Miguel Street

13. THE MECHANICAL GENIUS

My Uncle Bhakcu was very nearly a mechanical genius. I cannot remember a time when he was not the owner of a motor vehicle of some sort. I don’t think he always approved of the manufacturers’ designs, however, for he was always pulling engines to bits. Titus Hoyt said that this was also a habit of the Eskimos. It was something he had got out of a geography book.

If I try to think of Bhakcu I never see his face. I can see only the soles of his feet as he worms his way under a car. I was worried when Bhakcu was under a car because it looked so easy for the car to slip off the jack and fall on him.

One day it did.

He gave a faint groan that reached the ears of only his wife.

She bawled, ‘Oh God!’ and burst into tears right away. ‘I know something wrong. Something happen to he’

Mrs Bhakcu always used this pronoun when she spoke of her husband.

She hurried to the side of the yard and heard Bhakcu groaning.

‘Man,’ she whispered, ‘you all right?’

He groaned a little more loudly.

He said, ‘How the hell I all right? You mean you so blind you ain’t see the whole motor-car break up my arse?’

Mrs Bhakcu, dutiful wife, began to cry afresh.

She beat on the galvanized-iron fence.

‘Hat,’ Mrs Bhakcu called, ‘Hat, come quick. A whole motor-car fall on he?’

Hat was cleaning out the cow-pen. When he heard Mrs Bhakcu he laughed. ‘You know what I always does say,’ Hat said. ‘When you play the ass you bound to catch hell. The blasted car brand-new. What the hell he was tinkering with so?’

‘He say the crank-shaft wasn’t working nice.’

‘And is there he looking for the crank-shaft?’

‘Hat,’ Bhakcu shouted from under the car, ‘the moment you get this car from off me, I going to break up your tail.’

‘Man,’ Mrs Bhakcu said to her husband, ‘how you so advantageous? The man come round with his good good mind to help you and now you want to beat him up?’

Hat began to look hurt and misunderstood.

Hat said, ‘It ain’t nothing new. Is just what I expect. Is just what I does always get for interfering in other people business. You know I mad to leave you and your husband here and go back to the cow-pen.’

‘No, Hat. You mustn’t mind he. Think what you would say if a whole big new motor-car fall on you.’

Hat said, ‘All right, all right. I have to go and get some of the boys.’

We heard Hat shouting in the street. ‘Boyee and Errol!’

No answer.

‘Bo-yee and Ehhroll!’

‘Co-ming, Hat.’

‘Where the hell you boys been, eh? You think you is man now and you could just stick your hands in your pocket and walk out like man? You was smoking, eh?’

‘Smoking, Hat?’

‘But what happen now? You turn deaf all of a sudden?’

‘Was Boyee was smoking, Hat.’

‘Is a lie, Hat. Was Errol really. I just stand up watching him.’

‘Somebody make you policeman now, eh? Is cut-arse for both of you. Errol, go cut a whip for Boyee. Boyee, go cut a whip for Errol.’

We heard the boys whimpering.

From under the car Bhakcu called, ‘Hat, why you don’t leave the boys alone? You go bless them bad one of these days, you know, and then they go lose you in jail. Why you don’t leave the boys alone? They big now.’

Hat shouted back, ‘You mind your own business, you hear. Otherwise I leave you under that car until you rotten, you hear.’

Mrs Bhakcu said to her husband, ‘Take it easy, man.’

But it was nothing serious after all. The jack had slipped but the axle rested on a pile of wooden blocks, pinning Bhakcu to ground without injuring him.

When Bhakcu came out he looked at his clothes. These were a pair of khaki trousers and a sleeveless vest, both black and stiff with engine grease.

Bhakcu said to his wife, ‘They really dirty now, eh?’

She regarded her husband with pride. ‘Yes, man,’ she said. ‘They really dirty.’

Bhakcu smiled.

Hat said, ‘Look, I just sick of lifting up motor-car from off you, you hear. If you want my advice, you better send for a proper mechanic’

Bhakcu wasn’t listening.

He said to his wife, ‘The crank-shaft was all right. Is something else.’

Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘Well, you must eat first.’

She looked at Hat and said, ‘He don’t eat when he working on the car unless I remind he?’

Hat said, ‘What you want me do with that? Write it down with a pencil on a piece of paper and send it to the papers?’

