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By Root 7600 0

however, and found Govind wary of his approaches. On a few evenings Govind suffered himself to be led outside by Mr Biswas. Sitting under the arcade, nervously swinging his long legs and smiling, sucking his teeth and exploring them with his jagged, dirt-stained fingernails, Govind didn’t appear at ease. There was little to talk about. Women, of course, could not be discussed, and Govind didn’t wish to discuss India or Hinduism. So Mr Biswas could talk only of the Tulsis. He asked what it was like to work under Seth. Govind said it was all right. He asked what Govind thought of Mrs Tulsi. She was all right. Her two sons were all right. Everybody was all right. So Mr Biswas talked of jobs. Govind showed a little more interest.

‘You should give up that sign-painting,’ he said one evening, and Mr Biswas was surprised and even slightly annoyed that Govind, of all people, should offer him advice, and so positively.

‘They looking for good drivers on the estate,’ Govind said.

‘Give up sign-painting? And my independence? No, boy. My motto is: paddle your own canoe.’ Mr Biswas began to quote from the poem in Bell’s Standard Elocutionist.

‘What about you? How much they paying you?’

‘They paying me enough.’

‘So you say. But those people are bloodsuckers, man. Rather than work for them, I would catch crab or sell coconut.’

At the mention of his former profession Govind gave a nervous laugh and swung his legs agitatedly.

‘You wouldn’t see the little gods in the field, I bet.’

‘Lil gods?’

Mr Biswas explained. He explained a lot more. Govind, smiling, sucking his teeth and laughing from time to time, didn’t say anything.

Late one afternoon Shama came up with food for Mr Biswas and said, ‘Uncle want to see you.’ Uncle was Seth.

‘Uncle want to see me? Man, go back and tell Uncle that if he want to see me, he must come up here.’

Shama grew serious. ‘What you been doing and saying? You getting everybody against you. You don’t mind. But what about me? You can’t give me anything and you want to prevent everybody else from doing anything for me. Is all right for you to say that you going to pack up and leave. But you know that is only talk. What you got?’

‘I ain’t got a damned thing. But I not going down to see Uncle. I not at his beck and call, like everybody else in this house.’

‘Go down and tell him so yourself. You talking like a man, go down and behave like one.’

‘I not going down.’

Shama cried, and in the end Mr Biswas put on his trousers. As he went down the stairs his courage began to leave him, and he had to tell himself that he was a free man and could leave the house whenever he wished. In the hall, to his shame, he heard himself saying, ‘Yes, Uncle?’

Seth was fixing a cigarette in his long ivory holder, an exquisiteness which no longer seemed an affectation to Mr Biswas. It no longer contrasted with his rough estate clothes and rough, unshaved, moustached face; it had become part of his appearance. Mr Biswas, concentrating on the delicate activity of Seth’s thick, bruised fingers, could feel that the hall was full. But no one was raising his voice; the whispers, the sounds of eating, the muted and seemingly distant scuffles, amounted to silence.

‘Mohun,’ Seth said at last, ‘how long you been living here?’

‘Two months, Uncle.’ And he couldn’t help noticing how much he sounded like Govind.

Mrs Tulsi was there, sitting on a bench at the long table. Unusually, the two gods, unsmiling boys, were there, sitting together in the sugarsack hammock, their feet on the floor. Sisters were feeding husbands at the other end of the table. Sisters and their children were thick about the black entrance to the kitchen.

‘You been eating well?’

In Seth’s presence Mr Biswas felt diminished. Everything about Seth was overpowering: his calm manner, his smooth grey hair, his ivory holder, his hard swollen forearms: after he spoke he stroked them, and looked at the hairs springing back into their original posture.

‘Eating well?’ Mr Biswas thought about the miserable meals, the risings of his belly, the cravings which were seldom satisfied.