The Chip-Chip Gatherers

by Shiva Naipaul

  Sita was silent under this onslaught. There were many things she could have said but she had no idea how to begin saying them. In any case, Sita knew her mother would not understand. She would not even be interested.

  3

  The disparity of character and the lack of understanding that existed between them was more obvious and disquieting to both only because this was the longest period they had lived together as mother and daughter. It had always been so. Prolonged association had simply brought it out into the open. During Sushila’s brief, whirlwind descents on the Settlement the truth had been disguised, to some extent, by the fleeting violence of her publicly displayed affection. Yet even that could not entirely obscure the residual uneasiness lurking not far below the surface and becoming more apparent as Sita grew older. The uneasiness was hard and unyielding and permanent. There had been an overly frenzied aspect to those orgiastic sessions; as if Sushila had to flay herself into the conviction that she loved her daughter and was not an unnatural mother. The times they spent together seemed to permit no stillnesses. Silence would descend with unpremeditated suddenness, revealing gaps of deadening incomprehension which Sushila – never Sita – endeavoured to bridge with a rush of extravagant nonsense; promising her more books, more dresses, more toys.

  To Sita, Sushila had been an exotic manifestation, a shifting, impermanent combination of scent and sound and colour. When she was younger, Sita puzzled for hours over this curious creature people called her mother and whose irregular manifestations threw the Settlement into such a frenzy of disapproval and outrage. She had tried to love her but it was not possible to love a shifting combination of scent and sound and colour which was there one minute and gone the next. Her love had nothing to which it could attach itself. All around her she saw people drawn together and welded into comprehensible wholes by relationships denied her: the elementary ties of husband and wife; brother and sister. Excluded from membership of any of these, Sita belonged to no one.

  ‘I too have a mother like everybody else,’ she reassured herself over and over again. ‘A mother … a mother … a mother.’ She repeated the word in an endless hypnotic chant, twisting and rolling it on her tongue this way and that. But repetition enhanced its alien qualities and converted it into something unreal. It fractured and broke on her tongue, resolving itself into a tumble of meaningless syllables, devoid of rhyme and reason. ‘Mo-ther … mot-her … moth-er.’ She tried ‘Ma’ and ‘Mummy’ – she had once heard the Bholai girls calling their mother ‘Mummy’ – but they did not work either. Their intimacy was too fabulous.

  Then she recalled that somewhere in the world there had to be a man who was her father. So, she experimented with that. ‘Fa-ther … fat-her … fath-er.’ It was no good. Neither did ‘Pa’ and ‘Daddy’ improve the situation. She quailed when it occurred to her that Farouk might be the man those fragmenting syllables sought to identify. Sita could not desist from examining herself closely in mirrors and, when she saw him, surreptitiously comparing her salient features with Farouk’s. She dismissed the possibility. However, she shuddered inwardly and blushed whenever she went past the Palace of Heavenly Delights and Farouk twirled his beautiful moustache and winked at her with sly good humour. It was he – more than Phulo, more than Basdai, more than Mrs Bholai – who made her life in the Settlement a torment.

  Sita developed the habit of talking to herself. ‘My name is Sita … Seetah … See-tah …’ When even her own name seemed in danger of dissolving into gibberish, the discovery was both exhilarating and terrifying. She applied the same technique indiscriminately to people and things; and, under the influence of her subtle and secret magic, they too became remote and eventually disintegrated. At whim she could create, destroy and reconstruct the world around her. It was how she learned to cope with the abuse and taunting scorn which was inescapably the lot of ‘a child of Sushila’. When Basdai screamed at her, ‘You is a worthless girl – just like your no-good mother was,’ Sita would immediately go and stand before the mirror and repeat the phrase until it had worn itself out and lost all its meaning. The trick rarely failed.

  Sita was an enigma to those with whom she lived. Recognizing that she was different (it was drummed into her by Phulo and Basdai), she had consciously set herself apart from them. She developed a fierce and distinctive self-regard which expressed itself in a belief in her own singular destiny arising from her unique position. Every act she performed, no matter how trivial, was invested with a ritual significance and solemnity; part, it seemed, of a grand design which she refused to communicate to anyone; a preparation for a world infinitely superior to the one in which, through no fault of her own, she had found herself.

