In the days when the house belonged to Narine Sangha’s nana and nani, it had been little more than a barracks-like box sitting atop wood posts. Over the course of three generations, walls had been put up to make extra rooms and other walls taken down to enlarge others. The house was raised; the original packed dirt underneath was paved and enclosed on two sides by lattice woodwork. Unadorned pillars that once had been purely functional were embellished. The original four wood ones at the back were replaced with straightforward concrete ones. And the newer section of the house sported custom-made molded concrete ones with opulent bellies and Corinthian-like crowns. Stairways that connected upstairs and downstairs were erected, a concrete one with wrought-iron banisters at the front, and a plain one of wood at the back. A portion of the downstairs area was walled off in the course of time to make servants’ quarters and to enclose a laundry area. A verandah with arched framing eventually wrapped around the house. Decorative vines grew on the latticework, and potted bread-and-butter begonias lined the banister of the verandah.
Narine Sangha, although he had not lived in the house for almost four years, employed a man twice a week to upkeep the garden and the house. As long as the children remained within the view of this man they called the yardman, they were permitted to play downstairs on the paved area, where its spaciousness was interrupted only by the tall supporting pillars. They played hide-and-seek behind the pillars and behind the curtains of sheets and towels that hung from the drying lines. They were allowed outside in the yard also, but only at the front of the house, where they would play among clumps of trimmed and trained shrubs, trees, and flowering plants. At the back, the yard was undeveloped, the bushes there tended only with an occasional swipe of a cutlass, to keep them short enough to discourage snakes, and it was because of the possibility of snakes, scorpions, and other biting and stinging insects and larger fauna that had never been named that the children were not to play there. They took to heart the gardener’s threat to chop off their feet with his cutlass if they disobeyed him.
He allowed them to think they helped him by letting them drop seedlings of flowering plants into beds of rich black manure. The children would pull up weeds for no longer than just a few minutes, but to them, in the hot sun, it would seem as if they had been out in the yard with the gardener all day, and so they would boast of their labor to Mrs. Sangha and to Dolly, wiping their brows and necks of imaginary perspiration. With a tin watering can belonging to the girl, they watered plants but mostly themselves. Quickly they tired of chores and resorted to digging holes into which they poured can after can of water with an aim only they knew. They picked periwinkles and strung them on lengths of thread. One day the gardener caught the boy struggling to get one of these garlands over the girl’s long, frizzy hair, with the aim of hanging it around her neck.
“Ey, boy. What is this? Wedding? You taking dulahin so young, boy?” he teased. Once the girl had run off upstairs for one of her frequent visits to her mother, he called the boy into the shed that housed the garden supplies under the back stairway and seized the chance to more quietly advise, “You and she different, boy. That is Narine Sangha daughter. You and me is yard-boy material. She is the bossman daughter. Oil and water. Never the two shall mix. You too young to know what I saying. But I saying it anyway. She will grow up pretty. You so young, and already you have taste. But girls like she does only make fellas like we cry. Hear what I telling you!”
The boy stared into the dark shed, mesmerized by the variety of spades, the coil of hose, the concrete-crusted wheelbarrow, clay pots, saucers, and cans of paint. But he was thinking about what the yardman had just said to him. It sounded like a stern warning. It sounded like the man was saying something unkind about his friend. He did not understand, and he did not like this man who was not always allowed to enter Mrs. Sangha’s house saying bad things about his little friend. In any case, why would a child make a big man cry?
The gardener approached him. “You daydreaming, boy? Awright. Come. You going to plant something in this yard. This little number here is a Norfolk pine. I’ll dig the hole for you, and you can put it in. One day when you is a big man, you will pass this tree. By then it will be fully grown, and you will be glad of what I tell you when you was a child.”
The child patted the earth around the pine while the gardener held it steady. He stood up. He stared at the gardener. So many letters of the alphabet swallowed, there must be words by now inside of him. Finally they came. “Uncle Mako say big people don’t cry. If you cry, you is a baby. And you mustn’t say bad things about people. And I don’t cry.”
The gardener set his face in a look of shock, shook his head in mock disbelief, then laughed. “Awright, awright, big boy. You answering back, eh! Well, you get me. You get me there, in truth!”