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

But he got no reply because at that moment a loud crash on the galvanized-iron roof startled them all. The Negro waiters shuddered. There was a sound of breaking glass.

From inside a woman’s voice, weary, placid — Mrs. Chittaranjan’s — said, ‘Breadfruit again. Break a glass pane this time.’

Chittaranjan jumped up, his sabots giving the loudest clack. ‘Is that son-of-a-bitch Ramlogan!’ He ran to the veranda wall, stood on tiptoe and hunched himself over the ledge. Harbans and Foam looked out with him.

Ramlogan was picking his teeth with unconcern. ‘Ha. Ha.’

‘Ramlogan!’ Chittaranjan shouted, his thin voice edged and carrying far. ‘One of these days I going to mash up your arse.’

‘Ha. You go mash up my arse? You ain’t even got nothing to sit down on, and you go mash up my arse?’

‘Yes, I go do it. I, Chittaranjan, go do it, so help me God!’ He suddenly turned to Foam and Harbans, the fixed smile on his face, and screamed at them: ‘Oh, God! Don’t let that man provoke me, you hear! Don’t let him provoke me!’

Ramlogan left his shop door and walked to the edge of his yard. ‘Come down,’ he invited, with savage amiability. ‘Come down and mash up my arse. Come down and fight. Come down and cut down the breadfruit tree or the zaboca tree. Then we go see who is man.’

‘Don’t worry with the man, Pa,’ Nelly Chittaranjan, inside. ‘You don’t see that the man just want you to low-rate yourself?’

Chittaranjan paid no attention. ‘You is a fighter?’ he challenged. ‘You? You ever been to Port of Spain? Go to Port of Spain, ask somebody to show you where St Vincent Street is, walk down St Vincent Street, stop at the Supreme Court and ask them about Chittaranjan. They go tell you who is the fighter. Supreme Court know you as a fighter?’

Ramlogan hesitated. Chittaranjan had been an expert stick-fighter. He hadn’t much of a reach but he made up for that by his nimbleness. And his stick-fighting had often got him into trouble with the police.

Ramlogan couldn’t reply. He put his hands on the wire fence.

‘Take your fat dirty hand offa my fence,’ Chittaranjan snapped. ‘A nasty blow-up shopkeeper like you want to put your hand on my fence?’

‘All right, all right. One day I going to build my own fence, and then you don’t touch it, I warning you.’

‘But till then, take your fat dirty hand offa my fence.’

Then, unexpectedly, Ramlogan began to cry. He cried in a painful, belly-shaking way, pumping the tears out. ‘You don’t even want me to touch your fence now.’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his big hairy hand. ‘But you don’t have to be so insultive with it. All right, you ain’t want me. Nobody ain’t want me. The candidate ain’t want me. The three of all-you remain up there complotting against me, and you ain’t want me to put my hand on your fence now. I don’t control no votes, so nobody ain’t want me. Just because I don’t control no votes.’ He stopped for breath, and added with spirit: ‘Chittaranjan, the next time one of your wife chickens come in my yard, don’t bother to look for it. Because that night I eating good.’ He became maudlin again: ‘I don’t control no votes. Nobody don’t want me. But everybody chicken think they could just walk in my yard, as if my yard is a republic.’

Sobbing, he retreated to his shop.

Chittaranjan went back to his rocking-chair. ‘Mother arse,’ he said, giving a bite to every consonant. ‘For three years now, since the man come to live in Elvira, he only giving me provocation.’ But Chittaranjan was as poised as before. His face was flushed; but the flush on Chittaranjan’s face was, it seemed, as fixed as the smile.

Night fell.

Chittaranjan said, ‘You go have to start a rum-account with Ramlogan.’ The quarrel might not have been, to judge from Chittaranjan’s calm.

Foam nodded. ‘Only rumshop in Elvira, Mr Harbans.’

Harbans looked down at his hands. ‘I have to buy rum for everybody?’

‘Not everybody,’ Chittaranjan said.

Harbans changed the subject. ‘What about that traitor Lorkhoor?’

‘Lorkhoor ain’t got no mind,’ Chittaranjan said. ‘But he can’t worry me. Even supposing Lorkhoor win one thousand Hindu votes for Preacher, that still leave you three thousand Hindu votes. Now, three thousand Hindu votes and one thousand votes — you could depend on me for the Spanish votes — that give you four thousand votes.’

‘Don’t forget the thousand Muslim votes,’ Foam boomed.

Chittaranjan acknowledged them distastefully. ‘Make five thousand votes. You can’t lose.’

‘So is only five thousand now, eh?’ Harbans said to Foam. ‘In the lorry you tell me six thousand. I imagine tomorrow you go tell me four thousand and the day after you go tell me three thousand.’

‘Mr Harbans!’ Chittaranjan called. ‘Mr Harbans, you mustn’t talk like that!’

‘Nobody can’t fool me. I know this was going to happen. I had a sign.’

‘Five thousand out of eight thousand,’ Chittaranjan said. ‘You can’t lose. Majority of two thousand. Remember, I, Chittaranjan, is for you.’

‘This Lorkhoor is a damn traitor!’ Harbans exclaimed finally. He became calmer. He looked at Foam and Chittaranjan, smiled and began to coo: ‘I sorry, Goldsmith. I sorry, Foam. I was just getting a little down-couraged, that is all.’

‘Election fever,’ Foam said. ‘I know how it is.’

They settled other matters. Chittaranjan accepted the need for a committee, and they decided who were to be members of it. It pleased Harbans to see Chittaranjan growing less frigid towards Foam. At length he broke the news that Foam was the campaign manager. Chittaranjan took it well. It was not a post he coveted, because it was a paid post; everything he did for Harbans, he did only out of the goodness of his heart.

Before they left, Chittaranjan said, ‘I coming up to Port of Spain to see that doctor son you have. I like ambitious children.’

‘He want to see you too, Goldsmith.’

Foam and Harbans got into the Dodge.

A small oil lamp burned in Ramlogan’s gloomy shop and the man himself was eating his dinner from an enamel plate on the counter.

‘Wave to him,’ Foam said.

Ramlogan waved back. ‘Right, boss!’ He was surprisingly cheerful.

‘Funny man,’ Harbans said, driving off.

‘He always ready to play brave brave, but you never know when he going to start crying,’ Foam said. ‘He lonely really. Wife dead long time. Daughters don’t come to see him.’

*

This time there was no waving and shouting. The youths sitting on the culverts and the half-naked children still straying about were dazzled by the headlights of the Dodge and recognized Harbans only when he had passed. Harbans drove warily. It was Friday evening and the main road was busy. The drinking was to begin soon at Ramlogan’s rumshop; the other Friday evening excitement, Mr Cuffy’s sermon, had already begun.

Foam pointed out Mr Cuffy’s house. A gas lamp in the small rickety veranda lit up Mr Cuffy, an old Negro in a tight blue suit, thumping a Bible; and lit up Mr Cuffy’s congregation in the yard below, a reverent Negro group with many women. The rumble of the Dodge obliterated Mr Cuffy’s words, but his gestures were impassioned.

‘Mr Cawfee is Preacher right hand man,’ Foam said. ‘Not one of those Negro people there going to vote for you, Mr Harbans.’

‘Traitors! Elvira just full of traitors.’

Mr Cuffy and his congregation passed out of sight.

Harbans, thinking of the white women, the black bitch, the loudspeaker van, the seventy-five dollars a month, the rum-account with Ramlogan, the treachery of Lorkhoor, saw defeat and humiliation everywhere.