The Chip-Chip Gatherers

by Shiva Naipaul

  ‘She must have gone with only the clothes on her back,’ Wilbert said.

  Sita bent down and picked up a powder puff which she played with idly.

  ‘Do you think she’ll come back?’

  Sita shook her head. ‘Not this time.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Sita did not answer.

  ‘Is as if she went mad.’ Wilbert walked into the room.

  ‘She didn’t have to go mad. She was always mad. In a sense, this is the sanest thing she ever did in her whole life.’ She let the powder puff slip from her fingers. Where it fell the white particles of powder hung in the air.

  Wilbert looked at her. Her face was bloodless. He felt sorry for her. Never had she seemed so vulnerable. ‘You sound as if you have no feelings at all for her,’ he said – but not angrily.

  ‘I do have feelings for her,’ she said. ‘When I was little girl I used to cry when she would suddenly get up and disappear without a word. But I couldn’t cry forever. The time had to come when it made no difference to me whether she was there or not there.’ Her bloodless face stared at him. ‘Why should I begin crying for her all over again? Why?’ Nevertheless, she was crying.

  He listened to the sense of her words rather than to the words themselves. He observed the delicate curve of the mouth, the firm moulding of the nose, the protuberant cheekbones and slightly sunken cheeks; and explored the unfamiliar, brooding depths of the eyes. In that brief space of time Sita acquired a fresh clarity.

  Sita averted her face from him. ‘We must clear this mess up,’ she said. Her voice was stifled. ‘And – we must break the news to your father somehow.’

  Egbert Ramsaran did not take the trouble to inspect the damage. When Wilbert brought the news of the night’s events to him he had responded with an apparent lack of concern. ‘Stop harassing me. I don’t have time for such foolishness. If Sushila want to mash up everything she have that is she affair. She will have to walk about naked for I not going to replace a single button.’

  ‘Sita say she not going to come back this time.’

  Egbert Ramsaran’s eyes clouded with a momentary uncertainty. ‘Nonsense,’ he whistled. ‘Who it have for she to go to, eh? Who? She bound to come back. If not today then tomorrow.’

  He went to work as usual and when he returned in the evening he did not have to be told that Sushila still had not arrived. ‘She bound to come back,’ he said. ‘Who it have for she to go to?’ He avoided looking at Sita. The pattern was repeated the next day: and the day after. On the fourth day Egbert Ramsaran maintained a rigid silence: and on the fifth he called Wilbert to him and delivered his instructions. ‘Knock on my door when she come back. But don’t disturb me for anything else. You hear that? Just knock on my door when she come. She bound to come back to me. Who it have for she to go to, eh? Who?’

  Egbert Ramsaran immured himself in his bedroom, refusing food and drink. For hours they listened to him pace and once he groaned aloud. He paced back and forth for most of the night and then, towards morning, there was silence. Wilbert crept up and put his ear against the door, trying to catch the smallest sound within. But there was nothing to be heard. It was an unbroken and absolute stillness. He peeped in at the keyhole and saw his father stretched out motionless on the bed. Egbert Ramsaran was lying flat on his back and staring up at the ceiling. Disobeying the instructions he had been given, Wilbert knocked.

  ‘She come back?’ The voice that answered was as dead as the motionless figure he had seen.

  ‘No. But …’

  ‘I tell you not to disturb me for anything else.’

  ‘You must have something to eat, Pa. You must keep your strength up. Sita preparing food for you … Pa? … You hearing me? You must keep your strength up. You must have something to eat.’

  There was no response to his entreaties; not a shuffle or a murmur. Egbert Ramsaran did not emerge from his bedroom all that day. It was not until the following afternoon he stirred and, opening the door, called for Sita. She had returned from school a few minutes before and was still wearing her crisp uniform. Wilbert accompanied her.

