The Chip-Chip Gatherers

by Shiva Naipaul

  Wilbert coughed. Sita’s head jerked upwards from the paper. She started in surprise when she saw him.

  ‘What you standing there for? Somebody calling me?’ Sita half-rose from the chair. She was not welcoming and covered with her hand the closely written page she had been working on.

  ‘Nobody calling you,’ Wilbert said.

  Sita sat down again. Wilbert advanced a step into the room, gazing at the hand which covered the writing; the slim, tapering fingers; the sharply defined knuckles; and the network of bluish veins on the wrist. Sita closed the book. It was a diary.

  ‘What you does write in there?’ Wilbert’s attention shifted from her hand to the diary.

  ‘Anything I feel like. That’s what diaries are for.’ She drummed on the cover. ‘It helps to pass the time.’ She stared out through the open window at the field with its shadowy hulks. ‘I write down anything I find interesting.’

  ‘Like what?’ His tone was tinged with insolence – and curiosity. He gripped the knob of the door, swinging it to and fro. Like all the doors in the house it creaked on its hinges.

  Sita looked round vaguely, waving her arms. ‘This and that. Nothing earthshaking.’

  ‘Could I read some of what you write?’ He extended his hand towards the diary.

  Sita shook her head. ‘You’re not supposed to read what people write in their diaries. It’s private.’

  ‘But if is not important …’

  ‘That makes no difference,’ Sita said. ‘It’s still private.’

  Wilbert nodded slowly; consideringly. The door creaked on its hinges. ‘You does write about Julian Bholai in there? Is that why you don’t want to show me?’

  Sita looked up at him, colouring slightly. ‘A diary is private. I’m not going to tell you who or what I write about in it.’

  ‘I bet,’ Wilbert said, coming closer to the desk, ‘that is only him you does write about?’

  Sita laughed. ‘Even if that was true, what concern is it of yours?’

  ‘You know his mother have plans for him to marry a white woman when he go to England? You know that?’

  Sita tautened.

  ‘He would never marry you,’ Wilbert said. ‘His mother wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this for? What are you trying to gain by it?’ Sita stared at him, drumming on the diary. ‘Who Julian gets married to is nothing to do with me.’

  ‘But the two of you is boy-friend and girl-friend, not so? Why else he does always be coming here to see you? Why else does the two of you be talking so hush-hush out in the verandah?’ Wilbert grinned.

  ‘You jealous?’

  ‘Why should I be jealous of a little sissy like him? Doctor! He only going to be a doctor so he could cheat poor people.’ Wilbert giggled. ‘He ever tell you about the time I beat him up? I had him on the floor begging for mercy.’

  Sita applauded. ‘Bravo! Bravo!’

  ‘Is true. I had him on the floor begging for mercy.’ He remembered the stark blackness of Julian’s eyes pleading with him. ‘I suppose he was too ashamed to tell you about that.’

  ‘As a matter of fact he did tell me about it,’ Sita replied calmly. ‘He wasn’t ashamed. If anybody should be ashamed it’s you.’

  Wilbert lunged forward suddenly and attempted to grab the diary. Sita anticipated him and sent it sliding across the table out of his reach. It slipped over the edge and fell on the floor. Getting down on their knees, they scrambled for it wildly. Wilbert howled, clutching his wrist: Sita had bitten him. She laughed gaily and with the diary secure in her grasp she crawled away from him.

  ‘I told you diaries are private,’ she said.

  ‘If you wasn’t a girl …’ Nursing his maimed hand, Wilbert went out of the room. Sita closed the door and, reclining on the bed, laughed a long time.

  4

  Julian’s visit to the house in Victoria had put Mrs Bholai in one of her typical dilemmas. It was extremely unlikely she should approve of her son needlessly placing himself in such dangerously close proximity to the infamous pair; and of exposing himself to the debilitating and baleful influence of Wilbert Ramsaran: she had not forgotten the fight. However, her hopes for Shanty would be dashed if some sort of connection were not maintained with the Ramsarans. And Julian was undoubtedly the most appropriate medium of contact. Thus, she could not bring herself to do anything about Julian’s visits.

