A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [34]
He became increasingly impatient at living in the back trace; and although his income, despite Christmas, elections and shopkeepers’ jealousies, was small and uncertain, he would have liked to risk moving. But Bipti, who had always talked of moving, now said she had lived there too long and did not want to be among strangers in her old age. ‘I leave here. One day you will get married, and where shall I be then?’
‘I am never going to get married.’ It was his usual threat, for Bipti had begun to say that she had only to see Mr Biswas married and her life’s work would be complete. Pratap and Prasad were already married, Pratap to a tall, handsome woman who was bearing a child every eighteen months, Prasad to a woman of appalling ugliness who was mercifully barren.
‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ Bipti said. She could still irritate him by taking everything he said seriously.
‘So what? You expect me to bring a wife here?’ He walked about the cluttered room, always smelling now of paint and oil and turpentine, and kicked at the dusty brown piles of his magazines and books on the floor.
He stayed in the back trace and read Samuel Smiles. He had bought one of his books in the belief that it was a novel, and had become an addict. Samuel Smiles was as romantic and satisfying as any novelist, and Mr Biswas saw himself in many Samuel Smiles heroes: he was young, he was poor, and he fancied he was struggling. But there always came a point when resemblance ceased. The heroes had rigid ambitions and lived in countries where ambitions could be pursued and had a meaning. He had no ambition, and in this hot land, apart from opening a shop or buying a motorbus, what could he do? What could he invent? Dutifully, however, he tried. He bought elementary manuals of science and read them; nothing happened; he only became addicted to elementary manuals of science. He bought the seven expensive volumes of Hawkins’ Electrical Guide, made rudimentary compasses, buzzers and doorbells, and learned to wind an armature. Beyond that he could not go. Experiments became more complex, and he didn’t know where in Trinidad he could find the equipment mentioned so casually by Hawkins. His interest in electrical matters died, and he contented himself with reading about the Samuel Smiles heroes in their magic land.
And yet there were moments when he could persuade himself that he lived in a land where romance was possible. When, for instance, he had to do a rush job and worked late into the night by the light of a gas lamp, excitement and the light transforming the hut; able then to forget that ordinary morning would come and the sign would hang over a cluttered little shop with its doors open on to a hot dusty road.
There were the days when he became a conductor on one of Ajodha’s buses which ran in competition with other buses on a route without fixed stops. He enjoyed the urgent motion and noisy rivalry, and endangered himself needlessly by hanging far out from the running-board to sing to people on the road, ‘Tunapuna, Naparima, Sangre Grande, Guayaguayare, Chacachacare, Mahatma Gandhi and back,’ the glorious Amerindian names forming an imaginary route that took in the four corners of the island and one place, Chacachacare, across the sea.
And there were times when elusive Alec, with a face that hinted of debauch, came to Pagotes, spoke of pleasures and took Mr Biswas to certain houses which terrified, then attracted, and finally only amused him. With Bhandat’s boys he also went;