A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [77]
Mr Biswas, seeing himself as the hero of one of Misir’s stories, could scarcely hide his alarm.
‘All right, then, man.’ Moti fixed his bicycle clips around his ankles. ‘I got to go. Thanks for the chat. I hope everything go all right with you.’
‘But you know Seebaran,’ Mr Biswas said.
‘Know him, yes. But I don’t know whether I could just go and ask him to help out a friend of mine. Busy man, you know. Handling nearly all the work in the Petty Civil.’
‘Still, you could tell him?’
‘Yes,’ Moti said, without conviction. ‘I could tell him. But Seebaran is a big man. You can’t go troubling him with just one or two little things.’
Mr Biswas brushed his hand up and down the papers on the spike. ‘It have a lot of work here for him,’ he said aggressively. ‘You tell him.’
‘All right. I go tell him.’ Moti got on his cycle. ‘But I ain’t promising nothing.’
Savi was asleep when Mr Biswas went to the back room.
‘Going to settle Mungroo and the rest of them,’ Mr Biswas said to Shama. ‘Putting Seebaran on their tail.’
‘Who is Seebaran?’
‘Who is Seebaran! You mean you don’t know Seebaran? The man who handling practically all the work in the Petty Civil.’
‘I know all that. I hear what the man was saying too.’ ‘Why the hell you ask me then for?’
‘You don’t think you better get advice before you start bringing up people?’
‘Advice? Who from? The old thug and the old she-fox? I know they know everything. You don’t have to tell me that. But they know law?’
‘Seth bring up a lot of people.’
‘And every time he bring somebody up, he lose. You don’t have to tell me that either. Everybody in Arwacas know about Seth and the people he bring up. He don’t know everything.’
‘He used to study doctor. Doctor or druggist.’
‘Used to study doctor! Horse-doctor, if you ask me. He look like a doctor to you? You ever look at his hands? Fat, thick. Can’t even hold a pencil properly.’
‘He cut open that boil Chanrouti had the other day.’
‘And yes. That is another thing I want to tell you, eh. In advance. In advance. I don’t want Seth cutting open any boil on any of my children. And I don’t want him prescribing any blasted sulphur and condensed milk for any of them either.’
Mungroo was the leader of the village stick-fighters. He was a tall, wiry, surly man, made ferocious in appearance by a large handlebar moustache, for which the villagers called him Moush, then Moach. As a stickman he was a champion. He had reach and skill, and his responses were miraculous. He converted a parry into a lunge so fluently it seemed to be a single action. He fought every duel as though he had rehearsed its every development. It was Mungroo who had organized the young men of The Chase into a fighting band, ready to defend the honour of the village on the days of the Christian Carnival and the Muslim Hosein. Under his direction and in his yard they practised assiduously in the evenings by the light of flambeaux. The village boys went to watch this evening practice. So, despite Shama’s disapproval, did Mr Biswas.
As much as the game he liked the making of the sticks. Designs were cut into the bark of the poui, which was then roasted in a bonfire; the burnt bark was peeled off, leaving the design burnt into the white wood. There was no scent as pleasant as that of barely roasted poui: faint, yet so lasting it seemed to come from afar, from some immeasurable depth captive within the wood: as faint as the scent of the pouis Raghu roasted in the village like this, in a yard like this, in a bonfire like this: bringing sensations, not pictures, of an evening meal being cooked over a