A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [25]
And every evening, when the shop was emptied, when the sleepers had been put outside and the broken bottles and glasses swept up, and the floor washed down – though no amount of water could get rid of the smell of raw rum – the drawer was pulled out and the Petromax gas lamp, taken down from the long wire hook that hung from the ceiling, was placed next to the drawer on the counter. The money was arranged in neat piles and Bhandat noted the day’s takings on a sheet of stiff brown paper, smooth on one side, rough on the other. Bhandat wrote on the smooth side with a soft pencil that smudged easily. The shop had thick edges of darkness; the smell of dirty boards and stale rum was sharp; and Bhandat made his calculation in whispers against the noise of the Petromax whose hiss, lost in the din of the evening, had now in the silence swollen into a roar.
Bhandat’s voice, even when low, was a whine with a querulous edge. He was a small man, with a nose as sharp as Ajodha’s and a face as thin; but this face could never express benignity; always it looked harassed and irritable, and more so than ever at the end of the evening. He was going bald and the curve of his forehead repeated the curve of his nose. His thin upper lip was heavily outlined and had two neat and equal bumps in the middle which pressed in a swollen way over the lower lip and practically hid it. While Bhandat calculated Mr Biswas studied these bumps.
Bhandat made it clear that he regarded Mr Biswas as Tara’s spy and distrusted him. And it was not long before Mr Biswas realized that Bhandat was stealing, and that these feverish nightly calculations were meant to frustrate Tara’s weekly checks. He was not surprised or critical. Only, he was embarrassed by some of Bhandat’s methods.
‘When these people have three or four drinks and want another,’ Bhandat said, ‘don’t give them full measure.’
Mr Biswas asked no questions.
Bhandat looked away and explained, ‘It is for their own good really.’
Mr Biswas got to know when Bhandat felt he had given short measure often enough to risk pocketing the price of a drink. Bhandat stared straight at the man who had paid him, talked absurdly for a moment, then began to spin the coin. Whenever Mr Biswas saw a coin rising and falling through the air he knew that it would eventually land in Bhandat’s pocket.
Directly afterwards Bhandat became as gay as he could with the customers, and suspicious and irritable with Mr Biswas. ‘You,’ he would say to Mr Biswas. ‘What the hell are you looking at?’ And sometimes he would say to people across the counter, ‘Look at him. Always smiling, eh? As though he is smarter than everybody else. Look at him.’
‘Yes,’ the drinkers said. ‘He is a real smart man. You better keep an eye on him, Bhandat.’
So to the drinkers Mr Biswas became ‘smart man’ or ‘smart boy’, someone who could be ridiculed.
He revenged himself by spitting in the rum when he bottled it, which he did early every morning. The rum was the same, but the prices and labels were different: ‘Indian Maiden’, ‘The White Cock’, ‘Parakeet’. Each brand had its adherents, and to Mr Biswas this was a subsidiary revenge which gave a small but continuous pleasure.
The bottling-room was in the ancillary shop-buildings which formed a square about an unpaved yard. Bhandat lived with his family, and Mr Biswas, in two rooms. When it was dry Bhandat’s wife cooked on the steps that led to one of these rooms; when it rained she cooked in a corrugated-iron shack, made by Bhandat during a period of sobriety and responsibility, in the yard. The other rooms were used as storerooms or were rented out to other families. The room in which Mr Biswas slept had no window and was perpetually dark. His clothes hung on a nail on one wall; his books occupied a small amount of floor space; he slept with Bhandat’s two sons on a hard, smelly coconut fibre mattress on the floor. Every morning the mattress was rolled up, leaving a deposit of coarse