Four months after Narpat’s accident, the cast was removed. Doodoon appeared suddenly one evening with a hacksaw blade and a chipping hammer. As he sawed away, he said, “Good cast. Good material. But the trick is the mixing.”
“What so hard about making a cast? Is just like mixing flour for a roti.”
After he left, Narpat got up and wiped away the dust and flakes from his foot. He flexed his thigh muscles and noticed the atrophied state of the injured leg. “Have to get you back in action with some good exercise,” he murmured. But when he attempted to stand on the leg, he fell immediately. He tried once more and fell again. When he sat and examined the leg, he saw that the ankle, twisted to the right, had not been set properly. He reached for his cane and experimented with the amount of pressure he could place on the leg, but after a while the effort both tired and frustrated him. He flung the cane against the louvres. “The blasted quack!” Dulari appeared from the kitchen. “A little thing like setting a bone he couldn’t do properly. Damn stupid chamar.”
She picked up the cane and placed it next to him. She had never heard him use the term disparagingly. “It will take time.” “Time? How much time? One year? Ten? Look how twist-up the ankle is.” He straightened his leg. “The only way to fix this is to break it and set it again.” He grabbed his cane and whacked it against his ankle.
“Don’t!”
Holding the cane with both hands, he brought it down on his instep. “I have to break it first. Get it in a state of flux.”
“No! Don’t do that.” She tried to wrench away the cane. “Why you doing this? It going to make it worse.”
“How it could be worse?” He stamped his heel on the floor, again and again. The pain shot through his ankle and up his leg.
“Look at how you behaving like a child.”
He gazed up at her, annoyed and astonished. Finally he looked away and whispered, “Like a cripple, not a child.”
“You is not a cripple. And you just making it worse by pounding it on the floor. It will heal. Everything does heal. Give it time.”
“I was just getting back the circulation.”
She smiled bleakly. “I think it get back enough circulation. Now put it up and let me rub it with some Tiger Balm.”
He closed his eyes, but every now and again his eyelids would flutter as he watched his wife applying the ointment to his ankle and massaging in a circular motion. “The pain passing,” he said quietly. “I think it went to the other foot.” He placed his other leg on her lap.
When Chandra returned from work, she saw her father lying on the couch, his feet on his wife’s lap. She was about to ask who had removed the cast but decided to leave them alone. She went into the kitchen. A pot of milk was boiling on the chulha. She pulled out a burning log. On the cupboard were sliced vegetables: eggplant, tomato, and carailli. She poured some oil into a saucepan and threw in the vegetables. Half an hour later Sushilla returned from school and asked her, “You cooking this evening? Mammy and Pappy looking nice sleeping together on the couch.” She giggled, then said seriously, “Go and change in your home clothes. I will finish this.”
“Make sure you don’t put too much salt or you will upset Pappy. And don’t burn the roti.”
Sushilla placed her hands on her waist and pretended she was annoyed. “Okay, madam, I will try my utmost not to burn anything.” She playfully pushed away her sister from the kitchen. “You already get a oil stain on your dress. Now go.”
“Shh, you will wake them.”
“Romeo and Juliet, man.”
A worried look crossed Chandra’s face. She seemed set to say something, but when Sushilla began humming the song from Love Story and danced around the kitchen as if she were playing a flute, Chandra smiled tiredly and placed a finger against her lip. “Shh.”
Narpat continued practicing with his cane. He realized he could hop for only three or four steps without support. When he grew tired, he would sit on the couch or on the Pavilion and wonder how he would manage with crop season just two months away. His factory, once more, would be neglected. He hid this worry from his family and joked about his infirmity. “Make way for the crappo,” he said when dinner was served. “What is this? Rice and vegetables and sardine? Where the flies?” He flicked out his tongue as if he were catching invisible insects. “I need a parrot,” he told Jeeves one weekend. “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. You know who say that?”
“Long John Silver.”
“Then you better start calling me Captain Langra.”
“Lengua?”
“Langra.” He spelled the word. “It mean broko-foot.”
“Like this?” Jeeves hopped around the living room.
“Jeeves!” Chandra glared at him
But Narpat got up and placed his hand on his son’s shoulder. “You have to teach me how to hop, boy. You doing it better than me.” On evenings he hopped around with Jeeves and recited poems about cripples. He told his son of an amputee mechanic who dragged on a box cart, and of an artist who drew with his feet. But as crop season approached, Narpat’s simmering worry increased. He asked the few visitors about hiring labour, but they all knew of his impatience, and although they promised to look around, most never returned. Jeeves noticed his growing reluctance to engage in stories about crippled men and women. The boy gauged his father’s silence. “You think is a test? Like the kind of test you used to tell me when I was small and was afraid to sleep alone?”
