A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [9]
Then one day Mr Biswas lost the calf. He had forgotten it, watching the fish. And when, after dropping the stick and scattering the fish, he remembered the calf, it had gone. He hunted for it along the banks and in the adjoining fields. He went back to the field where Dhari had left the calf that morning. The iron piquet, its head squashed and shiny from repeated poundings, was there, but no rope was attached to it, no calf. He spent a long time searching, in fields full of tall weeds with fluffy heads, in the gutters, like neat red gashes, between the fields, and among the sugarcane. He called for it, mooing softly so as not to attract the attention of people.
Abruptly, he decided that the calf was lost for good; that the calf was anyway able to look after itself and would somehow make its way back to its mother in Dhari’s yard. In the meantime the best thing for him to do would be to hide until the calf was found, or perhaps forgotten. It was getting late and he decided that the best place for him to hide would be at home.
The afternoon was almost over. In the west the sky was gold and smoke. Most of the villagers were back from work, and Mr Biswas had to make his way home with caution, keeping close to hedges and sometimes hiding in gutters. Unseen, he came right up to the back boundary of their lot. On a stand between the hut and the cowpen he saw Bipti washing enamel, brass and tin dishes with ashes and water. He hid behind the hibiscus hedge. Pratap and Prasad came, blades of grass between their teeth, their close-fitting felt hats damp with sweat, their faces scorched by the sun and stained with sweat, their legs cased in white mud. Pratap threw a length of white cotton around his dirty trousers and undressed with expert adult modesty before using the calabash to throw water over himself from the big black oil barrel. Prasad stood on a board and began scraping the white mud off his legs.
Bipti said, ‘You boys will have to go and get some wood before it gets dark.’
Prasad lost his temper; and, as though by scraping off the white mud he had lost the composure of adulthood, he flung his hat to the ground and cried like a child, ‘Why do you ask me now? Why do you ask me every day? I am not going.’
Raghu came to the back, an unfinished walking-stick in one hand and in the other a smoking wire with which he had been burning patterns into the stick. ‘Listen, boy,’ Raghu said. ‘Don’t feel that because you are earning money you are a man. Do what your mother asks. And go quickly, before I use this stick on you, even though it is unfinished.’ He smiled at his joke.
Mr Biswas became uneasy.
Prasad, still raging, picked up his hat, and he and Pratap went away to the front of the house.
Bipti took her dishes to the kitchen in the front verandah, where Dehuti would be helping with the evening meal. Raghu went back to his bonfire at the front. Mr Biswas slipped through the hibiscus fence, crossed the narrow, shallow gutter, grey-black and squelchy with the ashy water from the washing-up stand and the muddy water from Pratap’s bath, and made his way to the small back verandah where there was a table, the only piece of carpenter-built furniture in the hut. From the verandah he went into his father’s room, passed under the valance of the bed – planks resting on upright logs sunk into the earth floor – and prepared to wait.
It was a long wait but he endured it without discomfort. Below the bed the smell of old cloth, dust and old thatch combined into one overpoweringly musty smell. Idly, to