In 1964, the year after the land deeds were settled, B.J. Tiwary, the leader of the Sanatanist Hindus in the island, a strapping man who had made a fortune from trading with the Americans at the military base in Chaguaramas, died. On the day of his cremation, rain fell unendingly, and the pundits worried that his body would not be properly cremated at the Caroni river, but Hindu journalists marveled that “it seemed as if the heavens had opened up in tribute to the man who had changed the course of history.” The cremation site was crowded with politicians, pundits, businessmen, and bemused Americans.
B.J., as he was known, was one of the few Indians in the island for whom Narpat had any time, and though the two men had almost come to blows at their only meeting more than two decades earlier during a public reading of the religious text the Ramayana, Narpat admired his brawny appearance, his brash, forthright manner of speaking, and the discipline that characterized his self-extrication from terrible poverty.
The mourners were all well dressed, and when Narpat showed up, his hair neatly groomed but with rumpled shirt and trousers, he stood out as he walked though the crowd sheltering beneath their umbrellas, and as he stood bareheaded in the downpour, listening to speech after speech. The orthodox Hindus who knew him from his public dissension with pundits conducting Ramayanas or kathas, glanced warily in his direction. The final speech was delivered by Isbitt Ramdeen, a Christian Indian who hoped to woo the Hindus in his campaign to replace the absentee leader of the opposition, Dr. Sohan Bhandara, who had resumed his job at Cambridge following his party’s defeat. Ramdeen heaped praises on the local Hindus, citing their industriousness, thrift, introspection, family values, and religious devotion. Narpat moved closer to him.
“The Hindus are verily the bedrock of this island. They have brought with them and introduced to others centuries of finely honed dogmas and doctrines.”
“And superstitious mumbo-jumbo.”
A murmur went through the crowd. Some of the men glanced angrily at Narpat. Ramdeen adjusted his jacket and continued. “The Hindus are verily the envy of people all over the world because—”
“Because of what? Because it is the only religion that has not evolved properly? Because everything is a big pappyshow like this funeral here?”
“Sir, please have respect for the dead. This is not a time for needless arguments.”
“Is not a time for making speech either. For campaigning and misleading these simple, stupid people here. Leave that for the street corner and the junction.”
“Sir, I have been verily invited—”
“By who? The pundit? The mahapatar? The family? By special committee?”
“By me! I invite him.”
Narpat recognized B.J.’s son, a husky young man who owned a racing pool in Tunapuna and who was often photographed in the newspapers with heavy gold chains draped around his neck. He gestured to the young man. “This is the Hindu you was talking about? Gambling and drinking? Centuries of civilization? Carrying around two hundred extra pounds?”
The young man rushed toward Narpat but was restrained by a group of mourners. “Leave me alone. Let me teach him a lesson. Coming in my own father funeral to cause confusion and jhanjhat like a blasted madman.” He struggled with the men. “Your ass dark with me, you hear me. It dark with me.” Unexpectedly, he began to cry. “In my own father funeral.”
Narpat walked away, smiling. The crowd parted.
Later, there were several versions told of the disruption. The son had pulled out and pointed his revolver at Narpat. The dispute had later developed into a brawl at the roadside. The police had arrested both men. And at a hawk and spit bar, Mr. Doon heard that the Prime Minister, disguised as a woman, had also been to the funeral.
There were other, more visible dignitaries at the cremation. One of them was a stocky young man with a military crewcut and a carefully cultivated moustache. His name was Alvin Seegobin, and he was a former member of Parliament who had resigned from the government after a humiliating junior placement in the Culture Ministry. He had been one of the few Indians in the ruling party, and following his resignation he developed a reputation as reckless and hot-headed. He eventually got a column in a local newspaper and wrote weekly of “plantation and colonial mentality.” He advocated, in his columns, islandwide strikes of teachers, stevedores, and shopkeepers. When he was accused of “communist agitation” and threatened with jail, he turned his attention to reforms, and each week he resurrected some dormant group like the Poultry Owners Association, before he set his sights on the sugar industry and on the moribund Cane Farmers Association. He appeared suddenly in Debe and Penal and other cane farming areas.
Eventually he came to Lengua. From Huzaifa, Narpat heard of the meeting. “Young fella. Fiery like hell. Say that cane farmers of the world have to arise. Talk ’bout Gandhi and the next creole fella too.”
