Miguel Street - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,44

beating him too, with her tongue, and I think Bhakcu was really the loser in these quarrels.

It was hard to back the lorry into the yard and it was Mrs Bhakcu’s duty and joy to direct her husband.

One day she said, ‘All right, man, back back, turn a little to the right, all right, all clear. Oh God! No, no, no, man! Stop! You go knock the fence down.’

Bhakcu suddenly went mad. He reversed so fiercely he cracked the concrete fence. Then he shot forward again, ignoring Mrs Bhakcu’s screams, and reversed again, knocking down the fence altogether.

He was in a great temper, and while his wife remained outside crying he went to his little room, stripped to his pants, flung himself belly down on the bed, and began reading the Ramayana.

The lorry wasn’t making money. But to make any at all, Bhakcu had to have loaders. He got two of those big black Grenadian small-islanders who were just beginning to pour into Port of Spain. They called Bhakcu ‘Boss’ and Mrs Bhakcu ‘Madam,’ and this was nice. But when I looked at these men sprawling happily in the back of the lorry in their ragged dusty clothes and their squashed-up felt hats, I used to wonder whether they knew how much worry they caused, and how uncertain their own position was.

Mrs Bhakcu’s talk was now all about these two men.

She would tell my mother, mournfully, ‘Day after tomorrow we have to pay the loaders.’ Two days later she would say, as though the world had come to an end, ‘Today we pay the loaders.’ And in no time at all she would be coming around to my mother in distress again, saying, ‘Day after tomorrow we have to pay the loaders.’

Paying the loaders-for months I seemed to hear about nothing else. The words were well known in the street, and became an idiom.

Boyee would say to Errol on a Saturday, ‘Come, let we go to the one-thirty show at Roxy.’

And Errol would turn out his pockets and say, ‘I can’t go, man. I pay the loaders.’

Hat said, ‘It look as though Bhakcu buy the lorry just to pay the loaders.’

The lorry went in the end. And the loaders too. I don’t know what happened to them. Mrs Bhakcu had the lorry sold just at a time when lorries began making money. They bought a taxi. By now the competition was fierce and taxis were running eight miles for twelve cents, just enough to pay for oil and petrol.

Mrs Bhakcu told my mother, ‘The taxi ain’t making money.’

So she bought another taxi, and hired a man to drive it. She said, ‘Two better than one.’

Bhakcu was reading the Ramayana more and more.

And even that began to annoy the people in the street.

Hat said, ‘Hear the two of them now. She with that voice she got, and he singing that damn sing-song Hindu song.’

Picture then the following scene. Mrs Bhakcu, very short, very fat, standing at the pipe in her yard, and shrilling at her husband. He is in his pants, lying on his belly, dolefully intoning the Ramayana. Suddenly he springs up and snatches the cricket bat in the corner of the room. He runs outside and begins to beat Mrs Bhakcu with the bat.

The silence that follows lasts a few minutes.

And then only Bhakcu’s voice is heard, as he does a solo from the Ramayana.

But don’t think that Mrs Bhakcu lost any pride in her husband. Whenever you listened to the rows between Mrs Bhakcu and Mrs Morgan, you realised that Bhakcu was still his wife’s lord and master.

Mrs Morgan would say, ‘I hear your husband talking in his sleep last night, loud loud.’

‘He wasn’t talking,’ Mrs Bhakcu said, ‘he was singing.’

‘Singing? Hahahahaaah! You know something, Mrs Bhakcu?’

‘What, Mrs Morgan? ’

‘If your husband sing for his supper, both of all you starve like hell.’

‘He know a damn lot more than any of the ignorant man it have in this street, you hear. He could read and write, you know. English and Hindi. How you so ignorant you don’t know that the Ramayana is a holy book? If you coulda understand all the good thing he singing, you wouldn’t be talking all this nonsense you talking now, you hear.’

‘How your husband this morning, anyway? He fix any new cars lately?’

‘I not going to dirty my mouth arguing with you here, you hear. He know how to fix his car. Is a wonder nobody ain’t tell your husband where he can