The Chip-Chip Gatherers

by Shiva Naipaul

  ‘Since when? You always …’

  Mynah’s fork fell to the floor with a clatter, interrupting her mother’s indignation. Her head disappeared from view as she groped and fumbled under the table to retrieve it. Shanty pulled her offending knee away but she was too late. Mynah surfaced twittering.

  ‘I hope you have enough leg room under there, Wilbert.’

  Shanty stared at her sullenly.

  ‘You’ll be catching a cramp soon,’ Mynah twittered.

  ‘What’s all this about leg room and catching cramp?’ Mrs Bholai asked.

  ‘Shanty will tell you.’

  Mrs Bholai looked enquiringly at Shanty.

  Mynah squealed with unladylike laughter.

  Shanty, her face red and inflamed, leaned over the table and, lifting the vase of flowers, emptied its contents on her sister’s lap. Mynah screamed. She leapt from her chair and emptied her glass of Coca-Cola on Shanty. It all happened very quickly. The two girls grappled with each other across the table.

  ‘Oh God! Save us!’ Mrs Bholai scraped her fingers across the tablecloth. ‘And you,’ she shouted at her husband, ‘why don’t you do something? All you good for is to drink and drink and drink. Shopkeeper! Two pound of butter, half-pound of salt!’

  Mr Bholai smiled sleepily at his fighting daughters; while Gita, the peacemaker, tried to separate them.

  Julian pushed his plate away and got up. ‘I’m going from here. This is a madhouse.’

  ‘Where you going, Jules?’ Mrs Bholai gazed distractedly from her struggling daughters to her son.

  ‘He not going anywhere.’ Mr Bholai suddenly roused himself. ‘He not going anywhere. You will stay right where you is, young man.’

  ‘You can’t make me.’

  ‘Oh yes? Is that what you think? What would you do if I was to bring my belt to you and peel your backside raw with it, eh? Would that “make” you?’ Mr Bholai stood up and unbuckled his belt. He spoke with unwonted authority.

  Julian shuffled irresolutely.

  ‘For too damn long you been having your own way around here. You don’t like beer. You don’t like goat meat. Tell me what you like?’

  ‘I can’t help it if I don’t like …’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about that. It wouldn’t have kill you to take a sip of beer with me – or to have another piece of goat meat. Is time you start learning to please other people instead of just pleasing yourself. You is not the only one around here with likes and dislikes – though that is what you seem to believe. I have them too – except that nobody does take account of them. I is two pound of butter, half-pound of salt. I don’t like people calling me that, but I does put up with it for the sake of peace. None of you does ever stop to think how it does hurt me. Well I fed up to the throat with it. You listening to me? I fed up to the throat! And if tonight you don’t do as I say, you going to feel the weight of this strap.’ Swishing the belt, Mr Bholai stalked across to Mynah and Shanty. ‘You two market women will also do as I say. You even worse than market women. They can’t help the way they does behave, but you have education – or say you have. What you do with it? Where you hiding it?’ He stared at the broken vase. ‘Monsters. That is the only name for all-you. Educated monsters which is the worst kind of monster it have.’ He turned to face his wife. ‘That is what you teach them to be, Moon. It was you who teach them to hate their father so that today they have no respect for me. But I is not the only one who going to suffer – you going to suffer too. They won’t have no respect for you either.’

  ‘Liar! If we was living in San Fernando …’

  ‘If we was living in San Fernando we would have been even worse off. You family would have kick you about like a football …’

  ‘You! A drunkard and a shopkeeper! Daring to talk to me like that. My children will always respect me. They will always …’ She rested her head on the table, circling it with her bony arm.

  Mr Bholai threw the belt on the floor. ‘What’s the good?’ He sighed and opened another bottle of beer. The froth welled over the sides and dripped on to the tablecloth. ‘What’s the good?’ The remains of the meal – gnawed bones and grains of curry-stained rice – were scattered like debris.

  ‘Can I go now?’ Julian asked.

  Mr Bholai nodded. ‘Do whatever you want to do.’ He did not look at him.

  Julian disappeared behind the partition. The girls followed after him.

