The Chip-Chip Gatherers

by Shiva Naipaul

  ‘Let us make a bet.’ Julian extended a finger.

  ‘No,’ she replied, drawing away from him. ‘What would be the point of that?’

  ‘You see!’ He slapped his thighs gleefully. ‘That prove that you yourself don’t really believe what you saying.’

  ‘It don’t prove anything.’ Sita fell silent, averting her face from his. This was a favourite ploy of hers: to descend into abrupt silence for no reason he could fathom in the middle of a quite normal flow of conversation. She had retreated into a sphere where he could no longer follow her.

  ‘If you not going to talk to me any more I may as well go home,’ he said.

  Sita did not answer, staring at the restless interchange of light and shadow on the ground.

  Their meetings never ended happily. They always parted on a note of discord and neither could be sure that the other would be there at the next visit of the Library Van. It was Sita, not Julian, who was the main offender. She seemed to court what – for her – would have been a disaster. Their meetings in the hollow were as much a joy as a misery to her. She could not banish the thought that the hour must come to an end and that she must return to Basdai and Phulo and Sharma. It was unendurable. All that she held most dear and precious were saved up and compressed into this hour. Outside of it there was nothing: nothing but the rectangles of bright green sugarcane; the blank metallic bowl of the sky; the strident tones of Phulo; and the wracking cough of Basdai keeping her awake at night. Her silences were a protection; a refuge to hide her misery from him. These hours in the hollow – as she repeatedly reminded herself – could never be to him a millionth of the joy and misery they were to her. For him, the hour he spent with her was merely one way of ‘killing’ time. It could be no more important (and perhaps a great deal less) than the myriad hours he spent away from her. His real life existed beyond it. Her real life existed within it. It was a rotten bargain and she loathed it. But what was she to do? One incident had summed it up for her. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he had declared casually as they were plodding back up the slope of the hollow. ‘I nearly forgot to tell you – I won’t be able to come next time. I’m going to see my cousins in San Fernando.’ He peered at her. ‘I hope you’re not too disappointed.’ She was devastated by his casualness. ‘Not in the slightest,’ she had replied. ‘Why should I be disappointed? I hope you have a good time.’ He laughed. ‘I always have a good time wherever I am,’ he said. ‘There’re very few people I don’t get on with.’ ‘You’re very fortunate,’ she had answered.

  That walk through the Settlement during which Sushila had announced to her that she was soon to take her away came as a timely rejoinder to Julian’s casualness. The prospect of release muted the pain the memory of it called forth. And not only that. It muted also the pain of the scornful glances they had received and Farouk’s unwelcome cordiality. Even Mrs Bholai’s pulling her son sharply away from the verandah rail paled into insignificance. She was going to be leaving all that behind her. The walls of her prison were on the verge of being shattered; smashed to rubble. Her sentence had been commuted and she was to be freed. The windings and twistings of the narrow main road unrolled themselves like a magic carpet before her. She could sit in the hammock and gaze upon the cars traversing its length without longing and allow herself to dream of the day when it would spirit her away forever from this place; just as once, a long time ago, it had spirited away her mother.

  Sita had been disappointed when Sushila had said she would be taking her neither to Port-of-Spain nor to San Fernando. However, she had reconciled herself. Compared to the Settlement almost anywhere would be paradise. Her optimism was short-lived. The news of Sushila’s instalment in the Ramsaran household deadened Sita. ‘Soon you going to be leaving we,’ Basdai chuckled. ‘Is more than you deserve.’ Sita looked at her dumbly. Egbert Ramsaran! She repeated the name to herself several times but the trick did not work. The detested sound revolved recalcitrantly on her tongue. She could refuse to go: they could not compel her. Sita swayed back and forth on the hammock, staring at the cars on the main road. The magic carpet had been pulled from under her feet. This road led only to the house in Victoria where Rani had been condemned to eke out her sad, ghostly existence.

  Her last meeting with Julian had been the unhappiest one of all. Sita arrived in a sullen mood. He greeted her smilingly.

  ‘I have some news for you,’ he said.

  ‘If it’s anything to do with my mother going to live … I’m sick and tired of that.’

