Jeevan was sickly right from the beginning. Some of the neighbours whispered about Dulari’s age, and others mentioned Narpat’s well-known dietary eccentricities. The boy developed sores on his knees from creeping about on the hard floor, and Dulari nightly applied a balm of aloes to his feet. Occasionally his mother placed him on the step leading to her garden while she picked at the weeds. Once he rolled off the step and crept beneath the house. She dropped her cutlass, pulled him out, and dusted his knees and palms. “Don’t ever go there again, Jeeves. You understand?” As was the habit with Trinidadian Indians, she had shortened and anglicized his name. The new name stuck.
Every evening Jeeves squatted with Chandra, Kala, and Sushilla on the Pavilion and listened to lengthy lectures on ethics, religion, and nutrition. His sisters sat attentively, chins on cupped palms, but Jeeves struggled to stay awake. Occasionally he recalled the straggle of little boys he had spotted earlier in the day, running along the road dragging sardine cans fashioned into cars and trucks or returning from the rivers with strings of guabeen and cascadoo, and at other times he focused on a cockroach crawling on the wooden floor planks. He frequently dozed off, awakened by the moths banging against the gas lamp set atop Carnegie.
Interwoven into the lectures were snippets of information on cane farming, the island’s politics, and fables that Narpat called “Nancy stories.” One of these fables terrified Jeeves, and he would cover his ears whenever his father was midway, though he had heard its conclusion many times. The story was of a warrior besieged in battle and, in desperation, promising his god the first person he saw when he returned to his homeland. “This master fighter, tired like a dog, finally reach home. And the first person he spot was his last little child running out to greet him.” Narpat would pluck Jeeves from the bench and hoist his squirming son before him. “But the warrior had already made a promise so he had no choice.”
Jeeves would look in confusion at his father’s face, stricken with the clench of too many frowns, and then hear his mother from the kitchen, her voice seeming to float on a long sigh, “Leave the boy alone. Don’t frighten him for nothing.”
As the evening progressed, Narpat grew more serious. He constantly criticized the neighbours, who were busily wiring their houses ever since electricity had come to Lengua a year ago. “What you see happening around here,” he told his children one night, “is nothing more than follow fashioness. Monkey see, monkey do. What is the point of this electricity nonsense when you could get the brightest light from any gas lamp? No outage, no blackout, no monthly bill.” Jeeves gazed at a moth trapped inside the lampshade, scraping the soot with its frantic fluttering. “And why you want a big, fancy concrete house when a small, humble, two-bedroom hut with no unnecessary furniture is so comfortable? A hammock? That is the prime cause of laziness and hunchback. A rocking chair? The shakes. Malkadee. A couch? Stoop shoulder and lumbago. I could spot these couch people from a mile walking like if they dragging a tail.” Jeeves tried to imagine these strange people. After each lecture, his mother fed him a bowl of soup made from pumpkin vines, fever grass, and vervine brought in the evenings from the canefield by Narpat. Occasionally this grim diet was enlivened by slices of mangoes or squishy pawpaws or wedges of fragrant soursop.
The nighttime arrangements were disastrous both for Jeeves and for his sisters—who drew turns to nap next to him—not only because he was a boy but also because the diet administered by his father left him suffering frequent bouts of diarrhea. “The system getting rid of all the slush and sledge,” his father said. “I have to strengthen you up so you could help me in the canefield.” This was the only intimation to the boy that he was different from his sisters, and it managed to transform his tasteless meals into a manageable ritual. Each morning, while his sisters were dressing for school with their white blouses and green skirts, plaiting and oiling their hair, dusting their faces with Johnson’s Baby Powder, his mother removed the old plastic tablecloth she had placed beneath the sheet the night before, examined it for stains, flipped it a few times, then draped it over the railing on the porch. Jeeves would stand next to the bed, his thumb in his mouth, and stare at this early morning activity. One evening Chandra, the eldest sister, complained about Jeeves’s “bulgy eye watching me all the time” and received a stern reprimand from their father who had named the bedroom the Barracks because in it sleeping arrangements were fluid and everyone was treated equally. “Our own little commune,” he had said. “The way all proper family suppose to operate.”