  Shaking his head, Mr Bholai swayed unsteadily out to the verandah and Wilbert alone remained with Mrs Bholai. It was time he returned to Victoria; time to forget about the Bholais and plunge back into the certainties of nuts and bolts and palms stained black with grease and oil. Outside, Mr Bholai coughed twice. Wilbert left the table and went out to join him. Mr Bholai was creaking slowly on the rocker and smoking. His face was indistinct, except for the frog’s eyes which considered Wilbert in silence. The red point of the cigarette glowed dully.

  ‘It’s nice and cool out here,’ Mr Bholai said. The rocker creaked; the cigarette glowed and spluttered. ‘Around Christmas it does get even cooler though.’ He did not seem at all drunk. His voice was level and sober. He tossed the cigarette over the rail. It sailed in a thin, red arc to the road below where it rolled into the gutter and disappeared. ‘What Moon doing? She still have she head on the table?’ The frog’s eyes stared across the rooftops to the invisible canefields.

  ‘Yes … I must be getting back home, Mr Bholai.’

  ‘Don’t go yet. Stay and talk with me a little.’ He offered him a cigarette.

  Wilbert refused it. ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Like your father.’ Mr Bholai laughed. ‘Is a habit I pick up in my old age.’ He paused to light the cigarette, the match sparking with a smell of sulphur. ‘I sorry you had to be a witness to all this confusion. What they does call it? Washing your dirty clothes in public? I should have keep my big trap shut. It was the beer that make me behave so. I don’t know what you must think of me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t let that worry you, Mr Bholai.’

  ‘That kind of thing never happen in this house before. We used to be a really happy little family. Not that we didn’t have we quarrels. What family doesn’t have they quarrels? Children have to grow up. Is senseless to expect them to be tied to your apron strings forever. I right?’

  Wilbert nodded.

  Mr Bholai sat forward on the edge of the rocker. He crossed and uncrossed his knees. ‘Who I trying to fool?’ he asked abruptly. ‘I can’t fool you and I can’t fool myself. The beer had nothing to do with what happen tonight. You know that as well as me. It was building up for a long time inside of me. It had to come out sooner or later.’ Smoke billowed through his nose. A car went by on the road below, its tyres screeching on the curve. ‘You father’s a lucky man to have a son like you.’

  Wilbert looked askance at him.

  ‘To have somebody to follow in his footsteps, I mean.’

  ‘But you didn’t want Julian to run a grocery,’ Wilbert said. ‘You wanted him to be a doctor. Whereas from since I was small I always knew I was going to follow my father in the business and so …’ What else was there to say? That was the long and short of it. ‘And so the question of my being something different never arise.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t want Julian to run a grocery – that is no kind of ambition for a man to have for his son. But what I getting at is this. A son should still have respect for his father even though he’s not the most successful man in the world. And, when you come down to brass tacks, what is the great crime in running a grocery? It have a lot more shameful things I could be doing. You agree with me?’

  Wilbert nodded.

  The rocker creaked. ‘Julian don’t think of it like that. None of them does think of it like that. They don’t take into consideration what I had to fight against. You know what Julian tell me the other day? He say I waste my life. Imagine telling me a thing like that!’ The cigarette described an indignant arc as Mr Bholai flung it down to the road. �
��He say that all I does think about is money and it have other things in the world beside money. He ask me if I ever wonder about the true meaning of life. The meaning of life! He say it have people who does kill theyself over that kind of thing. Philosophy he call it.’ Mr Bholai waved his arms excitedly. ‘If everybody spend they time thinking about the true meaning of life what would happen? You have to have a full belly before you could let that bother you and your belly don’t get full by magic. Somebody have to sell salt and butter.’ Mr Bholai sank back into the rocker. He softened his voice. ‘You is a educated man, Wilbert …’

  ‘I hardly have any education at all, Mr Bholai. All I know is how to add and subtract.’

  ‘You have more than me,’ Mr Bholai said impatiently. ‘It really have people who does kill theyself over the meaning of life?’ It was a genuine enquiry and search for assurance. ‘Because that is one question I never ask myself. It never occur to me. It ever occur to you?’

  ‘No,’ Wilbert replied.

  ‘You mean,’ he pursued eagerly, ‘that is all a load of nonsense Julian was talking?’

  ‘It must depend on the kind of person you are, Mr Bholai. For some people’ (he thought of Sita) ‘it might make a lot of sense.’