  ‘It’s not about your mother – though it’s connected up in a kind of way. Guess who is coming to stay with us?’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Julian giggled. ‘I see you’re in one of your moods.’

  ‘Who’s coming to stay with you?’ Sita asked mechanically.

  ‘Wilbert Ramsaran. After years and years of licking his father’s boots Pa finally succeeded. Ma can’t control herself. She …’

  Sita stared at him dully. ‘That should be nice for you.’

  ‘It’s not nice for me at all. We don’t get on.’

  ‘I thought you got on with everybody.’

  ‘Not with him I don’t. He’s a …’

  Sita scowled. ‘Don’t bother to explain. What about that book you said you were going to lend me?’

  Julian pounded his head with his fists. ‘It completely slip my mind in all the excitement about Wilbert. I’ll bring it for you next time.’

  ‘There mightn’t be any next time.’

  ‘The rumour is true then.’ His face fell. ‘You going to live with your mother.’

  ‘It’s possible. Any day now she might come for me.’

  ‘What you want to go and live there for? You must be crazy.’

  Sita studied the shifting patterns of light and shadow. ‘What would you have me do instead?’ She curled her lips.

  ‘Almost anything but that.’

  ‘Anything like what?’ she asked drily.

  Julian swept his hair back from his forehead. ‘You will hate living there. Take my word for it. You’ll have nobody to talk to.’

  ‘What about Wilbert?’

  ‘Wilbert!’ Julian roared with incredulous laughter. ‘Wilbert is worse than nobody. He never read a book in his whole life. He’s ignorant – born to be a businessman like his father.’

  ‘So you would have me stay here just because Wilbert never read a book in his life. To judge from you, it’s probably a good thing. You really feel you’re the only person worth talking to in the whole world, don’t you? Well, let me tell you, you’re not. Do you seriously suppose I’m going to drop down dead without you? Maybe your cousins in San Fernando might. But not me.’ His arrogance, his easy self-assurance, his very handsomeness were loathsome to her; more loathsome than they had ever been. They were oblivious to her troubles. She wanted to hurt him; to make him share her pain. ‘You know you’ll be leaving this place one day to go away and become Dr Julian Bholai. You’re not going to care about me then. Oh no! I would just be some stupid little country girl you used to know.’

  ‘I’m not to blame if I’m going to be a doctor. Do you expect me not to be one just to please you?’

  ‘I don’t expect you to do anything just to please me. You will always be free to do exactly as you please. That is the difference between the two of us. I have to take my chances where I find them. I can’t pick and choose.’ Her eyes glowed with anger. ‘If I stayed here, do you think I will get another chance to leave? Who’s going to give me that chance? You? Your mother? No. I’ll end up like Phulo – if I’m lucky. You have no right – no right at all – to tell me what to do.’

  ‘I’m not telling you what to do. Do whatever you want.’ He shrugged.

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘Listen, Sita …’

  ‘I’ve listened to you enough.’ She turned her face from him.

  ‘I’m going home. Take out your temper on the mango tree. Not on me.’ Julian got up and walked a few steps. ‘I’ll get
that book to you somehow. Maybe I’ll send it by Wilbert Ramsaran. That will give you the opportunity to …’

  ‘I don’t want your damn book. Now go and leave me alone. I can’t bear to look at you.’

  He left her. When he got to the rim of the crater he looked back. Sita was still sitting under the mango tree, her eyes fixed on the ground. He shrugged and walked on.

  Her mind was made up. To miss her chance – such as it was – because of some silly squeamishness would be to condemn herself to servitude. If she could withstand the Settlement, she could probably learn to withstand anything the Ramsaran house had to offer. She would be able to take care of herself regardless of her surroundings. These reflections strengthened her resolution. Julian was not indispensable. She was not going to be deflected by the dubious gratification of a dubious relationship.