The sisters, particularly Chandra and Kala, were irritated by Jeeves’s constant clapping at the mosquitoes trapped inside the bed’s netting, the wet, lapping sound he made sucking his thumb, and the way he would follow them to the porch when they were leaving for school, wearing a nightie they had outgrown. Occasionally he was massaged with a yellow hardi and turmeric paste to deter sandflies and mosquitoes. His sisters bolted down the road, praying that none of their schoolmates would notice Jeeves glowing like a weak bulb and peeping through the wooden balusters, the nightie skimming the ground.
Jeeves would remain in the porch for a while, watching the little boys shouting and laughing on their way to school, until his mother shooed him inside with her cocoyea broom for his orange juice and his small bowl of soup. This special diet didn’t agree with him; each month he grew knobbier, and his knees, his eyes, and his shoulder blades more protuberant. His mother usually started the day in a good mood, but after she had cooked, swept the entire house with her cocoyea broom, and washed the wares on the wooden ledge projecting from the kitchen and the clothes on the ribbed concrete tub outside, she was flustered and short-tempered. By then the light-colored cotton dresses she favoured would be damp and smudged with ashes and vegetable stains. Only when her three daughters returned from school, their khaki bookbags crammed with loose paper and pencils, would she soften a bit and inquire about their day while she set the food on the table.
Jeeves was frequently annoyed by Chandra’s tendency to follow him around circumspectly and by Kala’s habit of interrupting and correcting his manner of speaking. Most of all, though, he was peeved that they were allowed to go to Hakim’s parlor, about ten minutes away, to fetch butter and cheese and tins of sardine. In her own way Sushilla was just as insufferable because she would cry for inexplicable slights and hide beneath the table until she was coaxed out by her mother.
Once he had followed Chandra halfway to the parlour, hiding in the roadside ditch until a neighbour, One-foot Satoo, spotted him. Chandra ran back screaming, and Jeeves, fished out by his mother and dragged to the porch, received a serious flogging. When his father returned from the canefield at six-thirty, he told Jeeves, “Right now you have more than one hundred germs crawling all over you and inside your body like bachac, eating up everything on the way. Hookworm and tapeworm already climbing up to find a nice nest next to your kidneys. You ever hear about this little boy who used to play in these nasty drains?” Narpat gazed at his son’s sickly body. “He end up looking like a crappo fish that not even his own mother could recognize. A black, nasty, slimy tadpole.” He glanced once more at his son and conjured a pet name. “You understand, Carea?” Jeeves, imagining the queasiness in his stomach to be the hookworm and tapeworm establishing a beachhead, shook his head. “The only cure is the cornhocks.”
Kala ran immediately into the kitchen and returned with a corn husk, ribbed like a frayed, elongated grenade. Narpat hauled Jeeves outside to the copper, dipped in an aluminum bucket, and heaved the water over his son’s naked body. Jeeves pressed his palms against his eyes and spluttered. While Narpat was lathering him with a blue, foul-smelling laundry soap, he explained that the drain was overflowing with dead animals, water snakes, and leeches that could hide between his toes and live there for years. Jeeves raised a leg and tried to spread his toes. The rainwater from the barrel mingled with the soap to form a soft oily solution that was difficult to wash off, so Jeeves had several buckets of water dashed against him before he was led into the house, abraded and thoroughly cleansed. That night he received an especially strong dose of the laxative senna, and Chandra, whose turn it was to sleep next to him, remained awake for half the night, sniffing and murmuring.
Two weeks later, a month after Jeeves’s fourth birthday, Narpat hired Janak, a stiff, morose man who owned the only taxi in the village, an Austin Cambridge with a cracked windshield and its shocks shot through, to carry the family to the Ramleela celebrations at St. Julien’s village, about half an hour from Lengua. Janak had also decided to bring along his four sons, who sat in the back with Chandra, Kala, and Sushilla. The boys were as stiff and grim looking as their father, and while Jeeves’s three sisters frowned in displeasure, their neatly ironed dresses threatened by this intrusion, Jeeves, sitting atop his mother, shifting each time the car landed in one of the potholes, took in the view.
