No Comebacks

'Harkishan Ram Lai,' said the student. McQueen looked at his pencil, the list of names in front of him and the student.

'We'll call you Ram,' he said, and that was the name he wrote down on the list.

The student walked out into the bright July sunshine of Bangor, on the north coast of County Down, Northern Ireland.

By that Saturday evening he had found himself cheap lodgings in a dingy boarding house halfway up Railway View Street, the heart of Bangor's bed-and-breakfast land. At least it was convenient to the main station from which the works truck would depart every morning just after sun-up. From the grimy window of his room he could look straight at the side of the shored embankment that carried the trains from Belfast into the station.

It had taken him several tries to get a room. Most of those houses with a B-and-B notice in the window seemed to be fully booked when he presented himself on the doorstep. But then it was true that a lot of casual labour drifted into the town in the height of summer. True also that Mrs McGurk was a Catholic and she still had rooms left.

He spent Sunday morning bringing his belongings over from Belfast, most of them medical textbooks. In the afternoon he lay on his bed and thought of the bright hard light on the brown hills of his native Punjab. In one more year he would be a qualified physician, and after another year of intern work he would return home to cope with the sicknesses of his own people. Such was his dream. He calculated he could make enough money this summer to tide himself through to his finals and after that he would have a salary of his own.

On the Monday morning he rose at a quarter to six at the bidding of his alarm clock, washed in cold water and was in the station yard just after six. There was time to spare. He found an early-opening cafe and took two cups of black tea. It was his only sustenance. The battered truck, driven by one of the demolition gang, was there at a quarter past six and a dozen men assembled near it. Harkishan Ram Lai did not know whether to approach them and introduce himself, or wait at a distance. He waited.

At twenty-five past the hour the foreman arrived in his own car, parked it down a side road and strode up to the truck. He had McQueen's list in his hand. He glanced at the dozen men, recognized them all and nodded. The Indian approached. The foreman glared at him.

'Is youse the darkie McQueen has put on the job?' he demanded.

Ram Lai stopped in his tracks. 'Harkishan Ram Lai,' he said. 'Yes.'

There was no need to ask how Big Billie Cameron had earned his name. He stood 6 feet and 3 inches in his stockings but was wearing enormous nail-studded, steel-toed boots. Arms like tree trunks hung from huge shoulders and his head was surmounted by a shock of ginger hair. Two small, pale-lashed eyes stared down balefully at the slight and wiry Indian. It was plain he was not best pleased. He spat on the ground.

'Well get in the fecking truck,' he said.

On the journey out to the work site Cameron sat up in the cab which had no partition dividing it from the back of the lorry, where the dozen labourers sat on two wooden benches down the sides. Ram Lai was near the tailboard next to a small, nut-hard man with bright blue eyes, whose name turned out to be Tommy Burns. He seemed friendly.

'Where are youse from?' he asked with genuine curiosity.

'India,' said Ram Lai. 'The Punjab.'

'Well, which?' said Tommy Burns.

Ram Lai smiled. 'The Punjab is a part of India,' he said.

Burns thought about this for a while. 'You Protestant or Catholic?' he asked at length.

'Neither,' said Ram Lai patiently. 'I am a Hindu.'

'You mean you're not a Christian?' asked Burns in amazement.

'No. Mine is the Hindu religion.'

'Hey,' said Burns to the others, 'your man's not a Christian at all.' He was not outraged, just curious, like a small child who has come across a new and intriguing toy.

Cameron turned from the cab up front. 'Aye,' he snarled, 'a heathen.'

The smile dropped off Ram Lai's face. He stared at the opposite canvas wall of the truck. By now they were well south of Bangor, clattering down the motorway towards Newtownards. After a while Burns began to introduce him to the others. There was a Craig, a Munroe, a Patterson, a Boyd and two Browns. Ram Lai had been long enough in Belfast to recognize the names as being originally Scottish, the sign of the hard Presbyterians who make up the backbone of the Protestant majority of the Six Counties. The men seemed amiable and nodded back at him.

'Have you not got a lunch box, laddie?' asked the elderly man called Patterson.

'No,' said Ram Lai, 'it was too early to ask my landlady to make one up.'

'You'll need lunch,' said Burns, 'aye, and breakfast. We'll be making tay ourselves on a fire.'

'I will make sure to

buy a box and bring some food tomorrow,' said Ram Lai.

Burns looked at the Indian's rubber-soled soft boots. 'Have you not done this kind of work before?' he asked.