  Chapter Six

  1

  There was one fact around which Wilbert Ramsaran’s life revolved and beside which nothing else mattered: the Ramsaran Transport Company. It was to provide him with his role and function in life. Of that, there could never be any serious doubt or question. From the earliest days it had been drummed into his head that nothing else was expected of him. ‘I don’t want you to come with any doctor stupidness to me,’ Egbert Ramsaran had said. ‘Leave that to Bholai. I not going to tolerate any nonsense from you. I sending you to school so that you could learn to read and write and add and subtract – especially add and subtract because that is what your life will be about. Nothing else! That was all I needed in my day so I don’t see why it should be any different with you.’

  Accordingly, operating on the instructions he had received, Wilbert neglected the frills of education and concentrated his efforts on mastering the arts of addition and subtraction; and learning to read and write tolerably well. These accomplishments successfully achieved, the education of Wilbert Ramsaran came to an effective end. School, as such, held no further interest for him. Wilbert did not seek the companionship of boys of his own age. He had nothing in common with most of them: their ambitions and general outlook were not his. His fate had already been decided and their competitive cleverness and passion for the frills of education irritated him. Nevertheless, he was acutely sensitive to their jibes and was quick to take offence at insults – real and imaginary. He was proud of his natural physical strength and was always ready to call on it to settle arguments.

  Having fulfilled his father’s commands, he seized every opportunity to absent himself from the irksome confinement of the classroom and to roam haphazardly around the seedier streets of Port-of-Spain to which he was irresistibly drawn. His teachers complained to Egbert Ramsaran. ‘Your son does hardly ever be in school,’ they said. ‘At the rate he seem to be going he won’t learn anything.’ Egbert Ramsaran’s response was disappointing. ‘You try beating him?’ ‘We tried beat him,’ they replied, ‘but it don’t seem to have any effect on him at all.’ Egbert Ramsaran laughed. ‘He could read and write?’ ‘Just about,’ they said. ‘And he could add and subtract?’ ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘he very bright in arithmetic.’ ‘Well then, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. That is all I send him to school to learn in the first place. I don’t care about nothing else. I wouldn’t be surprised if he have more to learn from outside school than inside it.’ ‘If that is your attitude,’ they said, ‘we can’t do nothing.’

  The teachers gave up on Wilbert and he was permitted to come and go virtually as he pleased. The arrangement suited him.

  Wilbert was a regular visitor to the hovel occupied by Chinese Cha-Cha and his mistress. He had retained a soft spot for his feckless uncle and enjoyed being in his company. Chinese welcomed Wilbert warmly. With Chinese it was possible to forget about things and – to use a favourite phrase of his – ‘take things easy’. In fact, he seemed to do nothing else but take things easy. Wilbert did not have to answer any awkward questions (such as why he was spending his time with him and not at school) since Chinese treated him as a fully adult person, offering him glasses of rum and cigarettes and speaking to him on a variety of subjects with frank openness.

  Chinese had given up even the pretence of working, putting the blame on his diabetic condition. ‘Sometimes I doesn’t even have the strength to lift a glass,’ he moaned pathetically. ‘You could ask she.’ Chinese baulked from referring to his mistress by name. She was an unprepossessing woman. Her hair was matted and greasy and her moonshaped face was heavy and sickly yellow. ‘I never see you get so weak yet,’ she said. ‘If it was as bad as you like to say you would have been dead by now. You could lift a barrel if it had rum inside it.’ She smiled at him pastily: it was an affectionate rejoinder. Chinese waved her remarks away. ‘Sometimes it does get so,’ he added, ‘a feather could knock me down.’ She shook her head at him. It was her labours which maintained them: she worked on a night-shift in a nearby laundry. Exactly what attracted her to Chinese – and kept her attracted to him – was a mystery. She possessed both those qualities which were anathema to him: application and a hard-headed realism. They were squandered on Chinese but she did not complain. Her affection for him and her patience never seemed to waver. ‘She’s a good woman,’ Chinese would say, nodding appreciatively in her direction. ‘A damn good woman. Ugly as sin, mind you. But a damn good woman all the same, eh!’