  ‘But you. It make any sense to you?’

  ‘No.’ Wilbert sounded weary.

  The frog’s eyes shone with relief. ‘You put my mind at rest. You is a man after my own heart.’

  Mr Bholai, content with the admission he had extracted, yawned and stretched.

  ‘I had better be going,’ Wilbert said. The conversation with Mr Bholai had depressed him, stirring a latent unrest which he could not understand. Mr Bholai yawned again. He shook Wilbert’s hand.

  ‘Thanks for putting my mind at rest. Now I must go and see what Moon is doing.’ He went inside. Wilbert lingered on the verandah. He heard Mr Bholai pleading with her. The word ‘drunkard’ floated out and a door closed. Wilbert went down the steps to the road and waited for a taxi.

  3

  ‘What is the meaning of life?’ Wilbert asked Sita.

  ‘The meaning of life?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know what it is?’

  Sita laughed. ‘What an odd question to ask all of a sudden. And even odder to ask me of all people.’

  ‘Forget how odd it is.’ Wilbert was ruffled. ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘I just live,’ she said, ‘I don’t ask why.’

  ‘That is all you do?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I live from day to day.’

  ‘It don’t matter how you live?’

  She looked at him seriously. ‘Most of us don’t have a choice in the way we live. We’ve simply got to make do with what we have.’

  ‘Suppose you not satisfied with what you have?’

  ‘Then that is your bad luck,’ she said.

  Wilbert had been sincere when he told Sammy and the other mechanics he was prepared to go on indefinitely as he was. For him, it was a test of will. He suspected that his father was waiting for him to weaken and break down; and Wilbert was resolved that nothing of the sort would happen. He would ask no favours and seek no special dispensation: he would do as he was bid. If in so doing he inflicted unnecessary punishment and hardship on himself, he was compensated by the reflection that, in the process, he was denying his father a perverse satisfaction.

  After the latter’s stroke he frequently talked to Sita of the Company and its affairs, expounding the plans he had hatched for making it more ‘streamlined and efficient’. In this role he was assertive, delivering his opinions in a loud, confident voice across the dining table. He was victim of a queer, raging optimism. ‘What worked in my father’s time won’t work now,’ he explained, chewing noisily on his food and licking his fingers. ‘He was falling far behind the times. The trouble was that in his day he didn’t have any serious competition to worry about. But nowadays it’s a different story. That place accumulate too much dead wood. We should fire at least a quarter of the people we have working there. To survive in business today you have to modernize. No getting away from it. I’m going to reorganize that place from top to bottom when Pa die. I’m going to make everything more streamlined and efficient.’

  Nevertheless, it did sometimes occur to him that it was all highly absurd and that his optimism was baseless. His words sounded hollow and empty even in his own ears. His father might not die for years. Was it worth punishing himself? Why should he not throw in his hand? These moods would come upon him suddenly and then he would be taciturn and morose. He toyed with the idea of leaving Victoria and renouncing his ‘inheritance’ which seemed like a weight dragging him down. It would be novel to make a genuinely free decision and start again from scratch. He would go to one of those lands of whose existence he wanted convincing proof. But Wilbert did not know what it was to make a genuinely free decision: he was ignorant of the art. The Ramsaran Transport Company was the centre of the universe and to escape from it would require an impetus over which he would be able to exercise no control. It would plunge him into the heart of that other universe whose focus was the market and whose presiding genius was Chinese Cha-Cha. There was no compromise; no middle ground between the two where he could safely land. He had been reared on extremes and was capable of responding only to extremes.

  Although he took no part in the discussions of the mechanics, old memories and desires would revive as he listened to their idle prattle. Sammy was the most voluble and articulate and his accounts of his adventures with women gave rise to a great deal of hilarity in the repair sheds. The shrieks, hoots and screeches of the mechanics rang through the cavernous building. One such account had stuck in Wilbert’s mind: a description of a visit he had paid the previous night to a Port-of-Spain brothel and the encounter he had had with one of its inmates.

