A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [137]
The spasms of terror didn’t come. The knots of fear were still in his stomach, but they were so subdued he knew he could ignore them. The world had been restored to him. He looked at the nails of his left hand; they were still whole. He tested them against his palm; they were sharp and cutting.
He walked past the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign; past the rumshop with the vast awning; past the Roman Catholic church; the court house; past the police station, primly ochre-and-red, its lawn and hedges trimmed, the drive lined with large whitewashed stones and palm trees which, whitewashed halfway up their trunks, looked like the legs of Pratap and Prasad when, as boys, they returned from the buffalo-pond.
PART TWO
1. ‘Amazing Scenes’
TO THE city of Port of Spain, where with one short break he was to spend the rest of his life, and where at Sikkim Street he was to die fifteen years later, Mr Biswas came by accident. When he left Hanuman House and his wife and four children, the last of whom he had not seen, his main concern was to find a place to pass the night. It was still early morning. The sun was rising directly above the High Street in a dazzling haze, against which everyone was silhouetted, outlined in gold, and attached to shadows so elongated that movements appeared uncoordinated and awkward. The buildings on either side were in damp shadow.
At the road junction Mr Biswas had still not decided where to go. Most of the traffic moved north: tarpaulin-covered lorries, taxis, buses. The buses slowed down to pass Mr Biswas, and the conductors, hanging out from the footboard, shouted to him to come aboard. North lay Ajodha and Tara, and his mother. South lay his brothers. None of them could refuse to take him in. But to none of them did he want to go: it was too easy to picture himself among them. Then he remembered that north, too, lay Port of Spain and Ramchand, his brother-in-law. And it was while he was trying to decide whether Ramchand’s invitation could be considered genuine that a bus, its engine partially unbonneted, its capless radiator steaming, came to a stop inches away with a squeal of brakes and a racking of its tin and wood body, and the conductor, a young man, almost a boy, bent down and seized Mr Biswas’s cardboard suitcase, saying imperiously, impatiently, ‘Port of Spain, man, Port of Spain’.
As a conductor of Ajodha’s buses Mr Biswas had seized the suitcases of many wayfarers, and he knew that in these circumstances a conductor had to be aggressive to combat any possible annoyance. But now, finding himself suddenly separated from his suitcase and hearing the impatience in the conductor’s voice, he was cowed, and nodded. ‘Up, up, man,’ the conductor said, and Mr Biswas climbed into the vehicle while the conductor stowed away his suitcase.
Whenever the bus stopped to release a passenger or kidnap another, Mr Biswas wondered whether it was too late to get off and make his way south. But the decision had been made, and he was without energy to go back on it; besides, he could get at his suitcase only with the cooperation of the conductor. He fixed his eyes on a house, as small and as neat as a doll’s house, on the distant hills of the Northern Range; and as the bus moved north, he allowed himself to be puzzled that the house didn’t grow any bigger, and to wonder, as a child might, whether the bus would eventually come to that house.
It was the crop season. In the sugarcane fields, already in parts laid low, cutters and loaders were at work, knee-deep in trash. Along the tracks between fields mudstained, grey-black buffaloes languidly pulled carts carrying high, bristling loads of sugarcane. But soon the land changed and the air was less sticky. Sugarcane gave way to rice-fields,