Only when the taxi had left behind the seaside village of Raleigh did the child open his eyes. They passed fields of cane. A man flagged them, but there was no room, and he was left in a trail of dust and blue smoke of engine oil to wait the hour until another taxi came along. Mr. Walter had to swerve and hug his side of the road when a car approached and passed down the middle of the unpaved road. Mr. Walter surprised himself and everyone with a string of curses, but still he waved to the other driver as the cars passed. Mr. Walter’s passengers, including Dolly and her son, turned back to watch the other motorcar vanish down the road.
The child scratched sand-fly bites on the back of his hand. She held his hand tightly to stop him from turning new ones into fierce watery eruptions. He complained that he was hot, and in a whisper asked her to roll her window down a little more. She sucked her teeth, ignored him. He sucked his teeth in response and sighed resignedly. Wearily, she unzipped the vinyl bag she carried. The smell of freshly fried dough and melted cheese rose out of the bag. The passenger next to her shifted to get a view. Dolly took out the brown paper containing the thin triangle of roti stuffed with cheese and shut the bag quickly. The boy nibbled at the buttery section of the flat bread, pushed it back at her, barely touched. Under the arch of the bridge, he pressed his face against the window to watch the mesmerizing passage of wood, iron railings, and wires, and through them snippets of the unfathomable black water. She caught his hand in hers just as he was about to reach for the window’s handle. Wrestling it out of hers, he whined in a whisper, “I not turning it down, Ma. Don’t hold my hand so. You hurting me.”
She rested her head back and closed her eyes.
On opening her eyes, she noticed Mr. Walter watching her in the rearview mirror yet again. What wrong with that damn good-for-nothing man? What he still watching so? she asked herself.
Mr. Walter, as if in response, threw his arm over the seat and turned back to face her, a move that caused the other passengers to gasp and, in varying words and expressions, demand that he keep his eyes on the road.
“I was there when they find him, you know.”
Dolly’s face drained; she didn’t know the body had been found. She put her hand to her mouth. The other passengers became stonily silent.
“What you mean, when they find him?” she whispered.
One passenger leaned forward and looked directly at Dolly, anticipating her reaction to Mr. Walter’s response.
Mr. Walter, realizing his words had been mistaken, spoke up rather quickly and loudly. “No, no, no. I don’t mean his body. His body never surface, ain’t so? No, girl, I mean I was there when they find him, a little boy bawling his eyes out on the steps of the dry-goods parlor.”
Dolly didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry. Her child was busy looking out the window. But she knew well enough that he heard everything, even if he might have appeared involved elsewhere.
“Two, three days so we wait for news that a child gone missing from some other village. But no such news. Then, you know, the old people, Mako and his lady—ent you know them? They say leave the child with them, that it is God who send this little boy for them to keep as their own. A Indian child they bring up, like if he is one of we. And you know, in time he come true-true like one of we!”
He don’t have no sense? she asks herself, talking so in front of the child? He driving motorcar and still he stupid so?
“But you know, he was a pretty child. Fair-fair, like Indians from town. Poor thing. He didn’t know where he was from or who drop him on the parlor steps. All he know was his name. It was Seudath, not so? But everybody call him Indian. All of we used to play cricket with him. Not just Mako and the lady. He grow up to be a nice fella.” Pointing to her son he added, “The child look like him for so.”
She turned to look through the window. Why he shaming her so, in front of her child, and in front of people she don’t know, she wonders. In a car full of black people who bound to say how Indians does throw-way their own, easy so.
In any case, she did not believe Mr. Walter. Everyone liked saying that they were there when the abandoned Indian boy was found outside Raleigh’s only shop. She wanted to tell him to mind his own business, but if he in truth did play cricket with her husband, for the sake of his memory, she would not be rude.
First stop on the edge of Marion was for petrol at a station owned by an Indian man. Initially Dolly was shy to be seen by the man and his workers, all of whom were Indian, in the car otherwise full of black people. On the second trip there, one of the attendants, sitting idle atop an overturned wooden soft-drink crate, picking his teeth with a toothpick, winked at her, removed the pick, puckered his lips, sent a kiss in her direction, and then resumed cleaning his teeth. She sucked her teeth long and hard before turning away from him. But all day long, if the truth be known, she remembered the freshness of the idle attendant with a degree of pleasure, imagining herself as he might have seen her: hair long and thick, black and wavy, her skin almost as dark as a person of African origin, reddened by Raleigh’s sun, sea, and wind, her nose and lips unusually slim for an Indian’s. When her husband had brought her to Raleigh, Tante Eugenie, taking her pipe out of her mouth long enough to greet her, held her face in her hands, lifted it to the sun, and studying it, said, “Well, Indian couldn’t do better. You is the prettiest Indian woman I ever see. How much children you planning for? Don’t waste them good looks, you hear? That is all God in heaven does bless human being with looks for, you know.”
Dolly took the attendant’s attention to mean that caring for a child by herself, doing hard work to make a living, and living for a handful of years without any man in her life had not hurt her appeal. But still, since then, whenever they arrived at the station, she would lean her head against the backrest, close her eyes, and pretend to be fast asleep. If she had not done so, she surely would have noticed that the man was no longer around. If she were to have inquired, a most unlikely thing for her to do, she would have found out that the owner, who did not miss a thing on the grounds of his station, had seen his worker’s freshness that day and promptly terminated his employment.
The strong odor as the car’s tank was refueled, and the honking of car horns on the busy street, jolted the child. While his mother pretended to sleep, he sat upright expectantly. From Saturdays past, this smell and the sudden busyness had come to signal that they were mere minutes from the center of town, from Ashton Road, from Mrs. Sangha’s large spacious house, from what he most looked forward to from one Saturday to the next: an entire day of play with Mrs. Sangha’s daughter.