They passed Hakim’s parlour, its front steps almost running into the road, then a few wooden houses built on awkward slopes and, as the car grated on, a pond with ducks swimming in the muddy water. Beyond the pond, a bison was dragging a log while its owner swished his whip on the animal’s back. After about ten minutes they came to a road curving down a hill and narrowed by a jagged landslide. Exposed boulders and gravel dredged and beaten by the rain were scattered all along the slope, which, Jeeves saw, led to a ravine shadowed by tangled bamboo. A few etiolated papaw trees with sickly yellow leaves clung to the eroding soil.
Janak drove slowly, making no attempt to evade the potholes, and Jeeves peered out of the car to gauge the distance between the tires and the landslide. Occasionally, to save on gas, Janak switched off the engine and allowed the car to coast before he kick-started it with a jerk that pitched the children forward. His eldest son, lanky and bony, pursed his lips and made a strange droning sound. Chandra, sitting next to him, tossed her hair angrily and squeezed forward.
“This road is killing my vehicle. Just now the whole place will cave away. But my understanding is the government don’t care—”
“All these homeowners have to do is build some good soakaway at the back and retaining walls at the side. One weekend work.”
Jeeves pushed his head out of the window to look at a narrow wooden bridge that groaned and shook as the car passed over the loose planks. Farther along he spotted men and women, some on bicycles, with cutlasses slung from their waists. A few of the women glanced at Janak’s vehicle, and one of them said, “Where you going with that sardine can, Janak?”
His eldest son stopped droning. “Daddoes! I tell you that would happen.” He tried to stamp his feet, and Chandra tugged her skirt away.
“Don’t worry, Bankey. Dog have mouth. Let them bark.” And after a while, “Let them try to go to the Ramleela in they tractor.” Bankey rattled out a high-pitched chortle. “See how long it will take.” Bankey’s brothers joined in his mirth. “Pok-pok-pok-splut-splut.” Janak imitated a tractor stalling. His children giggled.
But Narpat put an end to this frivolity. “I travel once on a tractor straight from Lengua to Port of Spain. Take me the whole day. August the eighteenth, nineteen forty-seven. It was during the war, when these Americans had set up their base in Chaguaramas. Everybody was rushing to work there because of the nice American dollars. Half the sugar mills shut down during that time.” As he recounted his trip, Janak’s children sank into a fretful gloominess.
A few minutes later Janak pulled up alongside a parlour, a huge wooden box balanced on two planks atop a drain. He got out of the car and asked solemnly, “Penny sweet drink and sugar cake? Anybody want?” His children snorted and raised their hands. “One hand, two, three, four. That make it four penny sweet drink in all.”
“And four sugar cake,” Bankey rasped.
“And four,” Janak repeated. “Children nowadays,” he gushed. “They too smart.” He peered into the car. “Any more hands? Only four?”
“These children don’t drink sugar water,” Narpat said. “Poison does taste nice sometimes.” When Janak returned, Narpat added, “You know how these sellers does make sugar cake? Grind up the coconut with their teeth and spit it out in a bowl with sugar and water. Careful you don’t find any teeth in it.” For the rest of the trip, Janak’s children turned their sugar cakes, biting cautiously.
Narpat remained silent until they approached the crowded town with the wares of small shops advertised on elaborate Plexiglas signs and gaudy banners strung above the doorways. As the car inched forward in the traffic, he pushed his head out of the window and shouted to a listless policeman hovering outside Maggie’s bar, “Why you don’t lock up all them idlers instead of looking for a free drink?”
The policeman glanced up angrily, but Janak, grinding his gears, overtook two slow-moving cars and moved out of view. “That Pangay is a bad man to cross. He don’t make joke.”