  He was shocked by the sight that greeted him. His father appeared to have shrunk and dried up during his incarceration; to have become smaller and frailer and older. Wilbert shuddered. The image of the desiccated pond which Singh had shown him on the estate a long time ago – such a long time ago it seemed to be an experience remembered from another life – rose up unbidden from the obscure recesses of memory. He saw as vividly as if he were there the caked, creamy-white mud, minutely veined and segmented by a mosaic of tiny cracks. There was Singh prodding at it with a stick. His father too seemed veined and segmented and cracked: a pond from which the life was being slowly sucked out and dissipated in the dry air. Egbert Ramsaran’s face had a waxen pallor and the eyes were bright and hard: it was a harsh, surface brightness, cold and lacking in depth. The real eyes might have been removed and marbles inserted in their sockets. His skin was the texture of parchment. Wilbert would not have been surprised if the fragile structure were to fall apart and tumble in a disjointed heap on the floor.

  Egbert Ramsaran gave no sign of having noticed his son. The marble eyes were pinned on Sita.

  ‘You should have something to eat,’ she said. ‘It’s no good to be without food for so long.’

  ‘Is not food I want.’

  ‘At least a cup of tea then.’

  ‘Is not tea I want.’ He coughed and his whole body was racked. ‘Come closer where I could touch you.’

  Sita approached the bed timidly.

  Egbert Ramsaran pinched and kneaded her arms and cheeks. ‘Very soft! Very tender!’ He removed his hands abruptly and did not speak for a while. The marble eyes were set and frozen. ‘That is a nice uniform you wearing,’ he began afresh. ‘You still going to school, eh? Learning French and Spanish and Latin. B.A. Languages! You real lucky, not so?’

  ‘I’m very grateful for everything you’ve done for me.’

  ‘Grateful!’ He laughed hoarsely. ‘Is not your gratitude I want. What good is your gratitude to me? It won’t bring …’ He had another bout of coughing. ‘You won’t have much to be grateful for by the time I done with you. You could take my word for that.’

  Sita bowed her head.

  Egbert Ramsaran hauled himself upright and dangled his legs over the edge of the bed. ‘You won’t have any more need for that nice uniform. From today your education finish. Finish! You could forget the convent. You could forget about B.A. Languages.’

  Sita lifted her head and looked at him. Since her mother’s departure the convent had seemed an irrelevance. Her continued attendance there was like planning for tomorrow knowing the world was to end today. If she had performed the motions – putting on her uniform, collecting her books, catching the bus, answering the roll call – it was done out of sheer habit; and because there was nothing else to do.

  Her unruffled acquiescence infuriated Egbert Ramsaran. ‘And that is not all,’ he yelled at her. ‘I want you to take all them expensive books I buy for you and carry them out to the back yard. I’ll meet you there.’ He slid off the bed.

  ‘To the back yard? Why?’

  ‘Because I’m going to watch you burn them.’

  Sita was devastated. Her poise crumbled and she slumped at his feet. ‘Don’t make me do that. Ask me to do anything but that. But please don’t make me burn them.’

  Egbert Ramsaran laughed. ‘You not going to have any more use for books. So the best thing to do is burn them.’

  ‘Let me give them away instead,’ she begged. ‘I’ll give them away. But don’t make me burn them.’ All her sorrows had come to centre on the books.

  ‘I don’t want you to give them away. I want to see you burn them.’ He sidestepped her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Go and ask your mother. She will tell you why.’

  ‘You really have to do this to her, Pa?’

  Egbert Ramsaran acted as if he had only just then b
ecome aware of his son. ‘Oh! You here too,’ he said.

  Sita got up from the floor and dashed past them.

  ‘What good will it do, Pa? It won’t bring Sushila back.’

  Egbert Ramsaran wrapped a blue dressing-gown around him, drawing the sash in tightly. ‘You better keep out of this if you know what’s good for you.’ He left the room, Wilbert trailing after him.

  They met Sita carrying a pile of books out to the yard. Egbert Ramsaran installed himself at the top of the back steps in one of the wooden chairs from the kitchen: from there he would direct the operation. Sita brought a tin of kerosene from the kitchen and a box of matches. All was ready. Egbert Ramsaran stared at the disused, rotting cowsheds.

