In the village, Narpat usually got his own way, and he anticipated a swift resolution to the problem of the property rights. But the world beyond Lengua held its own rules, and Narpat’s intractability, which inspired a grudging respect from the villagers, was viewed in the cramped lawyers’ offices in Princes Town and San Fernando, and the government departments in Port of Spain, as nothing more than a nuisance. The harassed-looking lawyers, uncomfortable in their tweed jackets, a symbol of their Cambridge years, peered from behind stacks of old files and cited unresolved cases of ligitation, some as old as twenty years. The government officials glanced at Narpat’s rough country apparel and, expecting a shifting obsequiousness, were startled and affronted by his forthrightness. And they blocked all his arguments with tortuous bureaucratic subterfuges. A middle-aged official with a bored drawl told him, “The problem is that allyou country Indian does sue like if is a style. Is that what clogging up the system.”
“And fellas like you unclogging it, not so? Bright helpful fellas like you?”
The official, startled out of his drawl said, “Listen, mister, if you not happy with my help, you free to go elsewhere.”
“And I will bounce up the same slackness. People sluggish with piles and constipation. Operating only on one cylinder. ”
“Look, mister …”
“I going to the top. To the Prime Minister.”
The official relaxed; he glanced at his co-workers and grinned.
At home, Narpat’s family, already familiar with his broad condemnation of the village Indians, now listened to his criticism of other races. “When some of these British fellas abandon the island, they leave behind nice buildings and nice laws. What they didn’t leave was people in these buildings smart enough to interpret the laws. All you have now is a set of jackasses dress up in jacket and tie and pretending they know what they doing.” Kala was always keen to debate her father on anything pertaining to independence, but when he moved on to the more amorphous discussion of duty, she and her sisters cited their homework and retreated to their room. And Jeeves, alone with his father, was anxious to please him and would ask questions like, “Why is only your duty to see about these farmers?” To which Narpat would reply, “Because I don’t give up. I like a old boxer dancing around the rope.” One night he told his wife, “I going to the top. To the Prime Minister himself.”
“To who! You think he will have time for you?”
“That is his job. That is what we put him as Prime Minister for.”
Narpat’s letter to the Prime Minister was reported by Partap’s son in a one-paragraph article and created a minor scandal in the village. The enraged Manager shouted to his daughter, “Write down this. Prabble number one hundred. The dog what see it shadow in the water and leggo the bone want to live in the bower all by itself.” In the rumshops, some of the farmers speculated on the Prime Minister’s reaction when he received the letter. “I sure he never get a letter like that before. He bound to reply.”
At school Quashie asked Jeeves, “Your father really write a letter to Mr. Gibbons?”
“Yeah. A big long letter. Twenty page in all.”
Quashie whistled admiringly.
During each meeting the farmers inquired about the Prime Minister’s response. They encouraged Partap’s son to write a critical article about the Prime Minister’s private life. Say that he have half-dozen children scatter all over the place. Say that he does talk to spirit and prate.
The letter was never acknowledged, and Narpat blamed Googool, he blamed Tate and Lyle, he blamed the Prime Minister, he blamed the lawyers and aldermen, and finally he blamed the villagers who came to his house with their complaints and who grew sad and reproachful when he explained that he was unable to assist them. Frequently, he would berate them for not anticipating these problems and for their inability to look after themselves. It was not karma, he explained, or the malevolence of mysterious officials that had brought them to their state, but their own weaknesses. Sometimes Narpat’s lectures released these supplicants from pretense and they would rub their hands together and curse their condition and talk about the blight of poverty. At that point, he would call out to Dulari for a few coins.
Initially Dulari had been thrilled with her husband’s new status, and when her brother Bhola and his wife had visited, she had fussed about Narpat’s duties and about his beleaguered constituents who expected him to single-handedly ease all their burdens. She was also able to match Radhica’s air of mordant fatigue, and if a visitor had spotted these two women chatting across the road while a battalion of trucks and vans deposited hollow clay blocks, cement, sharp sand, laminated sheets, and truckloads of lumber, each load a different colour, this visitor might have assumed that the conversation was a brief respite from some laborious construction. But things were not working out the way Dulari had anticipated. Narpat’s duties took him away during unpredictable hours, and he returned harassed and brittle with annoyance. He gave away most of his county councillor’s salary to the supplicants, and Dulari, who had always felt trapped in the village, now began to take an even dimmer view of its inhabitants. She studied the house opposite. Each week some old broken section was knocked down and replaced with a modern substitute, so that in a few months a two-story concrete house with Bermuda tile roof, panel sliding doors, casement windows, and eggshell-blue walls rose from Samsoondar’s dilapidated property.
