A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [81]
‘They wasn’t signed. I did warn you about that, remember. But you didn’t listen. Clients don’t listen. Is a serious business, man. It got Seebaran worried like anything. I could tell you.’
‘Hear you. It got Seebaran worried. What about me?’
‘Seebaran don’t think you would have a chance in court. He say it would be better to settle outside.’
‘You mean shell out. All right. Pounds, shillings and pence, dollars and cents. Let me hear who have to get how much. This is the way Seebaran handling all the work in the Petty Civil, eh?’
‘Seebaran only want to help you out, you know. You could take your case to some K C or the other and pay him a hundred guineas before he ask you to sit down. Nobody stopping you.’
Mr Biswas listened. He learned with surprise that there had already been friendly discussions between Mungroo’s lawyer, Mahmoud, and Seebaran; so that the case had been raised and virtually settled without his knowing anything about it at all. It appeared that Mungroo was willing, for one hundred dollars, to call off the action. The fees of both lawyers came to a hundred dollars as well, though Seebaran, appreciating Mr Biswas’s position, had said he would accept only such money as he could recover from Mr Biswas’s creditors.
‘Suppose,’ Mr Biswas said, ‘that all the others decide to behave like Mungroo. Suppose that every manjack bring me up.’
‘Don’t think about it,’ Moti said. ‘You would make yourself sick.’
As soon as he could, Mr Biswas cycled to Arwacas to ask Shama to come back. He did not tell her what had happened. And it was not from Mrs Tulsi or Seth that he borrowed the money, but from Misir, who, in addition to his journalistic, literary and religious activities, had set up as a usurer, with a capital of two hundred dollars.
More than half the time that remained to Mr Biswas in The Chase was spent in paying off this debt.
In all Mr Biswas lived for six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that at the end they could be comprehended in one glance. But he had aged. The lines which he had encouraged at first, to give him an older look, had come; they were not the decisive lines he had hoped for that would give a commanding air to a frown; they were faint, fussy, disappointing. His cheeks began to fall; his cheek bones, in a proper light, jutted slightly; and he developed a double chin of pure skin which he could pull down so that it hung like the stiff beard on an Egyptian statue. The skin loosened over his arms and legs. His stomach was now perpetually distended; not fat: it was his indigestion, for that affliction had come to stay, and bottles of Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder became as much part of Shama’s purchases as bags of rice or flour.
Though he never ceased to feel that some nobler purpose awaited him, even in this limiting society, he gave up reading Samuel Smiles. That author depressed him acutely. He turned to religion and philosophy. He read the Hindus; he read the Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus which Mrs Weir had given him; he earned the gratitude and respect of a stall-keeper at Arwacas by buying an old and stained copy of The Supersensual Life; and he began to dabble in Christianity, acquiring a volume, written mostly in capital letters, called Arise and Walk. As a boy he had liked to read descriptions of bad weather in foreign countries; they made him forget the heat and sudden rain which was all he knew. But now, though his philosophical books gave him solace, he could never lose the feeling that they were irrelevant to his situation. The books had to be put down. The shop awaited; money problems awaited; the road outside was short, and went through flat fields of dull green to small, hot settlements.
And at least once a week he thought of leaving the shop, leaving Shama, leaving the children, and taking that road.
Religion was one thing. Painting was the other. He brought out his brushes and covered the inside of the shop doors and the front of the counter with landscapes. Not of the abandoned field next to the shop,