A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [81]
‘Right, man, Moti!’ Mr Biswas called back.
He remained where he was, palms pressed against the edge of the counter, staring at the road, at the mango tree and the side wall of the hut in the lot obliquely opposite, and the sugarcane fields stretching away with an occasional blob of trees, to the low hills of the Central Range.
‘All right!’ he said. ‘Somebody turn you into a statue?’
Shama sighed.
‘I suppose I is my own boss.’
‘And a professional man,’ she said.
‘Shoulda give him ten dollars.’
‘Is not too late. Why you don’t empty the drawer and run after him?’
And having stimulated his rage and his appetite for argument, she left the doorway and went to the back room, where after much thumping and sighing she began to sing a popular Hindi song:
Slowly, slowly,
Brothers and sisters,
Bear his corpse to the water’s edge.
He didn’t have the Hindu delight in tragedy and the details of death, and he had often asked Shama not to sing this cremation song. Now he had to listen while she sang with sweet lugubriousness to the end. And when, fretted to defeat, he went to the back room, he found Shama, in her best satin bodice and most elaborately worked veil, putting bootees on a fully dressed Savi.
‘Hello!’ he said.
Shama tied one bootee and slipped on the other.
‘Going somewhere?’ She tied the other bootee.
At last she said in Hindi, ‘You may have lost all shame. But everyone hasn’t. Just remember that.’
He knew that the Tulsi daughters who lived with their husbands often went back after a quarrel to Hanuman House, where they complained and got sympathy and, if they didn’t stay too long, respect. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Pack up and go. I suppose they are going to give you some medal at the monkey house.’
After she left, he stood in the shop doorway, fondling his belly and watching his creditors coming back from the fields. The only thing that gave him pleasure was the thought of the surprise these people were going to get in a few days: a flutter of disturbances throughout The Chase for which he, inactive in his shop, would be responsible.
*
‘Biswas!’ Mungroo shouted from the road. ‘Come out, before I come in.’
The day had arrived. Mungroo was holding a sheet of paper in one hand and slapping at it with the other.
‘Biswas!’
A crowd was beginning to gather. Many held papers.
‘Paper,’ Mungroo said. ‘He has sent me a paper. I am going to make him eat this piece of paper. Biswas!’
Unhurriedly Mr Biswas lifted the counter-flap, pulled the little door open and passed to the front of the shop. The law was on his side – he had, indeed, brought it into play – and he felt this gave him complete protection. He leaned against the doorpost, felt the wall quiver, stifled his fear about the wall tumbling down, and crossed his legs.
‘Biswas! I am going to make you eat this paper.’
Women screamed from the road.
‘Touch me,’ Mr Biswas said.
‘Paper,’ Mungroo said, stepping into the yard.
‘Touch me and I bring you up.’
Still Mungroo advanced.
‘I bring you up and you spend Carnival in jail.’
The effect was startling. Carnival was less than a month away. Mungroo halted. His followers, seeing themselves leaderless during the two most important days of the stick-fighting year, at once ran to Mungroo and held him back.
‘I call all of all-you as witnesses,’ Mr Biswas said, unaware of the reasons for his deliverance. ‘Let him touch me. And all of all-you have to come to court to be my witnesses.’ He believed that by being the first to ask them he had bound them legally. ‘Can’t ask my wife,’ he went on. ‘They