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

‘Seventy dollars a month.’

‘All right, boss.’

Foam said, ‘Eh, I could talk for myself, you hear. Seventy-five.’

‘Ooh. Children, Baksh.’

‘They is like that, boss. But the boy have a point. Make it seventy-five.’

Harbans hung his head.

The formal negotiations were over.

Baksh said, ‘Foam, cut across to Haq and bring some sweet drink and cake for the boss.’

Baksh led Harbans through the dark shop, up the dark stairs, through a cluttered bedroom into the veranda where Mrs Baksh and six little Bakshes — dressed for the occasion in their school clothes — were introduced to him.

Mrs Baksh was combing out her thick black hair that went down to her hips. She nodded to Harbans, cleared her comb of loose hair, rolled the hair into a ball, spat on it and threw it into a corner. Then she began to comb again. She was fresh, young, as well-built as her husband, and Harbans thought there was a little of her husband’s recklessness about her as well. Perhaps this was because of her modern skirt, the hem of which fell only just below the knee.

Harbans was at once intimidated by Mrs Baksh. He didn’t like the little Bakshes either. The family insolence seemed to run through them all.

If it puzzled Harbans how a burly couple like Mr and Mrs Baksh could have a son like Foam, elongated and angular, he could see the stages Foam must have gone through when he looked at the other Baksh boys; Iqbal, Herbert, Rafiq and Charles. (It was a concession the Bakshes made to their environment: they chose alternate Christian and Muslim names for their children.) The boys were small-boned and slight and looked as though they had been stretched on the rack. Their bellies were barely swollen. This physique better became the girls, Carol and Zilla; they looked slim and delicate.

Baksh cleared a cane-bottomed chair of a pile of clothes and invited Harbans to sit down.

Before Harbans could do so, Mrs Baksh said, ‘But what happen to the man at all? That is my ironing.’

Baksh said, ‘Carol, take your mother ironing inside.’

Carol took the clothes away.

Harbans sat down and studied the back of his hands.

Mrs Baksh valued the status of her family and felt it deserved watching. She saw threats everywhere; this election was the greatest. She couldn’t afford new enemies; too many people were already jealous of her and she suspected nearly everybody of looking at her with the evil eye, the mal yeux of the local patois. Harbans, with his thin face and thin nose, she suspected in particular.

Harbans, looking down at the grey hairs and ridge-like veins of his hands and worrying about the loudspeaker van and the seventy-five dollars a month, didn’t know how suspect he was.

Foam came back with two bottles of coloured aerated water and a paper bag with two rock cakes.

‘Zilla, go and get a glass,’ Baksh ordered.

‘Don’t worry with glass and thing,’ Harbans said appeasingly. ‘I ain’t all that fussy.’ He was troubled. The aerated water and the rock cakes were sure not to agree with him.

The little Bakshes, bored up till then, began to look at Harbans with interest now that he was going to eat.

Zilla brought a glass. Foam opened a bottle and poured the bright red stuff. Zilla held the paper bag with the rock cakes towards Harbans. Foam and Zilla, the eldest Baksh children, behaved as though they had got to the stage where food was something to be handled, not eaten.

The little Bakshes hadn’t reached that stage.

Baksh left the veranda and came back with a cellophane-wrapped tin of Huntley and Palmer’s biscuits. He felt Mrs Baksh’s disapproval and avoided her eye.

‘Biscuit, Mr Harbans?’

The little Bakshes concentrated.

‘Nice biscuits,’ Baksh tempted, stubbornly. ‘Have them here since Christmas.’

Harbans said, ‘Give it to the children, eh?’ He broke off a large piece of the rock cake and handed it to Herbert who had edged closest to him.

‘Herbert!’ Mrs Baksh exclaimed. ‘Your eyes longer than your mouth, eh!’

‘Let the poor boy have it,’ Harbans cooed, and showed his false teeth.

She ignored Harbans’s plea and faced Herbert. ‘You don’t care how much you shame me in front of strangers. You making him believe I does starve you.’

Herbert had already put the cake in his mouth. He chewed slowly, to show that he knew he had done wrong.

‘You ain’t shame?’ Mrs Baksh pointed. ‘Look how your belly puff out.’

Herbert stopped chewing and mumbled, ‘Is only the gas, Ma.’

The other little Bakshes had their interest divided between their mother’s anger and Harbans’s food.

Harbans said, ‘Ooh, ooh,’ and smiled nervously at everybody.

Mrs Baksh turned to him. ‘You eat those cakes up and drink the sweet drink and don’t give a thing to any of these shameless children of mine.’

She used a tone of inflexible authority which was really meant for the little Bakshes. Harbans didn’t know this. He ate and drank. The warm liquid stabbed down to his stomach; once there it tore around in circles. Still, from time to time he looked up from the aerated water and rock cake and smiled at Mrs Baksh and Baksh and Foam and the other little Bakshes.

The biscuits were saved.

At last Harbans was finished and he could leave. He was glad. The whole Baksh family frightened him.

Foam walked down the steps with Harbans. They had hardly got outside when they heard someone screaming upstairs.

‘Herbert,’ Foam said. ‘He does always make that particular set of noise when they beat him.’

When Foam said they Harbans knew he meant Mrs Baksh.

Candidate and campaign manger got into the Dodge and drove on to see Chittaranjan.

EASILY THE MOST IMPORTANT person in Elvira was Chittaranjan, the goldsmith. And there was no mystery why. He looked rich and was rich. He was an expensive goldsmith with a reputation that had spread beyond Elvira. People came to him from as far as Chaguanas and Couva and even San Fernando. Everyone knew his house as the biggest in Elvira. It was solid, two-storeyed, concrete, bright with paint and always well looked after.

Nobody ever saw Chittaranjan working. For as long as Foam could remember Chittaranjan had always employed two men in the shop downstairs. They worked in the open, sitting flat on the concrete terrace under a canvas awning, surrounded by all the gear of their trade: toy pincers, hammers and chisels, a glowing heap of charcoal on a sheet of galvanized iron, pots and basins discoloured with various liquids, some of which smelled, some of which hissed when certain metals were dipped in them. Every afternoon, after the workmen had cleared up and gone home, children combed the terrace for silver shavings and gold dust. Even Foam had done so when he was younger. He hadn’t got much; but some children managed, after years of collecting, to get enough to make a ring. Chittaranjan never objected.

No wonder Foam, like nearly everyone else, Hindu, Muslim, Negro, thought and spoke of his house as the Big House. As a Hindu Chittaranjan naturally had much influence among the Hindus of Elvira; but he was more than the Hindu leader. He was the only man who carried weight with the Spaniards of Cordoba (it was said he lent them money); many Negroes liked him; Muslims didn’t trust him, but even they held him in respect.

‘You ain’t have nothing to worry about, Mr Harbans,’ Foam said, speaking as campaign manager, as he and Harbans drove through Elvira. ‘Chittaranjan control at least five thousand votes. Add that to the thousand Muslim votes and you win, Mr Harbans. It only have eight thousand voters in all.’

Harbans had been brooding all the way. ‘What about that traitor Lorkhoor?’