A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [103]
Afterwards Seth said to Mr Biswas, ‘You can’t trust those buggers. They are going to give a lot of trouble. You better watch out.’
The labourers never spoke about the land to Mr Biswas, and while the crop was being reaped there was no trouble.
When the land was bare Seth said, ‘They will want to dig up the roots. Don’t let them.’
It was not long before Mr Biswas had to report that some roots had been dug up.
Seth said, ‘It looks as though I will have to horsewhip one or two of them.’
‘No, not that. You go back every night to sleep safe and sound in Arwacas. I have to stay here.’
In the end they decided to employ a watchman, and the land was prepared, without further trouble, for the new crop.
‘You think the whole thing worth it?’ Mr Biswas asked. ‘Paying watchman and everything?’
‘In a year or so we wouldn’t have any trouble,’ Seth said. ‘People get used to everything.’
And it seemed that Seth was right. The dispossessed labourers, though they saw Mr Biswas every day, contented themselves with sending him messages by other labourers.
‘Dookinan says that he know you have a kind heart and wouldn’t want to do anything to harm him. Five children, you know.’
‘Is not me,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Is not my land. I just doing a job and drawing a salary.’
The labourers’ acceptance, at first touched with hope, turned to resignation. And resignation turned to hostility, directed not against Seth, who was feared, but against Mr Biswas. He was no longer mocked; but no one smiled at him, and outside the fields he was ignored.
Every night he bolted himself in his room. As soon as he was still he felt the stillness around him and he had to make movements to destroy the stillness, to challenge the alertness of the room and the objects in it.
He was rocking hard on the creaking board one night when he thought of the power of the rockers to grind and crush and inflict pain, on his hands and toes and the tenderer parts of his body. He rose at once in agony, covering his groin with his hands, sucking hard on his teeth, listening to the chair as, rocking, it moved sideways along the cambered plank. The chair fell silent. He looked away from it. On the wall he saw a nail that could puncture his eye. The window could trap and mangle. So could the door. Every leg of the green table could press and crush. The castors of the dressingtable. The drawers. He lay face down on the bed, not wanting to see and, to drive out the shapes of objects from his head, he concentrated on the shapes of letters, working out design after design for the letter R. At last he fell asleep, with his hands covering the vulnerable parts of his body, and wishing he had hands to cover himself all over. In the morning he was better; he had forgotten his fears.
There had been many changes at Hanuman House, but though he went there two or three times a week he noticed the changes as from a distance and felt in no way concerned. Marriage had taken away one wave of children, among them the contortionist. Marriage had also overtaken the elder god, though for some time it had looked as though he might be reprieved. The search among the eligible families had failed to provide someone beautiful and educated and rich enough to satisfy Mrs Tulsi or her daughters, who, notwithstanding the chancy haste of their own marriages, based solely on caste, thought that their brother’s bride should be chosen with a more appropriate concern. For a short time afterwards a search was made for an educated, beautiful and rich girl from a caste family who had been converted to Christianity and had lapsed. Finally, it was agreed that any educated, beautiful and rich Indian girl would do, provided she had no Muslim taint. The oil families, whatever their original condition, were too grand. So they searched among the families in soft drinks, the families in ice, the transport families, the cinema families, the families in filling stations. And at last, in a laxly Presbyterian family with one filling station,