Late one night Jeeves was awakened by loud knocking on the door of his sisters’ room, where he now slept. He got up sleepily, and in the dull glow of the fluorescent, he saw his father at the doorway. “I want you to read this for me.”
“Now?” Jeeves rubbed his eyes.
His father did not answer but entered the room, and with the tip of his cane he tapped the bulb. “This light no good again. The life nearly gone out from it.” He sat on the bed, and Jeeves pulled up his feet and propped his back against the bedhead. His father gave him the sheet. “Read it aloud.”
Dear Kala,
I have not contacted you since the funeral but as you know I have been busy trying to get the boarding school dedicated to Mammy off the ground. As I quite expected, nobody is willing to help. They make excuses left right and centre because they don’t have the vision to see what few people could see. I am one and you are another. I propose that you return to Trinidad and help supervise the construction. Your reward apart from knowing the school will be dedicated to your mother will be principalship. I believe you have all the qualities to make an excellent principal. There will be a few issues to be discussed but those can be done when the school is completed.
I regret to inform you that none of the family has been of much help. Your eldest sister is determined to be nothing more than a housewife and your younger sister is living with a group of frauds in a make-believe world. As for your brother …
“Read it till the end,” Narpat said.
As for your brother he comes and leaves the house like a shadow. He seems to be waiting for my death but this old man is not going anywhere in a hurry.
I will end this letter by saying that I am in good health. Although on many days I do not eat, my mind and body are still strong. I will delay the start of the school construction until I hear from you.
Your one and only Pappy.
Jeeves was surprised by the letter’s clarity.
“I want you to send this to Kala as soon as possible. I don’t know her address. When she come back with her big degree, she will put everybody in their place. That bogus Sookdeo and all these neemakaram farmers. Your mammy was right about them.” He smiled, and Jeeves noticed the gaps between his teeth. “She see things I wasn’t able to spot. All along she used to say that the farmers was a bunch of rogues. She warn me that I was wasting time with them.” He paused, then added, “But that was my duty. Is still my duty. You see, boy, without that vision, I would be no different from all of them.” His voice had softened into an almost imperceptible gentleness. “Ever since I could remember … since the day my father die, I fighting. My father was a fighter too, but his battle get cut short.” He looked at his son’s bare chest and said, “This strength get pass from generation to generation.” Jeeves wondered whether he was referring to him or to Kala. “This room too hot, boy. You should sleep with the louvres open.” Jeeves stretched and opened the nearest louvre. “The first battle was against my uncle, the second against my mother who just give up, the third against poverty, the fourth against these rich landowners and proprietors who didn’t like the idea of a boy who had to drop out from school challenging them. That battle last for a long while. But the fifth battle was the most difficult.” He paused, and Jeeves wondered whether he was about to mention his wife or his children. “This battle still going on. Is against ignorance and superstition and small-mindedness. Against weakness parading as strength. Against gossipy people who good at pulling down others because they incapable of doing anything themself. These people … believing in fables instead of what they see all around. Blaming everybody but themself. Freeing themself from action. Crying at the slightest problem, not out of grief but just to get sympathy. You didn’t cry for your mammy funeral?”
It took a while before Jeeves realized a question had been posed.
“I can’t remember.”
“Why? Why you can’t remember?” When his son did not reply, he added, “It don’t matter. She gone now.”
And Jeeves felt a whiff of tenderness, a shrill affection for his father that was like a burst of pain because it was so unexpected and because he knew it would not last. He remembered their first visit to the canefield. The old man placed both hands on his cane as if he were about to get up, but he remained in that position, staring at the wall or perhaps at the dresser Sushilla had bought. The dim light accentuated his profile, and Jeeves imagined he saw his father, in repose, not as a cantankerous, cruel old man but as a solitary warrior. Finally Narpat got up and walked out of the room.
During the following weeks, he visited everyone whom he had asked for help, and to each he revealed that the school would be built after all. The Manager watched his approach and fumbled for some quotation from Open Spirit, but Narpat was in an unusually ebullient mood.
Narpat’s mood changed. He hobbled down the road each day, visiting villagers randomly. Salima grew worried and warned Huzaifa. At home Narpat now spoke regularly with Jeeves. At the end of each conversation he would ask if Kala had replied.
One morning he went outside to the backyard garden and, kneeling on the dirt, pulled out the dried weeds and moulded the tomatoes and ochroes. He piled the trash in a heap and set about repairing the machan, now sagging from unwanted vines. “Allyou plants suffering since Mammy gone, not so? The parasites springing up on all sides and shutting off the light. I will put a stop to that.” He hummed songs his wife had sung in the backyard. At the end of the day the garden was almost restored to its former state. While Jeeves was walking home, he noticed the fire at the side of the house. He quickened his stride and saw his father sitting on the tractor’s step, staring at the fire. The first thing the old man asked was whether Jeeves had received a reply.
