CREATIVE WRITING

Oct 24, 2010 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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Prologue to: A Lantern in the Wind

A Novel in Progress
By Ameena Gafoor

Continued from last week:
The Gopaul’s two sons, twenty and eighteen years old respectively, had received ample preparation for the world of work at the government primary school. They had mastered the Royal Readers and the Shilling Arithmetic; Ragbeer was now a messenger at the LegCo in the city and Jagbeer a counter attendant at the Sanitary Laundry and Dry Cleaners at Lombard and Princes Street, near the waterfront with its many lumber sheds and pungent smell of damp timber: tatabu, purple heart, kabakalli, locust, greenheart and silverballi and, occasionally, the odd murdered or drowned body floating under the stelling.
What Gopaul’s wife, Sugharee, Sugh for short, kept to herself was that two nights earlier she had dreamt a lot of dead cows floating among the carrion crow bushes, the tall bizi bizi reeds and razor grass in the trench in front of her temple, their eyes wide open and bulging like immense white marbles. She placed no store in dreams, barely mentioned to her husband “mi dream wan funny dream las nite” and thought no more of it.
Kareem, factotum to a Water Street provisions merchant, owned a third-hand 1926 model Ford, black all over, now held together by mud and paint, which he washed and polished every evening.
The brothers shunned the East Coast locomotive, popularly known as the Bermuda, for the convenience of Kareem’s motorcar.
Shortly after seven o’clock that Friday morning Kareem set out with his two passengers as usual. The sun’s rays had cracked through the black lagoons and the eastern sky had a pinkish aura.
They passed Haniff just over the railway-crossing hurrying to his work at the village pumping station to take notes of the tides. Kareem picked his way over the tedious stretch of sharp and uneven red bricks dumped by the Village Council in heaps all along the Main road to fill the countless potholes. After crossing the train lines he picked up speed. Three minutes later, without due care and attention, he turned onto the pubic road, just a stone’s throw away from where the ocean pounded the Dutch sea defence with all its fury. It was high tide; of course, it was new moon.
A green Bedford truck piled high with three hundred bags of paddi, heading to Georgetown at breakneck speed, descended upon them like an aeroplane crashlanding on its belly. Both brothers were buried beneath the avalanche of unmilled rice.
The public road at that junction was transformed into a paddi field and Kareem was hauled out from the wreckage coughing violently, disoriented but miraculously with no more than a few scratches.
Kadir and Zainab did a full day’s work at the back-dam, weeding, forking, hoeing, planting and reaping, pausing only to slake hunger. By mid-afternoon they filled their bateau with produce: plantains, eddoes, sweet potatoes, cassavas, avocados, bananas, cashews, and headed back along the middle-walk trench. Kadir sat at the stern and steered with a paddle gently cutting the ochro-coloured sweet water. Zainab, the soles of her bare feet hardened and lacerated with razor grass cuts, stood on the western bank of the trench, seized the sisal rope tied to the bow, set it on top of her right shoulder and proceeded to stride along the muddy grass verge of the red brick road, hauling the laden bateau and its occupant for the mile and a half back to the mooring point opposite the temple.
Villagers rushed to the bateau to buy fresh produce. Someone said, “A yuh hear ‘bout Ragbeer and Jagbeer?…. Dem dead dis maanin.” Zainab was _stupefied as if by a blow to the head.
The Moulvi could only stare mutely at no one in particular. At that moment the meaning of his dream came home to him forcefully.
The barefoot village bell crier, Dasrat, had already sounded the toll gong along the main road and two cross streets of the village that morning; it was a matter of added anguish to Indian settlers who were Hindus that cremation was not yet permitted in the colony.
The Gopauls slowly came to understand that Kadir had powers of seeing far, this long-bearded Moulvi to whom mothers brought young babies who would not drink their milk, children troubled with “bad eye” and “haslee”, who cried endlessly, even those tormented by churaile jumbie crying at their gates at nights, those who craved prayers and holy water for errant spouses and property disputes.
