A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [170]
The war was beginning to have its effects. Prices were rising everywhere. Mr Biswas’s salary was increased, but the increases were promptly absorbed. And when his salary reached thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents a fortnight the Sentinel started giving COLA, a cost-of-living allowance. Henceforth it was COLA that went up; the salary remained stationary.
‘Psychology,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘They make it sound like a tea party at the orphanage, eh?’ He raised his voice. ‘All right, kiddies? Got your cake? Got your icecream? Got your cola?’
The shorter the money became, the worse the food, the more meticulously Shama kept her accounts, filling reporter’s notebook after reporter’s notebook. These she never threw away; they lay in a swollen, grubby pile on the kitchen shelf.
There were fights in shops for hoarded, weevil-ridden flour. The police kept a sharp eye on stall holders in markets, and a number of vegetable growers and small farmers were fined and imprisoned for selling above the scheduled price. Flour continued to be scarce and full of weevils; and Shama’s food became worse.
To Mr Biswas’s complaints she said, ‘I walk miles every Saturday to save a cent here and a cent there.’
And soon, food forgotten, they were quarrelling. Their quarrels lasted from day to day, from week to week, quarrels differing only in words from those they had had at The Chase.
‘Trapped!’ Mr Biswas would say. ‘You and your family have got me trapped in this hole.’
‘Yes,’ Shama would say. ‘I suppose if it wasn’t for my family you would have a grass roof over your head.’
‘Family! Family! Put me in one poky little barrackroom and pay me twenty dollars a month. Don’t talk to me about your family.’
‘I tell you, if it wasn’t for the children –’
And often, in the end, Mr Biswas would leave the house and go for a long night walk through the city, stopping at some empty shack of a café to eat a tin of salmon, trying to stifle the pain in his stomach and only making it worse; while below the weak electric bulb the sleepy-eyed Chinese shopkeeper picked and sucked his teeth, his slack, bare arms resting on a glasscase in which flies slept on stale cakes. Up to this time the city had been new and held an expectation which not even the deadest two o’clock sun could destroy. Anything could happen: he might meet his barren heroine, the past could be undone, he would be remade. But now not even the thought of the Sentinel’s presses, rolling out at that moment reports of speeches, banquets, funerals (with all names and decorations carefully checked), could keep him from seeing that the city was no more than a repetition of this: this dark, dingy café, the chipped counter, the flies thick on the electric flex, the empty Coca Cola cases stacked in a corner, the cracked glasscase, the shopkeeper picking his teeth, waiting to close.
And in the house, while he was out, the children would come out of bed and go to Shama. She would take down her bloated reporter’s notebooks and try to explain how she had spent the money given her.
At school one day Anand asked the boy who shared his desk, ‘Your father and mother does quarrel?’
‘What about?’
‘Oh, about anything. About food, for instance.’
‘Nah. But suppose he ask her to go to town and buy something. And suppose she don’t buy it. Boy!’
One evening, after a quarrel had flared up and died without being concluded, Anand went to Mr Biswas’s room and said, ‘I have a story to tell you.’
Something in his manner warned Mr Biswas. He put down his book, settled a pillow against the head of the bed and smiled.
‘Once upon a time there was a man —’ Anand’s voice broke.
‘Yes?’ Mr Biswas said, in a mocking friendly voice, still smiling, scraping his lower lip with his teeth.
‘Once upon a time there was a man who –’ His voice broke again, his father’s smile confused him, he forgot what he had planned to say and abandoning grammar, added quickly, ‘Who, whatever you do