The spokes on Singh’s bicycle are rusted in spots. It pains her to look at them.
“Miss Anna!” Singh has seen her. “You here!” He bolts up from the bench.
“Sit, sit, Singh.” Anna waves him away. “Sit and finish your breakfast.”
This is the first time she has seen him since she arrived on the island four days ago. Lydia works for her parents every day except Sundays. She comes at seven each morning. On weekdays, she leaves at five o’clock sharp. On Saturdays she works a half-day. But Singh works only three days a week for her parents. He arrives at dawn, at five thirty, and leaves at three.
“How long you stay dis time, miss?” Singh settles back down on his bench.
“A month.”
“A whole month? Your mother and father must be glad to have you for a whole month.”
In spite of his age, Singh’s hair is thick and jet black. He has slicked it down with coconut oil. It shines in the sunlight and the sweet scent of the oil tickles Anna’s nose.
He does not dye his hair, Singh says. His people do not gray. When his father died at ninety-eight, he had a full head of hair, jet black as his own.
Anna’s father is practically bald. At fifty, his head was already marked with a monk’s tonsure. Now, except for a gray semicircle that starts at his ears and dips low at the base of his head, the surface of his head is smooth, not a strand of hair in sight.
They are both old men with longevity in their genes, but on the matter of hair, Singh has the upper hand. It is a triumph over her father he rarely exercises. Once, many years ago, Anna heard him say to her father: “Boss-man, like soon you go have no hair at all on your head.” It was an expression of compassion, not a boast.
“So you’re still here, Singh,” Anna says.
“Who go garden for de madam better den me?” Singh grins. He has all his teeth. Her father has lost half of his and wears dentures. “I doe use tootbrush like rich people,” Singh had once explained. “I does use cane stalk to clean between my teet.”
She does not know Singh by any other name. Singh, he has been to her and to the rest of her family. They do not know his first name.
It is a Hindu name, yet Singh says he is Christian. His mother and father, seeking a better life for their children from the poverty they knew in India, had indentured themselves to the British colonial powers. They arrived on the island with the second wave of immigrants, sometime in the late 1800s. His parents converted. “It easier for dem,” he said. “Dey get work if dey say dey Christian. But we does still fly de flags and make puja.”
“You’re looking good,” Anna says.
Singh’s skin is the color of dark brown chocolate. His mustache, like the hair on his head, is jet black. His face is unlined. The bones are pronounced, his skin taut. His muscles bulge on the calves of his legs and on his forearms. Only his eyes betray his age. They are old man’s eyes, fixed in sinkholes above his cheekbones. Like her father’s eyes, they are beady, the fire in them extinguished, replaced by a glare that is embarrassing to her: the old man asking for answers to questions he is afraid to articulate. Where has the time gone? How much time do I have left? What will happen to me when I die?
“Is de wife,” he says. “She keep me young.”
He remarried for the third time the year before. The new wife is thirty, almost ten years Anna’s junior.
“I hope
you
are keeping her young, Singh,” Anna says.
He throws his head back and laughs. He is wearing black clogs. Not clogs really; he has cut down his tall black rubber boots so they cover the upper part of his feet and leave his heels exposed. On him, the look is unconventional, fashionable even. Youthful.
“De wife not complaining,” Singh says.
Anna avoids his eyes. “And your daughters?”
“De big one gone to Canada. She husband take she and de children. De middle one still here. She give me five grandchildren. I still have de littlest one with me.
She going to university.”
The littlest one is twenty-two, the daughter he had with his second wife who died two years ago. She is the same age as his first granddaughter. He is proud of her, the first in his family to go to university.
“Good for you, Singh.”
“I tell de wife I know how to make children,” he says.
“You’re not planning to have more, are you, Singh?” Anna asks, aghast.
He pats his head. “De wife want one.”
“Not at your age, Singh!”
“I still strong, you know, miss.”
She knows what he means and she does not want to encourage him in dialogue about his sexual prowess. Not that he would be explicit. He has too much respect for her. And he knows his place.
How casually she accepts that.