  It was this intense self-regard which kept her aloof and separate from those around her, showing itself in the slow and measured style of her speech; in the fanatical care she took of her personal property; and the pains she devoted to the details of her dress. There was the question of shoes, for instance. It was common practice for the children in the Settlement – the young Bholais excepted – to go without. But Sita would never permit herself to appear barefooted in the yard: she was always to be seen in a pair of lovingly whitened canvas shoes. She flew into a rage if anyone dared to use her towels, her soap, her hairbrush – all gifts of her mother. ‘It’s not hygienic to use what belong to somebody else,’ she would explain when she had calmed down.

  It was this aura of being set apart which, as much as anything else, brought down the wrath of Phulo and Basdai on her head and encouraged the taunts of the Settlement as a whole. Sita was not blameless. She fostered that hostility and appeared to draw strength from the isolation which it imposed. It was a necessary element of her self-esteem that she should be disliked: it served to reinforce her sense of a singular destiny.

  Many of her ideas were derived from the books she read. Sita was a voracious reader and one of her big excitements was the monthly visit of the van sent by the Trinidad Public Library on tours of the country districts. Her reading, an extension of the fervent privacy she cultivated, was sacrosanct She was unwilling to divulge even the title of the books she read. That she ‘pretended’ to read was an opinion not restricted to Phulo and Mrs Bholai but shared by most of the Settlement.

  Youth and beauty could not survive long in the Settlement. Decay was at the very core of its existence and the women, more vulnerable to its ravages than the men, were the first to succumb. For the young girls, the decline into womanhood was swift, startling and irreversible. It was as if, after a certain stage had been reached, the processes of life were artificially speeded up. From day to day – so Sita felt – it was possible to chart the changes in the faces she knew. When the transformation was complete, their familiar features could hardly be recognized in the women they had become. Their children, doomed to the cycle, grew up with the fated sameness of animals born and bred to a particular role in life. The Settlement taught Sita the horrors of poverty and ignorance. But it was more than pity which it aroused in her. There was fear and repugnance as well.

  Her first memories of Phulo were of a slim and pretty girl with unusual greyish-coloured eyes. She must have been no more than eighteen when she married Basdai’s younger son and was flirtatiously shy and reticent in front of her husband. Her shortcomings as a wife were commented on indulgently even by Basdai who had bestowed on her the affectionate title of Doolahin. As for her husband, he seemed dangerously fond of her. He regularly brought her little trinkets from San Fernando and encouraged and fomented her wifely incapacities. She was the great favourite of the family, eclipsing Sharma, the wife of Basdai’s elder son. But the birth of Phulo’s first child effectively marked the end of the honeymoon. Attitudes changed rapidly. Her shortcomings ceased to be charming and the quarrels began.

  The sad fact was that Phulo herself had changed by that time. She had sunk into the landscape, growing fatter and less picturesque. Not having been warned of the inevitable betrayal lying ahead of her, Phulo had let herself go. She
had taken too much for granted and when she awakened from her sleep it was too late. Without her being aware of it, she had increasingly approximated to the run of women in the Settlement. Phulo became indistinguishable from those who walked with buckets balanced on their heads to fetch water from the standpipe. Her grey eyes counted for nothing now: their novelty had worn off. Doolahin wept but weeping got her nowhere. It hastened the disenchantment. Therefore, the crying stopped.

  Phulo mourned her loss of beauty and special favour by adopting a style of dress in keeping with her new status. Discarding her modish blouses and skirts, she wore instead unflattering, hastily assembled dresses which hung loosely from her shoulders and brushed her ankles. Child followed monotonously on child and a generalized coarseness set in. Her voice lost its lilt and lightness and was strident and vulgar; thriving on the daily exchange of abuse with her mother-in-law and husband. The Phulo Sita was familiar with was the Phulo with puffed-out cheeks; with eyes that had lost their sparkle and liveliness and become dull and brutal; with sagging breasts milked dry; the Phulo pursued by a brood of barefooted, bare-bottomed children who clung to her dusty skirts and at whom she shrieked obscenities. She talked and behaved as though her youth had never happened; as though it belonged to an order of things impossibly remote and farfetched. Sita was always shocked to remember how young she really was.

