your body.’ She exempted herself from the ban. ‘Here I is,’ she stormed, ‘breaking my back to bring up my son and daughters in a decent way and then to have this shameless whore Sushila and she equally shameless daughter shaking they backside for all the world to see. What kind of example that is to young children like mine?’ She went so far as to propose that Sushila might be forcibly restrained from returning to pollute the air of the Settlement. ‘I don’t want she coming back here,’ she said. ‘And as for Miss Sita – they should send she away to a orphanage. She even more dangerous than she mother. You see all them book she does be pretending to read? Soon she going to start thinking she is as good – if not better – than my daughters. Who is to say what kind of dangerous ideas she going to plant in they head if she get the opportunity?’

  ‘Is a free country, Moon,’ her husband explained mournfully time and time again. ‘I don’t like the idea of Sushila coming back here any more than you but is nothing you can do about it. Is a free country and it have no law in the books to say that Sushila can’t come and go as she please.’

  Mrs Bholai did not believe him. ‘You just making that up,’ she accused him.

  ‘Go ahead then,’ he said. ‘You throw the both of them out.’

  She switched the argument. Mrs Bholai had a great variety of weapons in her arsenal. ‘Is that man Farouk to blame. Is he who give Sushila the child in the first place. Is he they should hang. If it wasn’t for he Sita would never have been born to trouble me. I would have been a happy woman today.’ More than almost anyone in the Settlement, Mrs Bholai had been affected by Sushila’s pregnancy and subsequent outrageous behaviour. The anathema it inspired in her was not easy to explain. She had no reason to be especially offended; but especially offended she had been. It was as if she had convinced herself that Sushila had become pregnant for no other reason than to provoke her, and her frantic denunciations had been as much the occasion for comment as Sushila herself was. To Mrs Bholai, mother and daughter were a pestilential pair for whom the fires of hell could never burn brightly or fiercely enough. But the present tempest that raged in Mrs Bholai did not have as its only cause Sushila’s joining the Ramsaran household. As if to compound her troubles, she had been told just two days previously that Julian and Sita had been having secret meetings during the monthly visits of the Library Van to the Settlement. The ubiquitous Basdai had been the agent of this shattering piece of rumour. ‘I thought it best to tell you myself,’ Basdai had confided, her face wrinkled with sorrow at th
e self-appointed task it was her melancholy duty to perform. ‘It can’t be true,’ Mrs Bholai had replied. ‘Julian would never do a thing like that. He wouldn’t go behind his own mother’s back.’ ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ Basdal had challenged. But Mrs Bholai, forthright as her rejection of Basdai’s rumour-mongering had been, did not have the courage to ask her son. She did not even have the courage to speak of her fears to her husband: to do so would have given them a status she did not wish them to have. ‘If Sita had never been born,’ she repeated, ‘I would have been the happiest woman in the world today. That child was born to torment me.’

  ‘That is only because you does let she trouble you, Moon. People would think is Lucifer you talking about and not a young girl, the way you does be carrying on.’

  Mrs Bholai switched her argument again. ‘And then to invite Wilbert to come and stay with we! I won’t have him in this house! You hear that? Not while Mistress Sushila living under the same roof as he.’

  ‘Yes, Moon.’

  ‘I don’t know why you want Wilbert and Jules to be friends,’ she raged uselessly. ‘What could be the result of bringing him here but more trouble for me? I glad to see Jules have enough sense not to mix with people like that. But that didn’t satisfy you. Oh no! You had to invite him here.’

  ‘You being unreasonable, Moon. Is not Wilbert fault that Sushila working for his father.’

  ‘I don’t call it working. I call it addling his brain.’

  ‘Yes, Moon.’

  ‘You should send Jules to another school.’

  ‘You didn’t have anything against him going there before.’

  ‘Well I have now.’ Mrs Bholai folded her arms resolutely across her bosom.

  Mr Bholai sighed and shook his head. ‘If that is what you really want I could do it tomorrow. You just have to say the word.’

  ‘Me? Why me?’ She belied her resolution.

  ‘You want me to cancel the invitation to Wilbert?’ He was gentler.

  ‘Me? Why you asking me? Is you who invited him. Is too late to do that. What’s done is done. But if anything wrong I will know where to put the blame. You could depend on that.’

  ‘I think I better cancel the invitation,’ Mr Bholai said. ‘I could tell him is not convenient after all.’

  Mrs Bholai gazed at him scathingly. ‘Sometimes I think you is really stupid man, you know, Bholai. How you suppose that will look? After all the years you spend begging his father and when you finally get him to agree to turn round and say …’ She laughed. ‘Use your common sense, man.’

  Mr Bholai shook his head perplexedly. ‘You is a funny person, Moon. I just never know where I is with you from one minute to the next. First you don’t want him to come and then … what’s the use?’

  It was a heartfelt criticism. Mr Bholai was anxious to please and do whatever his wife thought was right. Unfortunately, it was not an easy task to discover her true opinions. She placed the burden of decision-making on him and, at the crucial moments of a project, would cut the ground from under his feet. The crux of the problem was that Mrs Bholai was driven by a host of contradictory desires and notions which she had not learned how to control and subordinate to one another. Taken singly, they might have been plausible and legitimate; but taken together (as was her habit) they were implausible and illegitimate. At any one time, all these contradictory desires and notions dangled alluringly before her like fruit waiting to be picked. Mrs Bholai felt she had simply to reach forward and pluck whichever her fancy chose. She wanted everything simultaneously and, that not being possible, she was therefore an unhappy woman. Reason – as epitomized by Mr Bholai – served merely to increase her frustrations and her husband’s strictures reinforced her fury against its thwarting constraints.

