A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [63]
Mr Biswas, his back to everyone in the hall, said, ‘I not eating any of the bad food from this house.’
‘Well, nobody not going to beg you, you hear,’ Shama said.
He curled the brim of his hat over his eye and went down into the courtyard, lit only by the light from the hall.
The god said, ‘Anyone see a spy pass through here?’
Mr Biswas heard the laughter.
Under the eaves of a bicycle shop across the High Street an oyster stall was yellowly, smokily lit by a flambeau with a thick spongy wick. Oysters lay in a shining heap, many-faceted, grey and black and yellow. Two bottles, stopped with twists of brown paper, contained red peppersauce.
Postponing the salmon, Mr Biswas crossed the road and asked the man, ‘How the oysters going?’
‘Two for a cent.’
‘Start opening.’
The man shouted, released into happy activity. From somewhere in the darkness a woman came running up. ‘Come on,’ the man said. ‘Help open them.’ They put a bucket of water on the stall, washed the oysters, opened them with short blunt knives, and washed them again. Mr Biswas poured peppersauce into the shell, swallowed, held out his hand for another. The peppersauce scalded his lips.
The oyster man was talking drunkenly, in a mixture of Hindi and English. ‘My son is a helluva man. I feel that something is seriously wrong with him. One day he put a tin can on the fence and come running inside the house. “The gun, Pa,” he said. “Quick, give me the gun.” I give him the gun. He run to the window and shoot. The tin can fall. “Pa,” he say. “Look. I shoot work. I shoot ambition. They dead.” ’ The flambeau dramatized the oyster man’s features, filling hollows with shadow, putting a shine on his temples, above his eyebrows, along his nose, along his cheek-bones. Suddenly he flung down his knife and pulled out a stick from below his stall. He waved the stick in front of Mr Biswas. ‘Anybody!’ he said. ‘Tell anybody to come!’
The woman didn’t notice. She went on opening oysters, laying them in her scratched, red palms, prising the ugly shells open, cutting the living oysters from their moorings to the pure, just-exposed inside shell.
‘Tell anybody,’ the man said. ‘Anybody at all.’
‘Stop!’ Mr Biswas said.
The woman took her hand out of the bucket and replaced a dripping oyster on the heap.
The man put away his stick. ‘Stop?’ He looked saddened, and ceased to be frightening. He began to count the empty shells.
The woman disappeared into the darkness.
‘Twenty-six,’ the man said. ‘Thirteen cents.’
Mr Biswas paid. The raw, fresh smell of oysters was now upsetting him. His stomach was full and heavy, but unsatisfied. The peppersauce had blistered his lips. Then the pains began. Nevertheless he went on to Mrs Seeung’s. The high, cavernous café was feebly lit. Flies were asleep everywhere, and Mr Seeung was half-asleep behind the counter, his porcupinish head bent over a Chinese newspaper.
Mr Biswas bought a tin of salmon and two loaves of bread. The bread looked and smelled stale. He knew that in his present state bread would only bring on nausea, but it gave him some satisfaction that he was breaking one of the Tulsi taboos by eating shop bread, a habit they considered feckless, negroid and unclean. The salmon repelled him; he thought it tasted of tin; but he felt compelled to eat to the end. And as he ate, his distress increased. Secret eating never did him any good.
Yet what he considered his disgrace was in fact his triumph.
The next morning Seth summoned him and said in English, ‘I come back late last night from Carapichaima, just looking for my food and my bed and the first thing I hear is that you try to beat up Owad. I don’t think we could stand you here any longer. You want to paddle your own canoe. All right, go ahead and paddle. When you start getting your tail wet, don’t bother to come back to me or Mai, you hear. This was a nice united family before you come. You better go away before you do any