of dirty white pants that showed how his fat legs shook when he walked, and a dirty white vest with many holes. And he was in his slippers: dirty canvas shoes open at the little toes, with the heels crushed flat.
‘What the hell you want, black Haq?’
Haq put his face close up to Ramlogan’s unshaved chin. ‘When you hear me! When you hear me!’
Ramlogan pushed him away. ‘You ain’t bound and ’bliged to spit on me when you talk.’
Haq didn’t seem to mind. ‘When you hear,’ he twittered, his lower lip wet and shining. ‘Just wait until you hear. It not going to be black Haq then.’
Ramlogan was striding ahead, flinging out his legs, shaking and jellying from his shoulders to his knees.
They went to the room behind the shop. Here Ramlogan cooked, ate and slept. It was a long narrow room, just the size of the rumshop. Trinidad Sentinels covered the walls and sheltered many cockroaches. The one window was closed; the air was hot, and heavy with the sweet smell of Canadian Healing Oil.
Ramlogan said grumpily, ‘You wake up a man when a man was catching a little sleep, man,’ and he lay down on his rumpled bed—a mattress thrown over some new planks—scratching easily and indiscriminately. He yawned.
Haq leaned his stick against the rum crates in a corner and eased himself into the sugar-sack hammock hanging diagonally across the room.
Ramlogan yawned and scratched. ‘Before you start, Haq, remember one thing. No trust. Remember, no trust.’
He pointed to the only picture on his walls, a coloured diptych. In one panel Haq saw the wise man who had never given credit, plump—though not so plump as Ramlogan—and laughing and counting what looked like a fortune. In the other panel the incorrigible creditor, wizened, haggard, was biting his nails in front of an empty money chest. Ramlogan had a copy of this picture in his shop as well.
‘In God we trust, as the saying goes,’ Ramlogan glozed. ‘In man we bust. As the saying goes.’
‘I ain’t come to beg,’ Haq said. ‘If you ain’t want to hear what I have to say, I could just get up and walk out, you know.’
But he made no move to go.
He talked.
Ramlogan listened. And as he listened, his peevishness turned into delight. He rolled on his dirty bed and kicked up his fat legs. ‘Oh, God, You is good. You is really good. Was this self I been waiting and praying for, for a long long time. Ha! So Chittaranjan is the fighter, eh? He in the Supreme Court for fighting, eh? Now we go show this Supreme Court fighter!’
Then the breadfruit fell. Then Chittaranjan cursed.
Haq waited. Ramlogan did nothing.
‘Go on and tell him now,’ Haq urged. ‘Answer him back.’
‘It could wait.’ And Ramlogan began to sing: ‘It could wait-ait, it could-ould wait-ait.’
He stopped singing and they both listened to Chittaranjan cursing. Ramlogan slapped his belly. Haq giggled.
‘Let we just remain quiet like a chu’ch and listen to all that he have to say,’ Ramlogan said. He clasped his hands over his belly, looked up at the sooty corrugated-iron ceiling, smiled and shut his eyes.
Chittaranjan paused. All that could be heard in Ramlogan’s room was the whisking of cockroaches behind the Trinidad Sentinels on the wall.
Chittaranjan began again.
‘He talking brave, eh, Haq? Let him wait. Haq, you black, but you is a good good friend.’
Haq was about to speak, but Ramlogan stopped him: ‘Let we well listen.’
They listened until there was nothing more to listen to.
Haq said, ‘Ramlogan, you is my good good friend too. You is the only Hindu I could call that.’
Ramlogan sat up and his feet fumbled for the degraded canvas shoes.
‘I is a old man, Ramlogan. My shop don’t pay, like yours. People ain’t buying sweet drink as how they use to. I is a widow too. Just like you. But I ain’t have your strength.’
‘All of we have to get old, Haq.’
‘That boy Foam say he going to send me to hospital.’
‘Foam only full of mouth, like his father.’
‘He did beg and beg me not to tell nobody. Wasn’t for my sake I break my word.’
Ramlogan stood up, stretched, and passed his big hairy hands over his big hairy belly. He walked over to the rum crates and took out a quarter bottle.
‘A good Muslim like you shouldn’t drink, you know, Haq.’
Haq looked angrily from the quarter bottle to Ramlogan. ‘I is a very old man.’
‘And because you is very old, you want to take over my shop?’