Evenings, after dinner and before settling into homework, the boy would sit on the verandah with the man he more often than not thought of now as his father.
On one occasion Mr. Persad began—after a long silence and the rhythmic pensive rocking that had become like an overture to Dolly and the boy—“Not so the Bihar boy in your class?”
The boy, expecting something but not this, sat upright and nodded.
“You know, in the early days, when I bought the gas station, the chamber of commerce used to have a lot of parties. Well, the time I am about to relate to you, the party was held in the home of one of its members. I had to take a taxi … yes, I had a gas station, but even then I had no car. So I took a taxi to the house. Soon as I arrived at the gate to the house, I ready to back out of there. You never see men dress up so! I was the only one with shoes that had the sole worn thin. Lots of women, and all of them looking so tidy and pretty and everything looking very dear.
“One of them was Bihar. The taxi people. What is the name of the boy in your class?”
“Shem.” The boy could but whisper the name. He was aware that the Bihar family and the Sangha family were well acquainted, and now that Mr. Sangha was living at home again, it seemed, from classroom chatter he overheard, that the families visited each other’s houses regularly. Somehow it had become known that his mother once worked for Mrs. Sangha, and he was uncomfortable in the Bihar boy’s presence.
Mr. Persad hadn’t heard what he said, and he had to repeat Shem’s name.
“He is the only boy. He have sisters, but it is he who will inherit his father’s business, you know. A lot of properties and businesses. The whole taxi service. Now, if we can get the account for gas for the taxi service, we would be in big business, eh? So, he and you might be doing business together, and I was thinking one day you might have to entertain him in your home. It is never too early to start preparing yourself.”
Everyone in school knew that Shem didn’t want to be a businessman. He was always making fun of business families, as if he were different, saying that he was going to study law when he finished school.
The boy wanted to tell Mr. Persad about a party Shem’s parents had thrown for him that year to celebrate his seventeenth birthday. Two boys from the class had been invited. The school day after, they bragged incessantly that they had drunk champagne to toast Shem’s birthday. It later became known that it was not champagne at all that they drank, but a new carbonated drink, a bubbly apple-flavored drink the color of champagne that was being advertised as the champagne of soft drinks. According to them, however, they got falling-down drunk from that one glass. That was good champagne, they said again and again, as if they were regular drinkers. The boy wondered what Mr. Persad would have thought about that.
Listening to the wishes of Mr. Persad, knowing he was placing them in the wrong basket, the boy was reminded of a time not long before, which, ever since, had caused him no small measure of grief.
It had been talked about in school that Mr. and Mrs. Sangha were having a party for their daughter’s sixteenth birthday. It was to be at the prestigious All India Members Only Club of which her father was treasurer. Shem’s family had already received their invitation, which Shem was using as a bookmark in one of his class texts. The boy went home from school every day until the day before the event, expecting to learn from his mother that his family—his mother, businessman Bhatt Persad, and himself—had received an invitation. When none came on that second-to-last day, he decided to take the situation into his own hands. Even as he took the circuitous walking route home from school that passed the Sanghas’ house, he did not have a plan. When their house was in view, he paused, watched, and tried to find some reason to enter the yard. He looked to see if there might have been a delivery of the evening newspaper tucked in the wrought-iron fronds of the gate or thrown on the front steps that he could retrieve and take up to the door. There was none. Perhaps a window that had blown open and was not latched. This was a vain wish; there had not been any such obliging wind. But he couldn’t have hoped for more than what presented itself like a blessing. When he was close enough, he noticed that a large clay pot that had been on the front verandah lay on the paved yard below, shattered, the bread-and-butter begonia it had contained still looking fresh and salvageable. He felt he had chanced upon a truly urgent situation, not a contrived or convenient reason to call out to the Sanghas, but something he could not in good conscience ignore. He unlatched the front gate. The pine tree he had so long ago planted was almost his height. He ran up the stairs, calling out not to the young lady he thought of as his friend but to Mrs. Sangha. A servant he did not recognize peeped around a wall and disappeared. Mrs. Sangha came out with a dish towel in her hand. She saw him, and the moment of silence between that time and when she said, “Eh-eh, child? What you doing here? I wasn’t expecting you,” seemed an eternity.
He lied that he was walking home with a friend from school who lived nearby when, as he was passing the house, he saw the fallen begonia. She looked at the place on the verandah wall where the plant would have been. It missing indeed, she quickly glanced over the wall. She shouted out to the woman who had looked out before, saying, “Joyce, the cat was in the house again. Come quick. It knock over a plant again. Come and clean it up. Leave what you doing. Now-now.”
Perhaps the boy could have left then, having accomplished that task, but he stayed. He thought about offering to clean it up, but he couldn’t bear to be put to work in that house, and he also didn’t want to lose the opportunity to chat with Mrs. Sangha. He waited while she seemed preoccupied with Joyce’s cleaning. Then she said, “Well, you really growing up, yes, child. How is Mammy?”
He said his mother was fine and that, well, it was true, he was indeed getting older. After all, he was sixteen that year. She seemed oblivious to his opening and said distractedly that, well, everything and everybody was changing. He pointed to the pine and said, “The Christmas tree looking nice,” hoping to engage her in a familiarity. She said, “Yes. That is a Norfolk pine. First time you seeing that tree?” He was shocked that she had forgotten it was he who had planted it. He did not remind her. She said nothing more, and in the silence the boy felt, strangely, shame for her, that she, too, had changed. All at once she looked unfamiliar. He would not be invited to the party. In a voice that of its own accord had become coarse and had dropped in volume and enthusiasm, he muttered that he had better get home before it got any later. He ran down the stairs and as fast as he could away from the house.
That night he did not eat his dinner. He suffered bouts of fever, nausea, and profuse sweating. His mother wanted to send for a doctor. He begged her not to send for anyone, assured her that he would be well by the following morning, and only then, if he was not, should she call for the doctor. He remained curled up in his bed under several cotton blankets, crying when he was alone, and praying that Mrs. Sangha would forget that he had gone to her house. He begged God to keep him from being, at that very moment, the topic of conversation and jokes between Mrs. Sangha and her daughter. That he would not be talked about at the party among the children or the adults. That Shem Bihar and Paul Busby would not hear about the visit he had made on the day before the party—to which he remained uninvited.
For weeks he expected his mother to say questioningly, surely with rage, that she had heard he went to the Sanghas’ house the day before the birthday party. He fell into a depression that threatened, in the face of Mr. Persad’s current conversation, to engulf him again.