He didn’t know what he thought or felt but he didn’t want to cry and left the room. They were waiting for him to come out and quickly encircled him. He heard Ramlogan saying, ‘Come on, man, give the boy air. Is his father dead, you know. His only father.’ And the wailing began again.
No one asked him about plans for the cremation. Everything seemed arranged already and Ganesh was content that it should be so. He allowed Ramlogan to take him away from the house, with its sobs and shrieks and lamentations, its gas lamps, oil lamps, bottle flambeaux, bright lights everywhere except in the small bedroom.
‘No cooking here tonight,’ Ramlogan said. ‘Come and eat at the shop.’
Ganesh didn’t sleep that night and everything he did seemed unreal. Afterwards he remembered the solicitude of Ramlogan — and his daughter; remembered returning to the house where no fire could be lit, remembered the sad songs of the women lengthening out the night; then, in the early morning, the preparations for the cremation. He had to do many things, and he did without thought or question everything the pundit, his aunt, and Ramlogan asked him. He remembered having to walk round the body of his father, remembered applying the last caste-marks to the old man’s forehead, and doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.
When it was all over — his father burnt, the ashes scattered, and everybody, including his aunt, gone away — Ramlogan said, ‘Well, Ganesh, you is a man now.’
Ganesh took stock of his position. First he considered money. He owed Mrs Cooper eleven dollars for two weeks board and lodging, and he found that of his own money he had no more than sixteen dollars and thirty-seven cents. He had about twenty dollars to collect from the school, but he had made up his mind not to ask for it and to return it if it were sent him. He had not stopped at the time to think who had paid for the cremation; it was only later, just before his marriage, he found that his aunt had paid for it. Money was not an immediate problem, now that he had the oil royalties — nearly sixty dollars a month — which made him practically a rich man in a place like Fourways. Still, the royalties could dry up at any moment; and although he was twenty-one, and educated, he had no means of earning a living.
One thing gave him hope. As he wrote afterwards in The Years of Guilt: ‘In conversation with Shri Ramlogan I learnt a curious fact. My father had died that Monday morning between five minutes past ten and a quarter past ten — just about the time, in short, when I had the dispute with Miller, and was deciding to give up my teaching job. I was much struck by the coincidence, and it was only then, for the first time, I felt I had something big ahead of me. For it was indeed a singular conspiracy of events that pulled me away from the emptiness of urban life back into the stimulating peace and quiet of the country.’
Ganesh was happy to get away from Port of Spain. He had spent five years there but he had never become used to it or felt part of it. It was too big, too noisy, too alien. It was better to be back in Fourways, where he was known and respected and had the double glamour of a college education and a father recently dead. They called him ‘sahib’, and some parents encouraged their children to call him ‘Teacher Ganesh’, but this brought back unhappy memories and Ganesh made them stop it.
‘It wrong to call me that,’ he said, adding cryptically, ‘I feel I was teaching the wrong things to the wrong people.’
For more than two months he loafed. He didn’t know what he wanted to do or what he could do, and he was beginning to doubt the value of doing anything at all. He ate at the houses of people he knew and, for the rest, merely wandered around. He bought a second-hand bicycle and went for long rides in the hilly lanes near Fourways.
People said, ‘He doing a lot of thinking, that boy Ganesh. He full with worries, but still he thinking thinking all the time.’
Ganesh would have liked his thoughts to be deep and it disturbed him that they were simple things, concerned with passing trifles. He began to feel a little strange and feared he was going mad. He knew the Fourways people, and they knew him and liked him, but now he sometimes felt cut off from them.
But he couldn’t escape Ramlogan. Ramlogan had a sixteen-year-old daughter he wanted married, and wanted married to Ganesh. It was an open secret in the village. Ganesh was always getting little gifts from Ramlogan — a special avocado pear, a tin of Canadian salmon or Australian butter — and whenever he passed the shop Ramlogan was sure to call him in.
‘Eh, eh, sahib. What happening that you passing without saying a word? People go think we vex.’
Ganesh could not find it in his heart to refuse Ramlogan’s invitation, though he knew that whenever he looked at the doorway leading to the room at the back of the shop he was going to see Ramlogan’s daughter peering through the grimy lace curtains. He had seen her on the night of his father’s death, but he hadn’t paid much attention to her then. Now he saw that the girl behind the curtains was tall; sometimes, when she peered too closely, he could see her eyes wide with mischief, simplicity, and awe, all at once.
He couldn’t link the girl with her father. She was thin and fair, Ramlogan fat and almost black. He seemed to have only one shirt, a dirty striped blue thing which he wore collarless and open down his hairy chest to just where his round and big belly began. He looked of a piece with his shop. Ganesh got the impression that every morning someone went over everything in it — scales, Ramlogan, and all — with a greased rag.
‘It ain’t dirty,’ Ramlogan said. ‘It just look dirty. Sit down, sahib, sit down. You ain’t have to blow any dust or anything away. You just sit down on that bench against the wall and let we have a good chat. I is not a educated man, but I like to hear educated people talk.’
Ganesh, reluctantly seated, did not at once respond.
‘It have nothing like a good chat,’ Ramlogan began, slipping off his stool and dusting the counter with his fat hands. ‘I like hearing educated people giving off ideas.’
Meeting with further silence, Ramlogan remounted his stool and spoke about the death. ‘Your father, sahib, was a good man.’ His voice was heavy with grief. ‘Still, we give him a good funeral. Fust funeral I attend in Fourways, you know, sahib. I see a lot of funeral in my time, but I go say now and I don’t care who hear me say it, that your father funeral was the best I see. Smatterer fact, Leela — my daughter, you know, second and best — Leela say is the best funeral she see. She say she count more than five hundred people from all over Trinidad at the funeral, and it had a lot of cars following the body. People did like your father, sahib.’
Then they both fell silent, Ramlogan out of respect for the dead, Ganesh because he didn’t know what he was expected to say; and the conversation ended.
‘I like these little chats we does have, sahib,’ Ramlogan would say, walking to the door with Ganesh. ‘I ain’t educated meself but I like to hear educated people giving off ideas. Well, sahib, why you don’t drop in again? Let we say, tomorrow?’