  ‘She was like a dog in heat. Like one of them mangy pot-hounds you does see all over the place smelling each other backside.’ Sammy sniffed suggestively and the mechanics roared and clapped. ‘She was smelling like a rubbish heap. I never meet such a stinking woman in my whole life. Is as if she was rottening. As if water never touch she skin.’ Sammy crinkled his nostrils. ‘The moment I walk in the place she come straight up to me and start rubbing up she legs against me and breathing heavy heavy all over me and putting she hand inside my shirt. Like this.’ Sammy illustrated and his listeners fell about.

  ‘You lying, Sammy.’

  ‘I not lying. Is exactly what she do. “Buy me a drink, darling,” she start whispering. “Buy me a little drink and let we go upstairs and have some fun.” “Not on your life,” I say, “I not buying you anything.” She was the ugliest woman I ever see. Fat and blacker than the Ace of Spades and with a bottom sticking out ten miles behind she. She wouldn’t stop rubbing up against me and begging me to buy she a drink and go upstairs to have some fun. Like a dog she was.’ Sammy spat and surveyed his audience.

  ‘And what you do then?’

  Sammy spun round, startled by the sound of Wilbert’s voice.

  ‘What you do then?’ Wilbert repeated.

  Sammy collected himself. ‘I didn’t realize you was listening,’ he said. ‘I thought this sort of thing didn’t interest you.’

  ‘I couldn’t help overhearing.’ Wilbert reverted to his customary aloofness.

  Sammy grinned. ‘What I do then? I do the only thing I could do. I push she away from me. Then you should hear how that nigger start to curse me to high heaven.’

  Wilbert smelled afresh the stench of rotting fish and the cloying odour of the bloodstained carcasses impaled on hooks; the swollen gutters; the asphalt steaming after the rain; and heard the cry of the creature who propelled herself along the crowded pavements on the palms of her hands. ‘Make way! Don’t mash me. Make way!’ He saw Chinese Cha-Cha lying in state on a high bed in the darkest corner of a dark room, a glass clasped loosely within his fingers and talking sonorously; he saw lines of was
hing strung out across a wet courtyard and heard the trundle of wheelbarrows in a dank brick tunnel. Above all, there were the languorous scents of the stale, heated air both dulling and stimulating the senses; invading the cavernous building and washing over him. ‘What you do then?’ The question had floated involuntarily from his lips.

  His confidence in his ability to persevere was severely shaken. He tried to avoid listening to Sammy but that was impossible. Sammy’s honeyed, nasal tones had lodged in his brain. He could not keep attention fixed on what he was doing. It wandered and Wilbert, coming to with a start, would realize he had not missed a single word of Sammy’s conversation with the other mechanics.

  ‘Why don’t you come with me? You could see for yourself then if I was telling the truth.’

  Sammy’s honeyed voice buzzed in his ears.

  ‘Why don’t you come? There have to be a first time for everything. What you say? It might interest you.’

  ‘Who you talking to? Me?’

  ‘You self. Come with me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight. Today is Friday. Payday.’

  Sammy was talking and he was replying – involuntarily. The words were automatic. He was standing outside himself, a lucid, dispassionate spectator of his own dreams. It had been like that the day he had wrecked Julian’s collection of model aeroplanes.

  ‘We’ll go straight after work.’

  ‘Straight after work,’ Wilbert replied.

  Three hours later he was striding along beside Sammy and Sammy was talking incessantly and laughing; and he too was talking incessantly and laughing. It was easy: all he had to do was read his lines from the already prepared script which unwound itself in a smooth, continuous reel inside his head. Each footstep, once taken, was forgotten beyond recall; as were their unending stream of words and laughter. They stopped outside a lighted doorway.

  ‘This is it,’ Sammy said.

  They skipped up the flight of red-painted concrete steps. The walls had been painted a garish yellow reflecting the light with a sickly sheen. Two men, with greying hair, were standing at the first landing, chatting in soft, restrained voices. They were respectable in their jackets and well-creased trousers. They glanced indifferently at the newcomers, waving them through to a further flight of steps which led steeply up to what was called the saloon bar. The swing doors to the saloon bar were thrown wide open. They entered and looked round. A jukebox throbbed in one corner and a few couples shuffled lethargically across the floorboards. The whole room was drowned in a green, subaqueous gloom, thick and jelly-like, in which whorls of cigarette smoke had congealed into frozen arabesques. Metal chairs and tables were ranged against the walls.