A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [113]
Jagdat said breezily, ‘You come to squeeze something out of the old man, eh?’
‘What? Me? I just come to see the old people, man.’ ‘That wasn’t what the old man tell me.’ Jagdat waited, then clapped Mr Biswas on the back. ‘But I didn’t tell him anything.’
‘The old Mohun, man. Trying out the old diplomatic tactic, eh. The old tic-tac-toe.’
‘I wasn’t trying out anything.’
‘No, no. You mustn’t think I look down on you for trying. What else you think I doing every day? But the old man sharp, boy. He could smell a thing like that before you even start thinking about it. So what, eh? You still building this house for the children sake?’
‘You build one for yours?’
There was a sudden abatement of Jagdat’s high spirits. He stopped, half turned, as though about to go back, and raising his voice, said angrily, ‘So they spreading stories about me, eh? To you?’ He bawled, ‘O God! I going to go back and knock out all their false teeth. Mohun! You hearing me?’
The melodramatic flair seemed to run through the family. Mr Biswas said, ‘They didn’t tell me anything. But don’t forget that I know you since you was a boy. And if is still the old Jagdat I imagine you have enough outside children now to make up your own little school.’
Jagdat, still in the attitude of return, relaxed. They walked on.
‘Just four or five,’ Jagdat said.
‘How you mean, four or five?’
‘Well, four.’ Some of Jagdat’s bounce had gone and when, after some time, he spoke again, it was in an elegiac voice. ‘Boy, I went to see my father last week. The man living in a small concrete room in Henry Street in a ramshackle old house full of creole people. And, and’ – his voice was rising again – ‘that son of a bitch’ – he was screaming – ‘that son of a bitch not doing a damn thing to help him.’
In lighted windows curtains were raised. Mr Biswas plucked at Jagdat’s sleeve.
Jagdat dropped his voice to one of melancholy piety. ‘You remember the old man, Mohun?’
Mr Biswas remembered Bhandat well.
‘His face,’ Jagdat said, ‘come small small.’ He half-closed his small eyes and bunched the fingers of one hand raised in a gesture so delicate it might have been made by a pundit at a religious ceremony. ‘O yes,’ he went on, ‘Ajodha always ready to give you vitamin A and vitamin B. But when it come to any real sort of help, don’t go to him. Look. He employ a gardener one time. Old man, wearing rags, thin, sick, practically starving. Indian like you and me. Thirty cents a day. Thirty cents! Still, poor man can’t do better, in all the hot sun the old man working. Doing his little weeding and hoeing. About three o’clock, sun hot like blazes, sweating, back aching as if it want to break, he ask for a cup of tea. Well, they give him a cup of tea. But at the end of the day they dock six cents off his pay.’
Mr Biswas said, ‘You think they going to send me a bill for the food they give me?’
‘Laugh if you want. But that is the way they treat poor people. My consolation is that they can’t bribe God. God is good, boy.’
They were in the Main Road, not far from the shop where Mr Biswas had served under Bhandat. The shop was now owned by a Chinese and a large signboard proclaimed the fact.
The moment came to separate from Jagdat. But Mr Biswas was unwilling to leave him, to be alone, to get on the bus to go back through the night to Green Vale.
Jagdat said, ‘The first boy bright like hell, you know.’
It was some seconds before Mr Biswas realized that Jagdat was talking about one of his celebrated illegitimate children. He saw anxiety in Jagdat’s broad face, in the bright jumping little eyes.
‘I glad,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Now you could get him to read That Body of Yours to you.’
Jagdat laughed. ‘The same old Mohun.’
There was no need to ask where Jagdat was going. He was going to his family. He too, then, lived a divided life.
‘She does work in a office,’ Jagdat said,