A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [121]
But Mr Biswas knew of the many killings in Indian districts, so well planned that few reached the courts. He knew of the feuds between villages and between families, conducted with courage, ingenuity and loyalty by those same labourers who, as wage-earners, were obsequious and negligible.
He decided to take precautions. He slept with a cutlass and a poui stick, one of his father’s, at the side of his bed. And from Mrs Seeung, the Chinese café-owner at Arwacas, he got a puppy, a hairy brown and white thing of indeterminate breed. The first night at the barracks the puppy whined at being left outside, scratched at the door, fell off the step and whined until he was taken in. When Mr Biswas woke up next morning he found the puppy in bed beside him, lying quite still, its eyes open. At Mr Biswas’s first gesture, which was one of surprise, the puppy jumped to the floor.
He called the puppy Tarzan, to prepare it for its duties. But Tarzan turned out to be friendly and inquisitive, and a terror only to the poultry. ‘The hens stop laying because of your dog,’ the poultry owners complained, and it looked true enough, for Tarzan often had pieces of feather stuck in the corners of his mouth, and he was continually bringing trophies of feathers to the room. Then one day Tarzan ate an egg and immediately developed a taste for eggs. The hens laid their eggs in bush, in places which they thought were secret. Tarzan soon got to know these places as well as the owners of the hens and he often came back to the barracks with his mouth yellow and sticky with egg. The owners of the hens took their revenge. One afternoon Mr Biswas found Tarzan’s muzzle smeared with fowl droppings, and Tarzan in great misery at this novel and continuing discomfort.
The placards in Mr Biswas’s room increased. He worked more slowly on them now, using black and red estate ink and pencils of many colours. He filled the blank space with difficult decorations and his letters became intricate and ornamented.
Thinking it would help him if he read novels, he bought a number of the cheap Reader’s Library editions. The covers were dark purple with gold lettering and decorations. In the stall at Arwacas they had looked attractive, but in his room he could scarcely bear to touch them. The gilt stuck to his fingers and the covers reminded him of funeral palls and of those undertakers’ horses that were draped with the colours of death every day.
The sun shone and the rain fell. The roof didn’t leak. But the asphalt began to melt and hung limply down: a legion of slim, black, growing snakes. Occasionally they fell, and, falling, curled and died.
Late one night, when he had put out the oil lamp and was in bed, he heard footsteps outside his room.
He lay still, listening. Then he jumped out of bed, grabbed his stick and deliberately knocked against the kitchen safe and table and Shama’s dressingtable. He stood at the side of the door and violently pushed out the top half, his body protected by the lower half.
He saw nothing but the night, the still, colourless barrackyard, the dead trees black against the moonlit sky. Two rooms away a light was burning: someone was out, or a child was ill.
Then, making a lapping, happy sound, Tarzan was on the step, wagging his tail so hard it struck against the lower half of the door.
He let him in and stroked him. His coat was damp.
Tarzan, overjoyed at the attention, stuck his muzzle against Mr Biswas’s face.
‘Egg!’
For a second Tarzan hesitated. No threat appearing, he redoubled his tail-wagging, continually shifting his hind legs.
Mr Biswas embraced him.
After that he always slept with his oil lamp on.
He began to fear that his house might be burned down. He went to bed with an added anxiety; every morning he opened his side window as soon as he got up, looking past the trees for signs of destruction; in the fields he worried about it. But the house always stood: the variegated roof,