During each weekend he was home from school, Jeeves imagined he spotted some change in the baby, and he was surprised at its transformation, in less than a year, from a quivering, squealing lump into a smiling, gurgling girl who paddled her feet into the air, rolled over, and clenched his finger with her fist. He liked the fresh baby smell mingled with Johnson’s Baby Powder and the manner she would crinkle her round face so that she resembled the Chinese grocer, Lumchee. The first time he tried to hold her, she was so tiny and soft, he felt she would slip through his hands.
One month-end Kala saw him playing with the baby. “So you is not the baby in the family again, Jeeves? You lose your place?”
He felt embarrassed. “What baby you talking ’bout?”
“You right, boy. I think your voice beginning to change. And what is this here?” She tried to pull the sprinkle of fine hair on his chin and laughed when he stepped back. “You better give me the baby.”
Narpat also developed a belated affection for the baby. He had been furious when he learned the Brahmin had named her Kalawattie. “A nice little Puranic name. The superstition start early.” He’d refused to touch her. “Take her to the fish market. Teach her to sell baby fish.”
“Hold her, Pappy. Look at how cute she is, looking at you.”
He glared at Sushilla. “Cute what? With all that kaajaar paste on to her eye. And that sindoor in the forehead? And jumbie beads around the wrist? What century we living in?”
“She making eyes at you, Pappy.”
“All that protection they stick up on her. They make her look so ugly.” He couldn’t resist for long, though, and he finally hit on the idea of giving her a proper Vedic name. He consulted his old yellow Hindi books and listed and crossed out names. “Mala,” he told his daughter one evening. “It mean a garland. From now on that is the baby name in this house.” His children soon learned he was serious about this injunction, and whenever he heard the name Kalawattie, he quarrelled and said, “Take it to the fish market to sell baby fish.” Soon everyone pretended that Mala was her real name, and for the rest of his life Narpat used no other name for his granddaughter. Once this was established, he grew into a doting grandfather, creeping around the floor with his Mala, bouncing her on his healthy leg and speaking to her as to an adult.
“Why Pappy talking nonsense to the baby for?”
“Is not nonsense,” Sushilla told Jeeves. “If you listen carefully.”
“You think a little baby could understand the reason for idol worship and protection from evil spirit and all that simi-dimi?”
“It making Pappy happy, and that is a good sign.”
“You think is a sign?”
She looked at her brother in confusion. “Yes.”
This was intriguing, but Jeeves was skeptical of Sushilla’s disclosure, especially since she was developing some strange ideas of her own. She had recently discovered the benefits of vegetarianism and spoke often of living in an ashram in far-off Benares. Jeeves began to pay attention to the interaction between grandfather and granddaughter. Once when Narpat was lecturing to the baby about the devolution of the caste system and the Brahmins’ monopoly of knowledge, Jeeves asked the old man, “You think she could understand all this history?”
“She understanding every single word. Look at how carefully she listening.” The baby’s eyes were closed. “Everything sinking in her brains.” She opened her eyes and looked at Jeeves.
At the Brahmin’s house, the old sourness between Chandra and Radhica reemerged. Radhica complained to Ray. “She with Kalawattie all the time. You don’t think she could spare a few minutes to wash some cup or plate or dry some clothes?” She took her grievances to Dulari and was exasperated when the other woman offered no sympathy.
Every evening Dulari told Chandra, “A daughter-in-law who stay in her mother-in-law house just looking for trouble.” She mentioned lots that were going cheap in Debe and Matilda and Monkeytown. “Two–three thousand for the land, and a next two–three thousand to build.”
“You think it so easy, Mammy?” Chandra felt helpless and frustrated. “Is like you trying to get rid of me.” Sometimes she broke down in tears, and Dulari would feel guilty about haranguing her daughter. But one evening Chandra and Ray returned later than usual. “We went to look at a lot in Petite Café.” She didn’t mention the brutal argument with Radhica the previous night. Radhica had called her a snake who was poisoning the relationship between mother and son.
“That is a very good place. Is only twenty minutes from here and about ten minutes from Princes Town. It convenient for you and Ray.”
The shouting across the road grew more frenzied, and when Dulari listened, she heard Radhica screaming about entire families of snakes.
“The fish market doing good business these days.” But Narpat too was disturbed by the screaming, and each evening he limped to the tractor and started the engine. That infuriated Radhica even more.