He knows his place
. Her friends in America would be shocked to hear she thinks this way, her African American friends especially. Not that she believes one should be consigned permanently to his place. One should aspire to, and be given the opportunity to attain, the highest rung on the ladder to success, but having a place and knowing where others are in relation to one’s place is to have the comfort that order brings, the reassurance of stability. Now that she is here, in the Caribbean, no longer in America, she finds there is something very civil about such notions. There are no surprises, no rude intrusions. One can depend on certain courtesies, respect and deference granted and assumed. Singh will say no more than he has already said.
I still strong
. He giggles childishly when he says it.
“Your grandchildren will keep her occupied,” Anna says.
“I tell she dat. But she say all woman want child of dey own.” His eyes crinkle and his mustache spreads over his top lip. “So you come to see me, Miss Anna, or you come to take my bench? Don’t think I forget. I remember how you use to like to sit in de garden on dis bench.”
“That was a long time ago, Singh. I was a little child in those days. You can keep the bench.”
“So if you don’t come for de bench, what you come to tell me, miss?”
“My mother says she won’t be coming out today.”
The contours of Singh’s face change abruptly. His eyes darken, his lips tighten. “Anyting wrong with she?”
“No. Not at all. No,” Anna says quickly.
“She does always come out in de morning time.”
“Well, not today. She told me to tell you to work on the seedlings, and if you have time, you should weed the anthuriums.”
“Someting wrong.” Singh does not frame these words in a question. He states them as an indisputable fact.
“No,” Anna says. “Mummy is fine.”
Singh gets up and scratches his head. “Madam does always come out in de morning time. Someting wrong with she. She say to me Monday dat today we work on de orchids. She does always do what she say.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Mummy.”
“I don’t know, miss.” Singh shakes his head.
“She’s probably tired this morning. And it’s hot.”
“Is hot every morning, Miss Anna, and she does still come out.”
“Mummy’s getting up in age. You can’t expect her to do the things she used to do.”
“So she start today?” There is both accusation and worry in Singh’s voice.
Anna brushes him off. “
Today
Mummy is tired.”
Singh keeps his lips closed.
“Do you want me to call my father?”
“What for?”
“He may know what my mother wanted you to do with the orchids.” .
“De bossman have nothing to do with de garden,” Singh says irritably.
“Shall I go ask Mummy what she wants you to do?”
Singh wipes his hands on the sides of his pants. Flecks of the split peas from the dhalpourie flutter to the ground. “No,” he says. “Don’t bother she. I already know what she want me to do. I go work here in de nursery. You tell madam I weed de anthurium bed too for she.”
Anna leaves the nursery. She does not look back. She senses that in spite of his declaration to begin working, Singh has remained where she has left him, standing next to her child’s bench, still puzzling out the reason for her mother’s absence.
Her answers have not satisfied him, but she will not allow him to transfer his anxiety to her. Her mother looked fine at breakfast. After breakfast, she was her usual self, giving orders to Lydia. And if her mother’s stern exchange with Lydia has left her exhausted, that is to be expected. She is not young anymore. She is way past middle-age. She cannot be expected to be spry every morning. On hot days, she cannot be expected to stand in the brutal sun that blazes down on the garden.
She finds her father squatting at the edge of his fish-pond. His feet are firmly planted on the narrow pebbled border, his knees spread apart to the height of his chest, his backside hovering inches away from the ground. In one hand, he is holding a thin, black pole. At the end of the pole is a small green net. He scoops the net down into the water and up again. He repeats this movement several times, peering into the net when he brings it up, once disentangling a tiny fish squirming inside. Next to him are a tin watering can, a large gray stone, and a block of wood. He scoops the net down in the water again. “Ah hah!” he shouts. “Got you!” He pulls up the net. From where she is, Anna can see two legs wriggling out of the holes in the bottom of the net. Frog’s legs.
“What’s that you have, Daddy?” Anna approaches him.
“Frog. They eat my fish.” He lowers the net to the watering can. The frog wriggles and squirms, trying to escape, but her father sinks two fingers into the sides of its neck, pulls it out of the net, and deposits it into the watering can.
