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

And then Foam shouted, ‘Look, Mr Harbans! Preacher.’

Harbans saw. A tall Negro with high frizzy hair, long frizzy beard, long white robe; haloed in the light of the headlamps; walking briskly at the edge of the road, stamping his staff, the hem of his robe dancing above sandalled feet. They saw him leave the road, go across a yard, saw him knock; and as they drove past, saw the door opened for him.

‘That is all he doing,’ Foam said. ‘Walking brisk brisk from door to door and knocking and going in and coming out and walking brisk brisk again.’

‘What he does talk about when he go in?’

‘Nobody ain’t know, Mr Harbans. Nobody does tell.’

They stopped at Baksh’s house and Foam got off.

‘We go have the first committee meeting some time next week, Mr Harbans. It going to give you a encouragement.’

But Foam’s hand was still on the door.

‘Ooh, I was forgetting.’ Harbans dipped into his hip pocket. ‘Something. Nothing much, but is a beginning.’

‘Is a encouragement,’ Foam said, taking the note.

Harbans drove out of Elvira, past the abandoned cocoa-house, past Cordoba, up Elvira Hill, down Elvira Hill. At the bottom of the hill his headlights picked out the two white women on their bicycles.

‘It don’t mean nothing,’ Harbans said to himself. ‘I mustn’t get down-couraged. It don’t mean nothing at all.’

If he only knew, his troubles hadn’t started.

IN SPITE OF WHAT HE HAD SAID to Harbans in the lorry about going up for the County Council, Foam hadn’t been thinking of going into politics at all. But when Lorkhoor had suddenly begun to campaign for Preacher, Foam announced that he was going to campaign for Harbans. Mrs Baksh objected. But Baksh said, ‘It going to be a good experience for the boy.’ Baksh had already agreed to support Harbans for two thousand dollars. Foam, however, wanted to do some loudspeaking, like Lorkhoor; and Baksh himself had been talking for some time in Ramlogan’s rumshop about the money to be made out of a loudspeaker. So when Harbans came that afternoon, Baksh hadn’t said a word about the two thousand dollars but had asked instead for a loudspeaker van and for Foam to be campaign manager.

The rivalry between Foam and Lorkhoor began when Teacher Francis, the new headmaster of the Elvira Government School, formed the Elvira Social and Debating Club. Teacher Francis was a young red-skinned Negro who dazzled Elvira with his sharp city dress: sharkskin zoot suit, hot tie knotted below an open collar, two-toned shoes. He was young for a headmaster, but to be a headmaster in Elvira was to be damned by the Trinidad Education Department. (Teacher Francis had been so damned for parading his agnosticism in a Port of Spain school. He had drawn a shapeless outline on the blackboard and asked his class, ‘Tell me, eh. That soul you does hear so much about, it look like that, or what?’ One boy had been outraged. The boy’s father complained to the Director of Education and Teacher Francis was damned to Elvira.) He formed the Elvira Social and Debating Club to encourage things of the mind. The idea was new and the response was big. Lorkhoor quickly became the star of the club. It was Lorkhoor who wrote most of the poems and stories which were read to the club, and one of Lorkhoor’s poems had even been printed on the leader page of the Trinidad Sentinel, in the special type the Sentinel reserves for poetry and the Biblical quotation at the bottom of the leader:

Elvira, awake! Behold the dawn!

It shines for you, it shines for me …

In all the discussions, political and religious — Teacher Francis was still hot on religion — Lorkhoor shone and didn’t allow Foam or anyone else to shine. Teacher Francis always backed up Lorkhoor; between them they turned the club into a place where they could show off before an audience. They made jokes and puns that went over the heads of nearly everyone else. One day Teacher Francis said, ‘People like you and me, Lorkhoor, are two and far between.’ Lorkhoor alone roared. At the next meeting Lorkhoor began a review of a film: ‘The points in this film are two and far between — the beginning and the end.’ People stopped coming to the club; those who came, came to drink — there were always two or three people in Elvira who were having a row with Ramlogan the rumshop owner — and the club broke up.

Teacher Francis and Lorkhoor remained thick. Teacher Francis felt Lorkhoor understood him. He said Lorkhoor was a born writer and he was always sending off letters on Lorkhoor’s behalf to the Sentinel and the Guardian and the Gazette. So far nothing had come of that.

And then Foam was really cut up when Lorkhoor got that job advertising for the cinemas from a loudspeaker van. It was Foam who had heard of the job first, from Harichand the printer, a man of many contacts. Foam applied and had practically got the job when Lorkhoor, supported by Teacher Francis, stepped in. Lorkhoor pointed out that Foam was too young for a driving permit (which was true); that Foam’s English wasn’t very good (which was true). Lorkhoor pointed out that he, Lorkhoor, had a driving permit (which was true); and his English was faultless (which was an understatement). Lorkhoor got the job and said it was a degradation. But while he drove about Central Trinidad in his loudspeaker van, speaking faultless English to his heart’s content, Foam had to remain in Elvira, an apprentice in his father’s shop. Foam hated the stuffy dark shop, hated the eternal tacking, which was all he was allowed to do, hated Elvira, at moments almost hated his family.

He never forgave Lorkhoor. The job, which Lorkhoor called a degradation, was his by rights; he would have given anything to get it. And now the election gave him the next best thing. It gave him a loudspeaker of his own and took him out of the shop. He worked not so much for the victory of Harbans and the defeat of Preacher, as for the humiliation of Lorkhoor and Teacher Francis.

*

Even before the committee met, Foam set to work. He got a pot of red paint from Chittaranjan and went around Elvira painting culverts, telegraph poles and tree-trunks with the enthusiastic slogan, VOTE HARBANS OR DIE!

Mrs Baksh didn’t like it at all. ‘Nobody ain’t listening to me,’ she said. ‘Everybody just washing their foot and jumping in this democracy business. But I promising you, for all the sweet it begin sweet, it going to end damn sour.’

She softened a little when the loudspeaker and the van came, but she still made it clear that she didn’t approve. All Elvira knew about the van — it was another example of Baksh’s depth — and Mrs Baksh was frightened by the very size of her fortune. She was tempting fate, inviting the evil eye.

Nobody else saw it that way. The little Bakshes clustered around the van while Foam and Baksh made arrangements for lodging it. To get the van into the yard they had to pull down part of the rotting wooden fence and build a bridge over the gutter. Some poorer people and their children came to watch. Baksh and Foam stopped talking; frowned and concentrated and spat, as though the van was just a big bother. And though it wasn’t strictly necessary then, they put up the loudspeaker on the van. They spread a gunny sack on the hood, placed the loudspeaker on it and tied it down to the bumper with four lengths of rope.

Baksh spoke only one sentence during the whole of this operation. ‘Have to get a proper stand for this damn loudspeaker thing,’ he said, resentfully.

After dinner that evening, Foam, with his twelve-year-old brother Rafiq, went in the van to Cordoba, a good three miles away, to do some more slogans. The Spaniards watched without interest while he daubed VOTE HARBANS OR DIE!