“What?”
“Like the tests these old-time Indians used to take?”
“You have a good memory, boy.”
The compliment pleased Jeeves. “I even remember the part about your uncle mashing up the room and how you save and save to buy a canefield. And how your mother stop talking. And the promises your father make you listen to.”
After a while Narpat said, “A test must have some result. You can’t keep on taking test after test after test.” His voice faded as if he were talking to himself.
At the beginning of the crop season, he stood on the porch watching the tractors and bisons plodding to the fields. He noticed the chatter and animation of the farmers, and he knew they enjoyed these five months of hard work because they had grown up in the canefield with their families and friends; he knew that the wielding of the cutlasses, the clearing of the fields, lighting the mounds, and gazing at the crackling sparks shooting up to the sky were like a ritual of purification conducted for centuries by men and women who saw no shame in honest work. He recalled his discussions with Kala and felt that the old plantation owners—or anyone not connected with cane farming, for that matter—misunderstood the singing and the dancing at the end of the crop season. In his frustration at being stuck helplessly in the house, he forgot his own criticisms of this merriment.
One evening Huzaifa told him, “I making a little study of all these new machinery which does be machining out these days. It have something call a combined harvester, for example. Just jump in, throw in a gear, and it level the field in no time. Cut, bundle, and transport. Like a little factory.” He nibbled his nails. “I have to do some more research to see if it could squeeze out the juice and dry it up to make sugar. Yes, yes, a nice little factory. Portable.”
Sometimes he brought along books with photographs of other machines that cleared, fertilized, dropped seeds, and harvested. He liked the fact that his friend was silent during these conversations, but one evening Narpat told him, “You notice all these fields in the book, flat?”
“Is true.”
“You put a machine like this anywhere in Lengua, and it will roll over in the first hour.”
“Hmm. Maybe it have another unit to pound down the land and make it flat. Have to check into that.” But his research revealed no such contraption, and gradually his enthusiasm for this sort of technology dwindled. He noticed too that Narpat’s silence was not a sign of acquiescence but rather a brooding. Occasionally he heard his friend muttering mysteriously about flux and chaos.
Early in the mornings, when the leaves and the grass were wet and turgid from the dew, Narpat hobbled to the backyard garden and gazed at the variety of leaves, some serrated as if they had been torn away and others smooth and heart-shaped. He noticed their textures and the different shades of green. Hidden were fruits too tiny or too well camouflaged to be noticeable. He flicked away aphids and caterpillars and mealybugs with his cane. Dulari looked at him from the kitchen and occasionally joined him outside and chatted about the freshness of the tomatoes or the purple sheen of the eggplants, but he never responded to her comments. One morning she repeated an old statement of his: The backyard garden was better than any freezer or fridge because the vegetables were always crisp. She also mentioned the money they were saving.
He remained silent, but when he returned to the porch to watch the farmers going to the fields, he said, “We saving a few pennies here and losing hundreds in the canefield.”
“It have anybody you could hire to cut the cane? It not too late.” He stared at the tractors chugging along, and Dulari realized he must have asked the farmers about hired help and that the cessation of their visits was possibly because they had made excuses or promises they would never fulfill.
One evening the Manager showed up. Narpat was chatting with Huzaifa at the time. “Ay-ay, Huzzie, you still living? I didn’t see you for a long time. I thought you get sick like your cousin Haroon or you drop dead or something. He still writing them stupid letters?”
Huzaifa bared his yellow teeth and said, “Aah, aah,” with muted menace.
The Manager turned to Narpat. “Sorry I couldn’t make it before, but your accident was resting heavy on me heart. Just last night I was talking to meself, and I say, ‘You know something, Manager? Is full time you pick up yourself and visit Narpat insteada worrying about it whole day.’ So said, so done.” He peered at the ankle. “It still twist a little. That is the thing with ankles. You could never know which way they will twist. Is like they have they own mind. You walking and thing?”
“With this mister here.” Narpat tapped his cane on the floor.
“It must be so painful. Tsk, tsk.” His eyes clouded. “I could never understand why these things does happen to good people for. What is the purpose?” He said pupposs. “Just last night when I was talking to meself, I say, ‘You better be careful, Manager, because you might be next.’ Tsk, tsk.”
All Narpat’s revulsion for the Manager rose, but he held his peace.
