When a small business man dies

The last weekend in May was a long weekend, extended by a public holiday on the Monday.  In keeping with tradition, it rained heavily as the first tropical wave of the season passed by, and on that wet Saturday we had a death on the street. “The Street” in common parlance, is the local name for the Cascade Road, not so much amongst the professional classes who drive to their large homes in the leafy suburb, but more so to the working classes and the unemployed who walk and ride taxis to their smaller houses scattered along the length of “The Street” and concentrated at the top in the Blanca. Nathan had his own small business.  I first met him at my front gate, where he arrived clutching his bucket and sponge, a look of earnest eagerness on his face as he sought to wash our car. 

He was small and lean, but then he did not have an income commensurate with being short and fat!  He was good at marketing himself, well spoken, humble, and he washed cars as well as the next person. And I saw his trade expand, as he developed a partnership with the mechanic just along the road from where he lived, turning up at the end of every day to clean the repaired cars before their owners reclaimed them.  Nathan was no hustler to be found begging for a job every week.  Only when business was bad did he have to ascend the hill as far as us to make his designated income, washing the car or helping with other chores. His sensitivity struck a chord with me.  Once, whilst clearing an old pile of excavated soil, he uncovered a clutch of iguana eggs and brought them gently to me in his cupped hands, seeking how to save the nascent lives he’d disturbed. 

A task, which despite my best endeavours, I was unable to accomplish, but Nathan never knew I failed. He had been in the construction business, whether skilled or unskilled I never asked, but Nathan was an epileptic or, in the language of “The Street,” ‘he caught fit’.  His employers dismissed him, being unable to meet the challenge with the same equanimity as he himself did. Understandable, as construction is a hazardous business, even without the workers unexpectedly falling over, but surely there was a job that someone of intelligence and loyalty could have accomplished, epileptic or not. The fits were controlled by medication, a couple of tablets a day at $6 each, which is a fair proportion of an income based on washing cars at $20 a time.

The medicine was available free at the General Hospital, but Nathan told us, indignation darkening his normally calm countenance, that many was the time he had queued for 2 or 3 hours and on eventually reaching the front of the line being told that the tablets he needed had just finished, or were out of stock, “come back tomorrow”; the reason irrelevant, the anger directed at those who did not have the courtesy or the caring to share that information with the public when they were joining the queue. He had a son in the States, exactly where, doing what, I never asked, a measure of my own reluctance to share personal testimony.  Nathan told us that every month, without fail, he sent his son US$100. That’s 30 car washings. His small business was no different from many private enterprises, whatever their size; the targets are the same, survival, family support and personal advancement.

In the early light of that wet Saturday morning at the end of May, Nathan ventured out into the pouring rain, to the standpipe across the road, to brush his teeth.  I guess it was more important to send money to his son than to WASA. With his head wrapped in a towel to protect it from the rain and his hand clutching the toothbrush, Nathan suffered a fit.  I have no idea if the hospital had again run out of his tablets, or if he did not have any money to buy them, or if it was one of those seizures that still happened occasionally even when he took his medication. Nathan fell where the camber of the road met the riser of the pavement, and in that rushing tunnel of rainwater, he drowned. Did anyone driving down the Cascade Road that morning see him, lying there and continue on their way?  If his friends and family on “The Street” had known how to administer CPR, could they have saved him?  I don’t know. I do know that I miss seeing him and deeply regret the nature of his passing.

The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Guardian Life. Send your comments to guardianlife@ghl.co.tt