A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [18]
With its flaming red colour and leg-of-mutton sleeves it was obviously a bodice and had, without comment, been recognized as such by the boys, most of whom wore garments not originally designed for them.
‘Where you get it from?’
‘My sister-in-law.’
‘And you thank her?’
There was no reply.
‘Anyway, when you see your sister-in-law, I want you to give her a message. I want you’ – and here Lal seized the boy and started to use the tamarind rod – ‘I want you to tell her that ought twos don’t make four. I want you to tell her that ought oughts are ought, ought twos are ought, one twos are two, and two twos are four.’
Mr Biswas was taught other things. He learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in Hindi from the King George V Hindi Reader, and he learned many English poems by heart from the Royal Reader. At Lal’s dictation he made copious notes, which he never seriously believed, about geysers, rift valleys, watersheds, currents, the Gulf Stream, and a number of deserts. He learned about oases, which Lal taught him to pronounce ‘osis’, and ever afterwards an oasis meant for him nothing more than four or five date trees around a narrow pool of fresh water, surrounded for unending miles by white sand and hot sun. He learned about igloos. In arithmetic he got as far as simple interest and learned to turn dollars and cents into pounds, shilling and pence. The history Lal taught he regarded as simply a school subject, a discipline, as unreal as the geography; and it was from the boy in the red bodice that he first heard, with disbelief, about the Great War.
With this boy, whose name was Alec, Mr Biswas became friendly. The colours of Alec’s clothes were a continual surprise, and one day he scandalized the school by peeing blue, a clear, light turquoise. To excited inquiry Alec replied, ‘I don’t know, boy. I suppose is because I is a Portuguese or something.’ And for days he gave solemn demonstrations which filled most boys with disgust at their race.
It was to Mr Biswas that Alec first revealed his secret, and one morning recess, after Alec had given his demonstration, Mr Biswas dramatically unbuttoned and gave his. There was a clamour and Alec was forced to take out the bottle of Dodd’s Kidney Pills. In no time the bottle was empty, except for some half a dozen pills which Alec said he had to keep. The pills, like the red bodice, belonged to his sister-in-law. ‘I don’t know what she going to do when she find out,’ Alec said, and to those boys who still begged, he said, ‘Buy your own. The drugstore full of them.’ And many of them did buy their own, and for a week the school’s urinals ran turquoise; and the druggist attributed the sudden rise in sales to the success of the Dodd’s Kidney Pills Almanac which, in addition to jokes, carried story after story of the rapid cures the pills had effected on Trinidadians, all of whom had written the makers profusely grateful letters of the utmost articulateness, and been photographed.
With Alec Mr Biswas laid six-inch nails on the railway track at the back of the Main Road and had them flattened to make knives and bayonets. Together they went to Pagotes River and smoked their first cigarettes. They tore off their shirt buttons, exchanged them for marbles and with these Alec won more, struggling continually to repair the depredations of Lal, who considered the game low and had forbidden it in the school grounds. They sat at the same desk, talked, were flogged and separated, but always came together again.
And it was through this association that Mr Biswas discovered his gift for lettering. When Alec tired of doing inaccurate erotic drawings he designed letters. Mr Biswas imitated these with pleasure and growing success. During an arithmetic test one day, finding himself with an astronomical number of hours in answer to a problem about cisterns, he wrote CANCELLED very neatly across the page and became absorbed in blocking the letters and shadowing them. When the period was over he had done nothing else.
Lal, who had noted Mr Biswas’s industry with approval,