  They lived on George Street near the main Port-of-Spain market. Chinese had drifted here after the break-up of his marriage. He had found the area entirely to his taste and so he had stayed; an intimate of every dingy bar, restaurant and cafe. ‘I wouldn’t move from this place if you was to pay me a million dollars,’ he said to Wilbert. ‘I could never be happy anywhere else. And what use I would have for a million dollars? Eh? I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Here it have everything a man could ever need in life. Take food. She’ (pointing at his mistress) ‘does go across to the market when business finish for the day and take she pick of what get leave behind. We does hardly spend a cent on food. Is all for free. No fuss. No bother.’ Chinese sipped delicately at the glass of rum he was holding and gurgled contentedly. ‘All the furniture you see in here – this bed I lying on, the table over there, the chairs – I get all that for free or nearly free. They does just be lying about on the street. You just have to know where to look.’ He wiggled his toes. The bed creaked noisily. ‘I don’t go for all this rushing about here, there and everywhere after money. My constitution could never stand up to that. My philosophy is to take things nice and easy. Money is more trouble than it worth. Money and ambition. That is one thing your father never understand.’ Chinese took another sip fromhis glass and gurgled as he had done before. ‘What more I need than this, eh?’

  The room he occupied was at street level. It was approached up a dank and insalubrious brick tunnel piled with sacks of charcoal (a charcoal merchant had premises to the rear) and cluttered with wheelbarrows, trolleys and other implements of the trade. The room was dark and poorly furnished. Even on the brightest days it was murky – it had originally been intended as a store-room. Daylight fought an inconclusive passage through a small, solitary window protected by a latticed grille. The panes, not easy to get at, had not been cleaned within living memory and were opaque with the accumulated dust and grime. However, since it was always kept open in order to admit the maximum amount of the stale, stagnant air, it did not matter.

  The most conspicuous and impressive item of furniture was – appropriately enough – the bed where Chinese passed most of his time. It was a brass fourposter raised high off the floor. Many of the rods were either missing or bent and it quivered and rattled with every movement. The castors were placed in shallow tins of water to prevent the ants from crawling up the posts. It glimmered mountainously in the gloom. Next to the bed and pushed up against the wall was a small square card table with two chairs. In the centre of the table, on a white lace doily, was a red glass vase with a single faded paper flower – a daffodil. These were the basic furnishings but the room was cluttered with other odds a
nd ends: stools, oil-lamps, a chest, a hat-rack with a cracked mirror; the debris, in short, of a lifetime’s scavenging and scrounging on the streets around the market.

  At the back was a courtyard paved with flagstones. It was here the charcoal merchant held sway in a lean-to shed equipped with a cash register and weighing scales. All around was the peeling, crumbling façade, fringed by a precariously supported wooden balcony, of the squat, two-storeyed tenement. Apart from the charcoal merchant’s customers, there was a constant coming and going to and from the standpipe in the middle of the courtyard – the only source of water it seemed in the district, for it was here several of the market vendors (not to mention ordinary passers-by) came to slake their thirst. At least a dozen families shared the tenement, living in conditions not markedly superior to Chinese’s. Their washing straddled a criss-cross of lines strung from the balcony. Throughout the day and late into the night the courtyard was a hive of busy but inscrutable activity.

  Chinese was lying prostrate on the bed and smoking, flicking the ash on the floor. At the opposite end of the room his mistress was preparing lunch, energetically fanning a coalpot with a piece of cardboard. The coalpot sat on a chest and was surrounded by a scattering of empty rum bottles and packing cases. A wheelbarrow clattered along the tunnel. ‘Tell me,’ Chinese said, ‘you believe in all this money business like your father?’ He did not wait for Wilbert to answer. ‘Let me give you some sound advice for which you will thank me in later years. Give it all away, man. Give it all away and live like me!’ Chinese gestured expansively.

  Wilbert laughed. ‘Who you want me to give it to?’

  ‘I don’t care who you give it to.’ The bed quivered and rattled as Chinese hauled himself upright. ‘Give it to me. I will get rid of it for you, eh! In no time at all. Another thing, I wouldn’t bother to get married if I was you. Is not necessary. Is a crazy thing to do. All you need to do is find yourself a good woman like I find and settle down with she somewhere. That is my recipe for happiness. What you say, eh?’ Chinese nodded emphatically and the bed rattled in unison. He stubbed out the cigarette on me wall above his head and threw the butt on the floor.