  Sita tilted the tin of kerosene and poured a thin stream of the fluid over the books, spreading it evenly. Wilbert watched her. She was working with a vengeful determination. A match sparked and she applied the flame to the soaked mound of books. Spirals of thickening black smoke rose from the sodden heap. They gathered strength, spreading like a pall across the yard. The tongues of red and yellow flames licked round the edges. Sita poked and stirred the fire with a stick, pouring more kerosene. The flames rose higher and redder. Charred fragments of paper floated into the field and the covers of the books bent and twisted and folded. Sita emptied the tin of kerosene.

  She ran up the step and went to her bedroom, returning with the diary. She threw it on the fire. Opening the cover with the tip of the stick, she peered at the closely written pages. They curled brownly at the edges.

  Egbert Ramsaran received the direct blast of the fire’s heat. Sitting at the top of the steps with his eyes shut, it seemed as if he were in the very midst of the flames. He smelt the kerosene and inhaled the acrid smoke which burnt his nostrils and suffocated him. Yet, the fierce heat was interspersed with spells when he was cold and shivery; when he wished to draw closer to the heart of the fire and warm himself. The shifts of temperature operated like a drug on him, lulling him into a drowsiness from which he had no desire to be roused. He was rocked gently by the ebb and flow of heat and cold; drifting easefully on these tides of pleasant stupor and forgetfulness which came from nowhere and went to nowhere. The fire crackled and there was a disembodied, nonsensical buzz in his ears. But that was pleasant too. Then the buzzing, formless to begin with, acquired a shape. It was a perfect circle, round and complete in itself. The circle was set in motion, revolving slowly on its centre but ever gaining in momentum until it became a dizzying whirl. He was swept up in its movement: no longer a passive spectator of its gyrations. The circle lost its shape, transformed into what resembled a hat that twirled ceaselessly. He danced on the brim, resisting the force which was pulling him into its scorched and flaming interior. It was all confusion now and he was torn between consent and refusal. He was being consumed by the fire. He must breathe a fresher, purer air cleansed of these acrid fumes. With one supreme effort he would break free and be rid of the descending, wheeling darkness. Egbert Ramsaran cried out despairingly. He collapsed forward on the chair as if he were about to tumble down the steps. The marble eyes were glazed and his head swung limply.

  ‘Your father,’ Sita said. She tossed her stick into the fire and ran up the steps to help support him.

  The doctor came and the doctor went. There was nothing much he could do. ‘When Mrs Ramsaran died I told him he ought to come for a yearly check-up. But what’s the use?’ He raised his eyebrows wearily and swung his black doctor’s bag to and fro. ‘Still, any man is free to play the fool with his own health. The statutes say nothing against it.’ He camouflaged a yawn.

  ‘He didn’t like the doctors,’ Wilbert said.

  ‘I know,’ the doctor replied sarcastically.

  ‘Will he ever recover?’

  ‘Your father will never walk again. His legs are dead. Quite dead. The nerves are like burnt out electric wires – if you see what I mean.’ The choice of phrase gave him considerable satisfaction. ‘Yes. The nerves are like burnt out electric wires – except we can replace electric wires. However, there is some hope he may regain his speech.’ He talked like a salesman; as though his offer were a bargain at the price.

  ‘And how long …’

  ‘I was coming to that. It could happen today, next week or in the next five years. It depends on the strength of the patient’s will to survive.’ The doctor smiled. ‘Knowing the kind of man your father was – sorry, is – I expect he has a lot of that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Wilbert said. ‘I expect so.’

  Sita announced to Wilbert her intention of leaving.

  ‘Don’t feel you have to leave,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no point in my staying on here any longer.’

  ‘I need somebody to help me look after Pa.’

  Sita pressed her lips together.

  ‘At least stay until I find somebody to look after him.’

  ‘People would talk if I stayed on here. More trouble!’

  ‘Let them talk. What you say?’