  Her disquiet was compounded by Basdai who, leaning conspiratorially across the counter, said to her in the shop one day, ‘I hear your son and Miss Sita is real good friends. Is not for me to give you advice but …’

  ‘You have it all wrong,’ Mrs Bholai replied uneasily. ‘Is Wilbert he does go to Victoria to see. The two of them is very close friends.’ Compared to Sushila and Sita, her ancient fears of Wilbert were trivial.

  ‘Ah.’ Basdai fingered her chin, studying the goods ranged along the shelves. ‘I must have get my information wrong then.’

  ‘What information?’ Mrs Bholai would have preferred not to know.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry if I was you,’ Basdai said smoothly. ‘Although Miss Sita sly and cunning like she no-good mother, it might still only be gossip-mongering and rumour. You know how some people is. But, as I does always say, where you see smoke it must have fire.’

  ‘What information?’

  ‘That they is boy-friend and girl-friend.’ Basdai stretched the corners of her mouth into a melancholy smile. ‘But I sure if it had any truth in it Julian would have tell you a long time ago.’ Basdai yawned, scanning the laden shelves.

  ‘Quite right,’ Mrs Bholai said firmly. ‘Jules not in the habit of hiding things from me. Is different with his father. But with me, his own mother …’

  But her confidence was not self-supporting. She told her son what she had heard.

  ‘You letting that old fool bother you? You should have tell her to go to hell and mind her own damn business.’

  ‘You haven’t answer my question,’ Mrs Bholai said.

  ‘Well,’ Julian replied carelessly, ‘what if I talk to Sita?’

  ‘You admit it then! You have the boldface to admit it!’

  ‘You want me to lie instead?’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Mrs Bholai clutched her head. ‘I never dream I would live to witness a day like this. I won’t let you go there any more.’

  ‘How you going to stop me?’

  ‘Jules! Jules! How you could do this to me?’ Mrs Bholai sobbed. ‘You only saying it to hurt me, not so? It’s only a joke you having with me, not so?’ She was cringing.

  ‘It’s no joke.’

  ‘Why don’t you spare a thought for my feelings?’ She held his hand.

  ‘If I was to spare a thought for every single one of your so-called feelings, I would never set foot out of this house or look at anybody without asking your permission first.’ He was beginning to believe in his cause.

  ‘What about all them trips we does make to your cousins in San Fernando? You call that never setting foot out of this house?’

  ‘I hate my cousins in San Fernando.’

  Mrs Bholai dropped his hand. ‘So,’ she yelled, ‘you prefer to be with the daughter of a whore than with your cousins in San Fernando? You love that daughter of a whore more than you love your own mother who carry you for nine months in she belly. What she bamboozling your brain with?’ Mrs Bholai trembled.

  ‘Obeah.’ Julian laughed.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. Is what she mother use to bamboozle old Ramsaran with. Obeah! And Miss Sita doing the same to you.’ Mrs Bholai gestured extravagantly. Her nostrils dilated and her hoarse voice resounded through the house and could be heard on the road in the intervals when there was no traffic. Mr Bholai listened anxiously in the shop downstairs. ‘Bholai! Bholai! Come here this instant and listen to what your son saying.’ She stalked out to the verandah. ‘Bholai! Like you deaf?’ Her voice travelled across the road, penetrating the screen of houses opposite, and frittered itself away in the hot gree
n of the canefields beyond.

  Mr Bholai stumbled, puffing and panting, up the steps. His wife leapt on him and dragged him unceremoniously into the sitting-room.

  ‘I want you to listen to what your son saying. This is all your doing.’

  ‘What he saying?’ Mr Bholai stared round helplessly.

  ‘He saying that he love that daughter of a whore more than he love his own mother. That is what he saying. And is all your doing.’

  ‘My doing!’ Mr Bholai groaned. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead. ‘I sure he didn’t say that.’

  ‘Ask him yourself then, shopkeeper.’

  ‘Calm yourself, Moon.’

  ‘I want you to put your foot down, Bholai, and keep him from going to see that wretch. You is his father, after all.’

  ‘You tell your mother you don’t love she?’ Mr Bholai looked not at his son but at the vases of flowers Mynah had sprinkled about the room.

  Julian did not reply. He scraped at his fingernails.

  ‘You should listen to your mother,’ Mr Bholai said after a while.

