The nightwatchman's occurrence book_ and other comic inventions - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,41

carbolic soap.’

‘Come down,’ Ramlogan invited.

‘I not going to dirty my hands on you.’ Chittaranjan paused. ‘But is my fence still.’

Inspiration came to Ramlogan. ‘Why you don’t put a fence around your daughter too?’

He scored.

‘Nalini?’ Chittaranjan asked, and his tone was almost conversational.

‘Yes, Nalini self. Little Nelly. Ha.’ Ramlogan gave his dryest laugh.

‘Ramlogan! What you want with my daughter?’

Ramlogan shook the wire fence. ‘Ha. I don’t want nothing with your daughter. But I know who want though.’

‘Ramlogan! Who you is to take my daughter name in your mouth in vain? You, a man like you, who should be running about kissing the ground in case she walk on it.’

‘Walk? Ha. Little Nelly tired with walking man. She lying down now.’

‘Ramlogan! You mean you sell everything from that rumshop of yours? You ain’t even keep back a penny shame? Is the sort of language to hear from a old, hardback, resign man like you?’

Ramlogan addressed Chittaranjan’s workmen under the awning. They had been studiously inattentive throughout. ‘Tell me, is something I make up?’

The workmen didn’t look at him.

Ramlogan said, ‘When girl children small, they does crawl, as the saying goes. Then they does start walking. Then they does lie down. As the saying goes. Ain’t something I sit down and invent.’

‘Who invent it?’ Chittaranjan screamed. ‘Your mother?’

Ramlogan said solemnly, ‘Chittaranjan, I beg you, don’t cuss my mother. Cuss me upside down as much as you want, but leave my mother alone.’ He paused, and laughed. ‘But if you want to learn more about Nelly, why you don’t ask Foam?’

‘Foam? Foreman? Baksh son?’

‘Campaign manager. Ha. Nice boy. Nice Muslim boy.’

Chittaranjan lost his taste for battle. ‘Is true? Is true, Ramlogan? You ain’t making this up?’

‘Why you asking me for? Ha. Ask little Nelly. Look, little Nelly coming back from school. Ask she.’ Ramlogan pointed.

From his veranda Chittaranjan saw Nelly coming up the road.

‘Proper student and scholar, man,’ Ramlogan said. ‘The girl going to school in the day-time and taking private lessons in the night-time. I know I is a Nazi spy, and I know I is a shameless hardback resign man, but I is not the man to stand up between father and daughter.’

He gave the fence a final shake, went and picked up the chicken and flung it into Chittaranjan’s yard. ‘It get fat enough eating my food,’ he said. ‘Cook it and eat it yourself. Supreme Court fighter like you have to eat good.’

He went back to his counter.

Nelly had stayed behind at school, as she always did, to help correct the exercises of the lower classes and rearrange the desks after the day’s upheaval. She was head pupil; a position more like that of unpaid monitor. On the way home she had heard about Tiger and seen him lying in the Bakshes’ yard. She knew then that her parents must have found him and turned him out.

She overdid the cheerfulness when she saw Chittaranjan. ‘Hi, Pops!’

Chittaranjan didn’t like the greeting. ‘Nalini,’ he said sadly, ‘don’t bother to go round by the back. Come up here. I have something to ask you.’

She didn’t like his tone.

‘Oh dog, dog,’ she muttered, going up the red steps to the veranda, ‘how much more trouble you going to cause?’

*

The Bakshes in their dilemma—whether they wanted Tiger dead or alive—were fortunate to get the advice of Harichand the printer.

Harichand was coming home after his work in Couva. No taxi-driver cared to come right up to Elvira, and Harichand was dropped outside Cordoba. He had to walk the three miles to Elvira. He enjoyed it. It kept his figure trim; and when it rained he liked sporting the American raincoat he had acquired—at enormous cost, he said—on one of his trips to Port of Spain. He was the only man in Elvira who possessed a raincoat; everybody else just waited until the rain stopped.

Baksh was sitting in his veranda, looking out as if to find a solution, when he saw Harichand and pointed to Tiger prostrate in the yard.

‘Ah, little puppy dog,’ Harichand said cheerfully. ‘Thought you did get rid of him.’

‘It come back, Harichand.’

‘Come back, eh?’ Harichand stopped and looked at Tiger critically. ‘Thin thing.’ He stood up and gently lifted Tiger’s belly with the tip of a shining shoe. ‘Ah. Preacher put something strong on you if dog come back.’

‘Come up, Harichand,’ Baksh said. ‘It have something we want to ask you.’

Harichand had an entirely spurious reputation as an amateur of the mystic and the psychic; but the thing that encouraged Baksh to call