“I catch one at least once a week,” he says. “Now we’re at the end of the dry season, I find more in the pond. They come out looking for water.”
“What are you going to do with him?” Anna stands next to her father.
“Oh, take him to the river,” her father answers, straightening up.
He will not kill any living thing. It wasn’t always so. When Anna was a child, he hunted and fished. Twice a month, on Fridays after work, he was gone. Her mother fought him over both, for both were dangerous. The island was still home to fauna left stranded from the great Amazon jungle on the chunk of land broken off in a continental drift. Hunting in the rain forest her father could be attacked by ferocious wild cats or bitten by the poisonous snakes that slithered silently through the matted ground, and if not snakes, he could find himself lost in the thick entangling trees and vines. On a fishing trip, he could be caught in a storm in the open sea. His boat could capsize. The latter had indeed happened and he almost drowned. Still, given a choice, Beatrice Sin-clair preferred her husband to fish rather than hunt. She preferred this because his fishing partner was a lawyer, a man from a prominent family. His hunting partners— there were four of them in all—were villagers from the countryside. When they came to meet him in their battered open truck, one could hear their pothounds howling from blocks around.
Beatrice’s point was that John was no longer a young man without responsibilities. He had a wife and a daughter. His hunting friends were fine when he had no one else but himself to feed. Now he had to think of his future. A man is judged by the friends he keeps, she said to him. To his bosses, he would appear to be a man without ambition. That was the way he would be viewed by the colonial government if he continued to be seen by the entire neighborhood in ragtag clothes, drunk, surrounded by men who could barely read and write, and with a pack of howling pothounds. Not that she objected to dogs in general, but these were dogs that bred with any other dogs and ate from any pot.
And indeed John Sinclair was often drunk when he came home from hunting, stinking of stale rum, sweat, and animal entrails, his arms around the shoulders of his hunting partners, they too stinking of stale rum, sweat, and animal entrails, the dogs straining against their leashes inside the truck, scratching the wooden barrier with their sharp nails, yapping and barking, joyous from the hunt.
John wore his most ragged clothes when he went hunting, torn shirts under torn shirts, pants he hid from his wife before she could pack them away for charity. In these clothes there was no way to distinguish him as a man who not only could read and write, but who, except for an injustice done to him (his mother insisted) would have won an island scholarship to Oxford University. That injustice, according to Mrs. Sinclair, John’s mother, was the doubt cast on the results of his Cambridge A-level chemistry exam that was graded in England. His score was perfect, or near perfect. He had to have cheated, the colonial government declared. But John had a photographic memory and had spent months memorizing the pages of his chemistry textbook.
Justified though Mrs. Sinclair was, and Beatrice’s advice not unfounded, John nevertheless rose up the ranks in the Ministry of Labor. When he ultimately left the colonial government it was for a better paying job at the island’s top oil company for a boss who did not care if he fished and hunted, or with whom he fished and hunted. So his weekends continued as before, even after he retired from the company at the early age of fifty-two. Then one day it ended
.
His fishing partner, the lawyer, suffered a heart attack while they were out at sea. John did all he could to save him. He pumped his chest, he breathed into his mouth, he pleaded with him to recover. There were no boats in sight, no one to help them. For one hour, under a ferocious sun, John held his friend in his arms and watched him die.
Shock and grief left John stunned. He lost weight, he hardly smiled, he moped around the house or paced the garden restlessly, seeing nothing around him except for the pictures in his mind.
Beatrice became frightened. The dark mood that had settled over her husband scared her. To pull him out of his stupor, she bought him a fish tank, a large one mounted on a metal frame with long legs. Inside the tank she put artificial sea reeds, sand, chunks of white coral, and a dozen fish of various colors. John was not unappreciative, but it bothered him to see fish so confined. “It’s like putting them in a prison,” he said. A pond was what he wanted for the fish. He pointed to the place that would be perfect for this. It was the spot in the garden at the edge of the veranda where Beatrice had planted her orchids.