“I wonder if this Seegobin ever plant a single stalk of cane in his life.”
“Educated in a big way. Had a nice briefcase load up with pamphlet. And manifesto too, some nearly three inch thick. Talk nonstop for nearly two hours.”
“And that is all he will ever do. I wonder who invite him down here.”
Huzaifa clicked his nails nervously.
“These fellas just looking for a little fame. In ten months he will run to some new jhanjhat.”
But Seegobin’s campaign to dislodge the Cane Farmers Association took hold in Debe and Penal and Barrackpore. For years these farmers had complained of neglect by the government; now suddenly a former member of Parliament, an ex-prisoner, and a journalist was paying them attention. He promised higher prices, increased subsidies, and a guaranteed tonnage. He waved glossy pamphlets describing the sugar industry in Cuba. He spoke of Castro as if they were old friends.
After each meeting he gathered endorsements, and one week he was able to write that he had collected over a thousand signatures from frustrated farmers. The next week he announced his intention of forming the True and Noble Cane Farmers Association. Many of the farmers in Lengua joined; Narpat’s resolution of the land deeds was forgotten. During lunch breaks the farmers from the adjoining fields who congregated beneath the hogplum tree no longer gloated about their legal rights to the field but discussed Seegobin’s innumerable proposals. Narpat thought of a class of unruly children promised some treat, but he said nothing. Soon these farmers stopped visiting his house, and at night he would untie the copper wire from the kitchen wall and spend much time reading and rereading the dietary stipulations and the quirky injunctions he had, over the years, stabbed onto the wire. His wife was confused by his uncharacteristic silence, but she was relieved that he was spending more time at home. In the children’s presence she made mysterious Hindi jokes with him and chuckled. In the afternoons she cooked his favourite meal, sardine seasoned with lemon and turmeric and shadow beni, and after his meal she sat close to him on the Pavilion and closed her eyes.
Late in the night, when his wife was in the bedroom, Narpat untied the copper wire, and frequently Jeeves would be awakened by the rustling of paper. One night he heard his father mumbling, “We will see how this story will end.”
“Story?” Jeeves asked sleepily.
His father did not reply immediately, and just as the boy was once more drifting to sleep, he heard, “Long, long time ago this mangy jackal fall inside a copper fullup with blue dye, and when it crawl out all the other animals begin to bow down before this strange new creature. They decide to replace the old lion, the ruler of the animals, with this jackal, and they build a nice throne with sip and tapano and poui and immortelle for it.”
Jeeves had heard this story years ago, but because the resolution to his father’s fables often changed, he asked, “And what the old lion decide to do?”
“To wait.”
“For what?”
“For the beginning of rainy season.”
“And then the dye wash away.”
“Exactly.”
“And the animals tear up the jackal and beg the lion to come back.”
“Maybe. But the lion, while it was banished, had get used to the idea of wandering about the forest watching the sun rising every morning and the little animals running back to their hole in the night.”
This was a new development. “So the old lion never come back?” Jeeves heard the rustling of paper once more and thought that his father was considering the question, but there was no response.
Narpat soon developed a routine. He left and returned to his house at the same time each day. His children came back from their television viewing at the Brahmin’s house at seven-thirty. His daughters went either to the kitchen or to their bedroom. His son twisted and turned on his fibre mattress until he fell asleep. Each day Narpat carefully observed this pattern. He sat with his wife on the Pavilion for an hour and a half. She left for her room at ten-thirty. He unclasped the wire at eleven. He reordered the jottings and calculated the year and month he had written them. He went through the old bills and receipts, again carefully noting their dates. He assessed the time it took him to eat, shower, and get to the field. During the lunch break he no longer walked to the hogplum tree, but portioned, weighed, and carefully mixed his herbicides and fungicides. The old brass can that he slung on his back needed to be pumped sixty-five times before the chemical mixture ran out. In the afternoon, a pair of egrets flew to his field and poked about in the ravines. Cornbirds flapped out from the immortelle tree at the end of his field. Other birds—bananaquits and kiskidees and ground doves—waltzed and whistled overhead. Most birds looked alike: the ground dove he had seen yesterday could be the same bird he spotted today. On his way home he passed the same villagers at identical spots each day; and he thought: To everything there is a pattern; everything is predictable. The world was ordered by laws that, with careful observation, could be deciphered, their consequences anticipated. One night while his son was twisting on his mattress, Narpat mouthed the phrase he was recording: “There are no coincidences, only consequences.”
