A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [18]
Ought oughts are ought,
Ought twos are ought.
The chanting of the children pleased Lal. He believed in thoroughness, discipline and what he delighted to call stick-to-it-iveness, virtues he felt unconverted Hindus particularly lacked.
One twos are two,
Two twos are four.
‘Stop!’ Lal cried, waving his tamarind rod. ‘Biswas, ought twos are how much?’
‘Two.’
‘Come up here. You, Ramguli, ought twos are how much?’
‘Ought.’
‘Come up. That boy with a shirt that looks like one of his mother bodice. How much?’
‘Four.’
‘Come up.’ He held the rod at both ends and bent it back and forth quickly. The sleeves of his jacket fell down past dirty cuffs and thin wrists black with hair. The jacket was brown but had turned saffron where it had been soaked by Lal’s sweat. For all the time he went to school, Mr Biswas never saw Lal wearing any other jacket.
‘Ramguli, go back to your desk. All right, the two of you. All-you decide now how much ought twos is?’
‘Ought,’ they whimpered together.
‘Yes, ought twos are ought. You did tell me two.’ He caught hold of Mr Biswas, pulled his trousers tight across his bottom, and began to apply the tamarind rod, saying as he beat, ‘Ought twos are ought. Ought oughts are ought. One twos are two.’
Mr Biswas, released, went crying back to his desk.
‘And now you. Before we talk about anything, tell me where you get that bodice from?’
With its flaming red colour and leg-of-mutton sleeves it was obviously a bodice and had, without comment, been recognized as such by the boys, most of whom wore garments not originally designed for them.
‘Where you get it from?’
‘My sister-in-law.’
‘And you thank her?’
There was no reply.
‘Anyway, when you see your sister-in-law, I want you to give her a message. I want you’ – and here Lal seized the boy and started to use the tamarind rod – ‘I want you to tell her that ought twos don’t make four. I want you to tell her that ought oughts are ought, ought twos are ought, one twos are two, and two twos are four.’
Mr Biswas was taught other things. He learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in Hindi from the King George V Hindi Reader, and he learned many English poems by heart from the Royal Reader. At Lal’s dictation he made copious notes, which he never seriously believed, about geysers, rift valleys, watersheds, currents, the Gulf Stream, and a number of deserts. He learned about oases, which Lal taught him to pronounce ‘osis’, and ever afterwards an oasis meant for him nothing more than four or five date trees around a narrow pool of fresh water, surrounded for unending miles by white sand and hot sun. He learned about igloos. In arithmetic he got as far as simple interest and learned to turn dollars and cents into pounds, shilling and pence. The history Lal taught he regarded as simply a school subject, a discipline, as unreal as the geography; and it was from the boy in the red bodice that he first heard, with disbelief, about the Great War.
With this boy, whose name was Alec, Mr Biswas became friendly. The colours of Alec’s clothes were a continual surprise, and one day he scandalized the school by peeing blue, a clear, light turquoise. To excited inquiry Alec replied, ‘I don’t know, boy. I suppose is because I is a Portuguese or something.’ And for days he gave solemn demonstrations which filled most boys with disgust at their race.
It was to Mr Biswas that Alec first revealed his secret, and one morning recess, after Alec had given his demonstration, Mr Biswas dramatically unbuttoned and gave his. There was a clamour and Alec was forced to take out the bottle of Dodd’s Kidney Pills. In no time the bottle was empty, except for some half a dozen pills which Alec said he had to keep. The pills, like the red bodice, belonged to his sister-in-law. ‘I don’t know what she going to do when she find out,’ Alec said, and to those boys who still begged, he said, ‘Buy your own. The drugstore full