A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [62]
The oyster man was talking drunkenly, in a mixture of Hindi and English. ‘My son is a helluva man. I feel that something is seriously wrong with him. One day he put a tin can on the fence and come running inside the house. “The gun, Pa,” he said. “Quick, give me the gun.” I give him the gun. He run to the window and shoot. The tin can fall. “Pa,” he say. “Look. I shoot work. I shoot ambition. They dead.” ’ The flambeau dramatized the oyster man’s features, filling hollows with shadow, putting a shine on his temples, above his eyebrows, along his nose, along his cheek-bones. Suddenly he flung down his knife and pulled out a stick from below his stall. He waved the stick in front of Mr Biswas. ‘Anybody!’ he said. ‘Tell anybody to come!’
The woman didn’t notice. She went on opening oysters, laying them in her scratched, red palms, prising the ugly shells open, cutting the living oysters from their moorings to the pure, just-exposed inside shell.
‘Tell anybody,’ the man said. ‘Anybody at all.’
‘Stop!’ Mr Biswas said.
The woman took her hand out of the bucket and replaced a dripping oyster on the heap.
The man put away his stick. ‘Stop?’ He looked saddened, and ceased to be frightening. He began to count the empty shells.
The woman disappeared into the darkness.
‘Twenty-six,’ the man said. ‘Thirteen cents.’
Mr Biswas paid. The raw, fresh smell of oysters was now upsetting him. His stomach was full and heavy, but unsatisfied. The peppersauce had blistered his lips. Then the pains began. Nevertheless he went on to Mrs Seeung’s. The high, cavernous café was feebly lit. Flies were asleep everywhere, and Mr Seeung was half-asleep behind the counter, his porcupinish head bent over a Chinese newspaper.
Mr Biswas bought a tin of salmon and two loaves of bread. The bread looked and smelled stale. He knew that in his present state bread would only bring on nausea, but it gave him some satisfaction that he was breaking one of the Tulsi taboos by eating shop bread, a habit they considered feckless, negroid and unclean. The salmon repelled him; he thought it tasted of tin; but he felt compelled to eat to the end. And as he ate, his distress increased. Secret eating never did him any good.
Yet what he considered his disgrace was in fact his triumph.
The next morning Seth summoned him and said in English, ‘I come back late last night from Carapichaima, just looking for my food and my bed and the first thing I hear is that you try to beat up Owad. I don’t think we could stand you here any longer. You want to paddle your own canoe. All right, go ahead and paddle. When you start getting your tail wet, don’t bother to come back to me or Mai, you hear. This was a nice united family before you come. You better go away before you do any more mischief and I have to lay my hand on you.’
So Mr Biswas moved to The Chase, to the shop. Shama was pregnant when they moved.
4. The Chase
THE CHASE was a long, straggling settlement of mud huts in the heart of the sugarcane area. Few outsiders went to The Chase. The people who lived there worked on the estates and the roads. The world beyond the sugarcane fields was remote and the village was linked to it only by villagers’ carts and bicycles, wholesalers’ vans and lorries, and an occasional private motorbus that ran to no timetable and along no fixed route.
For Mr Biswas it was like returning to the village where he had spent his early years. Only, now the surrounding darkness and mystery had gone. He knew what lay beyond the sugarcane fields and where the roads went. They went to villages which were just like The Chase; they went to ramshackle towns where, perhaps, some store or café was decorated by his signs.