“No. Nothing today.”
After a while his father said, “When you wait too long, nothing ever come back. I get the garden back in shape just in time. In a little while all the nice vegetables would have been gone.”
“It look very clean.”
“Nothing ever get accomplish without effort.”
“Boy.”
Jeeves stopped and turned around.
“How long it take a letter to reach America?”
“About a week, I think.”
“And another week for a reply to get here. Today make it twelve days since I give you the letter.” His voice lightened. “You remember when Mammy use to come to the backyard all the time?”
Because plants don’t quarrel, Jeeves thought.
“Today I hear her humming a song over there. Listen. You could still hear her.”
Jeeves heard the snap and crackle of twigs and the hollow puffs of bamboo exhaling. Then a thin, low sound. He looked at his father. The old man’s eyes were closed, his head swaying slightly as he hummed. The ebbing fire coursed to an adjoining pile and burst once more to life, the flame waving like tattered flags. A frog leaped away from the heat, pausing as if in indecision, after each hop.
Narpat was still humming and swaying ever so slightly, as if in a trance. He seemed at peace. Jeeves walked quietly into the house. The following day there was another fire. “Why you burning all these books from Carnegie?” Jeeves asked him. He pulled out an old Hindi book, its pages curling from the heat.
“Hocus-pocus stories. They will reincarnate as better books.” He grinned.
When his father limped to the house, Jeeves tried to rescue some of the books he had seen his father reading silently on the Pavilion. The old man returned with an assortment of papers stabbed onto a copper wire. He pulled out the assorted sheets and one by one threw his jottings and bills and clippings into the fire. “Getting rid of attachments,” he told his astonished son. “Purifying myself.”
“Why?” The fire’s reflection glinted in his eyes.
“Because”—Jeeves didn’t know what to say—“because they were in the house when Mammy was still alive.”
“They have no value again. They belong to a different stage.”
Each night he asked about the letter, and when Jeeves shook his head, he grew silent for a few minutes before he provided some optimistic reason for the delay. Perhaps there was a postal strike in America. Maybe Kala was busy with her exams. The letter may have been lost in one of the chaotic local post offices. The reply, when it came, would put the entire village to shame. Adjustments to the construction would have to be made for lost time. The basic structure would be unchanged, though. One huge classroom, a room for stocks, a small office for Kala, and a big playing field for the girls to exercise. At the centre of the field would be his wife’s statue.
But as the weeks passed, some of his optimism faded, and he repeatedly asked his son about the location of the post office from which he had sent the letter, and if he was certain the correct postage had been affixed. One night he mentioned a nebulous conspiracy and threatened to go to the huge post office at San Fernando to register a complaint. He went first to the village postal agency, then to the Princes Town branch, and finally to the San Fernando centre. At each of these places he demanded a list of all the incoming mails. No such records were kept, the officers explained. He accused them of secreting away letters from America that they assumed contained cash. The officer from the Princes Town branch, a man with long, oily hair and pockmarks on his sunken cheeks, grew nervous and pretended to read from a dusty folder. He shook his head. Nothing from America for the last month. Narpat threatened to sue. The officer, as if he had been through this before, said public officials couldn’t be sued. You will have to bring up the government, he said. Them big pappy from Port of Spain, lawyers themselves. Narpat poked his cane through the aperture, startling the officer. Just wait and see, he shouted.
He knew he couldn’t afford a lawyer, and he was averse to once more appealing for help. The notion of being enclosed by a selfish hostile world rose in him. Not only was everyone expecting him to fail, they were actively pursuing this goal. He searched for alternatives to help him build his boarding school and came up with nothing. For the first time in his life he allowed the possibility of failure. But failure was a reflection of weakness; it was associated with a mind encumbered by superstition, fear, and doubt. He had railed against this chaos for his entire life, had been enraged by the stream of excuses for inaction, where suffering was refined into a technique, poverty into a virtue, withdrawal into a gift. This loathing turned on himself. He saw, as if for the first time, his gaunt, wrinkled arms and his shrunken chest. He studied his broken leg and noticed how the muscles had atrophied, and the twist of the broken ankle. A body like that was a receptacle for disaster, he thought. On his bed at night he tried to still his breath and concentrated to pinpoint the precise points of pain. He focused on the dull ache in his leg and tried to connect it with the tension in his stomach and the pulsing at the back of his neck. His blood he imagined to be thick, black, and lumpy. One night he awoke with a thought desolate in his mind: It was time to put this body out of its misery. He got up from his bed, shivering. He tried to ignore the thought, but it grew stronger, like the pulsing, dull pain in his body. Arguments presented themselves. Useless animals were put down. The old and infirm died. It was the way of the world. Then another thought, just as sudden but more seductive danced in his head: We are made complete only through death. All that happens before is just a preparation. The evolution from student to householder to hermit extended to another more significant phase. He wrestled with this concept all night, but his mind failed and retreated to the fables he had scorned. Kama the god of death, dark and foreboding, appearing at the doorway. Shiva the destroyer, striding multiple universes. Hell populated with horned demons. A boatman ferrying across the recently dead. Men reborn as useless butterflies. A simple syllable of regret offering redemption to a deathbed murderer. Wounded spirits haunting familiar spots. The ghost of unbaptized babes wailing for lost opportunities.