I wanted to watch Bhakcu working on the car that evening, so I said to him, ‘Uncle Bhakcu, your clothes looking really dirty and greasy. I wonder how you could bear to wear them.’

He turned and smiled at me. ‘What you expect, boy?’ he said. ‘Mechanic people like me ain’t have time for clean clothes.’

‘What happen to the car, Uncle Bhakcu?’ I asked.

He didn’t reply.

‘The tappet knocking?’ I suggested.

One thing Bhacku had taught me about cars was that tappets were always knocking. Give Bhakcu any car in the world, and the first thing he would tell you about it was, ‘The tappet knocking, you know. Hear. Hear it?’

‘The tappet knocking?’ I asked.

He came right up to me and asked eagerly, ‘What, you hear it knocking?’

And before I had time to say, ‘Well, something did knocking,’ Mrs Bhakcu pulled him away, saying, ‘Come and eat now, man. God, you get your clothes really dirty today.’

The car that fell on Bhakcu wasn’t really a new car, although Bhakcu boasted that it very nearly was.

‘It only do two hundred miles,’ he used to say.

Hat said, ‘Well, I know Trinidad small, but I didn’t know it was so small.’

I remember the day it was bought. It was a Saturday. And that morning Mrs Bhakcu came to my mother and they talked about the cost of rice and flour and the black market. As she was leaving, Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘He gone to town today. He say he got to buy a new car.’

So we waited for the new car.

Midday came, but Bhakcu didn’t.

Hat said, ‘Two to one, that man taking down the engine right this minute.’

About four o’clock we heard a banging and a clattering, and looking down Miguel Street towards Docksite we saw the car. It was a blue Chevrolet, one of the 1939 models. It looked rich and new. We began to wave and cheer, and I saw Bhakcu waving his left hand.

We danced into the road in front of Bhakcu’s house, waving and cheering.

The car came nearer and Hat said, ‘Jump, boys! Run for your life. Like he get mad.’

It was a near thing. The car just raced past the house and we stopped cheering.

Hat said, ‘The car out of control. It go have a accident if something don’t happen quick.’

Mrs Bhakcu laughed. ‘What you think it is at all?’ she said.

But we raced after the car, crying after Bhakcu.

He wasn’t waving with his left hand. He was trying to warn people off.

By a miracle, it stopped just before Ariapita Avenue.

Bhakcu said, ‘I did mashing down the brakes since I turn Miguel Street, but the brakes ain’t working. Is a funny thing. I overhaul the brakes just this morning.’

Hat said, ‘It have two things for you to do. Overhaul your head or haul your arse away before you get people in trouble.’

Bhakcu said, ‘You boys go have to give me a hand to push the car back home.’

As we were pushing it past the house of Morgan, the pyrotechnicist, Mrs Morgan shouted, ‘Ah, Mrs Bhakcu, I see you buy a new car today, man.’

Mrs Bhakcu didn’t reply.

Mrs Morgan said, ‘Ah, Mrs Bhakcu, you think your husband go give me a ride in his new car?’

Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘Yes, he go give you a ride, but first your husband must give me a ride on his donkey-cart when he buy it.’

Bhakcu said to Mrs Bhakcu, ‘Why you don’t shut your mouth up?’

Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘But how you want me to shut my mouth up? You is my husband, and I have to stand up for you.’

Bhakcu said very sternly, ‘You only stand up for me when I tell you, you hear.’

We left the car in front of Bhakcu’s house, and we left Mr and Mrs Bhakcu to their quarrel. It wasn’t a very interesting one. Mrs Bhakcu kept on claiming her right to stand up for her husband, and Mr Bhakcu kept on rejecting the claim. In the end Bhakcu had to beat his wife.

This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. If you want to get a proper picture of Mrs Bhakcu you must consider a pear as a scale-model. Mrs Bhakcu had so much flesh, in fact, that when she held her arms at her sides they looked like marks of parenthesis.

And as for her quarrelling voice …

Hat used to say, ‘It sound as though it coming from a gramophone record turning fast fast backwards.’

For a long time I think Bhakcu experimented with rods for beating his wife, and I wouldn’t swear that it wasn’t Hat who suggested a cricket bat. But whoever suggested it, a second-hand cricket bat was bought from one of the groundsmen at the Queen’s Park Oval, and oiled, and used on Mrs Bhakcu.