One morning Radhica came across the road and beckoned to Dulari. “Ever since we move here I wanted to invite you, didi, but with all this renovation-penovation …” She patted her cheek with her orhni as they entered the house; and Dulari, who had noted the external repairs and had often imagined the kitchen and the living room, was startled by the glossy lacquered walls, the decorative mirrors and tiles, the sparkling furniture, and the spotless kitchen with its fridge, stove, and oak cupboards. “We still have some work to do.” Radhica passed a finger over a minor brush mark on the wall and frowned. “Poochoon does always say that a clean mind could only operate in a clean house.”
When Dulari returned to her chulha, stirring the milk, she knew that she would never be able to reciprocate the invitation. Later that morning, while she was sweeping the yard, she gazed at her own house, built on uneven posts, a barrel perched uselessly on the roof, and at the rotting walls, the old wooden windows, and the knot grass sprouting from the asphalt’s wedges. Her house, always a source of frustration, now became an object of shame. Even her air of fatigue faltered when pitted against Radhica’s more polished performance whenever the other woman complained about the huge rooms she cleaned each day, the ceramic tiles she mopped, the windows and sliding doors she polished.
Nevertheless a strange friendship—part competition, part genuine amity—developed between the two women, and it became routine for them to greet each other ponderously every morning before they launched into their conversation.
Narpat, rarely at home, was unaware of this blossoming friendship. He had, though, developed a swift distaste for Radhica’s two sons—lochos and peongs, he called them—who lounged about in their gallery with their oversize unbuttoned shirts flapping like capes when they slid down the banister, hooting and laughing. Then one morning at four a.m., when the village was still wrapped in its nighttime silence, he was awakened by the piercing wail of a conch. He sat up in his bed. “Who blowing that damn thing this time of the morning?”
“Radhica and them,” Dulari replied sleepily.
“What happen? They open a fish market?”
“They blessing the house today. According to the patra, is a good day. Radhica husband check it himself.” She hesitated then added, “He is a pundit.”
“A pundit?”
Dulari recognized the edge in his voice. He got up and went to the bathroom, and she heard the trickle of water. When he returned with a wet towel draped over his shoulders, she told him quietly, “They invite us to the blessing.”
He put on his work clothes, and Dulari went to the kitchen to prepare his meal. He ate moodily, flinching each time he heard the conch’s wail. He walked to the tractor, started it, and idled its engine, the exhaust belching black towels of smoke. As he was pulling out, he shouted to his wife, “When you go to the fish market today, make sure you buy five pounds of salmon and some sardine.” The tractor jumped across the drain and romped down the road.
In the late evening he glanced at his bright-eyed children and knew they had been to the house blessing. That night he lectured them extensively on the devolution of the caste system from a practical meritocracy in ancient India to an oppressive and inflexible hierarchy maintained by the Brahmins to safeguard their authority. He related stories of local pundits masquerading as true Brahmins. He mentioned Pundit Harridath from Debe, who conducted illicit liaisons with many of his female chelas, and Pundit Samsoondar from Felicity, sought after because of his prodigious chanting capability. “This man could chant a mantra nonstop for two hours. You know why?”
“Why?” Jeeves asked sleepily.
“Because he couldn’t do anything else. Couldn’t read Hindi, couldn’t read Sanskrit. So he learn out a few mantra and pretend it was a special skill. And these gaddahars, his chelas, use to chase him all over the place, because they really believe it was a unusual talent.” The Brahmins, though, were not only charlatans; they were the main perpetrators of the Indians’ unhealthy diet. He rattled out a few sweetmeats. Ladoo. Halwa. Gulab jamoon. Batassa. The children laughed at his nursery rhyme intonation. “Sugar. Oil. Butter. Fat. They should charge every one of these fellas with murder. For killing ten, twenty people every day.” He capped off his lecture by emphasizing the glory of Aryan India, when there were majestic armies of elephants, and fierce warriors, and codes of honour, and an ayurvedic system of medicine that could cure any ailment. “Scholars living in caves in the mountains meditating for half their life to solve some puzzling riddle.”