By morning, he was convinced his mind was going. He had limped to the kitchen thrice searching for his wife. He’d heard the laughter of children and felt the weight of a baby on his shoulders. He’d dreamed restlessly of his own father.
In the six months preceding his death, his father had passed through long periods when he no longer recognized his children, when he had forgotten his name, forgotten his canefield. His brother had seized the opportunity. House and property had been swiftly transferred. His family was reduced to tenants. The illness was sudden and devastating, but it may have been there unknown for years. Now there were names for these ailments. Alzheimer’s. Dementia. Pick’s disease. But Narpat had constructed defences against this devastation. He had strengthened his mind, ruthlessly weeded out weaknesses. And he thought: I have done all that is necessary. The fault cannot be mine. So he banged his cane on the floor when he heard distant snatches of laughter and shouted angrily at the kitchen when he heard a familiar song. He sat on the Pavilion and, with his eyes fixed firmly on the table, delivered long lectures on treachery. Over and over the phrase came to him: The fault cannot be mine, I have prepared myself.
Jeeves noticed the old man’s restlessness and the stream of inexplicable conversation. He had expected this, though. As always, his father’s moments of tenderness were swallowed by frenzy. But he had not expected the hatred directed at the dead. He had not expected the self-mutilation. He spoke to Chandra and Sushilla of the bruised mouth, the battered leg, the lacerated wrists and, faced with familiar excuses, decided this time to act alone.
One evening a white van drew up. The old man stared at the attendant injecting the sedative into his arm as if this were another of his phantoms, but in a few minutes he slumped back onto the couch, his mouth open. He awoke in the hospital on a bed with dirty sheets. On an adjoining bed was another old man with huge eyes and a scar on his neck. There was a persistent cough from a bed by the shuttered window. Narpat smelled the wash of antiseptic and faintly of excrement and rose up in a rage. Death factory! Death factory! He screamed. A plump, surly nurse marched to him, and he pushed her away. He clawed at a male nurse who was trying to administer a sedative. Another nurse was summoned. When the sedation wore off, he stumbled groggily from his bed and, without his cane, fell on his face. The nurses ran to him, and he surprised them with his strength. At the end of the second day, the coughing at the window bed stopped. A sheet was placed over the body. A few hours later the corpse was removed. The following day during his afternoon visits, the doctor said in a bored voice, “Carry this one down to the morgue. It look like he die sometime this morning.” He glanced at his watch. “Let’s say at eleven forty-five.”
Narpat gazed at his approach, and when the doctor leaned over his bed, he reached for his throat.
Jeeves was summoned to the hospital. He entered the ward and saw his father strapped down on the bed. A male nurse came to him. “This is your father?”
“Take him away. We can’t do anything for him here.” He released the leg straps. “He still halfway tranquillized.” He unloosened the straps from the hands and chest. “You better carry him home fast.” Narpat gazed insensately from the nurse to his son.
“Where is his cane?”
“We had to take it from him.” The nurse groped at the top of a cupboard, retrieved the cane and placed it at the foot of the bed. Jeeves held his father’s arms and gently pulled him to a sitting position. He placed one hand around the old man’s chest and got him standing.
“They well beat him last night.” Jeeves, unable to distinguish the words, turned. The man gazed with his big eyes at the boy. He placed his palm over the scar on his neck and wheezed. “They well beat him last night. Check his back.”
“This is how you all treat old people?” He saw the other patients gazing at him and a nurse glancing up from a table. He was surprised at the anger in his voice. “By beating them? Blasted savages.”
The nurse sucked her teeth and returned to her folder. An attendant walked stiffly to Jeeves. “What going on here? What is your problem? You think this is a damn charity we running here?”
With his free hand he collared the attendant and pulled him closer. “If anything at all …” He heard the attendant’s surprised gag, his father’s low breath, the hollow gasps bubbling from the hole in the patient’s throat, and at the door, the male nurse screaming for help.
