A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [139]
‘And bring out your copy book and show me what you do in arithmetic today.’
The boy took the book out to her and Dehuti said, ‘It look passable. But I don’t know anything about arithmetic. Take it to your uncle, let him see.’
Mr Biswas didn’t know anything about arithmetic either, but he saw the approving red ticks and again congratulated the boy, Dehuti and Ramchand.
‘This education is a helluva thing,’ Ramchand said. ‘Any little child could pick up. And yet the blasted thing does turn out so damn important later on.’
Dehuti and Ramchand lived in two rooms. One of these Mr Biswas shared with the boy. And though from the outside the unpainted house with its rusting roof and weatherbeaten, broken boards looked about to fall down, the wood inside had kept some of its colour, and the rooms were clean and well kept. The furniture, including the hatrack with the diamond shaped glass, was brilliantly polished. The area between the kitchen shed and the back room was roofed and partly walled; so that the open yard could be forgotten, and there was room and even privacy.
But at night gruff, intimate whispers came through the partitions, reminding Mr Biswas that he lived in a crowded city. The other tenants were all Negroes. Mr Biswas had never lived close to people of this race before, and their proximity added to the strangeness, the adventure of being in the city. They differed from country Negroes in accent, dress and manner. Their food had strange meaty smells, and their lives appeared less organized. Women ruled men. Children were disregarded and fed, it seemed, at random; punishments were frequent and brutal, without any of the ritual that accompanied floggings at Hanuman House. Yet the children all had fine physiques, disfigured only by projecting navels, which were invariably uncovered; for the city children wore trousers and exposed their tops, unlike country children, who wore vests and exposed their bottoms. And unlike country children, who were timid, the city children were half beggars, half bullies.
The organization of the city fascinated Mr Biswas: the street lamps going on at the same time, the streets swept in the middle of the night, the rubbish collected by the scavenging carts early in the morning; the furtive, macabre sounds of the nightsoil removers; the newsboys, really men; the bread van, the milk that came, not from cows, but in rum bottles stopped with brown paper. Mr Biswas was impressed when Dehuti and Ramchand spoke proprietorially of streets and shops, talking with the ease of people who knew their way about the baffling city. Even about Ramchand’s going out to work every morning there was something knowing, brave and enviable.
And with Mr Biswas Ramchand was indeed the knowledgeable townsman. He took Mr Biswas to the Botanical Gardens and the Rock Gardens and Government House. They went up Chancellor Hill and looked down at the ships in the harbour. For Mr Biswas this was a moment of deep romance. He had seen the sea, but didn’t know that Port of Spain was really a port, at which ocean liners called from all parts of the world.
Mr Biswas was amused by Ramchand’s city manners and allowed himself to be patronized by him. Ramchand had in any case always managed to do that, even when he had just stopped being a yard boy at Tara’s. Ostracized from the community into which he was born, he had shown the futility of its sanctions. He had simply gone outside it. He had acquired a loudness and heartiness which was alien and which he did not always carry off easily. He spoke English most of the time, but with a rural Indian accent which made his attempts to keep up with the ever-changing Port of Spain slang absurd. And Mr Biswas suffered when, as sometimes happened, Ramchand was rebuffed; when, for instance, partly to impress Mr Biswas, he overdid the heartiness in his relations with the Negroes in the yard and was met with cold surprise.
At the end of a fortnight Ramchand said, ‘Don’t worry about getting a job yet. You suffering from brain fag, and