If he were asked, he would say he had no memory of his mother and Mr. Persad calling each other by name. In truth, if Mr. Persad wanted Dolly, he would look for her for as long as it took without ever uttering her name. On finding her, he would simply begin talking.
“I was looking for you,” he might say, to which she might as gently answer, “Well, I was right here.” It was the most natural thing.
She did the same. Initiating communication with him, she would utter, as if it were his name, “Ehem …” and he would look up in acknowledgment. Speaking of her to the boy, he would say “your mammy.” She and the boy spoke of him as “Mr. Persad.” This was how the boy addressed him when he was speaking directly with him; in the most muted voice he could manage, he would try, at once, to be neither heard nor impertinent. Mr. Persad called him “son,” but he never referred to him as “my son.”
The boy didn’t have much of a sense of his mother and Mr. Persad’s relationship as a married couple. They had separate bedrooms. He never caught Mr. Persad going into hers and knew her to enter Mr. Persad’s only when he was not in it, to clean it or to look after his clothing. And yet to his mind, neither of them seemed dissatisfied or wanting.
Once, through his bedroom window, the boy heard them out in the backyard talking. He peeped out to see them walking in the yard, side by side, stopping to examine a rusted bit of the wire netting on the chicken coop. They were discussing things that needed to be done in the yard. His mother wondered if tomato plants would survive in such soilless gravel. Mr. Persad pointed to something in the hills behind the house. He and Dolly stood close to each other, watching whatever it was. He walked over to a clump of milk tins in which anthurium lilies were planted. He picked one up, inspected it. She bent over the ones on the ground and broke off browned, dead leaves. The boy believed he heard his name mentioned, but he couldn’t really be sure. He returned to his homework, comforted by the notion that he had been mentioned, thinking that all in all, his mother might be happy.
In preparation for the upcoming common entrance exam, Mr. Persad paid for extra lessons. He hired a man who ran a taxi to meet the boy at the end of each school day and take him directly to a Mr. Joseph’s house, a two-story concrete structure through which no air seemed to circulate. In a room that faced an unkempt road ridden with potholes, the boy and three others took two-hour lessons in spelling, comprehension, arithmetic, and the geography and history of the world. On any given day, Mr. Joseph, who smelled of sewing machine oil, leaned out of the window no less than five times to plead for peace and quiet from less ambitious boys prancing around the potholes in a raucous game of cricket or football. Mr. Joseph’s boys sat on low elementary-school-type benches on either side of a long low table. Various words and images: flowers, body parts, airplanes, and bombs, to name a few, were etched on the surface of the table, the groves filled in with years of grime that a protractor point could, with some determination, dislodge. There were, here and there, hearts through which Cupid’s arrows were drawn. Each heart and arrow was flanked by a girl’s name on one side and a boy’s on the other. Once, when the boy arrived first, and Mr. Joseph could be heard brushing his teeth, hacking and expelling phlegm in an adjoining room, he dug the point of his compass into the soft flesh of the desk and drew a heart. He wrote no name but etched an image of a rose within the heart.