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

Chittaranjan gave his corrosive titter. ‘You shoulda tell me, Mr Harbans. You woulda save both of we a lot of worry. One sign is bad. But when you get two signs in one day, is different. They does cancel out one another. Just as how the dog cancel out the Witnesses.’

Dhaniram wanted Chittaranjan to talk about the row with Baksh. He said, ‘I did always say we could give Preacher the Muslim vote. We could do without Baksh and Baksh son.’

‘Dhaniram,’ Chittaranjan said, ‘you know me. I does say my mind, and who want to vex, let them vex. But you talking like a fool. Those dead puppies in Cordoba, who you think put them there?’

‘Foam?’ Harbans said. ‘Ooh. You mean Foam is still faithful?’

‘But I thought you did have a row with the father, man,’ Dhaniram said.

‘With the father, yes. But not with the son.’ Chittaranjan glanced at Harbans. ‘Is the father who put him up to try.’

Dhaniram frowned and began to shake his legs, slowly. ‘Don’t like it. Baksh want something more. He got something at the back of his mind.’

Chittaranjan clacked his sabots. ‘Course he got! Baksh ain’t no fool. Baksh have everything calculate already.’

Dhaniram tried once more. He cocked his head to one side and said, ‘I feel I hearing little Nelly walking inside. She ain’t gone to school today?’

Chittaranjan didn’t look at Dhaniram but at Harbans who, his head bent, had gone absent-minded. Chittaranjan said, ‘No school for she today. After all, she practically engage already.’

Harbans didn’t look up.

‘I say,’ Chittaranjan said, slowly, incisively, ‘how you want me to still send Nelly to school, when she practically engage?’

Harbans woke up. ‘Wouldn’t be right,’ he said hurriedly, ‘especially when the girl practically engage already.’

Chittaranjan looked triumphantly at Dhaniram.

*

The Witnesses stayed away from Cordoba and Elvira.

THE CAMPAIGNS BEGAN to swing.

Preacher made his house-to-house visits. Mr Cuffy preached political sermons on Friday evenings. Lorkhoor blazed through the district.

Chittaranjan revisited Cordoba and won back the votes the Witnesses had seduced. Foam, loyal to Harbans, toured with his loudspeaker van, and neither Baksh nor Mrs Baksh objected. Harichand got orders for posters. Whenever Pundit Dhaniram officiated at a Hindu ceremony he urged his listeners to vote for Harbans.

Mahadeo kept a sharp, panicky eye on Old Sebastian. The man seemed to wilt more and more every day, and Mahadeo was giving him five shillings, sometimes two dollars a week to buy medicines.

Harbans resigned himself to visiting the Hindu sick. Whenever he came to Elvira and saw Mahadeo, he asked first, ‘Well, how much Hindu sick today? And what-and-what is the various entrance fee?’ Mahadeo would take out his little red notebook and say, ‘Mungal not so good today. Two dollars go settle him. Lutchman complaining about a pain in his belly. He got a big family and the whole house have six votes. I think you better give him ten dollars. Five dollars for the least. Ramoutar playing the fool too. But he so ignorant, he can’t even make a X and he bound to spoil his vote. Still, give him a dollar. It go make people feel that you interested.’

Harbans’s rum-account with Ramlogan rose steeply. But Ramlogan maintained to all the drinkers that he was impartial. ‘Once this election bacchanal over,’ he said, ‘I have to live with everybody, no matter who they vote for.’ Chittaranjan never went inside the shop. He and Foam devised rum-vouchers that could be exchanged only at Ramlogan’s. Harichand printed the vouchers.

And, secure in the cocoa-house, Tiger began to flourish.

*

But Baksh was doing nothing at all about the election. The thousand Muslim voters of Elvira looked to him in vain for a lead. He wasn’t campaigning for Preacher and he wasn’t campaigning against Harbans. He remained in his shop and sewed dozens of khaki shirts, working with a new, sullen concentration. He refused to talk about the election, refused almost to talk at all. This sudden reticence won him a lot of attention and respect in Ramlogan’s rumshop. But if he didn’t talk much, his actions were larger. He brought down his thick glass heavily on the counter; he smacked his lips and twisted his face as though the puncheon rum tasted like castor oil; he spat copiously and belched often, bending forward, blowing out his cheeks and rubbing his belly, like one who suffers. When people asked him about the election he only gave an odd, ironic little smile. Altogether he behaved like a deep man with a deep secret.

This finally annoyed Mrs Baksh. ‘You have everybody laughing at you. When this election nonsense did first begin, you ain’t ask nobody, you ain’t look right, you ain’t look left, you jump in. Now, when everybody washing their foot and jumping in, you remaining quiet, sitting on your fat tail like a hatching fowl.’

‘Well, all right I ain’t doing nothing. What you want me to do? You think I would let two shot of cheap grog fool me? Look, is not for my sake I worrying, you know. If I trying to make anything outa this election, is for you and the children, you hear, not for me.’

Mrs Baksh would say with scorn, ‘Even little Foam bringing home seventy-five dollars when the month end.’

Baksh’s silent inactivity worried Harbans and his committee as much as Preacher’s silent campaigning.

Messages from Baksh were always reaching the committee.

Some were boastful. ‘Baksh say he just got to walk around Elvira one time, saying all that he know, and everybody going to forget Harbans.’

Some were cryptic. ‘Baksh say he ain’t got to do nothing to make Harbans lose. Harbans doing that hisself.’

Some were threatening. ‘Baksh say Harbans could do what he want before the elections, but Harbans going to lose the election on election day itself.’

But Baksh himself did nothing.

Chittaranjan alone refused to be alarmed. He said, ‘Baksh ain’t no fool. Baksh know what he want. And the sad thing is that he going to get what he want. But we mustn’t make the fust move. We would be low-rating weself if we do that.’

*

Foam wasn’t happy about two things.

He would have liked to confess to Chittaranjan that it was he who had run over the clean-necked chicken; but he just didn’t have the courage. Then there was Nelly. He felt especially guilty about her. Chittaranjan had taken her out of school and stopped her going anywhere; she remained in the house all day.

Perhaps Foam would have confessed about the chicken if Chittaranjan had been at all cool towards him; but Chittaranjan showed himself surprisingly, increasingly amiable. He encouraged Foam to visit the Big House and gave him many sweet drinks. Only, Mrs Chittaranjan did the honours now; not Nelly. Foam responded by making it clear that he wasn’t interested in Nelly. He said, often and irrelevantly, that he couldn’t understand why people got married, that he wasn’t interested in marriage at all, hardly interested in girls even. Chittaranjan seemed to approve. ‘Well, what happen between your father and me ain’t have nothing to do with you.’

Then, when Chittaranjan thought he had proved to everyone in Elvira that Nelly’s honour was safe; that Foam was a good boy whom he trusted absolutely; that Baksh was the envious troublemaker; then he sent Nelly off to Port of Spain, to stay with his brother, the barrister.

He was a lonely man after that. Outside, canvassing in his visiting outfit, he was the powerful goldsmith, the great controller of votes. But at home, in his torn khaki trousers, patched shirt and sabots, Foam knew him as a sad humiliated man. He never rushed to the veranda wall to shout at Ramlogan. He heard his chickens being shooed and struck and made to squeal in Ramlogan’s yard, and he did nothing.