Miguel Street Read online

  My mother kept on crying and in the end even Ganesh broke down.

  When my mother saw this, she dried her tears and said, ‘If you only know, Pundit, how worried I is. I have to find so much money for so much thing these days, and I don’t really know how I going to make out.’

  Ganesh now stopped crying. My mother began to cry afresh.

  This went on for a bit until Ganesh gave back a hundred dollars to my mother. He was sobbing and shaking and he said, ‘Take this and buy some good clothes for the boy.’

  I said, ‘Pundit, you is a good man.’

  This affected him strongly. He said, ‘Is when you come back from England, with all sort of certificate and paper, a big man and a big druggist, is then I go come round and ask you for what you owe me.’

  I told Hat I was going away.

  He said, ‘What for? Labouring?’

  I said, ‘The Government give me a scholarship to study drugs.’

  He said, ‘Is you who wangle that?’

  I said, ‘Not me. My mother.’

  Eddoes said, ‘Is a good thing. A druggist fellow I know -picking up rubbish for him for years now-this fellow rich like anything. Man, the man just rolling in money.’

  The news got to Elias and he took it badly. He came to the gate one evening and shouted, ‘Bribe, bribe. Is all you could do. Bribe.’

  My mother shouted back, ‘The only people who does complain about bribe is those who too damn poor to have anything to bribe with.’

  In about a month everything was fixed for my departure. The Trinidad Government wrote to the British Consul in New York about me. The British Consul got to know about me. The Americans gave me a visa after making me swear that I wouldn’t overthrow their government by armed force.

  The night before I left, my mother gave a little party. It was something like a wake. People came in looking sad and telling me how much they were going to miss me, and then they forgot about me and attended to the serious business of eating and drinking.

  Laura kissed me on the cheek and gave me a medallion of St Christopher. She asked me to wear it around my neck. I promised that I would and I put the medallion in my pocket. I don’t know what happened to it. Mrs Bhakcu gave gave me a sixpenny piece which she said she had had specially consecrated. It didn’t look different from other sixpenny pieces and I suppose I spent it. Titus Hoyt forgave me everything and brought me Volume Two of the Everyman edition of Tennyson. Eddoes gave me a wallet which he swore was practically new. Boyee and Errol gave me nothing. Hat gave me a carton of cigarettes. He said, ‘I know you say you ain’t smoking again. But take this, just in case you change your mind.’ The result was that I began smoking again.

  Uncle Bhakcu spent the night fixing the van which was to take me to the airport next morning. From time to time I ran out and begged him to take it easy. He said he thought the carburettor was playing the fool.

  Next morning Bhakcu got up early and was at it again. We had planned to leave at eight, but at ten to, Bhakcu was still tinkering. My mother was in a panic and Mrs Bhakcu was growing impatient.

  Bhakcu was underneath the car, whistling a couplet from the Ramayana. He came out, laughed, and said, ‘You getting frighten, eh?’

  Presently we were all ready. Bhakcu had done little damage to the engine and it still worked. My bags were taken to the van and I was ready to leave the house for the last time.

  My mother said, ‘Wait.’

  She placed a brass jar of milk in the middle of the gateway.

  I cannot understand, even now, how it happened. The gateway was wide, big enough for a car, and the jar, about four inches wide, was in the middle. I thought I was walking at the edge of the gateway, far away from the jar. And yet I kicked the jar over.

  My mother’s face fell.

  I said, ‘Is a bad sign?’

  She didn’t answer.

  Bhakcu was blowing the horn.

  We got into the van and Bhakcu drove away, down Miguel Street and up Wrightson Road to South Quay. I didn’t look out of the windows.

  My mother was crying. She said, ‘I know I not going to ever see you in Miguel Street again.’

  I said, ‘Why? Because I knock the milk down?’

  She didn’t reply, still crying for the spilt milk.

  Only when we had left Port of Spain and the suburbs I looked outside. It was a clear, hot day. Men and women were working in rice-fields. Some children were bathing under a stand-pipe at the side of the road.

  We got to Piarco in good time, and at this stage I began wishing I had never got the scholarship. The airport lounge frightened me. Fat Americans were drinking strange drinks at the bar. American women, wearing haughty sun-glasses, raised their voices whenever they spoke. They all looked too rich, too comfortable.

  Then the news came, in Spanish and English. Flight 206 had been delayed for six hours.

  I said to my mother, ‘Let we go back to Port of Spain.’

  I had to be with those people in the lounge soon anyway, and I wanted to put off the moment.

  And back in Miguel Street the first person I saw was Hat. He was strolling flat-footedly back from the Café, with a paper under his arm. I waved and shouted at him.

  All he said was, ‘I thought you was in the air by this time.’

  I was disappointed. Not only by Hat’s cool reception. Disappointed because although I had been away, destined to be gone for good, everything was going on just as before, with nothing to indicate my absence.

  I looked at the overturned brass jar in the gateway and I said to my mother, ‘So this mean I was never going to come back here, eh?’

  She laughed and looked happy.

  So I had my last lunch at home, with my mother and Uncle Bhakcu and his wife. Then back along the hot road to Piarco where the plane was waiting. I recognised one of the customs’ officers, and he didn’t check my baggage.

  The announcement came, a cold, casual thing.

  I embraced my mother.

  I said to Bhakcu, ‘Uncle Bhak, I didn’t want to tell you before, but I think I hear your tappet knocking.’

  His eyes shone.

  I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.