Hat said, ‘Is the only thing she really could feel, I think.’

The strangest thing about this was that Mrs Bhakcu her self kept the bat clean and well-oiled. Boyee tried many times to borrow the bat, but Mrs Bhakcu never lent it.

So on the evening of the day when the car fell on Bhakcu I went to see him at work.

‘What you did saying about the tappet knocking?’ he said.

‘I didn’t say nothing,’ I said. ‘I was asking you.’

‘Oh.’

Bhakcu worked late into the night, taking down the engine. He worked all the next day, Sunday, and all Sunday night. On Monday morning the mechanic came.

Mrs Bhakcu told my mother, ‘The company send the mechanic man. The trouble with these Trinidad mechanics is that they is just piss-in-tail little boys who don’t know the first thing about cars and things.’

I went round to Bhakcu’s house and saw the mechanic with his head inside the bonnet. Bhakcu was sitting on the running-board, rubbing grease over everything the mechanic handed him. He looked so happy dipping his fingers in the grease that I asked, ‘Let me rub some grease, Uncle Bhakcu.’

‘Go away, boy. You too small.’

I sat and watched him.

He said, ‘The tappet was knocking, but I fix it.’

I said, ‘Good.’

The mechanic was cursing.

I asked Bhakcu, ‘How the points?’

He said, ‘I have to check them up.’

I got up and walked around the car and sat on the running-board next to Bhakcu.

I looked at him and I said, ‘You know something?’

‘What?’

‘When I did hear the engine on Saturday, I didn’t think it was beating nice.’

Bhakcu said, ‘You getting to be a real smart man, you know. You learning fast.’

I said, ‘Is what you teach me.’

It was, as a matter of fact, pretty nearly the limit of my knowledge. The knocking tappet, the points, the beat of the engine and-yes, I had forgotten one thing.

‘You know, Uncle Bhakcu,’ I said.

‘What, boy?’

‘Uncle Bhakcu, I think is the carburettor.’

‘You really think so, boy? ’

‘I sure, Uncle Bhakcu.’

‘Well, I go tell you, boy. Is the first thing I ask the mechanic. He don’t think so.’

The mechanic lifted a dirty and angry face from the engine and said, ‘When you have all sort of ignorant people messing about with a engine the white people build with their own own hands, what the hell else you expect?’

Bhakcu winked at me.

He said, ‘I think is the carburettor.’

Of all the drills, I liked the carburettor drill the best. Sometimes Bhakcu raced the engine while I put my palm over the carburettor and off again. Bhakcu never told me why we did this and I never asked. Sometimes we had to siphon petrol from the tank, and I would pour this petrol into the carburettor while Bhakcu raced the engine. I often asked him to let me race the engine, but he wouldn’t agree.

One day the engine caught fire, but I jumped away in time. The fire didn’t last.

Bhakcu came out of the car and looked at the engine in a puzzled way. I thought he was annoyed with it, and I was prepared to see him dismantle it there and then.

That was the last time we did that drill with the carburettor.

At last the mechanic tested the engine and the brakes, and said, ‘Look, the car good good now, you hear. It cost me more work than if I was to build over a new car. Leave the damn thing alone.’

After the mechanic left, Bhakcu and I walked very thoughtfully two or three times around the car. Bhakcu was stroking his chin, not talking to me.

Suddenly he jumped into the driver’s seat and pressed the horn-button a few times.

He said, ‘What you think about the horn, boy?’

I said, ‘Blow it again, let me hear.’

He pressed the button again.

Hat pushed his head through a window and shouted, ‘Bhakcu, keep the damn car quiet, you hear, man. You making the place sound as though it have a wedding going on.’

We ignored Hat.

I said, ‘Uncle Bhakcu, I don’t think the horn blowing nice.’

He said, ‘You really don’t think so?’

I made a face and spat.

So we began to work on the horn.

When we were finished there was a bit of flex wound round the steering-column.

Bhakcu looked at me and said, ‘You see, you could just take this wire now and touch it on any part of the metal-work, and the horn blow.’

It looked unlikely, but it did work.

I said, ‘Uncle Bhak, how you know about all these things?’

He said, ‘You just keep on learning all the time.’

