A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [93]
Into this room they moved all their furniture: the kitchen safe, the green kitchen table, the hatrack, the iron fourposter, a rockingchair Mr Biswas had bought in the last days at The Chase, and the dressingtable which, during Shama’s long absences at Hanuman House, had come to stand for Shama.
Only one small drawer of the dressingtable was Mr Biswas’s. The others were alien and if by some chance he opened one he felt he was intruding. It was during the move to Green Vale that he discovered that, in addition to the finer clothes of Shama and the children, those drawers contained Shama’s marriage certificate and the birth certificates of her children; a Bible and Bible pictures she had got from her mission school and kept, not for their religious content, but as reminders of past excellence; and a packet of letters from a pen-pal in Northumberland, the result of one of the headmaster’s schemes. Mr Biswas yearned after the outside world; he read novels that took him there; he never suspected that Shama, of all persons, had been in contact with this world.
‘You didn’t by any chance keep the letters you did write back?’
‘Headteacher used to read them and post them.’
‘I woulda like to read your letters.’
So Mr Biswas became a driver, or sub-overseer, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month, which was twice as much as the labourers got. As he had told Seth, he knew nothing about estate work. He had been surrounded by sugarcane all his life; he knew that the tall fields shot up grey-blue, arrowlike flowers just when shop signs were bursting into green and red gaiety, with holly and berries and Santa Claus and snow-capped letters; he knew the ‘crop-over’ harvest festival; but he didn’t know about burning or weeding or hoeing or trenching; he didn’t know when new cuttings had to be put in or mounds of trash built around new plants. He got instructions from Seth, who came to Green Vale every Saturday to inspect, and pay the labourers, which he did from the kitchen space outside Mr Biswas’s room, using the green kitchen table, and having Mr Biswas sit beside him to read out the number of tasks each labourer had worked.
Mr Biswas didn’t know the admiration and respect his father Raghu had had for drivers. But he could feel the awe the labourers had for the blue and green moneybags with serrated edges and small circular holes for the money to breathe, and he took some pleasure in handling these bags casually, as though they were a bother. It sometimes occurred to him that, perhaps at that very moment, his brothers were standing in similar slow submissive queues on other estates.
On Saturdays, then, he enjoyed power. But on the other days it was different. True, he went out early every morning with his long bamboo rod and measured out the labourers’ tasks. But the labourers knew he was unused to the job and was there simply as a watchman and Seth’s representative. They could fool him and they did, fearing more a single rebuke of Seth’s on Saturday than a week of shy remonstrance from Mr Biswas. Mr Biswas was ashamed to complain to Seth. He bought a topee; it was too big for his head, which was rather small, and he adjusted the topee so badly that it fell down to his ears. For some time after that, whenever the labourers saw Mr Biswas they pulled their hats over their eyes, tilted their heads backwards and looked in his direction. Two or three of the young and impudent even talked to him in this way. He thought he ought to ride a horse, as Seth did; and he was beginning to feel sympathy for those overseers of legend who rode on horseback and lashed labourers on either side. Then, being the buffoon with Seth one Saturday, he mounted Seth’s horse, was thrown after a few yards, and said, ‘I didn’t want to go where he was going.’
‘Gee up!’ one labourer shouted to another on Monday.
‘Oops!’ the second labourer replied.
Mr Biswas told Seth, ‘I got to stop living next door to these people.’
Seth