‘Is not true, Pa,’ a girl’s voice said, and they turned to see Leela at the kitchen door.
Ramlogan turned back quickly to Ganesh. ‘Is the sort of girl she is, sahib. She don’t like people to boast about she. She shy. And if it have one thing she hate, is to hear lies. I was just testing she, to show you.’
Leela, not looking at Ganesh, said to Ramlogan, ‘You buy those books from Bissoon. When he went away you get so vex you say that if you see him again you go do for him.’
Ramlogan laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘This Bissoon, sahib, is a real smart seller. He does talk just as a professor, not so good as you, but still good. But what really make me buy the books is that we did know one another when we was small and in the same grass-cutting gang. We was ambitious boys, sahib.’
Ganesh said again, ‘I think they is good books.’
‘Take them home, man. What book make for if not to read? Take them home and read them up, sahib.’
It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard.
‘Is Leela self who write that,’ Ramlogan said. ‘I didn’t ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.’
It read:
NOTICE
NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS!
ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS!
Ganesh said, ‘Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.’
That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib.’
‘But who is your shop assistants?’
‘Leela say is the law to have the sign up, sahib. But, smatterer fact, I don’t like the idea of having a girl in the shop.’
Ganesh had taken away the booklets on salesmanship and read them. The very covers, shining yellow and black, interested him; and what he read enthralled him. The writer had a strong feeling for colour and beauty and order. He spoke with relish about new paint, dazzling displays, and gleaming shelves.
‘These is first-class books,’ Ganesh told Ramlogan.
‘You must tell Leela so, sahib. Look, I go call she and you you go tell she and then perhaps she go want to read the books sheself.’
It was an important occasion and Leela acted as though she felt its full importance. When she came in she didn’t look up and when her father spoke she only lowered her head a bit more and sometimes she giggled, coyly.
Ramlogan said, ‘Leela, you hear what the sahib tell me. He like the books.’
Leela giggled, but decorously.
Ganesh asked, ‘Is you who write the sign?’
‘Yes, is me who write the sign.’
Ramlogan slapped his thigh and said, ‘What I did tell you, sahib? The girl can really read and really write.’ He laughed.
Then Leela did a thing so unexpected it killed Ramlogan’s laughter.
Leela spoke to Ganesh. She asked him a question!
‘You could write too, sahib?’
It took him off his guard. To cover up his surprise he began rearranging the booklets on the table.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I could write.’ And then, stupidly, almost without knowing what he was saying, ‘And one day I go write books like these. Just like these.’
Ramlogan’s mouth fell open.
‘You only joking, sahib.’
Ganesh slapped his hand down on the booklets, and heard himself saying, ‘Yes, just like these. Just like these.’
Leela’s wide eyes grew wider and Ramlogan shook his head in amazement and wonder.
4. The Quarrel with Ramlogan
‘I SUPPOSE,’ Ganesh wrote in The Years of Guilt, ‘I had always, from the first day I stepped into Shri Ramlogan’s shop, considered it as settled that I was going to marry his daughter. I never questioned it. It all seemed preordained.’
What happened was this.
One day when Ganesh called Ramlogan was wearing a clean shirt. Also, he looked freshly washed, his hair looked freshly oiled; and his movements were silent and deliberate, as though he were doing a puja. He dragged up the small bench from the corner and placed it near the table; then sat on it and watched Ganesh eat, all without saying a word. First he looked at Ganesh’s face, then at Ganesh’s plate, and there his gaze rested until Ganesh had eaten the last handful of rice.
‘Your belly full, sahib?’
‘Yes, my belly full.’ Ganesh wiped his plate clean with an extended index finger.
‘It must be hard for you, sahib, now that your father dead.’
Ganesh licked his finger. ‘I don’t really miss him, you know.’
‘No, sahib, don’t tell me. I know is hard for you. Supposing, just supposing — I just putting this up to you as a superstition, sahib — but just supposing you did want to get married, it have nobody at all to fix up things for you.’
‘I don’t even know if I want to get married.’ Ganesh rose from the table, rubbing his belly until he belched his appreciation of Ramlogan’s food.
Ramlogan rearranged the roses in the vase. ‘Still, you is a educated man, and you could take care of yourself. Not like me, sahib. Since I was five I been working, with nobody looking after me. Still, all that do something for me. Guess what it do for me, sahib.’
‘Can’t guess. Tell me what it do.’
‘It give me cha’acter and sensa values, sahib. That’s what it give me. Cha’acter and sensa values.’
Ganesh took the brass jar of water from the table and went to the Demerara window to wash his hands and gargle.
Ramlogan was smoothing out the oilcloth with both hands and dusting away some crumbs, mere specks. ‘I know,’ he said apologetically, ‘that for a man like you, educated and reading books night and day, shopkeeping is a low thing. But I don’t care what people think. You, sahib, answer me this as a educated man: you does let other people worry you?’
Ganesh, gargling, thought at once of Miller and the row at the school in Port of Spain, but when he spat out the water into the yard he said, ‘Nah. I don’t care what people say.’
Ramlogan pounded across the floor and took the brass jar from Ganesh. ‘I go put this away, sahib. You sit down in the hammock. Ooops! Let me dust it for you first.’
When he had seated Ganesh, Ramlogan started to walk up and down in front of the hammock.
‘People can’t harm me,’ he said, holding his hands at his back. ‘All right, people don’t like me. All right, they stop coming to my shop. That harm me? That change my cha’acter? I just go to San Fernando and open a little stall in the market. No, don’t stop me, sahib. Is exactly what I would do. Take a stall in the market. And what happen? Tell me, what happen?’
Ganesh belched again, softly.
‘What happen?’ Ramlogan gave a short crooked laugh. ‘Bam! In five years I have a whole chain of grocery shop. Who laughing then? Then you go see them coming round and begging, “Mr Ramlogan” — that’s what it go be then, you know: Mister Ramlogan — “Mr Ramlogan, gimme this, gimme that, Mr Ramlogan.” Begging me to go up for elections and a hundred and one stupid things.’
Ganesh said, ‘You ain’t have to start opening stall in San Fernando market now, thank God.’
‘That is it, sahib. Just just as you say. Is all God work. Count my property now. Is true I is illiterate, but you just sit down in that hammock and count my property.’
Ramlogan was walking and talking with such unusual energy that the sweat broke and shone on his forehead. Suddenly he halted and stood directly in front of Ganesh. He took away his hands from behind his back and started to count off his fingers. ‘Two acres near Chaguanas. Good land, too. Ten acres in Penal. You never know when I could scrape together enough to make the drillers put a oil-well there. A house in Fuente Grove. Not much, but is something. Two three houses in Siparia. Add up all that and you find you looking at a man worth about twelve thousand dollars, cool cool.’