The men in the street didn’t like Bhakcu because they considered him a nuisance. But I liked him for the same reason that I liked Popo, the carpenter. For, thinking about it now, Bhakcu was also an artist. He interfered with motor-cars for the joy of the thing, and he never seemed worried about money.

But his wife was worried. She, like my mother, thought that she was born to be a clever handler of money, born to make money sprout from nothing at all.

She talked over the matter with my mother one day.

My mother said, ‘Taxi making a lot of money these days, taking Americans and their girl friends all over the place.’

So Mrs Bhakcu made her husband buy a lorry.

This lorry was really the pride of Miguel Street. It was a big new Bedford and we all turned out to welcome it when Bhakcu brought it home for the first time.

Even Hat was impressed. ‘If is one thing the English people could build,’ he said, ‘is a lorry. This is not like your Ford and your Dodge, you know.’

Bhakcu began working on it that very afternoon, and Mrs Bhakcu went around telling people, ‘Why not come and see how he working on the Bedford?’

From time to time Bhakcu would crawl out from under the lorry and polish the wings and the bonnet. Then he would crawl under the lorry again. But he didn’t look happy.

The next day the people who had lent the money to buy the Bedford formed a deputation and came to Bhakcu’s house, begging him to desist.

Bhakcu remained under the lorry all the time, refusing to reply. The money-lenders grew angry, and some of the women among them began to cry. Even that failed to move Bhakcu, and in the end the deputation just had to go away.

When the deputation left, Bhakcu began to take it out of his wife. He beat her and he said, ‘Is you who want me to buy lorry. Is you. Is you. All you thinking about is money, money. Just like your mother.’

But the real reason for his temper was that he couldn’t put back the engine as he had found it. Two or three pieces remained outside and they puzzled him.

The agents sent a mechanic.

He looked at the lorry and asked Bhakcu, very calmly, ‘Why you buy a Bedford?’

Bhakcu said, ‘I like the Bedford.’

The mechanic shouted, ‘Why the arse you didn’t buy a Rolls-Royce? They does sell those with the engine sealed down.’

Then he went to work, saying sadly, ‘Is enough to make you want to cry. A nice, new new lorry like this.’

The starter never worked again. And Bhakcu always had to use the crank.

Hat said, ‘Is a blasted shame. Lorry looking new, smelling new, everything still shining, all sort of chalk-mark still on the chassis, and this man cranking it up like some old Ford pram.’

But Mrs Bhakcu boasted, ‘Fust crank, the engine does start.’

One morning — it was a Saturday, market day — Mrs Bhakcu came crying to my mother. She said, ‘He in hospital.’

My mother said, ‘Accident?’

Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘He was cranking up the lorry just outside the Market. Fust crank, the engine start. But it was in k’ear and it roll he up against another lorry.’

Bhakcu spent a week in hospital.

All the time he had the lorry, he hated his wife, and he beat her regularly with the cricket bat. But she was beating him too, with her tongue, and I think Bhakcu was really the loser in these quarrels.

It was hard to back the lorry into the yard and it was Mrs Bhakcu’s duty and joy to direct her husband.

One day she said, ‘All right, man, back back, turn a little to the right, all right, all clear. Oh God! No, no, no, man! Stop! You go knock the fence down.’

Bhakcu suddenly went mad. He reversed so fiercely he cracked the concrete fence. Then he shot forward again, ignoring Mrs Bhakcu’s screams, and reversed again, knocking down the fence altogether.

He was in a great temper, and while his wife remained outside crying he went to his little room, stripped to his pants, flung himself belly down on the bed, and began reading the Ramayana.

The lorry wasn’t making money. But to make any at all, Bhakcu had to have loaders. He got two of those big black Grenadian small-islanders who were just beginning to pour into Port of Spain. They called Bhakcu ‘Boss’ and Mrs Bhakcu ‘Madam,’ and this was nice. But when I looked at these men sprawling happily in the back of the lorry in their ragged dusty clothes and their squashed-up felt hats, I used to wonder whether they knew how much worry they caused, and how uncertain their own position was.

Mrs Bhakcu’s talk was now all about these two men.

She would tell my mother, mournfully, ‘Day after tomorrow we have to pay the loaders.’ Two days later she would say, as though the world had come to an end, ‘Today we pay the loaders.’ And in no time at all she would be coming around to my mother in distress again, saying, ‘Day after tomorrow we have to pay the loaders.’

