A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [206]
It was some time before he could distinguish the applications of the fraudulent: people who merely wanted the publicity, those who wanted to work off grudges, those who had wanted merely to write, and an astonishing number of well-to-do shopkeepers, clerks and taxi-drivers who wanted money and publicity, and offered to share what money they got with Mr Biswas. Many of his early visits were wasted, and since he had to provide a convincing destitute every morning he had sometimes had to take a mediocre destitute and exaggerate his situation.
The authorities at the Sentinel continued neither to comment on his work nor to interfere; and this policy, which he had at first regarded as sinister, now made his position one of responsibility and power. His recommendations were the only things that mattered; his decision was final. He was given a by-line and described as ‘Our Special Investigator’, which won Anand some respect at school. And for the first time in his life Mr Biswas was offered bribes. It was a mark of status. But, largely through a distrust of the Deserving Destees, he accepted nothing, though he did allow a crippled Negro joiner to make him a diningtable at a low price.
He wished he hadn’t, for when the table came it made the congestion in his rooms absolute. Shama’s glass cabinet was taken to the inner room, and the table placed in his, parallel to the bed and separated from it by a way so narrow that, after bending down to put on his shoes, for instance, he often knocked his head when he straightened up; and if, having put his shoes on, he stood up too quickly, he struck the top of his hip-bone against the table. The generous joiner had made the table six feet long and nearly four feet wide, wide enough to make shutting and opening the side window possible only if you climbed on to the table. On his restless nights Mr Biswas had been in the habit of relegating Anand to the foot of the Slumberking; now when this happened Anand left the bed in a huff and spent the rest of the night on the table, an arrangement Mr Biswas tried to make permanent. The window had to remain open: the room would have been stifling otherwise. The afternoon rain came swiftly and violently. Shama could never mount the table quickly enough; and presently that part of the table directly below the window acquired a grey, black-spotted bloom which defied all Shama’s stainings, varnishings and polishings. ‘First and last diningtable I buy,’ Mr Biswas said.
He was lying in vest and pants on the Slumberking one evening, reading, trying to ignore the buzzing and shrieks of the readers and learners, and W. C. Tuttle’s new gramophone record of a boy American called Bobby Breen singing ‘When There’s a Rainbow on the River’. Someone came into the room and Mr Biswas, his back to the door, added to the pandemonium by wondering aloud who the hell was standing in his light.
It was Shama. ‘Hurry up and get some clothes on,’ she said excitedly. ‘Some people have come to see you.’
He had a moment of panic. He had kept his address secret, yet since he had become investigator of destitutes he had been repeatedly traced. Once, indeed, he had been accosted by a destitute just as he was wheeling his bicycle between the high walls. He had pretended that he was investigating a deserving case, and as this had looked