BALDEO was a cane cutter. The politically correct title is cane-harvester. He worked very hard under brutal conditions. He worked hard and he drank hard. When he was working nothing else mattered. When he was drinking his focus was rum. After a spree, he would become dumb, dotish and hopelessly drunk.

Saturday night was his power night. That was when he really let go. There was no work to go to the next day and he had stopped going to the Temple a long, long time ago.

He had a number of drinking buddies. Frank, Basil, Sugrim, Da Silva and Salim. They were all ‘happy hour’ experts. Once rum was cheaper they were buying and drinking. Every Saturday there were about three ‘happy hours’ in the village. The skilled drinkers were able to sample all three venues. By the time they left the second, most of them were drunk.
That Saturday, the group with the exception of Da Silva, drank heavily.

It was 05:00hrs when Baldeo caught himself sprawled in front of the rum parlour. He struggled to his feet and staggered towards home. He got home moments before the Angelus Bell rang at the Catholic church. On that Sunday, 15:30hrs he was heading for the rum shop. He stopped for Da Silva and the two walked to Gobin’s Rum Parlour.

The other members of the gang were there already and they settled in for a nice long session. At around 18:30hrs Da Silva left for home complaining of feeling unwell. The others carried on – fewer friends, more ‘dinner’ served.
By 23:30hrs Baldeo was heading home or trying to do so. It was a very difficult task because the road would not stay still. It kept tilting and shifting causing him to waiver in directions he never knew existed. This resulted in an erratic zig-zag, up and down journey.
Sometime later he passed by Da Silva’s home.

“Silva! Silva!”
His loud and annoying bellow woke many of the neighbours. Some cursed and others threatened serious bodily harm if he didn’t get his drunken ‘so and so’ out of there. He was too plastered to take the hint. Da Silva’s wife appeared at the door of the house. She signalled for Baldeo to wait and then hurried out to the road to meet him.
“Mr Baldeo you friend dead!”

Baldeo gasped in shock
“W–what!”
“Yes Silva gone!”
She was whimpering with tears streaming down her cheeks.
“B-But how?”
“De man get sudden heart attack.”
“Heart attack?!”
Baldeo’s befuddled brain tried to wrestle with this new development, then he exploded in anger.

“Well if me heart attack me I would attack it back!”
Mrs. Da Silva stared at him in disbelief. Shaking her head in resignation she withdrew to her home. The drunk staggered onwards. He now entered a long stretch of unlit roadway leading to his end of the village. He felt tired and angry and shocked by the news of the demise of his pal.
“Bump!”

He had walked right into the trunk of a large tree. He knew it was not his fault. That tree should not be there. It was all due to the moving road. It had begun shifting things around. He steadied himself on the tree and took a second to light a cigarette. When he tried to shake the lit match out it kept going. He tossed it down and drew deeply on the cigarette. Then his whole world erupted.

You see it was a bright moonlight night and standing in the middle of the road was a Moon Gazer. Poor Baldeo had unwittingly burnt the beast with the lit match. In anger at being disturbed during its love affair with the moon, the creature struck out. Its humongous leg swung in an arc of vengeance and it hurled the now petrified man -who was desperately clinging to its leg like an unwanted appendix, a great distance away.
A sharp, hysterical scream could be heard as a small figure sailed away into the night.
“Oh Gawd! Ow Gawd! Oh Gawd!”

Baldeo found himself right in the middle of a large heap of extremely smelly garbage. It was that garbage that saved his life. He lay on his back trying to figure out what had just happened. He saw a giant figure moving purposefully toward him. That completely freaked him out. He panicked and his dumbfounded mind came up with an extraordinary explanation. This must be his time for a heart attack.

Well, as drunk as he was, he was not going that easily. With energy that belied his drunken state, he began tunnelling for his life. The refuse stank and oozed all sorts of foul things but he dug deep and curled up waiting for the inevitable.
Crunch!
Crack!
The creature had arrived
Rumble!
Crackle!
Bang!

It had begun searching through the dump. Thanks to the awful smell and the return of the brilliant silvery rays of the moon, the creature abandoned its quest and returned to its previous activity. Gazing spellbound at the moon.
Baldeo spent the rest of the time hidden under the heap and emerged only when the sun had come up. He made his way home filthy, confused and nursing a serious hangover. He still could not make any sense of what had taken place.
It was either he was losing his mind or he had dreamt the entire thing. He decided to keep this incident from his wife. He didn’t want to give her a heart attack.