“He just looking for bribe. Like everybody else in this country. Trini-dad. Tricki-dad. Everybody with some scheme in their back pocket.” He turned to the children in the back. “Learn it when they still small. While children in other country learning to read and write, here they mastering trickery and thiefing.” As they approached the recreation ground where the Ramleela was being enacted, the children came to life. They spotted a huge cardboard cutout of Ravana, the twelve-headed demon-god, swaying in the air. Jeeves had never been to this festival before. He was impatient to get out of the car, and while Janak searched for a parking spot alongside the road, shaking his head at the erratically parked vehicles, Jeeves gazed at the rakshas, the demons, their bodies glistening with black oil, and the rishis, wise old sages with beards made from loosened ropes. Skipping monkey men with rigid, erect tails and animals with papier-mâché faces and cardboard torsos scampered about.
Finally Janak squeezed in between two cars, slightly bumping the vehicle behind him. Jeeves wanted to rush into the ruckus, but his mother’s firm grasp restrained him. Vendors were standing over boxes filled with doubles, oily chickpea sandwiches, and pickled mangoes and pommecythere. Janak and his children disappeared into the crowd, and a few minutes later Jeeves’s sisters wandered off with their mother.
Standing by his father, Jeeves was exhilarated by the aroma of sweetmeats, the chatter coursing though the crowd, the actors dancing and jousting with one another, and the pulsating rat-a-tat of tassa drums. But his father, who started walking ahead, said, “Primitive nonsense. People hopping about and making a mockery of their religion.” When he passed the vendors, he said, “Toxins. Look at how much bloat-up people it have in this crowd. Diabetes and stroke just waiting to happen. The poison shoot straight up to their brains. Eating up everything on the way.”
A mournful Hindi film song grated out from two loudspeakers fastened to the branches of a samaan tree. A group of young men danced tipsily to the music, wriggling their fingers above their heads while executing complicated twirls. When they moved on, he told his son, “In ancient times, these festivals wasn’t just a pappyshow with drunken, sickly people parading about in their fancy clothes. They were like training camps.” He gestured dismissively to the dancing men. “Look at them. Look at how far the Aryans fall. They take all these great ideas and make it in a big game. What you think all these munis and rishis would say if they know that these things that they take centuries to write, end up as a big pappyshow?” He didn’t wait for a response. “How much people around here really understand the meaning of this performance? Not one! Not a single one.” Jeeves stared at an actor with antlers fashioned from a guava branch pretending to butt a group of excited young boys who had strayed into the rectangular area reserved for the performance. “And that family over there.” He gestured to a chubby teenaged boy plodding along with his fat, sweating parents. “A perfect example of a couch family. Couch father, couch mother, and couch son. They not going to last too long because the spine already damage. Liver and kidneys cramp up and twist out of shape. Mucus leaking from every vent. The organs have only thirty percent cranking potential again, if so much.”
A few men greeted Narpat but then hurried away. Jeeves was given a brief commentary on each of them. “Goolcharan. Suppose to be a sadhu taking care of the Craignish temple, but every night he in the cinema. Cinema Sadhu, they call him. And Malik. The most popular doubles vendor in Princes Town. You notice how dirty his fingers was? Salmonella and gastro. Kill more people than World War One and Two combine.”
Finally one couple stood their ground: Dulari’s brother, Bhola, his wife, Babsy, and their daughter. “Ay-ay. How you and the boy land up alone so?” Bhola, a stocky man whose paunch was neatly outlined in his tight banlon jersey, glanced at his wife, a tall, straight woman with thin, impatient lips. “You didn’t see little Mr. Dubay here?” He chortled and tugged the hair above Jeeves’s ear roughly. His wife ignored Jeeves, pulling her little girl—who had already developed the mother’s rigid features—closer.
“I didn’t cut out to be a duck with fourteen children quacking behind me. Women have their own matters to discuss, and that is none of my business.”
The wife moved away. “Come on, Bhola. We missing all the drama. Come on, Prutti.”
“Yes, go. Go and see the pappyshow. It good for little children. Plenty jokes and thing. Real interesting and educational.”
“Okay, little Dubay.” Bhola pinched Jeeves’s arm, almost wringing out a gob of flesh. “We will leave you two to enjoy the pappyshow.” He shot out a clattering laugh. The mother spun around angrily, and the daughter, almost in the same fashion, pirouetted and strode off.