One night during the commotion, Dulari told Narpat of Ray and Chandra’s purchase of a lot in Petite Café. Surprisingly, he offered no denunciations. During the following evenings, while the baby played at his feet, he sketched designs on cardboard ends. In two weeks he presented his family with the design. “Modern plan. Split level. Concrete outer wall and cedar inner wall. Flat roof.” His family peered skeptically at the design with its familiar slant. “Bamboo instead of boxing board. Small posts. It not building in a swamp. Simple and cheap. This plan will save a thousand dollars at the very least.” His family, pleased with his enthusiasm, humoured him, expecting that by the time construction began, after the rain, he would have forgotten. But when the rain ended and the farmers rode on their bisons and tractors to their fields, Narpat drove with Janak to Petite Café. Despite her mother’s misgivings, Sushilla paid Janak each weekend. “It will get him out of the house, Mammy. And what harm he could do with his bad foot?”
At first the builders treated him with an amused deference because of his disability, but as he got in their way more often, shouting suggestions about using untreated lumber because it was not coated with toxic material, or mixing clay with the cement to increase porosity and insulation, their lightness faded. “You have to prepare for everything when you building a house. This place long overdue for a earthquake, and the only thing to prevent the houses from crashing down is by tying the crossbeam loosely. So it will rock.” When they didn’t take his advice, he said, “The day the earthquake come, half this island will get wipe out. The government will blame the contractors and the contractors will blame the government. The newspapers people will suddenly discover all the defects in planning. The pundits will say we paying for our sin, and the stupid people will bawl about bad luck. It have a easy way to prevent all that.” Another day he told them, “If you use carat leaf instead of aluminum to cover the kitchen, all the bad odours will float out.”
“Carat easy to catch fire.”
“Only if you careless. Everything is a hazard, if you careless. In that case, you might as well build a iron box.”
Ray just grinned when they complained.
Narpat was in his element. After his frustration with the factory and his injury and with the Brahmin’s intolerable successes, he felt reinvigorated. He had hoped to complete his factory with the cane’s profit, but since his accident the portion of harvested area had shrunk with each crop season. His old inventiveness returned. He stood at the side of the masons while they set up the bricks for the outer walls and behind the carpenters while they hammered the crossbeams into place. He confused them with talk of tension and torque pressure and augur depth. When he felt the builders were not following his directions, he drew alternate designs on waxy drafting paper. The builders stared at the design of a skeletal house with a tilted floor, a round roof, and walls that seemed to be suspended from the ceiling. “You must never disturb the natural shape of the land. Instead of cutting and carving, you must use the natural topography to your advantage.” As the construction progressed, he drew other sketches detailing the electrical wiring and the plumbing.
“It not easier to install a straight pipe instead of one that twisting and turning all over the house?”
“You not thinking like a futurist.” He explained that because of its lengthy passage, the water would be warm by the time it reached the tap. When they complained about the placement of the electrical switches and outlets, he said, “Is not a hospital allyou building here. Every task should involve some bending and stretching.”
The builders had begun calling him Crackpot, though never to his face because their frustration was mixed with a slight trepidation of the old man. In spite of his injury, he spoke as if he expected to be obeyed. And because of his relatively proper English, they guessed he was educated. They speculated on his former profession.
“He look like a old schoolteacher.”
“He strike me as one of them lawyer fellas who get in trouble with the magistrate and get throw out from the court.”
“I have a feeling he is some sorta seerman. Telling the future and reading hand and that kinda thing.”
“Maybe he use to work in the hospital because he always talking ’bout poison and drugs and complaining about smoking and rum drinking.”
“It too early to idle.” Narpat limped up to the chatting builders. “If you don’t start the day with a proper attitude, then nothing will turn out right. Everything will be incomplete and defective.”
One afternoon an official from Town and Country Planning came to inspect the building. He glanced at the structure and at the realms of designs Narpat had sketched. “Who design this?” he asked angrily. The builders sensed it would be a mistake to identify Narpat, who was tapping his cane against the beam of the front door. “What exactly you all design here? A house or a rocket or a submarine?”
Narpat heard. “Mister, what is the difference between a house or a rocket or a submarine?” He limped toward the official. “They all serve the same purpose. To protect the inhabitants and provide an escape hatch in case of emergency.”
The official, who was from Barrackpore, studied the old man. “You is not the fella who was building the factory?”
“Not was building. Still building.”
The official had heard idle talk of Narpat’s stubbornness during his routine inspections. “Still building?” he asked timidly now.
“Just allowing the building to take a rest. To settle. When I return, I will notice all the structural faults. But I don’t expect to see any because I make sure everything was properly designed. Anything you don’t prepare for does come up and bite you straight on your bottom.”
