V. Naipaul - The nightwatchman's occurrence book - and other comic inventions

Tiger staggered on.

Baksh said, ‘Look, man. What you worried for? He ain’t even trying to cross the road yet.’

‘Baksh, I know. He go cross when he want to cross. That dog know his business, I telling you. Oh, Baksh, the mess you get me in!’

Herbert said, ‘Oh. He ain’t even stopping.’

Mrs Baksh, crying, asked, ‘You want it to stop, Herbert? Just answer me that. My own child want the dog to stop?’

Herbert said, ‘Well, it ain’t stopping.’

‘What I did tell you?’ Baksh said. He laughed. ‘Wonder who house little mister man dog going to. Come to think of it, you know, man, it ain’t even the same dog. The one we did have had a white spot on the right foot in front. This one ain’t have no white spot. Not the same dog really.’ He turned his back to the veranda wall and faced his family. ‘Don’t know why everybody was getting so excited. All right, all right, the show over.’ He clapped his hands and snapped his fingers at the young Bakshes. ‘Show over. Back to your reading and your studies. Homework. Educate youself. Jawgraphy and jawmetry. Nobody did give me a opportunity to educate myself …’

‘Dog coming back,’ Foam said. ‘He stop and turning.’

They all scrambled to look.

Tiger was limping brokenly across the road.

‘Somebody feed that dog here!’ Baksh shouted. ‘Nobody not going to tell me that somebody ain’t feed that dog here.’

Tiger dragged himself across the plank over the gutter. Then the strength that had driven him so far was extinguished; he collapsed on his side, his eyes vacant, his chest and belly heaving.

‘He behaving as if he come home,’ Herbert said.

‘Herbert, my son, my own son,’ Mrs Baksh said. ‘What come over you, son? Tell me what they do to you, to make you want that dirty dog. Tell me, my son.’

Herbert didn’t reply.

Mrs Baksh broke down completely. She cried and her breasts and belly shook. ‘Something going to happen, Baksh. In this house.’

‘Ten die,’ Rafiq said.

Baksh slapped him.

‘Suppose that dog just lay down there and dead,’ Baksh said. ‘Oh God, Foam, you want me to believe that you ain’t feed that dog here? That dog behave too much as if he know where his bread butter, you hear.’

Foam shrugged his shoulders.

Baksh said, ‘Man, what going to be the best thing? For the dog to live or dead?’

Mrs Baksh pressed her hands against her eyes and shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Baksh. I just don’t know what is the best thing.’

But Herbert knew what he wanted. ‘Oh, God,’ he prayed, ‘don’t let Tiger dead.’

*

Ramlogan didn’t know about Tiger’s passage through Elvira. After Haq left he remained in his narrow dark room, savouring the news Haq had brought. He couldn’t go back to sleep. He remained on his bed, completely happy, looking up at the corrugated-iron roof until the alarm clock went off on the empty rum crate at his bedside. It was an alarm clock he had got many years before for collecting empty Anchor Cigarette packets; the dial had letters in the place of eleven numerals and read SMOKE ANCHOR 6. The dial was yellow and the glass, surprisingly uncracked, was scratched and blurred. Every midday when he shut his shop Ramlogan set the alarm for a quarter to four. That gave him time to anoint himself with Canadian Healing Oil, dress and make some tea before he opened the shop again at four.

That afternoon, routine became delicious ritual. He was lavish with the Canadian Healing Oil. He rubbed it over his face and worked it into his scalp; he poured some into his palm and held it to his nostrils to inhale the therapeutic vapours; the only thing Ramlogan didn’t do with Canadian Healing Oil was drink it. He dressed leisurely, humming the song from Jhoola. He made his tea, drank it; and having some moments to spare, went out into his yard. The stunted and dead plants in the centre didn’t offend him that afternoon, and he looked almost with love on the breadfruit tree and the zaboca tree at the edge of the yard. He was particularly fond of the zaboca tree. He had stolen it not long after he had come to Elvira, from a lorry that was carrying a whole load of small zaboca trees in bamboo pods. The lorry had had a puncture just outside his shop; he had gone out to look; and when the driver went off to look for a pump, Ramlogan had taken a bamboo pod and walked off with it into his own yard. The tree had grown well. Its fruit was high-grade. You could tell that by just looking at it. It was none of your common zaboca, all stringy and waterlogged. That afternoon it didn’t grieve Ramlogan at all that he hadn’t tasted one of the fruit.

It was time to open the shop. He climbed over the greasy counter, thinking, as he did so, that after the election, when Harbans had settled his account, he would get a nice zinc counter. And perhaps even a refrigerator. For lager. People were drinking more lager and it didn’t do for him to keep ice wrapped up in the dirty sugar-sack. And sometimes the ice-lorry didn’t even come.

He lifted the solid bar that kept the shaky front doors secure, humming the song from Jhoola. He remembered he had picked up the song from Mrs Chittaranjan next door, and stopped humming. He opened the doors, squinting against the sudden dazzle of the afternoon sun. He looked down.

Before him, laid squarely in the middle of his doorway, was a dead chicken.

HE RECOGNIZED THE CHICKEN at once.

It was one of Mrs Chittaranjan’s clean-necked chickens, white and grey, an insistent, impertinent thing that, despite repeated shooings and occasional lucky hits with stones and bits of wood and empty Canadian Healing Oil bottles, continued to come into his yard, eat his grass, dig up his languishing plants and leave its droppings everywhere, sometimes even in the back room and in the shop.

It was the chicken Foam had hit earlier that day.

Ramlogan had known the chicken since it was hatched. He had known its mother and managed to maim her in the leg when she came into his yard one day with all her brood. The rest of that particular brood had disappeared. They had been stolen, they had grown up and been eaten or they had just died. Only the hardy clean-necked chicken had survived.

For a moment Ramlogan was sad to see it lying dead at his feet.

He looked up at Chittaranjan’s veranda.

Chittaranjan was waiting for him. ‘Look at it good, Ramlogan. It not going to worry you again. That fowl on your nasty conscience.’

Ramlogan was taken by surprise.

‘You is a fat blow-up beast. You can’t touch no human, so you take it outa a poor chicken. You is a bad wicked beast. Look at it good. Take it up. Cook it. Eat it. Eat it and get more fat. Ain’t is that you say you want to do for a long long time? Now is your chance. Cook it and eat it and I hope it poison you. You kill it, you wicked beast, you Nazi spy.’

Ramlogan hadn’t recovered. ‘Who you calling a Nazi spy?’

‘You. You is a Nazi spy. You is wuss than Hitler.’

‘And because I is wuss than Hitler, you come and put this dead fowl on my doorstep?’

‘But ain’t it make your heart satisfy, you wuthless beast? Ain’t it bring peace and satisfaction inside your fat dirty heart to see the poor little chicken dead?’

‘Eh! But who tell you I kill your fowl? I ain’t kill nobody fowl, you hearing me?’

‘You is a wuthless liar.’

Ramlogan lifted his leg to kick the chicken from his doorstep. But something Chittaranjan said arrested him.

‘Kick it,’ Chittaranjan said. ‘And I bet your whole fat foot drop off and rotten. Go ahead and kick it.’

Ramlogan was getting angry. ‘You just want to put something on me, eh? You is a big big fighter, and all you could do is put magic and obeah on me, eh? You is a Supreme Court fighter?’