“You could never anticipate these things, that is the problem. They does happen in good time and bad time, in crop season and outta crop season.” He glanced at Narpat. “Just the other day I was dropping off some material for Poolchan, and I pass by your field.” He stared at his boots. “Tsk, tsk. Cane standing up straight but dry as hell. Weed all over the place.”
“It have unit that could—”
The Manager cut Huzaifa short. “It hurt me heart to see all that waste.” He pounded his chest. “It hurt me so bad because I don’t like to see anything go to waste.”
“It wouldn’t waste. The field will still be there next year,” Narpat told him.
“Yes, yes, it will still be there, but in what condition? Soil done get hard like cement. Suckers done dead out. Weed done take over.” He shook his head sadly. “Is things like this that does make a big man cry.” He wiped the bags beneath his eyes. “In my stupid opinion you should sell it out while it still looking halfway respectable.”
“I see. You think is a good idea to sell it out? Who will buy it?” Narpat grasped his cane tightly.
“I always say that in time of distress neighbour suppose to help neighbour. Is they pupposs.”
Huzaifa looked at the Manager in horror.
“A ‘bandon field like that wouldn’t bring much cash, but something better than nothing.”
“I tending that field for close to forty years. It send all my children to school. Buy food and clothes. You think I will give it up just so?”
“But it useless now.” He laughed wet and congested. “When a donkey get old and useless, you have no choice but to put a good kick in he tail and send him on he way.”
“Get out.”
“Eh?” The Manager’s smile was still frozen on his face.
“Get out from here now.” Narpat’s voice was calm and steady.
“Get out from your house? The chamar not good enough to offer sympathy?”
“And don’t ever let your shadow cross this yard again.” Narpat raised his cane.
The Manager got up. “I going. And I wring me ears that this is the last time I ever help out hardup people again. From now on I will leave every single cripple alone.”
“Get out, you chamar. Everybody who come to this house want something.”
“I wring me ears. I wring it a thousand time. Everybody feel they could just ‘buse the Manager and insult he dreamsanhope just because he have a soft heart, but all that come to a end.” He stormed out, but before he climbed onto his truck, he shouted, “I have a little prabble for you. You listening? A dog that taking kick in he ass whole day does turn ‘round one day and put he mouth where he ass was, and drop some good bite on the kicker. Remember that prabble good. The Manager might look stupid, but he don’t forget.”
Huzaifa left soon after, walking slowly to his house.
Narpat’s gloom deepened following the Manager’s visit.
One morning Dulari saw him clubbing the marigolds and daisies and the poinsettia at the side of the front step. “Flowers, flowers. What is the use of flowers? It good to eat?” The milky sap from the poinsettia stained the wet leaves and coated Narpat’s cane. “Just good for superstitious people. Hocus-pocus. Simi-dimi.”
Across the road, the Brahmin exhaled his cigarette smoke in little gusts.
In the evening Narpat flung his cane against Carnegie. He fell to his knees. “What you doing?” he asked Dulari, who had rushed to help him up. “You never see a cripple drag before?” He climbed onto the couch. “Run across the road and tell your friend to come and watch too. A nice cinema show.”
Later in the morning Jeeves noticed the old man trying to climb onto the tractor. “You want me to help you, Pappy?”
“You think you could help?”
“Tell me what to do.”
“I want you to drive this Farmall to the canefield and reap all the cane.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?” his father snapped. “How old you is now? Thirteen? Fourteen? When I was your age, I work in the field from morning to night.”
“But I going to school.”
“They teaching you how to solve problems in school, not so?”
“All the time. Hard arithmetic and—”
“Okay, see if you could help me out with this.” He sat on the running board and rested both hands on his cane. “It have this old fella who had an accident and can’t work again. What you think this old fella should do?”
“Wait till it heal.”
“He should ask his friends to help him.”
“His so-called friends refuse.”
“His family then.”
“His family say they too busy with school.”
“Then he should find another job.”
“It have nothing else for him. He doing that job all his life. Now tell me this.” He stared across the road at the Brahmin’s flower garden. “You don’t think that when people become useless, then is time for them to go?”
“No, I—”
“You disagreeing because you don’t understand how this world operate. When an animal get old and sickly, the rest of the animals leave it behind because that animal have nothing to contribute to the herd again. It become a liability.”
“People different from animals.”
In the night, the boy asked him, “What happen to the old fella in the story you was telling me?”
“He leave everything to fate. Jon hoi, ton hoi.” His father was staring at him with a taunting half smile, as if the statement were a challenge.