  ‘That is all you could say?’ Mrs Bholai hopped furiously about the room. ‘That is what you call being a father? Shopkeeper! Two pound of salt, half-pound of butter! Is all your doing. If we was living in San Fernando none of this would have gone and happen. He would never have set eyes on that daughter of a whore.’

  ‘Yes, Moon.’

  ‘Shopkeeper!’

  ‘Yes, Moon.’

  ‘Two pound of salt, half-pound of butter!’

  ‘Yes, Moon.’

  In her despair over her son, Mrs Bholai was prepared to go to any lengths to save him from the machinations of Sita. She cast around for allies. Wilbert, she felt, was the only person who could provide the kind of aid she required. Abandoning her scruples, she descended on the grey fortress of the Ramsaran Transport Company. Wilbert received her politely – if unenthusiastically – dressed in his soiled overalls.

  ‘I not going to beat round the bush with you, Wilbert. Is Julian and Sita I want to talk to you about.’

  Wilbert had conjectured as much. He took her to a wired-off cubicle which served as a waiting-room. It was furnished with wooden benches.

  ‘I want you to put some sense into that boy head for me.’

  Wilbert smiled. ‘How do you expect me to do that, Mrs Bholai? If Julian wouldn’t listen to you, he would hardly be likely to listen to me.’

  ‘But he must listen to somebody.’

  ‘Maybe. But not to me.’

  Mrs Bholai got up from the bench. She stood directly in front of him, her fingers entwined in the mesh of the wire. ‘What about Sita then? She must listen to you. Is your father house she living in. Is he’ (and here Mrs Bholai nearly choked with outrage) ‘… is he who paying for she to go to a first-rate school in Port-of-Spain. My daughters …’

  Wilbert frowned. ‘It’s my father you should go and speak to.’

  ‘At least you could try and put a little sense in she head. You could say that Julian would never marry she. That he only playing around. That when he go away to England …’

  ‘If that is the case, why worry?’

  Mrs Bholai sat down again. ‘Jules have a great future ahead of him. She spoiling his chances to be a doctor. She could only drag him down. If she had any feelings at all …’ Mrs Bholai twirled her bracelets. ‘You can’t expect me not to worry. I can’t stand to one side and see Jules throwing his chances away. I must try and do something about it. They could still write to one another when he in England.’ Mrs Bholai’s eyes darkened. ‘And, who knows but Sita sheself might go to England.’ She got up, shaken by the prospect, ‘If your father could pay for she education in a Port-of-Spain convent, it have no reason why he mightn’t send she to England to become a B.A. Languages.’ She laid a hand on his shoulders as if for support. ‘You could have a heart to heart talk with she …’

  Wilbert scowled. ‘Why don’t you go and have a heart to heart talk with her?’

  ‘How I could do a thing like that? I would only lose my temper straight away. But you …’

  ‘Listen to me, Mrs Bholai, and listen to me well. The only thing that concern me is the Ramsaran Transport Company. If you wanted bricks or gravel delivered I could help you. But I can’t help you about anything else. So please don’t try and involve me.’

  From where they sat they could survey the length and breadth of the cavern housing the workshops and offices of the Ramsaran Transport Company. To their right were the bays where the red and black trucks not in service were parked in two neat rows facing each other on either side of the main gate. Above the main gate there were a series of green-painted metal cages similar to the ones on the ground floor in which they were talking. In these cramped cages the administrative side of the business was carried on by a small team of minions; the soles of their shoes and their legs visible to all who passed beneath. To the left – and to the rear of the cavern – were the repair sheds. Sounds of hammering echoed off the bare walls, brash and metallically insistent. Mechanics, dressed in soiled overalls like Wilbert’s, went ceaselessly to and fro whistling and shouting to one another. Engines coughed and spluttered and revved and the smell of oil and petrol suffused the air. The concrete floor was coated with thick layers of grime and scattered pools of oil shimmered with the colours of the rainbow. Strips of sunlight came through holes in the roof but they were not sufficient to dispel the prevailing dank gloom which appeared to ooze and seep from the building itself. The daylight creeping in from the main gate battled against an invisible barrier and succeeded in penetrating no more than a few hard-won feet into the interior before it was overcome; thickened with the gloom and suffocated by it. The atmosphere was subterranean, and electric lights burned dimly in the metal cages and repair sheds. Julian and Sita and the problems they posed seemed very far away to Wilbert: he had not spoken to Sita since their fray over the diary; and Mrs Bholai, impeccable in her pink dress and with her gold bracelets glinting on her wrists, was a wraith from another world.