“Take a good look at that family. That spread-out walk of Bhola mean that he have a serious case of godi. Hernia. Weak abdominal muscles. Stones tie-up in a knot. Everything slipping down. Mother and daughter no better either. Not out in the sun long enough. Living in the dark like cockroach. That is why they was perspiring so much and blocking the sun with their hand.” Bhola, some distance away, clapped a man on his shoulder. “A very bad influence.”
“Who?” Jeeves asked.
“Your uncle Bhola. He have a mistress.”
“What is that?”
“Another wife.”
Jeeves tried to make sense of this, then gave up. They passed a vendor scooping out shaved ice from a bucket, slapping it into a glass, lathering the cone with syrup, topping it with a dribble of condensed milk, then whacking out the compressed ice from the glass.
“Snowball. You want one?”
Jeeves knew he should refuse, but the sight of the excited children clustered around the vendor, and others walking away licking their cones and dipping their fingers in the condensed milk, was too much. “I could have one?”
“Wait right here.”
Narpat returned, holding the snowball before his face as if it were a glowing light. Jeeves took the snowball, punched a hole at the tip, and slurped some of the icy syrup. He crumbled away thimbles of ice and sucked joyfully. Throughout his father was silent, but when Jeeves was licking the red dye that had rolled down his elbow, he asked, “How it taste?”
“Sweet. It taste sweet and nice.”
Jeeves looked up at his father and smiled.
“Now tell me how long you think this happiness will last?”
Jeeves puzzled over the question.
“Where the snowball now?”
“It finish.”
“Good. Very good. And that is exactly what happen to the happiness too. It finish. But you know what remain? The paint and the sugar. In a hour or two they will start working on you. Plastering the stomach. Coating the vessels. Slowing down the system. Now tell me what lesson you learn?”
Jeeves thought for a while. “That snowball will make you sick?”
“Good. Very good. People who only interested in a few minutes of happiness without bothering to think about what going to happen later don’t last too long. Instant gratification. Say gratification.”
He looked at the red trickle on his wrist. “Gra-fi-ashan.”
“Remember that word good. Bhola look like he forget it. Now let us go and look for the women and them.”
Holding Jeeves’s hand, Narpat steered him to a shirtless man squatting and turning a tassa drum against a coalpot. “They have to heat up the goatskin for it to make a good sound. Heat it up good, brother,” he told the squatting man. When they walked away, he said, “You notice how muscular his hands was compare with the rest of his body? Is hard work beating that drum.”
“He tired then?” Jeeves glanced back.
“Too drunk to be tired. He operating on automatic.” He told Jeeves that alcohol released gas bubbles in the brain, the bubbles merging until it was big enough to take over the body like a copilot, but his son had stopped listening; a few yards away a very dark man with his long hair tied in a ponytail and with a thin, slippery-looking moustache that ran straight down his chin, was brandishing a wand, dipping the flaming tip into his mouth, puffing out his cheeks, then withdrawing the still-glowing tip. A group of children watched in fascination.
“Fire eater.” Narpat chuckled.
“How he could do that?”
“Easy. Is not real fire. Only crappo could eat fire.”
“It look real.”
Narpat smiled. “Everything look real if you not paying proper attention.” He walked up to the fire eater. “I could borrow that for a minute?”
The fire eater looked confused, but he gave Narpat the wand, thinking perhaps that this impudent spectator wished to test the heat of the fire, but as he watched in astonishment, Narpat opened his mouth wide and plunged the burning tip inside.
Jeeves uttered a stifled cry. He saw his father’s mouth with a trace of a smile closing around the fire, the look of surprise and pain in his eyes, his cheeks swelling, spitting out the wand, and coughing out little drops of fire.
For the rest of the afternoon, Narpat remained silent. He said nothing when the crowd gathered excitedly for the ceremonial burning of the Ravana effigy; he held his peace when, on the way back, Janak commented on the Ramleela; he made no comment when the children gushed about the club fights and the funny cardboard animals. But when Janak dropped them off, he leaned over and whispered to Jeeves, “I have the cleanest mouth in the whole village now. Properly sterilize. Burn out all the germs and parasites. Get rid of them for good.” He smiled painfully.