Gopaul now reflected on how he, Kadir and Rahimbux had together watched the endless oceans for weeks on end, praying day and night, on the decks of the Ganges, no land in sight, only pani stretching to the horizon to meet the skies.
Little could they guess that theirs would be the last ship bearing workers to West Indian plantations or that hundreds of destitute time-expired coolies were lying like dead- flies on the pavements of Georgetown, shrivelled and hungry from the ravages of malaria, time and Kaieteur rum, waiting to die quietly, waiting for a pauper’s grave at the Le Repentir cemetery.
Gopaul reflected on how he and Kadir were both allotted to the Success plantation, lived in adjoining logies that were blackened with three centuries of the grief and grime of slavery and indenture, infested with scorpions, flies and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, close to the trench where the outhouses overhung. He and Kadir walked the mile and a half together everyday to the open fields under scorching sun and driving rain, barefeet, their lunch in their two-tiered metal food saucepans, cutlasses sharpened. . . They hoed and ploughed, planted, slashed and burnt the infernal canes and loaded them onto punts according to the season. While they walked home in the evenings the gang complained about the overseer and the sirdar and when on payday Ramgolallpaul’s money never seemed right for the hours he had slaved from morning till night, he decided to cut his name to Gopaul to simplify matters at the pay desk . . . Five years of scrimping were enough to allow them to leave the estate and acquire two cottages that lay side by side in Triumph; they lived as jahaji bhais and good neighbours these nineteen years.
And now Gopaul felt so very alone in his grief. He would never see his two sons again, he cried, not in a hundred rebirths or reincarnations. On the surface life went on as before, like the motion of Kadir’s paddle when it cuts the trench water that instantly closes up leaving no evidence of a wound.
To affirm his freedom from Success, Gopaul had bought a cast-net and had taken to sea with two other village fishermen while Sugh tended ducks and fowls in their large backyard well endowed with fruit trees: cherry, mango, and sapodilla, rows of pakchoy and brambles bearing bora and tomatoes.
They owned a cow and sold its milk, as was the custom back in Bihar—a sign of prosperity. The parapet between Gopaul’s paled fence and the trench was a purple carpet of fallen fruits from the lofty, gnarled jamoon tree on which birds constantly fed. Between them, the two neighbours kept their part of the village supplied with fresh fish, poultry, ground provisions and fruits, secure in the thought that their sons would not become cane cutters. But what fate was this? Gopaul no longer knew who or what to believe in.
One Friday afternoon when the western sky glowed orange and crimson, the sun bent on one last brilliant showing before twilight, Zainab went to Gopaul’s fence to hoist another basket of vegetables but Sugh was nowhere to be seen.
The chickens were strangely quiet picking in the parched earth, the ducks still bathing themselves in the pond. Lately, Sugh had taken to following her husband as far as the seashore in the afternoons, going again in the mornings to help him bring in the cast-net while he managed the full quake. She had even started following him into the rum shop where he went more often since that cursed day.
When Gopaul’s conch-shell had not given a sound all next morning, the new fluffy yellow chickens just stumbled out of their cracked shells were hungrily cheeping cheeping and the house next door remained unopened, a troubled Moulvi walked up to the police station.
Constable Gordon, pen and notebook in his top pocket, was sent later that day to take a report and started to climb Kadir’s front steps.
A loud crackling sound filled the air and Gordon found himself under a heap of string-boards and risers. His left leg would be in plaster-of-Paris for the next three months. Kadir and his family had stopped using the rotten front steps altogether but now what was left was not even the semblance of steps.
Two days later, news spread throughout the village that two bodies were found washed up on the foreshore in front of the courida trees. Not long after their wake and burial a moneylender’s nephew moved into Gopaul’s cottage and duly took possession of his fishing nets and quakes, Sugh’s cow, ducks and new yellow chickens.

End of Prologue.

To contact the Editor of The Arts Forum Column, Ameena Gafoor: E-mail: [email protected] or Telephone: 592 227 6825.

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