Ram Persad was up. He was sitting on his bed, chopping onions on a wooden board: I heard the tack, tack, tack of his knife hitting the boa...
Ram Persad was up. He was sitting on his bed, chopping onions on a wooden board: I heard the tack, tack, tack of his knife hitting the board.
What the hell is he chopping onions so early for? I thought, turning to a side and closing my eyes again. I wanted to go back to sleep, but the tack, tack, tack of the knife hitting the board insisted:
This man has a secret.
I stayed awake, while the man on the bed chopped onions. I tried to figure it out.
What had I noticed about Ram Persad in the past few days?
For one thing, his breath had gone bad. Even Pinky Madam complained. He had suddenly stopped eating with us, either inside the house or outside. Even on Sundays, when there would be chicken, Ram Persad would refuse to eat with us, saying he had already done so, or he wasn’t hungry, or…
The chopping of the onions continued, and I kept adding thought to thought in the dark.
I watched him all day. Toward evening, as I was expecting, he began moving to the gate.
From my conversation with the cook, I had learned that Ram Persad had started to head out of the house at the same time every evening. I followed at a distance. He went...