  ‘Until you find somebody to look after him.’

  ‘Until I do.’

  Every morning and afternoon Egbert Ramsaran, wrapped in his blue dressing-gown, was wheeled out to the verandah by Sita. In the mornings he was provided with a copy of the newspaper and in the afternoons with a detective novel. When, at midday, as the sun was creeping up the front path, Sita came to take him inside, she found the newspaper as she had left it; and when, at dusk, as the shadows lengthened, she returned, she found the detective novel untouched.

  Egbert Ramsaran sat in his wheelchair, abstracted and motionless; a graven statue fitted with eyes of shining marble. The cows trailed by in their twilight procession, mooning bulbously at him. When they strayed from their customary path down the middle of the road and poked their noses into the front gate, no stones or bottles or tins were hurled at them in repayment for their insolent boldness. He was oblivious not only of the cows but of the passers-by who paused to lean against the fence and stare impassively at the emaciated, collapsed figure whose head sagged on his chest as if he were unable to support its weight.

  Wilbert raged at them. ‘What all you looking at him for? You never see a sick man before?’ He ran down the path and chased them away. Persistent as the flies on Egbert Ramsaran’s dining table, they would return before long to resume their vigil. ‘I going to shoot one of you bitches.’ He brandished his father’s pistols.

  ‘That don’t frighten we.’

  ‘He gone mad.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Wilbert shouted back. ‘And I mad enough to shoot all of you if you don’t clear away from here and leave the man in peace.’

  ‘Is only bluff he bluffing!’

  Nevertheless, they were sufficiently cowed by the sight of the guns to maintain a respectful distance from me fence. Eventually, the novelty wore off and the crowds of spectators thinned to a trickle.

  The statue with marble eyes was deemed worthy of no more than a fleeting glance.

  Chapter Eight

  1

  Sita was more relieved than she made out by Wilbert’s offer to stay on and look after his father. Not that the house held any particular attraction for her. On the contrary; it was the tomb in which her liveliest hopes had been buried. During the years she had lived there, she had developed no affection for it. An infectious blight had overwhelmed each of its inhabitants in turn: Rani, Singh, Sushila and, finally, Egbert Ramsaran himself. Neither had she escaped its crippling influence. Wilbert was the next in line. Nothing that was either new or good could spring from that soil for nothing of any value had ever been created in it. It was sterile ground.

  But if the Ramsaran household held no particular attraction for her, neither did the world existing outside of it. What was there to choose between them? Was it better to live alone in a room in a Port-of-Spain lodging house? She imagined the sort of room it would be: the narrow bed covered with a counterpane; the mirror on the wall; the massive wardrobe pushed into a corner. In the mornings, her hand
bag slung over her shoulders, she would hurry out to join the hordes of clerical staff going to their offices; and she would return exhausted in the evening to have dinner with her fellow-lodgers. She could hear the footsteps on the stairs and the hollow voices of people she did not know. Sita recoiled from the picture. She was paralysed by indecision. That other world was sterile ground too and its aspect was no less forbidding to her. She was afraid to act and to leave Victoria would be to commit herself to a definite course of action. Whatever her choice she was done for. Finished. Washed out.

  She had wanted something positive and glorious out of life; something which would have exalted it and endowed it with a value out of the ordinary. It had always eluded her though she had had glimpses of it. What she had seen as a child in the Settlement had made no sense to her. Phulo with her tucked-up skirts and her dirty brood of children scrambling after her was not life. Basdai drinking rum in a dark corner of the hut was not life. Sharma’s passive acceptance was not life. They were as meaningless and squalid as the burning green rectangles of sugarcane; as the hot, dusty days of the dry season when the sky was a fiery metallic bowl clamped over their heads; as the driving rain and mud and windswept cloud of the wet season; as the play of light and shadow beneath the mango trees. Life had to amount to more than the sum total of its parts. It had passed her by in the Settlement. It had passed her by in Victoria. It would surely pass her by in Port-of-Spain. All it had ever given her was a miserable parody of itself.