The boy turned and asked sleepily, “What you mean by that?”
“Nothing, Carea. Go back and sleep.”
Eleven months after Seegobin had announced the formation of his True and Noble Cane Farmers Association, he left for Rhodesia on a government scholarship. Sending troublemakers abroad was an old ploy of the government, but even before the scholarship Seegobin had grown frustrated with the association. The pamphlets from Cuba had described neat little villages and orderly cooperatives and grateful farmers. The villagers he encountered were impatient, accusatory, and after a few drinks, downright hostile. The villagers learned of his desertion from his last column, the title, “The Pleasures of Exile,” stolen from a famous West Indian novel.
Narpat resumed his lunch breaks beneath the hogplum tree and listened to the farmers grumbling about Seegobin’s abrupt departure. Some had paid union dues; others had donated money for the importation of his pamphlets. Once more they had been betrayed. From their energetic self-pity and finally their lacerating resignation, Narpat detected all the old familiar patterns. Arguments he had heard year after year. To everything there is a pattern, he thought.
One evening, after his work, he broke his routine by driving on his tractor to Debe and Barrackpore. He used the company roads, which were level and well maintained. On either side was cane, not broken into two- or three-acre plots like the privately owned fields, but uninterrupted, healthy, and majestic.
The following midday, when the farmers began their habitual litany of neglect and treachery, he said, “We should be grateful that Tate and Lyle even buying our cane.” This was a new angle, and the farmers were surprised. “They have hundreds of acres of cane. They have their own factories to grind the cane. They make profit from rum and molasses. Why they should study the farmers who in direct competition with them?”
“But we selling them cane for years.”
“And one day they could decide that enough is enough.”
“You think they could do that?”
“Look at the patterns. Look at the trends.”
Every evening he drove through the company roads, choosing a different route each time, going farther too, to Siparia and Penal. And these journeys became part of his routine, as were the farmers’ recitations of their woes. Every midday he offered the same enigmatic pronouncement about trends and patterns. One day he told them, “Every year the company output getting bigger and the farmers’ yield shrinking. In five years the company will say they have no use for our cane again.” He was speaking slowly, as if he were choosing his words carefully. “Don’t be surprised if they decide to shut down the factory too.”
The farmers were disturbed. “What we will do?”
After a while Narpat said, “Build our own factory.”
The following days he told them, “You all believe it can’t be done because nobody ever think of it before. But a sugar mill no different from all the family-run sawmills all over Rio Claro and Tableland.” He counted on his fingers. “Machines, workers, operation, product, and output. Exactly the same.”
The farmers joked about the factory in the rumshops. “You ever hear a ordinary farmer build a factory in your born life? Factory that cost the British people hundreds of thousand of dollars to put down.”
Huzaifa heard of the factory. He showed up at Narpat’s house, wearing his white cotton shirt, white oversize trousers, and rough wooden shoes called sapats. He liked the crude frugality of the house and the absence of unnecessary decoration and furniture. He got to the point straightaway. “We could make our own bricks to build the factory. People in India does make them all the time using a stupid lil oven. For fuel we could use goobar. The best source of energy in the world.” His communal instincts kicked in. “Get the farmers to go round the island and collect all the goobar they could find and make a big pile.” He lowered his glasses and peered above the wire frame. “Own bricks. Own fuel. Own factory. That will show the British.” How fitting, he thought, that Tate and Lyle was a British-owned factory.
But Narpat had everything already planned. The factory would be built with concrete, not clay bricks. It would be powered by a network of windmills, not goobar. “Wind free. Every other year a hurricane does be ramping through the island. Think of all the energy we could harness.”
Huzaifa thoughtfully rubbed his hands together. Narpat called to Jeeves for a pencil and a sheet of paper. He sketched a box with a chimney stuck at the top and surrounded by windmills. Jeeves stared at the drawing and thought of huge butterflies circling a Popsicle stuck to the ground. Huzaifa murmured and gently flicked away a mosquito from his arm. “Go away, little insect, go away, please. I don’t want to kill you. You is just a insect.”
