A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [92]
‘You got to get your furniture out first,’ Seth said.
‘My bureau!’ Shama exclaimed, and put her hand to her own mouth, as though astonished that, when she had left Mr Biswas, she had forgotten to take that piece of furniture with her.
‘You know,’ Seth said, ‘the best thing would be for you to do the insuranburning.’
‘No, Uncle,’ Shama said. ‘Don’t start putting ideas in his head.’
‘Don’t worry with the child,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘You just tell me.’
Seth sat on the bed again. ‘Well, look,’ he said, and his voice was amused and avuncular. ‘You had this trouble with Mungroo. You go to the police station and lay your life on Mungroo head.’
‘Lay my what on Mungroo head?’
‘Tell them about the row. Tell them that Mungroo threatening to kill you. And the moment anything happen to you, the first person they would pick up would be Mungroo.’
‘You mean the first person they would pick up would be me. But let me get this straight. When I dead, like a cockroach, lying on my back with my four foot throw up straight and stiff and high in the air, you want me to walk to the police station and say, “I did tell all-you so.” ’
Mrs Tulsi, still chuckling over her own joke, the first she had managed in English, made Mr Biswas’s an excuse to burst out laughing again.
‘Well, you lay your life on Mungroo head,’ Seth said. ‘You go back to The Chase and stay quiet. You let one week pass, two weeks, even three. Then you make your little preparations. You let Shama collect her bureau. On Thursday, half-day, you drop pitch-oil all over the shop – not where you sleeping – and in the night-time you set a match to it. You give it a little time – not too much – and then you run outside and start bawling for Mungroo.’
‘You mean,’ Mr Biswas said, ‘that this is why all those motorcars burning up every day in this place? And all those houses?’
5. Green Vale
WHENEVER AFTERWARDS Mr Biswas thought of Green Vale he thought of the trees. They were tall and straight, and so hung with long, drooping leaves that their trunks were hidden and appeared to be branchless. Half the leaves were dead; the others, at the top, were a dead green. It was as if all the trees had, at the same moment, been blighted in luxuriance, and death was spreading at the same pace from all the roots. But death was forever held in check. The tonguelike leaves of dead green turned slowly to the brightest yellow, became brown and thin as if scorched, curled downwards over the other dead leaves and did not fall. And new leaves came, as sharp as daggers; but there was no freshness to them; they came into the world old, without a shine, and only grew longer before they too died.
It was hard to imagine that beyond the trees on every side lay the clear plain. Green Vale was damp and shadowed and close. The trees darkened the road and their rotting leaves choked the grass gutters. The trees surrounded the barracks.
As soon as he saw the barracks Mr Biswas decided that the time had come for him to build his own house, by whatever means. The barracks gave one room to one family, and sheltered twelve families in one long room divided into twelve. This long room was built of wood and stood on low concrete pillars. The whitewash on the walls had turned to dust, leaving stains like those left on stones by bleaching clothes; and these stains were mildewed and sweated and freckled with grey and green and black. The corrugated iron roof projected on one side to make a long gallery, divided by rough partitions into twelve kitchen spaces, so open that when it rained hard twelve cooks had to take twelve coal-pots to twelve rooms. The ten middle rooms each had a front door and a back window. The rooms at the end had a front door, a back window, and a side window. Mr Biswas, as a driver, was given an end room. The back window had been nailed shut by the previous tenant and plastered over with newspaper. Its position could only be guessed at, since newspaper covered the walls from top to bottom. This had obviously been the work of a literate. No sheet was placed upside down, and Mr Biswas found