Paying the loaders-for months I seemed to hear about nothing else. The words were well known in the street, and became an idiom.

Boyee would say to Errol on a Saturday, ‘Come, let we go to the one-thirty show at Roxy.’

And Errol would turn out his pockets and say, ‘I can’t go, man. I pay the loaders.’

Hat said, ‘It look as though Bhakcu buy the lorry just to pay the loaders.’

The lorry went in the end. And the loaders too. I don’t know what happened to them. Mrs Bhakcu had the lorry sold just at a time when lorries began making money. They bought a taxi. By now the competition was fierce and taxis were running eight miles for twelve cents, just enough to pay for oil and petrol.

Mrs Bhakcu told my mother, ‘The taxi ain’t making money.’

So she bought another taxi, and hired a man to drive it. She said, ‘Two better than one.’

Bhakcu was reading the Ramayana more and more.

And even that began to annoy the people in the street.

Hat said, ‘Hear the two of them now. She with that voice she got, and he singing that damn sing-song Hindu song.’

Picture then the following scene. Mrs Bhakcu, very short, very fat, standing at the pipe in her yard, and shrilling at her husband. He is in his pants, lying on his belly, dolefully intoning the Ramayana. Suddenly he springs up and snatches the cricket bat in the corner of the room. He runs outside and begins to beat Mrs Bhakcu with the bat.

The silence that follows lasts a few minutes.

And then only Bhakcu’s voice is heard, as he does a solo from the Ramayana.

But don’t think that Mrs Bhakcu lost any pride in her husband. Whenever you listened to the rows between Mrs Bhakcu and Mrs Morgan, you realised that Bhakcu was still his wife’s lord and master.

Mrs Morgan would say, ‘I hear your husband talking in his sleep last night, loud loud.’

‘He wasn’t talking,’ Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘he was singing.’

‘Singing? Hahahahaaah! You know something, Mrs Bhakcu?’

‘What, Mrs Morgan? ’

‘If your husband sing for his supper, both of all you starve like hell.’

‘He know a damn lot more than any of the ignorant man it have in this street, you hear. He could read and write, you know. English and Hindi. How you so ignorant you don’t know that the Ramayana is a holy book? If you coulda understand all the good thing he singing, you wouldn’t be talking all this nonsense you talking now, you hear.’

‘How your husband this morning, anyway? He fix any new cars lately?’

‘I not going to dirty my mouth arguing with you here, you hear. He know how to fix his car. Is a wonder nobody ain’t tell your husband where he can fix all his so-call fireworks.’

* * *

Mrs Bhakcu used to boast that Bhakcu read the Ramayana two or three times a month. ‘It have some parts he know by heart,’ she said.

But that was little consolation, for money wasn’t coming in. The man she had hired to drive the second taxi was playing the fool. She said, ‘He robbing me like hell. He say that the taxi making so little money I owe him now.’ She sacked the driver and sold the car.

She used all her financial flair. She began rearing hens. That failed because a lot of the hens were stolen, the rest attacked by street dogs, and Bhakcu hated the smell anyway. She began selling bananas and oranges, but she did that more for her own enjoyment than for the little money it brought in.

My mother said, ‘Why Bhakcu don’t go out and get a work?’

Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘But how you want that?’

My mother said, ‘I don’t want it. I was thinking about you.’

Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘You could see he working with all the rude and crude people it have here in Port of Spain?’

My mother said, ‘Well, he have to do something. People don’t pay to see a man crawling under a motor-car or singing Ramayana?’

Mrs Bhakcu nodded and looked sad.

My mother said, ‘But what I saying at all? You sure Bhakcu know the Ramayana?’

‘I sure sure.’

My mother said, ‘Well, it easy easy. He is a Brahmin, he know the Ramayana, and he have a car. Is easy for him to become a pundit, a real proper pundit.’

Mrs Bhakcu clapped her hands. ‘Is a first-class idea. Hindu pundits making a lot of money these days.’

So Bhakcu became a pundit.

He still tinkered with his car. He had to stop beating Mrs Bhakcu with the cricket bat, but he was happy.

I was haunted by thoughts of the dhoti-clad Pundit Bhakcu, crawling under a car, attending to a crank-shaft, while poor Hindus waited for him to attend to their souls.