  Her life in San Fernando before marriage to Vishnu Bholai, she depicted to her children in the most glorious hues; while, in contrast, the Settlement and all who lived in it were depicted in the most sombre tones. Yet, when Mrs Bholai returned to San Fernando to stay with her relatives, she could not resist the temptation to boast of the Settlement where she was undisputed queen, enumerating the manifold virtues and compensations of country as opposed to city life. She talked then of the noise and the traffic and the wearying bustle. It was not dissimulation. She spoke truthfully at both times, for truth was not absolute with her. It arose from the circumstances and needs of the particular hour and thus, as the hours changed, could accommodate quite flagrant inconsistencies. This chain of self-contradictory truths lay looped in her mind.

  Her family did indeed have extensive business connections but, to Mrs Bholai’s mortification, her own branch of it had none. Poverty had put her into the invidious and humiliating position of having to accept the first respectable suitor who came along; a catastrophe for someone who was by nature choosy. Vishnu Bholai – his ambitions to be a lawyer still intact – was that man and she had to be grateful to him for rescuing her. Nevertheless, her gratitude could not be unmixed. Marriage to her had, undoubtedly, elevated him a rung or two and she demanded to be paid due homage. She floundered, trapped between gratitude for the man who had rescued her; and condescension for the man she had elevated. Over the years, condescension seemed, gradually, to have gained the upper hand, for her husband had not lived up to expectations: the budding lawyer had become the proprietor of the Settlement’s only grocery.

  It was a tragedy for Mrs Bholai. She worshipped wealth and her husband was a poor man who ran a grocery. When she visited her relatives in San Fernando, their superciliousness forced her into singing the praises of virtuous, hardworking poverty so as not to be unfaithful to the man for whom gratitude was still uppermost on such occasions. Reinstalled in the Settlement, she bemoaned her lucklessness and cursed her husband.

  Mrs Bholai believed there was only a limited quantity of success to be had in the world and the smallest symptom of ambition in other people – for example, Sita’s reading – filled her with dread. The fragility of her position communicated itself strongly to her: one slip and she would tumble she did not know where. Everyone and everything, not excluding her husband, was a potential threat to the future she had staked out for her children and herself. Naturally, she wished to reserve the maximum amount of success for her own personal use. If one man had a voracious appetite, then there would be that much less available to her. Thus, she could not forgive Egbert Ramsaran, holding him vaguely responsible for her husband’s lack of progress. Success and failure were, in her scheme of things, connected together like the two ends of a seesaw. She admired Egbert Ramsaran for what he had done – but she could not forgive him. Comparison with her husband heightened her contempt for the latter. ‘Bosom pals indeed,’ she would snort. ‘Being bosom pals with him didn’t get you very far, Bholai! Instead of boasting about it, you should be hiding yourself in a corner!’ Mrs Bholai regarded it as her sacred duty, on behalf of her children, to redress the balance of the seesaw.

  The ambiguous mixture of scorn and respect she bore towards Egbert Ramsaran flowered in its full bloom when she came to consider his son. The battles of the older generation had been fought and lost. Nothing could be done about it now. Those between the younger generation were still to be fought. It was impossible for Mrs Bholai not to conceive of Wilbert and Julian as natural enemies, locked in a preordained and mortal combat for supremacy. It was a struggle between light (Julian) and darkness (Wilbert) and light was bound to prevail. The Ramsarans were a bad breed, degenerate to a man. Poker! Chinese! Egbert himself! There were many strange stories told about that family. The irrefutable taint of Singh’s blood could not be forgotten. And now, there was the affair with Sushila. It was unlikely that Wilbert should have escaped unscathed. Like Sita, he was burdened with an incubus of original sin. Who was to know what lethal germs he might implant in Julian under the guise of friendship? Yet, her opposition to her son attending the same school as Wilbert and going out of his way to do so had been weak. To her family in San Fernando she said: ‘Jules and Wilber
t Ramsaran does go to the same school. He and Jules thick thick. Mind you, is Wilbert who does search out Jules. Not the other way round. He does keep inviting Jules to stay with him but I don’t care for the idea too much. Jules a million times brighter than he.’ ‘Who is this Wilbert Ramsaran you always talking about?’ the ignorant might enquire. Their ignorance astounded Mrs Bholai. ‘Like you never hear of the Ramsaran Transport Company? Where you does live? All them red and black trucks you does see going up and down …’ ‘You mean …’ ‘That’s exactly what I mean. The son of Egbert Ramsaran himself. He and Jules thick thick. You can’t separate them.’

  Though she had not dared admit it even to herself – and here was the essence of the contradiction – Wilbert inspired certain hopes in her. Mrs Bholai would have denied it strenuously, but the fact was that the Ramsaran fortune featured much in her thoughts when her gaze shifted from Julian to her three daughters. Seen in this light, Wilbert was transfigured beyond recognition. It would be appropriate and just if one of the three were to be united with his fortune. This put her in a typical quandary. Wilbert was simultaneously both threat and promise: a two-headed creature with aspect infinitely monstrous or infinitely pleasing, depending on the view one adopted. Mrs Bholai had adopted both points of view. So the fulminations against him and the visit that had been arranged, real as the motives guiding them were, stumbled against another set of motives equally real. Therefore, her fulminations petered out into nothing specific.

  On the day Wilbert was supposed to arrive, Mrs Bholai reverted to Farouk, the enemy most convenient to attack.

  ‘Basdai tell me he have murder on he conscience,’ she said, ‘and I believe she.’

  Mr Bholai wondered where it was leading to. ‘Careful, Moon. Don’t work yourself up. You does pay too much attention to Basdai. Farouk could have you up in court for defamation of character if he hear you saying that. Is a very serious charge.’