Narpat drew a series of intersecting lines beneath the box. “Water free too, if you know where to get it.” Huzaifa was distracted by the mosquito, which landed once more on his arm, and as Narpat elaborated on the intricate subterranean plumbing, he tried to blow away the insect. “Building the factory could be the easiest thing if everybody cooperate. Sacrifice for the common good. If they think about the end result instead of the day-to-day problem. If they could behave like futurists.”
Slap!
Huzaifa gazed at the mosquito flattened in a speck of blood on his skinny arm. He murmured, “You see, little insect? You see? You see when you don’t listen how you does cause a peaceful man to turn into a savage beast?” Jeeves drew closer and strained to hear this strange-looking man’s whispers.
Huzaifa returned to Narpat’s house the next evening, and between these two men the factory gradually began to take shape, to acquire a vague form, with pulley, cranks, boilers, fermentation tanks, vacuum pans, gantry cranes, and windmills. Huzaifa was thrilled by the solemn consequence of these technical details, and he would listen intently before asking questions like “You think we should have the windmills in a line or facing each other? I think if they face each other, they will cancel out the wind. Two positive always hatch out a negative.” Another evening he asked, “You think we should build the factory sloping like this house? So instead of the conveyor wasting energy, we could just throw in all the cane in one end and let it slide straight down to the other unit.” He was dense as to the operation of any piece of machinery; to him they were batches of dead units clamped together and miraculously tickling each other to life. Sometimes he prepared his questions in advance. He began visiting every evening, his approach signalled by the slow knocking of his sapats on the pitch road.
Jeeves was fascinated by Huzaifa’s strange stoop, his oversize clothing, and especially the way he crouched on his chair like a plucked helpless bat, but his sisters always seized on these conversations as opportunities to slip across to the Brahmin’s house. Their father had recently threatened to put an end to these visits, and they were grateful for the distraction of Huzaifa every night promptly at seven.
Huzaifa also fancied himself as an informant—which he reconciled with Gandhian philosophy by concluding that in dire circumstances, satyagraha could be suspended. His information was usually harmless gossip he had picked up from his wife, but one night he told Narpat, “I get a bulletin. Premsingh and Soogrim and Janak and that nasty, maljeau-eye Manager say we ain’t going to build no factory. They say is one setta old talk. And Kumkaran say all these crazy idea is a sign of Agramennon.” He pronounced it as a Hindi word.
That weekend Narpat commanded Jeeves to the Farmall. “Where we going?” Jeeves asked.
“To look for something exceptional.”
“Treasure?”
Narpat grinned. “Sorta.”
When the tractor swerved into Toolia trace, the boy asked his father, “The treasure bury in your canefield?”
“It scatter all over.”
“How I can’t see any? It bury deep?”
“It all around. But first we have to build a mill.”
“To grind it up?”
“Exactly.” Narpat jumped down from the tractor and held out his hands, but at the last minute he stepped back and Jeeves fell, tumbling. “You have to learn to jump properly, boy. Someday it might save your life.” While they were walking through the field, Narpat spoke mysteriously about shredding knives and crushing rollers. Jeeves gazed at the glinting melau pebbles in the ravines while his father spoke. “After you crush up the cane, you heat the juice and throw in some lime, which will cause all the dregs to sink to the bottom. Then you collect all the juice in evaporators.” He clacked his tongue as if he were tasting it, and Jeeves giggled. “And finally you boil up all the juice in vacuum pans until you get something called massecuite, which is sugar crystals mix up in a thick syrup. When you spin and spin this mixture in tubs with hundreds of holes, the syrup leak out and leave the pure shining crystals.”
“Treasure? The sugar is the treasure?”
“What you think we build the house with? And buy food and pay for electricity and all your schoolbooks?” They stopped walking. “But first we have to build a mill.” He pointed to the field’s edge. “Right here.” He stamped the ground, and his boot collected a clump of mud. “Nice sticky mud. It mean that the ground reliable. It will never cave. It have a proper slope too, so all the water will run off in the drain instead of collecting under the ground. You see that immortelle tree across there? Look at how solid and tall it is. It standing on firm ground. You could always assess the state of the land from the type and quality of trees and plants.”