“Any riddle, boy. Nothing was too difficult. Nothing was beyond their ability once they put their mind to it.”
At the next village council meeting, he said, “The Prime Minister has refused to acknowledge our letter. What should we do with this riddle?” The villagers looked at each other. “Give up? Leave it in the hands of god?” From his emerging smile, the gathering knew he had a plan. “What about if we force him to take notice? What about if a delegation of farmers march around his official residence at Whitehall?”
But the villagers’ taste for Gandhian resistance crumbled soon after the meeting, and even though the planned protest was reported by Partap’s son, on the appointed day Narpat was joined only by the journalist, Premsingh, Huzaifa, Soogrim, and Janak, whose taxi they had hired. By midday, however, the small delegation had attracted the attention of a few dozen vagrants and idlers who marched around Whitehall chanting, “We is people too” and “Give peace a chance” and “Don’t leggo.” During a brief lull, one of the stragglers, a recently released patient from the St. Ann’s madhouse, produced a battered trumpet and blew a stuttering tune that some of the idlers agreed was from My Fair Lady. By three o’clock the crowd had swelled to thirty, by four to almost fifty, with a half-dozen professional protestors who usually hung around Woodford Square. Narpat’s protest now included demands for a new steelband yard in Belmont, the resignation of the Commissioner of Police, an Indian radio station, and the revocation of independence. Partap’s son saw a major article.
The vagrants were the first to leave, hurrying away to secure their spots on the pavements. The professional protestors glanced guiltily at their watches and sneaked away. The idlers left soon after. On the way back, Janak made several morose pronouncements. “Half an hour again, and the police woulda be in we tail. Spot a few of them on they horse hiding by a snackette on Abercrombie street. The first slip we make, and they baton woulda be out. See some of them Marabuntas too,” he added, referring to the government’s alleged secret police composed of criminals.
“We could have lay down on the road,” Huzaifa said. “Let them beat we as hard as they want. For the sake of independence.”
“What independence? We get independence already,” Janak said.
“The small rural protest soon outgrew its limitations and burgeoned into a clarion call for justice and equality.” Partap’s son rehearsed his article.
Huzaifa, trapped between Premsingh and Soogrim, lunged forward. “Salt!”
“We accomplish what we set out to do,” Narpat said. “In this place the important thing is the size of the crowd.”
Janak didn’t like Narpat’s tone. “We don’t even know if the Prime Minister was in the building. Since he win election, he disappear again. I hear that he have a setta secret passage leading to river and mountain and beach and hoehouse.”
“Salt! We should collect salt like Gandhiji. Let we go and collect salt in Maracas bay.”
“It have no salt in Maracas,” Janak said, shattering Huzaifa’s fantasy. He remained silent for the remainder of the journey.
Five days later his fantasy was reignited. Huzaifa rushed home with the Evening News flapping in his hand. “Look! Look it right here. On the front page to boot.”
His wife Salima, a big dark woman who towered over her husband, glanced disapprovingly at the newspaper. She had been fuming over his transformation into a Gandhian acolyte. “It don’t have no picture,” she said.
“A thousand words is better than a simple picture,” he replied, confusing and angering his wife. “And it have a good few thousand here. Two thousand, three hundred, and twenty proper.”
“They shoulda drop a two-thousand-dollar fine on allyou tail for disturbing the peace.”
“Wouldn’t pay a single cent. Let General Dyer do his worse. Go to jail instead.” The idea appealed to Huzaifa.
His wife noticed his serene expression. She snatched the newspaper. “Where your name? I not seeing any reference to any Mahatma Muhammad. The Muslim Gandhi. Where you?”
This was Huzaifa’s true disappointment. Partap’s son’s article had mentioned just Narpat and focused on the multiethnic nature of the crowd. There were several references to “Trinidadian rebels with a cause” like Butler, Rienzi, and C.L.R. James. But no mention of Gandhi. None of Huzaifa. He retrieved the newspaper his wife had flung on the floor and refolded it carefully.
