A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [19]
With Alec Mr Biswas laid six-inch nails on the railway track at the back of the Main Road and had them flattened to make knives and bayonets. Together they went to Pagotes River and smoked their first cigarettes. They tore off their shirt buttons, exchanged them for marbles and with these Alec won more, struggling continually to repair the depredations of Lal, who considered the game low and had forbidden it in the school grounds. They sat at the same desk, talked, were flogged and separated, but always came together again.
And it was through this association that Mr Biswas discovered his gift for lettering. When Alec tired of doing inaccurate erotic drawings he designed letters. Mr Biswas imitated these with pleasure and growing success. During an arithmetic test one day, finding himself with an astronomical number of hours in answer to a problem about cisterns, he wrote CANCELLED very neatly across the page and became absorbed in blocking the letters and shadowing them. When the period was over he had done nothing else.
Lal, who had noted Mr Biswas’s industry with approval, flew into a rage. ‘Ah! Sign-painter. Come up.’
He didn’t flog Mr Biswas. He ordered him to write I AM AN ASS on the blackboard. Mr Biswas outlined stylish, contemptuous letters, and the class tittered approvingly. Lal, racing about the classroom, waving his tamarind rod for silence, brushed Mr Biswas’s elbow and a stroke was spoilt. Mr Biswas turned this into an additional decoration which pleased him and impressed the class. It was too late for Lal to flog Mr Biswas or order him to clean the blackboard. Angrily he pushed him away, and Mr Biswas went back to his desk, smiling, a hero.
Mr Biswas went to Lal’s school for nearly six years and for all that time he was friendly with Alec. Yet he knew little about Alec’s home life. Alec never spoke about his mother or father and Mr Biswas knew only that he lived with his sister-in-law, the owner of the red bodice, an unphotographed user of Dodd’s Kidney Pills, and, according to Alec, a great beater. Mr Biswas never saw this woman. He never went to Alec’s home and Alec never came to his. There was a tacit agreement between them that they would keep their homes secret.
It would have pained Mr Biswas if anyone from the school saw where he lived, in one room of a mud hut in the back trace. He was not happy there and even after five years considered it a temporary arrangement. Most of the people in the hut remained strangers, and his relations with Bipti were unsatisfying because she was shy of showing him affection in a house of strangers. More and more, too, she bewailed her Fate; when she did this he felt useless and dispirited and, instead of comforting her, went out to look for Alec. Occasionally she had ineffectual fits of temper, quarrelled with Tara and muttered for days, threatening, whenever there was anyone to hear, that she would leave and get a job with the road-gang, where women were needed to carry stones in baskets on their heads. Continually, when he was with her, Mr Biswas had to struggle against anger and depression.
At Christmas Pratap and Prasad came from Felicity, grown men now, with moustaches; in their best clothes, their pressed khaki trousers, unpolished brown shoes, blue shirts buttoned at the collar, and brown hats, they too were like strangers. Their hands were as hard as their rough, sunburnt faces, and they had little to say. When Pratap, with many self-deprecating sighs, half-laughs and pauses which enabled him to deliver a short sentence in easy instalments without in any way damaging its structure, when Pratap told about the donkey