The nightwatchman's occurrence book_ and other comic inventions - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,3

you felt that the moment he was born someone had clapped his face together.

Foam said, ‘Candidate coming, Pa.’

‘Let him come,’ Baksh said. If Harbans had heard he would have recognized the casual aggressiveness he had been fearing all afternoon. Baksh stood at a counter with a tape-measure round his neck, consulting a bloated copy-book and making marks with a triangular piece of yellow chalk on some dark blue material. At one end of the counter there was a pile of new material, already cut. A yardstick, its brass tips worn smooth, was screwed down at the other end.

Light came into the shop only through the front door and didn’t reach everywhere. Age had given the unpainted wallboards the barest curve; darkness had made them a dingy russet colour; both had given the shop a moist musty smell. It was this smell, warm and sharp in the late afternoon, not the smell of new cloth, that greeted Harbans when he walked over the shaky plank spanning the gutter and came into the yard.

Foam kept on tacking. Baksh made more marks on his cloth.

Two months, one month ago, they would have jumped up as soon as they saw him coming.

Harbans suffered.

‘Aah, Baksh.’ He used his lightest coo. ‘How you is?’ He flashed his false teeth at Foam and added all at once, ‘And how the boy is? He doing well? Ooh, but he looking too well and too nice.’

Foam scowled while Harbans ruffled his hair.

‘Foam,’ Baksh said, very gently, ‘get up like a good boy and give Mr Harbans your bench.’

Baksh left his chalk and cloth and came to the doorway. He had the squat build of the labourer and didn’t look like a leader or even like the father of seven children. He seemed no more than thirty. He seated Harbans and spat through the door into the gutter. ‘Ain’t got much in the way of furnishings, you see,’ he said, waving his hands about the dark windowless room with its gloomy walls and high sooty ceiling.

‘It matters?’ Harbans said.

‘It matter when you ain’t have.’

Harbans said, ‘Aah.’ Baksh frightened him a little. He didn’t like the solid square face, the thick eyebrows almost meeting at the bridge of a thick nose, the thick black moustache over thick lips. Especially he didn’t like Baksh’s bloodshot eyes. They made him look too reckless.

Harbans put his hands on his thin knees and looked at them. ‘I take my life in my hands today, Baksh, to come to see you. If I tell you how I hate driving!’

‘You want some suit and things?’

‘Is talk I want to talk with you, Baksh.’

Baksh tried to look surprised.

‘Foam,’ Harbans said, ‘go away a lil bit. It have a few things, pussonal, I want to say to your father.’

Foam didn’t move.

Baksh laughed. ‘No, man. Foam is a big man now. Eh, in two three years we have to start thinking about marrying him off.’

Foam, leaning against the wall under a large Coca-Cola calendar, said, ‘Not me, brother. I ain’t in that bacchanal at all. I ain’t want to get married.’

Harbans couldn’t protest. He said, ‘Ooh,’ and gave a little chuckle. The room was too dark for him to see Foam’s expression. But he saw how tall and wiry the boy was, and he thought his posture a little arrogant. That, and his booming voice, made him almost as frightening as his father. Harbans’s hands began to tap on his knees. ‘Ooh, ooh. Children, eh, Baksh?’ He chuckled again. ‘Children. What you going to do?’

Baksh sucked his teeth and went back to his counter. ‘Is the modern generation.’

Harbans steadied his hands. ‘Is that self I come to talk to you about. The modern world, Baksh. In this modern world everybody is one. Don’t make no difference who you is or what you is. You is a Muslim, I is a Hindu. Tell me, that matter?’ He had begun to coo again.

‘Depending.’

‘Yes, as you say, depending. Who you for, Baksh?’

‘In the election, you mean?’

Harbans looked ashamed.

Baksh lay down on a low couch in the darkest corner of the dark room and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Ain’t really think about it yet, you know.’

‘Oh. Ooh, who you for, Foam?’

‘Why for you bothering the boy head with that sort of talk, man?’

Foam said, ‘I for you, Mr Harbans.’

‘Ooh, ooh. Ain’t he a nice boy, Baksh?’

Baksh said, ‘The boy answer for me.’

Harbans looked more ashamed.

Baksh sat up. ‘You go want a lot of help. Microphone. Loud-speaking van. Fact, you go want a whole