“Where you going now, Mahatma? To collect salt from the ravine at the back? Why you don’t use that bike you never get ride yet?” Huzaifa walked through the front entrance smiling. “You better bring you lil ass here this evening if you know what is good for you. That back window still need repairing.” This was another advantage to Huzaifa’s new belief in passivity, and around the house were several unfinished projects: a window dangled from one hinge; half of the kitchen wall was painted in bright green, the rest covered in its original flaky brown; a quarter of the backyard was clean, the rest covered with paragrass; a clothesline sagged between an aluminum rod and a makeshift shank; the virgin bicycle was propped against an outside post.
“I am going to visit Narpat,” Huzaifa said in what he hoped was a meditative voice.
“Who? Nehru? Mahatma and Nehru planning to start the revolution?”
Huzaifa liked the analogy. “God is love, Salima.” He was too far down the road to hear his wife’s savage curses.
Narpat read the article carefully while Huzaifa stood erect, his eyes half closed. “Is a nice article but nothing about the deed and them.”
“I think Partap son hint at it in paragraph four. Third line.”
Narpat read the reference aloud. “‘The plight of the farmers in the neglected agricultural community of Lengua, with a population of just over four hundred, was a focal point of the protest.’”
“A lil hint but is still a hint.”
Narpat reread the article more carefully, and when Dulari came to the porch, he read a few paragraphs for her. Her eyes brightened, and she called out in her new fatigued voice to her children. “Allyou father in the papers again.” Her daughters peered at the newspaper for a photograph of their father and, finding none, lost interest. Jeeves hung around for a while. “What they say about you?”
“You have to learn to read, boy. It will protect you against all sort of superstition.”
Huzaifa nodded. “When I was a little boy, I used to read one half-inch book per week.” He indicated the thickness with his thumb and forefinger. “Nowadays I does read a one-inch book per week.” The space between his fingers widened. “And when I in the mood, I does tackle a one-and-half-inch book.”
The Manager read the article the following morning. Sunday mornings he usually lounged in the gallery, smoking and reading the newspapers and hawking on the steps. Occasionally visitors dropped by to negotiate the price for a load of sharpsand or gravel, or to talk about their children at school, and although the Manager rarely placed these children, he doled out advice liberally. But now the visitors had almost dried up. In a rage, he shredded the page and scattered the pieces on the floor.
He gazed at the pieces and lowered his body tiredly onto his hammock. Kamini, her face blazing with rouge, emerged from the house, glanced at the torn newspaper, and said, “I am going down to the post office for a while.” She hurried down the steps before her father had an opportunity to vent his rage, but he called after her, “When you finish lick stamp, I want you to walk down to Lumchee shop and get about eight feet of rope and some soft candle.”
Kamini hesitated. “Daddy, you shouldn’t talk like that all the time. What people will say if they hear you?”
Mention of “the people,” the broad mass of ungrateful voters, rekindled the Manager’s anger. “What people? Them mugwumpy, scrapegoaty bitches and them? The jookers and diggers? All of them could kiss my nasty ass.”
“Daddy!”
Kamini walked away hurriedly. Later, when she had detoured from the post office to Lalbeharry trace, where Mr. Doon was waiting in his Prefect, blowing smoke through the window idly, she did not mention her father’s poetic fancies but rather his frequent threats about suicide. Mr. Doon took a deep drag from his cigarette and contemplated this bit of information. The despicable squire was found swinging from his joist by a dappled assortment of chimney sweepers who proceeded to ransack the tenement in the hope of locating the ill-gotten treasure he had surely hoarded within the panels of the building. Pots and pans were overturned, clapboards removed, the attic scavenged, the basement combed.
“What you mumbling about, David?”
“One of the mysteries of nature is how a man like your father could have generated a creature like yourself.” His voice softened. “Roll up the window, please.”
But Mr. Doon’s book was not going well. He had been excited on his return to Trinidad by the untapped Dickensian world he saw at every corner. Late in the nights in his mother’s flat, he’d push aside his coilspring notebook, close his eyes, and imagine the editors of Descant, Exile, and Fiddlehead sending down special emissaries to coerce him into writing a piece. Occasionally he would peep through the louvres at the neighbour reading intently from a crumpled magazine to his dog. This blasted independence come and gone like a breeze, he would think sadly. Where were the riots? Where the stirring speeches? Where the partition with entire villages uprooted? Where the raw material for a controversial but universally acclaimed novel? Occasionally the students at Lengua government school would see him, his tie loose around his neck, his hands clenched against his back, staring at the playground and muttering.
“Look out for the white van any day now,” Danny told Jeeves.