Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“Powerful, powerful, man,” Mr. Biswas said. “Legal proceedings, eh. I didn’t know it was so easy to bring people up.”

Moti gave a knowing little grunt.

“One dollar and twenty cents, the cost of this letter,” Mr. Biswas said. “You mean I don’t even have to pay that?”

“Not with Seebaran fighting your case for you.”

“One dollar and twenty cents. You mean Seebaran getting that just for fulling up those dotted lines? Education, boy. It have nothing like a profession.”

“You is your own boss, if you is a professional man,” Moti said, his voice touched with a remote sadness.

“But one twenty, man. Five minutes’ writing for one twenty.”

“You forgetting that Seebaran had to spend years and years studying all sort of big and heavy books before they allow him to send out papers like this.”

“You know, the thing to do is to have three sons. Make one a doctor, one a dentist, and one a lawyer.”

“Nice little family. If you have the sons. And if you have the money. They don’t give trust in those places.”

Mr. Biswas brought out Shama’s accounts. Moti asked to see the credit slips again, and his face fell as he looked through them. “A lot of these ain’t signed,” he said.

Mr. Biswas had for long thought it discourteous to ask his creditors to do so. He said, “But they wasn’t signed the last time either.”

Moti gave a nervous laugh. “Don’t worry. I know cases where Seebaran recover people money even without paper or anything. But is a lot of work here, you know. You got to show Seebaran that you serious.”

Mr. Biswas went to the drawer below the shelves. The drawer was large but not heavy, and pulled out in an easy, awkward way; the wood inside was oily but surprisingly white. “A dollar and twenty cents?” he said.

A throat was cleared. Shama’s.

“Maharajin ,” Moti said.

There was no reply.

Mr. Biswas didn’t turn. “One twenty?” he repeated, rattling the coins in the drawer.

Moti said unhappily, “You can’t give a man like Seebaran one twenty to fight a case for you.”

“Five,” Mr. Biswas said.

“That would be good,” Moti said, as though he had hoped to get ten.

“Two,” Mr. Biswas said, walking briskly to the counter and laying down a red note.

“Is all right,” Moti said. “Don’t bother to count it.”

“And one is three.” Mr. Biswas put down a blue note. “And one is four. And one is five.”

“Five,” Moti said.

“Tell Seebaran I send that.”

Moti put the notes in his side pocket and Shama’s Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook in his hip pocket. He fixed on his bicycle clips and, looking up, said, “Maharajin ,” directing a brief smile over Mr. Biswas’s shoulder. Then, briskly, not looking back, he wheeled his shaky bicycle across the yellow dirt yard, dusty and cracked, with here and there a bleached and flattened Anchor cigarette packet. “Right,” he called from the road, hopping on the saddle and pedalling rapidly away.

“Right, man, Moti!” Mr. Biswas called back.

He remained where he was, palms pressed against the edge of the counter, staring at the road, at the mango tree and the side wall of the hut in the lot obliquely opposite, and the sugarcane fields stretching away with an occasional blob of trees, to the low hills of the Central Range.

“All right!” he said. “Somebody turn you into a statue?”

Shama sighed.

“I suppose I is my own boss.”

“And a professional man,” she said.

“Shoulda give him ten dollars.”

“Is not too late. Why you don’t empty the drawer and run after him?”

And having stimulated his rage and his appetite for argument, she left the doorway and went to the back room, where after much thumping and sighing she began to sing a popular Hindi song:

Slowly, slowly,

Brothers and sisters,

Bear his corpse to the water’s edge.

He didn’t have the Hindu delight in tragedy and the details of death, and he had often asked Shama not to sing this cremation song. Now he had to listen while she sang with sweet lugubriousness to the end. And when, fretted to defeat, he went to the back room, he found Shama, in her best satin bodice and most elaborately worked veil, putting bootees on a fully dressed Savi.

“He llo !” he said.

Shama tied one bootee and slipped on the other.

“Going somewhere?”

She tied the other bootee.

At last she said in Hindi, “You may have lost all shame. But everyone hasn’t. Just remember that.”

He knew that the Tulsi daughters who lived with their husbands often went back after a quarrel to Hanuman House, where they complained and got sympathy and, if they didn’t stay too long, respect. “All right,” he said. “Pack up and go. I suppose they are going to give you some medal at the monkey house.”

After she left, he stood in the shop doorway, fondling his belly and watching his creditors coming back from the fields. The only thing that gave him pleasure was the thought of the surprise these people were going to get in a few days: a flutter of disturbances throughout The Chase for which he, inactive in his shop, would be responsible.

“Biswas!” Mungroo shouted from the road. “Come out, before I come in.”

The day had arrived. Mungroo was holding a sheet of paper in one hand and slapping at it with the other.

“Biswas!”

A crowd was beginning to gather. Many held papers.

“Paper,” Mungroo said. “He has sent me a paper. I am going to make him eat this piece of paper. Biswas!”

Unhurriedly Mr. Biswas lifted the counter-flap, pulled the little door open and passed to the front of the shop. The law was on his side-he had, indeed, brought it into play-and he felt this gave him complete protection. He leaned against the doorpost, felt the wall quiver, stifled his fear about the wall tumbling down, and crossed his legs.

“Biswas! I am going to make you eat this paper.”

Women screamed from the road.

“Touch me,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Paper,” Mungroo said, stepping into the yard.

Touch me and I bring you up.”

Still Mungroo advanced.

“I bring you up and you spend Carnival in jail.”

The effect was startling. Carnival was less than a month away. Mungroo halted. His followers, seeing themselves leaderless during the two most important days of the stick-fighting year, at once ran to Mungroo and held him back.

“I call all of all-you as witnesses,” Mr. Biswas said, unaware of the reasons for his deliverance. “Let him touch me. And all of all-you have to come to court to be my witnesses.” He believed that by being the first to ask them he had bound them legally. “Can’t ask my wife,” he went on. “They don’t take wife as witness. But I asking all of all-you here.”

“Paper. The man has sent me a paper,” Mungroo muttered, while he allowed himself, without loss of prestige, to be pushed slowly back to the road by his followers.

“Well,” Mr. Biswas said. “One man get his paper. He had it coming to him a long time. Let me tell you, eh. Don’t let Tom, Dick or Harry think he can play with me, you hear. One man get his paper. A lot more going to get their paper before I finish. And don’t come to talk to me. Go and talk to Seebaran.”

When he came to the shop, a week later, Moti was businesslike. As soon as he greeted Mr. Biswas he took out a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, spread it on the counter and began ticking off names with his fountain pen. “Well, Ratni pay up,” he said. “Dookhni pay. Sohun pay. Godberdhan pay. Rattan pay.”

“We frighten them, eh? So, no legal proceedings against them, then?”