  Living in close proximity to her mother-in-law had proved a fruitful source of misunderstanding and discord. Rivalries and feuds flourished in the hothouse atmosphere of the family compound. Basdai considered it her duty to supervise her daughters-in-law and see to it that they remained ‘up to mark’. Sharma, good-natured and pliable, was no problem in that respect. Phulo, however, was not led easily. Basdai disapproved on principle of everything she did: the way she dressed; the way she brought up her children; the way she kept her house. ‘Ungrateful wretch,’ she screeched at her. ‘I don’t know why I ever allow my son to marry a bloodsucker like you. All you deserve is blows and more blows,’ ‘Why don’t you come and try?’ Phulo would challenge her. ‘I dying for a chance to break every bone in your body into little pieces.’ These quarrels would arise out of nothing, coaxed magically out of the hot day.

  But what irked Basdai most of all was Phulo’s determination to have a proper home of her own. The compound had started – ostensibly – as a purely temporary arrangement while her sons searched for homes for their families. Years passed and nothing happened. A series of renovations, extensions and other minor alterations gave the lie to their intentions and temporariness had merged into all the indications of permanency. For Phulo to want to leave behind the delights of the compound was an unforgivable presumption. Unhappily for her, it never went beyond presumption. It was an open secret that her husband, indifferent to those unusual grey eyes, maintained a mistress in San Fernando. When he was not squandering his wages on her, he was squandering what remained of them in the Palace of Heavenly Delights. Phulo, fighting a battle already lost, saved what she could. He did not hesitate to beat her when she refused to tell him where her paltry hoard was hidden. ‘Serve she right,’ Basdai declared. ‘A home of she own! What next I ask you?’

  Nevertheless, when they grew weary of their slanging matches, they could unite on one subject; or rather, on two subjects: Sushila and Sita. Sushila was as much anathema to Phulo as she was to Mrs Bholai, but their reasons were not the same. Phulo could not resist comparing her pitiful condition to Sushila’s. In the latter she saw everything she might have been. Worse still, Sushila’s good fortune had sprung from her disobedience; while she (and had she not been as beautiful? as coveted by men?) who had obeyed the command to marry and bear children had been the one to suffer. It was unfair; unjust that she should be the one trapped. Injustice had cramped and stifled her spirit; warped it. Phulo wished on Sita the punishment which ought to have been meted out to her mother. And not only on Sita; but on everyone like her who aspired to break their chains.

  Sharma had been luckier than Phulo but not because she was any better treated or any wiser. She was luckier in that she possessed a mild and placid disposition in which neither rebellion nor dissatisfaction could have a place. Like Phulo, she had once been slim and pretty; like Phulo, she had once been the household favourite; like Phulo, she had borne her husband a string of children; like Phulo, she was occasionally beaten. Yet, none of these things had embittered her or warped her spirit. She incorporated them without fuss or disturbance, bowing to the universal cycle of rise and decline and never questioning it. Pleasure and pain were modulations in an underlying rhythm which had regulated the lives of those who had gone before her and would regulate the lives of those who were to come after her. What had happened to her was, quite simply, what she had expected to happen – just as she expected to see the sun rise every morning in the east and see it sink every evening in the west. She would have been unpleasantly surprised had she not got fat. She had accepted her displacement as the household favourite by the grey-eyed Phulo without murmur and even joined in the praise of the newcomer. Her brood of children did not weigh on her as they did on Phulo.