“Carry him home fast.” Jeeves saw that the patient was crying. “Fast!” He released the attendant, who stumbled away, and he walked out of the hospital with Narpat leaning on him.
For two days Narpat lay on his bed, indifferent to the bowls of porridge and soup brought by his son. On the third day he limped to the toilet and tried to relieve himself. A few drops of urine the color of saffron trickled down. His face in the mirror seemed darker than usual, a dull, faded black. On the way back to the bedroom, he gazed at the rusty tint thrown by the evening sun on the curtain and the sofa. The pictures hung on the walls by his wife absorbed the amber and seemed aged and muddy. The remaining books looked like ash-covered dying embers.
He lay flat on the bed, the sheet up to his neck, and stared at the shadow falling on the house. He imagined he could smell the darkness—rotting fruits and dust and a cold, pungent aroma he could not recognize. A mango fell on the ground, and he jumped. Another fell, and he bolted upright, pulling the sheet around him and gazing at the doorway. He closed his eyes and counted. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. He reached seventy-four and opened his eyes and began counting once more.
When Jeeves arrived home, he was still sitting on the bed, clutching the sheet and counting.
“You sleeping?” the boy asked from the shadow.
“You come at last. I was waiting for you.” His voice was cold and flat.
Jeeves entered the room, and in the gloom, his father stared at him in fear and hatred. “You didn’t eat any of the porridge.” The old man’s eyes followed him around the room as he closed the louvres. “I will reheat it.” When he returned, his father stiffened and recoiled from the spoon thrust between his lips. “Come on. Is just a few spoonfuls.” The lips slackened a bit, and Jeeves fed him one spoon, then another. When the bowl was finished, the old man looked at his son. His lips, still slack, seemed to be grinning, but his eyes, alert as ever, were frightened and calculating, like an animal’s.
In the morning when he heard the approaching footsteps, he closed his eyes and pretended he was asleep. He heard the bump of the bowl on the side table, then receding footsteps on the outside steps. He opened his eyes, brought the bowl to his lips, and slurped down the porridge.
When Jeeves arrived home, he was gone.
The boy checked the rooms calling his father’s name He ran shouting to the backyard and, in a moment of panic, peered into the copper. He was still searching outside when Ray and Chandra brought him home. When he saw his son, Narpat struggled against the hands supporting him.
“Somebody see him walking pass Crappo Patch and bring him by us,” Chandra said.
“You better keep this fella under lock and key.” Ray leaned to Narpat. “What you was doing walking all alone in the night? You wanted a lil exercise?”
“Stop bothering him. You and all.” She exhaled.
Narpat freed an arm and pointed to Jeeves. “Him!”
“What happen to him now?” Ray was speaking in a childlike voice.
“He want me dead.”
“Stop talking nonsense, Pappy. He taking care of you.”
“Poison. Poison.” He began to struggle once more. “He want to burn down the house.”
“Maybe allyou should keep him,” Jeeves said.
“How we could keep him, Jeeves? Where we will put him? Ray mother using the spare room, and he have his house right here.”
“You hear what he just say.”
“Don’t bother, boy. Is the sickness talking. He don’t mean it.”
“Keep him away from me,” Narpat shrieked.
“Help Ray take him up the step.” She stopped at the front step. “I make a promise.”
When Jeeves tried to help, the old man began to scuffle. Jeeves stepped back and Ray took him to his room. Chandra was saying something, but Jeeves only heard the old man’s shrieks.
During the following days, after he had placed the food on the side table, Jeeves knocked on the door to let his father know he was leaving for work. One night Bhola came to the cinema. “I hear you taking care of the old man all by yourself.” He coughed, as if embarrassed. “Looking at you, I never woulda expect that.” He paused, then said, “You working here long enough for a raise. What you think?”
“Is up to you.”
“Boy, you just like your father and real different from him.” He did not explain. “I think four dollars a day is a good raise.’
When he left, Dr. Who said, “You taking care of Jhanjat? What wrong with him?”
“He a little sick.”
“That is why you don’t be watching all these chicks again? But I does see them checking you out all the time.” He glanced at the boy in the gloom. “You does look a little like Amitabh Bachchan, you know.” He fidgeted with his shirt. “Maybe is because you get so quiet. I can’t remember when last I hear your voice.” When Jeeves did not reply, he added, “It must be real hell taking care of that old man.”
“Is a kinda promise.” He hesitated. “A perfect pledge.”
“Eh? What is that?”
Jeeves recalled his father’s explanation about being prepared to die to protect something dear, but he knew he couldn’t accept this. “Is something that fall on your lap. Nobody else could do it.”
Dr. Who seemed satisfied. He said, “Is like the promise I make to beat my children every night.” After a while he added, “Not much fellas would do what you doing.”