ALL BETS ON THE ARCHER
MANU rode a bicycle to work. It was one of those World War II
Royal Enfield jobbies. Sturdy frame. Hammered metal badge. Flickering lights in front and under the seat. The lights rhymed with the effort on the pedal whether day or dusk.
Quite where Manu worked no one had any clue. He left each morning with four slices of high loaf Blue Ribbon bread filled with whatever was left over from the previous night’s pot. His longsuffering spouse Barbara, pronounced a sing-song baa-bra, ran up debts all over my beloved Bangladesh Market district in Chatsworth.
She never knew how much Manu was bringing home on a Friday night, if anything. When there was money, Ebrahim the Butcher at the Unit 3 shopping centre was the first to be paid. Meat came before the rent. Pity the poor butcher.
He accepted the settlement of a three-month-old debt while handing over six lamb cutlets on a promise to pay at the end of the week. What was Sunday morning in Chatsworth without pungent lamb chops drowned in tomato chutney? Fluffy white bread lashed with Rama margarine was the perfect accompaniment.
Manu makes these pages thanks to one Jeffrey Archer. The master storyteller fielded questions from the audience on a recent book tour of his latest best-seller Heads You Win.
“Archie-sir, what advice might you be able to give to an aspirant writer?” The question sounded choreographed by the Big Arch himself. The wealthy wordsmith who has legendary titles like Cane and Abel and Not A Penny More came down a notch from his public school pompous element.
“If you ride to work on a bicycle, then write about the people you meet on the street.” That sparked the memory of the mysterious Manu.
Few bother to fact check Archer, but one must grant that the man is a marvel with words.
Our Agatha Christie aficionado, Sherman, might have solved the Manu mystery. There are some among us who might recall that the real estate where the Chatsworth Centre stands was once all bush.
That was before marketing supremo Shobna Persadh pumped its share value into the stratosphere. Bang in the middle of the bush was a betting shop run by businessman Dhanpal Naidoo. Sherman swears that a Royal Enfield was chained to a light pole there all of the working day.