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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.’
    Ramlogan passed his hand over his forehead and behind his neck. ‘I know is hard to believe, sahib. But is the gospel truth. I think is a good idea, sahib, for you to married Leela.’
    ‘All right,’ Ganesh said.

    He never saw Leela again until the night of their wedding, and both he and Ramlogan pretended he had never seen her at all, because they were both good Hindus and knew it was wrong for a man to see his wife before marriage.
    He still had to go to Ramlogan’s, to make arrangements for the wedding, but he remained in the shop itself and never went to the back room.
    ‘You is not like Soomintra damn fool of a husband,’ Ramlogan told him. ‘You is a modern man and you must have a modern wedding.’
    So he didn’t send the messenger around to give the saffron-dyed rice to friends and relations and announce the wedding. ‘That old-fashion,’ he said. He wanted printed invitations on scalloped and gilt-edged cards. ‘And we must have nice wordings, sahib.’
    ‘But you can’t have nice wordings on a thing like a invitation.’
    ‘You is the educated man, sahib. You could think of some.’
    ‘ R.S.V.P.? ’
    ‘What that mean?’
    ‘It don’t mean nothing, but it nice to have it.’
    ‘Let we have it then, man, sahib! You is a modern man, and too besides, it sound as pretty wordings.’
    Ganesh himself went to San Fernando to get the cards printed. The printer’s shop was, at first sight, a little disappointing. It looked black and bleak and seemed to be manned only by a thin youth in ragged khaki shorts who whistled as he operated the hand-press. But when Ganesh saw the cards go in blank and come out with his prose miraculously transformed into all the authority