  Sharma was seamstress to the Settlement, churning out several dresses a week in identical style. ‘Can’t you sew something different?’ Phulo asked exasperatedly. ‘Is What the people want,’ Sharma answered equably. ‘But just for your own sake it might be nice to do something a little different each time,’ Phulo said. Sharma seemed not to understand. ‘Is what the people want,’ she said. She it was who kept the goat which provided a dribble of milk. Phulo, when she had nothing else to attack, would attack the goat for sprinkling its droppings about the compound. ‘One day,’ Phulo said, ‘I going to curry that goat.’ Sharma laughed. She bore no grudges. If her husband were to beat her over some trifling misdemeanour or merely because he was in a bad mood, Sharma cried a little but was bright and cheerful again before long.

  She took no part in the recriminations against either Sushila or Sita, though Phulo did her best to convince her of their iniquity. ‘Everybody have they own life to lead,’ was Sharma’s verdict, ‘including Sushila. If Sushila happy doing what she doing and not interfering with what I doing, why I should bother?’ ‘What Sushila doing is wrong,’ Phulo said, ‘is very wrong. She shouldn’t be allowed to do what she doing and get away scot free with it.’ Sharma was unperturbed. ‘It may not be your way and is certainly not my way. But so long as she don’t interfere with me …’ ‘What about Sita then?’ Phulo asked, ‘why she must be pretending to read all them book for?’ ‘If the girl like reading, let she read is what I say.’ Phulo’s patience cracked. ‘And what I say is that you just plain stupid.’ Sharma laughed. ‘If that is the way I is,’ she said, ‘then that is the way I is.’

  At night, Sita would lie awake listening to Basdai’s wracked struggles to breathe freely. Her thoughts wandered to Phulo and Sharma and the events of the past day: Sharma sewing her identical dresses; the children playing in the dusty compound; Phulo bent over the washtub shouting at them and in the intervals trading abuse with Basdai. The pattern never altered. Thinking of Phulo she experienced a chilling thrill compounded of fear and repugnance and pity. Could she ever become like her? Could she ever be reduced to such a state of coarse brutishness? Degradation crept up stealthily in the Settlement and by the time you realized what had happened it was too late. It was Phulo who absorbed the bulk of her attention; with whom, despite the overt hostility, she felt chilling reverberations of sympathy. On the other hand, no possible link could exist with someone like Sharma; no point of contact. Nothing was to be learned from Sharma. Indeed, hers was a lesson that could not be learned. It was a dispensation you received – or did not receive. Sharma was neutral and passive; the eternal spectator. Her support – if so vague a benignity could be called support – was of no value; as meaningless as the wind in the canefields. Her placidity was death itself to Sita. Lying there awake at night, listening to Basdai’s groans and wombed in the desolate darkness, Sita fell victim to a morbid hy
pochondria. She was surrounded – but as yet untouched – by a disease whose symptoms she knew all too well. Sita maintained an anxious watch on herself for the signs of infection.

  It was on one of the visits of the Library Van to the Settlement that Sita had spoken to Julian Bholai for the first time. He had gone up to her.

  ‘What you looking for?’ He was polite and smiling.

  Sita did not answer.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me? I might have it back home. I have a lot of books.’

  ‘If you have so many books why you bother to come here for?’ she replied.

  ‘I wanted to meet you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be wanting to meet me,’ she said coolly. ‘If you mother should find out …’

  Julian, covering his discomfort well, grinned. ‘You shouldn’t let what my mother say bother you.’

  ‘I never said it bothered me.’ Sita’s eyes combed the van’s shelves.

  ‘You looking for anything special?’

  ‘No. But tell me why you wanted to meet me.’

  ‘I thought maybe the two of us could become friends.’ Julian stroked the spine of a book. ‘I know you read a lot and as I like reading too I thought …’ He petered out lamely.

  ‘Is that the only reason?’

  ‘What other reason I could have?’

  ‘Maybe you think …’

  ‘I’m not like that at all.’

  ‘Like what?’ Sita raised her eyebrows. ‘How do you know what I was going to say?’

  Julian laughed. ‘What were you going to say then?’

  ‘Perhaps you think you’re doing me a favour talking to me. Your mother can’t stand the sight of me. She don’t allow any of her children to talk to me. And then all of a sudden you decide you want to be my friend. Why?’

  ‘Do you have to know? Can’t you just accept that I want to be your friend?’