  ‘I think is a very true thing what people does say.’

  ‘What is that, Mrs Bholai?’

  ‘They does say that if you born with too much brains is almost like if they does make you stupid. And that is the trouble with Jules. That son of mine have so much brains it making him behave stupid, stupid.’

  Wilbert agreed. ‘And now, if you will excuse me, Mrs Bholai, I must go back to my work.’

  Mrs Bholai was not easily discouraged. Wilbert, she had to admit, had not been helpful. But then, neither had he been actively hostile. He had listened to her patiently. That was an encouraging beginning. Her fertile brain teeming with ideas and proposals, she paid him a second unheralded visit. Wilbert received her with undiminished politeness.

  ‘I have the true solution to the whole problem,’ she said. ‘Let Julian get she pregnant. Then, as you know, they will have to expel she from that convent and that will stop she from wasting your father money. And don’t forget is your money as well.’ She tittered gleefully. ‘That is one side of the question. The other is this. You know as well as me that nothing could frighten a man more than a girl he not married to making baby for him. Love does stop quick quick once a woman belly start to swell up.’ Mrs Bholai wetted her lips. ‘So my plan is to let Julian get she pregnant. Let him go right ahead! It will put all that nonsense out of his head straight away.’ Mrs Bholai paced the metal cage. ‘I know what you going to say now. You going to say that Julian will have to marry she.’ She stopped in front of him. ‘But tell me who it have could make Julian marry she? If she had a father to call she own that would be a different matter. But without a father who it have to make trouble for Julian? She mother?’ Mrs Bholai frowned scornfully. ‘Just let Sushila try to cause trouble and I go make even more trouble for she. Basdai give me the full lowdown about she. I think that’s the best plan. What you say?’

  Wilbert agreed.

  Sita, however, showed no signs
of pregnancy – to Mrs Bholai’s unbounded regret. Then, in conformity to that chameleon nature of hers, she shifted her ground radically, and said to Wilbert without apparent discomfort: ‘Sita is not all that bad girl really when you think about it. It don’t matter who she mother – or father – is. She good-looking. In fact, I find she very good-looking. On top of all that she getting a really first-rate education.’

  Wilbert was too amazed even to agree.

  Mrs Bholai steeled herself, painfully aware of the sacrifice she was about to make on her son’s behalf. ‘One of these days Sita going to make somebody a good wife.’ She gazed slyly at Wilbert. ‘And the time not far off when you will have to be thinking of finding a wife.’

  ‘Are you trying to marry me off to Sita, Mrs Bholai?’ He was amused and angry. ‘She’s not good enough for Julian but she’s good enough for me, is that it?’

  ‘No, no,’ Mrs Bholai said. ‘I wasn’t suggesting that at all.’ She seemed shocked that any such motive could be imputed to her. ‘All I was saying was that she would make somebody a good wife. And why not you?’

  ‘Why not Julian?’

  Mrs Bholai twirled her bracelets.

  ‘If I ever decide to get married,’ Wilbert said, ‘I’ll choose my own wife.’

  Mrs Bholai was contrite. The plan had backfired. ‘I wasn’t meaning it like that, Wilbert. God is my witness. You misunderstand me. I was just trying to …’ Floundering, she gave up the attempt at explanation. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘let we forget the whole thing. Eh? Forget I ever say what I say.’ There was, fortunately, one consolation to be drawn: if Wilbert refused to entertain the idea of marriage to Sita, then the way still remained open for Shanty. This cheered her up.

  ‘You know, Wilbert,’ she started afresh, ‘Shanty is a very sensitive girl. You mustn’t let all that shouting and laughing fool you.’

  Wilbert looked at her.

  Mrs Bholai now toyed with her ear-rings. ‘She can’t take care of herself like the older ones. I think is because being the youngest we spoil her too much. But how could you help spoiling a pretty little girl like that? You would have to be a really heartless person not to.’