The builders laughed, relieved now.
The official scrutinized the plans and glanced up suddenly. “I could see the factory? It not in my jurisdiction, but I never ever witness a factory before. Studied them in drafting school though.”
“Drafting school is a waste of time. You must have imagination to design a proper building. You have to anticipate every obstacle that might come up and remember where every single nut and bolt went. You can’t put aside your building for a minute. You have to think about it day and night. You can’t stop until the job is complete. They can’t teach you these things in drafting school. You either born with it, or it get cement in your head when you still a child.”
The official recalled his own discomfort at the drafting school, and his disappointment at the dry, tiresome designs he was forced to study each week. He remembered his frustration with the chain of bribes and kickbacks in the construction industry. He was a neat, slim, mixed-race man in his mid-thirties with huge black-rimmed glasses that made the rest of his face irrelevant. He was neatly dressed but for his shoes, the tongue of which flapped out from his pants hem. A white plastic packet in his shirt pocket contained an assortment of pens and a wooden ruler. “So I could visit the factory?”
When Narpat agreed, the builders were overjoyed. But Narpat had been thinking more and more of the factory. The design of the house was too simple, and he yearned for the challenge and complexity of the factory. A house was just a ceiling and a roof with a few walls. Anyone could build that. A factory was different.
The official, Rupert Guerra, was in a testy mood on the day he was to visit the factory. He had received conflicting directions about the site from the villagers; it was now late in the day, and he was just about ready to give up. He was disappointed too at his first glimpse of the structure, with the vines and lathro and waist-high bull grass. He walked around the tower and gazed at the dried vines at the tower’s base and the shoots that had miraculously sprung from the dead mass to the blades. The damn old man make me come all the way from Barrackpore, he thought. Idly, he tugged at a liana, and the blades creaked an inch or two. He heard a rustling from within the tower and thought suddenly of snakes and wild dogs.
“I thought you wasn’t coming again.”
“Oh, lord!”
Narpat emerged from the tower with a cardboard box.
“You give me a real scare.” Guerra wiped his face with his handkerchief. “I didn’t realize you was hiding in there all the time. I didn’t hear a single sound.”
“I wasn’t hiding. And you didn’t hear a sound because you wasn’t paying attention.”
“What you have in that box?”
“Come inside.” He turned with his box.
“In the tower?”
“You not coming?” Narpat’s voice echoed from the tower.
“Yes … yes.” He entered gingerly. In the dim light, he saw a bench and a rough table and a stool shaped from a tree stump. “We will be able to see in here?”
“The human body design for adjustment. Just be patient.” He dropped the box onto the table.
For the entire evening, Narpat explained the rationale behind the graphs and the diagrams. Occasionally, his face serious and intent, he pointed with his cane to some aspect of his sketch. This man with his bad foot, standing for two hours without shifting his position, Guerra thought. Talking nonstop with no sign of tiredness. And every single explanation make a kind of crazy sense. His own back was aching from crouching on the small wooden stool. He looked at his watch and stood up. Narpat continued his commentary.
Guerra coughed and said apologetically, “I think this is enough for one day.”
Narpat was surprised. “You will come back?” he asked, his normally firm voice soft and uncertain. He looked away, tapped his cane on the ground, and waited for this weakness to pass. He tried to recall all the times he had been disappointed.
“Next Wednesday. I finish work early on Wednesdays.”
Narpat placed the box beneath the bench and limped to the trace. Guerra followed him. “You want a lift?” Narpat nodded and got in the car. On the way to Kanhai trace, Guerra asked, “How you get to the factory?”
“I get a lift halfway. I walk the rest.”
“With your cane? It must be take you a while.”
“Nothing wrong with a little exercise. The country air is the most purifying agent in the world. Pull in to that trace.”
“I think I better pick you up next Wednesday.”
“Why? That house on your left.”
“Because it—it along the way.”
“Where you from?”
The car stopped by the house. “Barrackpore. About half a mile from—”
“Barrackpore is not along the way. It will take you twenty minutes to drive here and another twenty minutes to the factory.”
“So you don’t want me to give you a lift then?”
“I didn’t say that. I just explaining the inconvenience. Once you understand that, the decision is yours.” He closed the door, not waiting for a response. Guerra looked at his watch. Eighteen and a half minutes from the factory. The old man’s calculations weren’t too far off.
When Narpat entered the house, he went straightaway to his plans. Late in the night Dulari took his untouched food from the table and threw the plate’s contents into the garbage bin.