A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [83]
‘Suppose,’ Mr Biswas said, ‘that all the others decide to behave like Mungroo. Suppose that every manjack bring me up.’
‘Don’t think about it,’ Moti said. ‘You would make yourself sick.’
As soon as he could, Mr Biswas cycled to Arwacas to ask Shama to come back. He did not tell her what had happened. And it was not from Mrs Tulsi or Seth that he borrowed the money, but from Misir, who, in addition to his journalistic, literary and religious activities, had set up as a usurer, with a capital of two hundred dollars.
More than half the time that remained to Mr Biswas in The Chase was spent in paying off this debt.
In all Mr Biswas lived for six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that at the end they could be comprehended in one glance. But he had aged. The lines which he had encouraged at first, to give him an older look, had come; they were not the decisive lines he had hoped for that would give a commanding air to a frown; they were faint, fussy, disappointing. His cheeks began to fall; his cheek bones, in a proper light, jutted slightly; and he developed a double chin of pure skin which he could pull down so that it hung like the stiff beard on an Egyptian statue. The skin loosened over his arms and legs. His stomach was now perpetually distended; not fat: it was his indigestion, for that affliction had come to stay, and bottles of Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder became as much part of Shama’s purchases as bags of rice or flour.
Though he never ceased to feel that some nobler purpose awaited him, even in this limiting society, he gave up reading Samuel Smiles. That author depressed him acutely. He turned to religion and philosophy. He read the Hindus; he read the Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus which Mrs Weir had given him; he earned the gratitude and respect of a stall-keeper at Arwacas by buying an old and stained copy of The Supersensual Life; and he began to dabble in Christianity, acquiring a volume, written mostly in capital letters, called Arise and Walk. As a boy he had liked to read descriptions of bad weather in foreign countries; they made him forget the heat and sudden rain which was all he knew. But now, though his philosophical books gave him solace, he could never lose the feeling that they were irrelevant to his situation. The books had to be put down. The shop awaited; money problems awaited; the road outside was short, and went through flat fields of dull green to small, hot settlements.
And at least once a week he thought of leaving the shop, leaving Shama, leaving the children, and taking that road.
Religion was one thing. Painting was the other. He brought out his brushes and covered the inside of the shop doors and the front of the counter with landscapes. Not of the abandoned field next to the shop, the intricate bush at the back, the huts and trees across the road, or the low blue mountains of the Central Range in the distance. He painted cool, ordered forest scenes, with gracefully curving grass, cultivated trees ringed with friendly serpents, and floors bright with perfect flowers; not the rotting, mosquito-infested jungle he could find within an hour’s walk. He attempted a portrait of Shama. He made her sit on a fat sack of flour – the symbolism pleased him: ‘Suit your family to a T,’ he said – and spent so much time on her clothes and the sack of flour that before he could begin on her face Shama abandoned him and refused to sit any more.
He read innumerable novels, particularly those in the Reader’s Library; and he even tried to write, encouraged by the appearance in a Port of Spain magazine of a puzzling story by Misir. (This was a story of a starving man who was rescued by a benefactor and after some years rose to wealth. One day, driving along the beach, the man heard someone in the sea shouting for help, and recognized his former benefactor in difficulties. He instantly dived into the water, struck his head on a submerged rock and was drowned. The benefactor survived.) But Mr Biswas could never devise