V. Naipaul - The nightwatchman's occurrence book - and other comic inventions

Mahadeo wasn’t looking. It overwhelmed him just to be in Mr Cuffy’s house. He felt triumph, shame, relief and awe. Then the shame and the awe went, leaving him exhausted but cool.

‘Lutchman.’

‘Mr Mahadeo.’

‘Stay here with Sebastian. Don’t let him go nowhere. Preacher mustn’t get to know about Cawfee right now.’

He hurried over to Chittaranjan’s, pushed his way through the drunken taxi-drivers on the terrace and went up the red steps. He saw Baksh at the top. Baksh was saying, with unconvincing dignity, ‘Is not you I come to see, Goldsmith, but Mr Harbans.’

Mahadeo followed Baksh and Chittaranjan into the drawing-room. Harbans was there with his committee. Foam was sitting at the polished cedar table, looking at a very wide sheet which contained all the committee’s dispositions for polling day: the names of agents and their polling stations, agents inside the stations and agents outside; taxis, their owners, their drivers, their stations.

Mahadeo said, ‘Goldsmith, I have to see you right away.’

Chittaranjan, honouring the occasion by wearing his visiting outfit (minus the hat) at home, looked at Mahadeo with surprise and some contempt.

‘Pussonal,’ Mahadeo insisted.

Chittaranjan felt the force of Mahadeo’s eyes. He led him to the back veranda.

Baksh said, ‘Mr Harbans, answer me this frank: if I go up, ain’t I just making the Muslims and them waste their good good vote?’

Dhaniram said, ‘Ach! You could keep the Muslim vote.’

‘I know,’ Baksh said. ‘You ain’t want the Muslim vote now. But you think it would look nice? When next election come round, and you ain’t want the Muslim to waste their vote, what you going to do then?’

Harbans said, ‘Next election? This is the fust and last election I fighting in Elvira.’

Foam studied his chart. He wasn’t going to take any part in the discussion.

Baksh knew he was pushing things too far. But he knew he was safe because Foam was there. Otherwise he stood a good chance of being beaten up. Not by Harbans or Dhaniram or Chittaranjan, but by helpers. He could hear the din from Ramlogan’s shop next door: the curses and the quarrels, swift to flare up, swift to die down. He could hear the taxi-drivers downstairs, drunk and getting drunker; they were making a row about petrol for the motorcade tomorrow.

Baksh said, ‘If the Muslims vote for Preacher, it going to make a little trouble for you, Mr Harbans. You is a old man and I ain’t want to trouble you. But is the only proper thing to do.’

‘And the only proper thing for you to do is to make haste and haul your tail away.’ It was Chittaranjan, returning to the drawing-room. ‘Dhaniram, at long last we could use your plan. Cawfee dead.’

‘Aha! What I did tell you?’ Dhaniram was so excited he lit a cigarette. ‘One Negro was bound to dead before elections. You in luck, Mr Harbans. Lorkhoor going away tonight. And tonight self you get a chance to start paying the Negroes their entrance fee.’

Harbans was too stupefied by his good fortune to react.

‘Wake,’ Dhaniram said. ‘Coffee. We coffee. Ha! Coffee for Cawfee. Coffee, rum, biscuits.’

Chittaranjan remained poised. ‘Foam, take the van and run down to Chaguanas and get Tanwing to come up here with a nice coffin and a icebox and everything else. And telephone Radio Trinidad so they could have the news out at ten o’clock. You could make up the wordings yourself. Dhaniram, go home and get your daughter-in-law to make a lot of coffee and bring it back here.’

‘How I go bring back a lot of coffee here?’

‘Is a point. Foam, when you come back, go and pick up the coffee from Dhaniram place. Nelly mother going to make some more.’

Baksh saw it was no use threatening to sell out to Preacher now. He said, ‘Funny how people does sit down and dead, eh? Since I was a boy so high in short pants I seeing Cawfee sitting down in his house, repairing shoe. All sorta shoe. Black shoe, brown shoe, two-tone shoe, high-heel, wedge-heel.’ Baksh became elegiac: ‘I remember one day, when I was a boy, taking a shoe to Cawfee. Heel was dropping off. One of those rubber heels. I take it to Cawfee and he tack back the heel for me. I offer him six cents but he ain’t take it.’

No one listened. Foam was folding up his election chart in a business-like way. Dhaniram was buckling his belt, ready to go and see about the coffee. Harbans was still bemused. Mahadeo, relieved, exhausted, didn’t care.

‘He ain’t take it,’ Baksh repeated.

Chittaranjan said, ‘Mahadeo, you better go and keep a sharp eye on the house. I going to talk to those taxi-drivers. We go want them for the funeral. I think it would be better to have the funeral before the motorcade.’

Mahadeo went back to Mr Cuffy’s house.

Sebastian was sitting in a morris chair, leaning forward and grimacing.

Lutchman said, ‘Sebastian ain’t too well, Mr Mahadeo. Just now, just before you come, he take in with one belly pain. He sick.’

‘Serve him damn right. And let me tell you one thing, Sebastian. If you dead, nobody not going to bury you, you hear.’

Sebastian only grimaced.

Lutchman said, ‘Food and everything spread out in the kitchen, you know, Mr Mahadeo. Nothing ain’t touch. Mr Cawfee,’ Lutchman said, feeling for the words, ‘get call away rather sudden.’

Sebastian straightened his face and got up. He stood in front of the tinted photograph. He said, ‘I did know Cawfee when he take out that photo. Always going to Sunday School.’ Abruptly his voice was touched with pathos. ‘They use to give out cakes and sweet drinks. Then he get take up with this shoemaking.’

They sat and waited until they heard a van stop outside. Foam, Chittaranjan, the D.M.O. and Tanwing came in. The D.M.O. was a young Indian with a handsome dissipated face. He hadn’t forgotten his association with England and continued to wear a Harris tweed jacket, despite the heat.

Foam asked, ‘You going to cut him up, Doctor?’

The D.M.O. pursed his lips and didn’t reply. He did two things. He took off Mr Cuffy’s stout black boots, said, ‘Good boots,’ turned up Mr Cuffy’s right eyelid, then closed both eyes.

‘Heart,’ he said, and filled the form.

‘Was that self I did think,’ Lutchman said.

Tanwing, the undertaker, was pleased by the D.M.O’s dispatch, though nothing showed on his face. Tanwing was an effervescent little Chinese who had revolutionized burial in Central Trinidad. He had a big bright shop in Chaguanas with a bright show window. In the window he had coffins of many sizes and many woods, plain and polished, with silver handles or without any handles at all, with glass windows on the lid through which you could look at the face of the deceased, or without these windows. Every coffin had its price tag, sometimes with a hint like: ‘The same in cyp, $73.00.’ There were also tombstones, with tags like this: ‘The same with kerbs, $127.00.’ The slogan of Tanwing’s was Economy with Refinement; because of the former he had abandoned horse-drawn hearses for motor ones. Refined economy paid. Tanwing was able to sponsor a weekly fifteen-minute programme on Radio Trinidad. The other programme of this sort was a hushed, reverent thing called ‘The Sunshine Hour’. Tanwing gave his audience fifteen lively minutes of songs from many lands on gramophone records, and called his programme ‘Faraway Places’.

Tanwing fell to work at once. He wasted no time sympathizing with anybody. But he was anxious to do his best; Mr Cuffy was being laid out in one of his more expensive coffins.

By now it could no longer be hidden from Elvira that something had happened to Mr Cuffy.