On the way back Jeeves asked, “When you going to build the mill?”
“As soon as you ready to help me.”
“Me?” Then the boy realized his father was joking. “You and Mammy then?”
“Your mammy have other things to think about. This is man work.”
“You and the bendup man then?”
“Which bendup man you talking about, boy?”
“The one with the wooden shoes.”
Narpat climbed onto the tractor, chuckling.
Huzaifa was a bit offended that Narpat had not taken him along on this significant exploratory venture, but he soon got over it, and during the following weeks he discarded his sapats for tall tops, which reached to his thighs. He padded about awkwardly while Narpat surveyed, measured, and drove wooden stakes into the mud. They connected the stakes with a strong twine, maling, until they had boxed off four lots; then Narpat hoisted on his back a heavy brass can filled with the herbicide Gramazone, pumped the handle a few times, and pointed the nozzle to the ground. Huzaifa stepped back and covered his mouth with his shirt sleeve
For the next couple weeks, he mostly stood at the border of the designated area and looked on while Narpat leveled and plowed with his tractor. He had always disliked manual labour and viewed himself more as a planner and troubleshooter.
After a month Narpat calculated that the land had been adequately prepared, and they shifted once more to an engineering and planning phase. Huzaifa brought construction manuals from YesRead, and while Narpat was poring over the manuals, he examined the set squares and protractors. Finally Narpat began to sketch his diagrams on a cardboard while discussing with his friend recent developments in the sugar industry and the period when sugar was king. “It had a time when eleven factories was operating on this island. Two right next door in Craignish and Hindustan.”
“Maybe was the war that cause all them to close. Heetlah. Real troublemaker.” He had always been uncomfortable with Narpat’s talk of the Aryans but he surmised that these Indian Aryans were good Aryans. The German Aryans were bad Aryans. “I believe Gandhiji too was involve in the war.” He tried to recall the connection.
“Gandhi was a jackass of the highest order.”
“Eh?” Huzaifa almost slid down his chair, but he offered a strong defence. “Independence. Mighty British. Free India. Just one man.”
“Not one man. Nehru. Tilak. Patel. Jinnah.”
“Yes, Jinnah. President of Pakistan. Bookworm and aristocrat.”
One night Narpat said, “I wonder what happen to all the machinery from the factories that close down in Reform and Hindustan?”
“Maybe people thief them out.”
Narpat shook his head.
“You think they might still be there?”
“Most likely cover up in vine and lathro.”
“Rusty units. Wouldn’t work again.”
“These old-time machinery build to last hundreds of years. A little fine-tuning and it good as new.”
“But we can’t just pick it up.” Huzaifa viewed this development as an unnecessary complication to the pleasant nighttime conversations.
“It in the ground twenty years now. Nobody claim it so far.”
“It might have some law or the other.”
“Let them lock us up. It will give Partap son a nice little article. Cane farmers jailed for removing junk.”
“Hmm. I see what you getting at. A sorta passive resistance stealing. Yes, yes.”
But on the appointed day Huzaifa did not show up, and the two workers Narpat usually hired during crop season uncovered the rusty engines from the rotted lumber and the swaths of vine, knocked off corroded exhaust and manifolds, attached ropes to flywheels, and dragged the engines along two planks sliding up the tractor. Three hours later they offloaded the junk beneath the Julie mango tree at the side of Narpat’s house.
That night Huzaifa walked around the heap, occasionally tapping his sapats against a broken line or pipe. “Small, small engine. Wonder how they operate the mill with these little units.”
“These is old bulldozer engines. That one is from a crane.”
“Think we could run the factory with tractor engine?”
“If you link up all these small engine, you get the same power like a big engine. Like a tug-of-war with eight people pulling on one side.”
Huzaifa gazed at the junk skeptically. “Maybe we could paint them over.”
“Why? They good as new. Touch one pulley or camshaft by mistake, and the whole thing will start roaring and jumping up.”
Huzaifa stepped back.
“We have to design a single ignition system so when you crank one engine, the rest must come to life too. A single fuel and electrical circuit. We have to be very precise with this.” He walked around the engines. “You ever look inside a clock with all the cogwheels spinning against each other? This call for careful planning because one little fumble or misalignment could cause everything to malfunction.”
“Yes, yes. Like a setta spinning jennies.”