The nightwatchman's occurrence book_ and other comic inventions - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,5

it back. Don’t worry too much with Lorkhoor. He ain’t even got a vote. He too young.’

‘But he making a hundred dollars a month,’ Baksh said.

‘Baksh, we really want a loudspeaker van?’

‘To be frank, boss, I ain’t want it so much for the elections as for afterwards. Announcing at all sort of things. Sports. Weddings. Funerals. It have a lot of money in that nowadays, boss, especially for a poor man’—Baksh waved his hands about the room again—‘who ain’t got much in the way of furnishings, as you see. And Foam here could manage your whole campaign for eighty dollars a month. No hardship.’

Harbans accepted the loudspeaker van sorrowfully. He tried again. ‘But, Baksh, I ain’t want no campaign manager.’

Foam said, ‘You ain’t want no Muslim vote.’

Harbans looked at Foam in surprise. Foam was tacking slowly, steadily, drawing out his needle high.

Baksh said, ‘I promise you the boy going to work night and day for you.’ And the Muslim leader kissed his crossed index fingers.

‘Seventy dollars a month.’

‘All right, boss.’

Foam said, ‘Eh, I could talk for myself, you hear. Seventy-five.’

‘Ooh. Children, Baksh.’

‘They is like that, boss. But the boy have a point. Make it seventy-five.’

Harbans hung his head.

The formal negotiations were over.

Baksh said, ‘Foam, cut across to Haq and bring some sweet drink and cake for the boss.’

Baksh led Harbans through the dark shop, up the dark stairs, through a cluttered bedroom into the veranda where Mrs Baksh and six little Bakshes—dressed for the occasion in their school clothes—were introduced to him.

Mrs Baksh was combing out her thick black hair that went down to her hips. She nodded to Harbans, cleared her comb of loose hair, rolled the hair into a ball, spat on it and threw it into a corner. Then she began to comb again. She was fresh, young, as well-built as her husband, and Harbans thought there was a little of her husband’s recklessness about her as well. Perhaps this was because of her modern skirt, the hem of which fell only just below the knee.

Harbans was at once intimidated by Mrs Baksh. He didn’t like the little Bakshes either. The family insolence seemed to run through them all.

If it puzzled Harbans how a burly couple like Mr and Mrs Baksh could have a son like Foam, elongated and angular, he could see the stages Foam must have gone through when he looked at the other Baksh boys; Iqbal, Herbert, Rafiq and Charles. (It was a concession the Bakshes made to their environment: they chose alternate Christian and Muslim names for their children.) The boys were small-boned and slight and looked as though they had been stretched on the rack. Their bellies were barely swollen. This physique better became the girls, Carol and Zilla; they looked slim and delicate.

Baksh cleared a cane-bottomed chair of a pile of clothes and invited Harbans to sit down.

Before Harbans could do so, Mrs Baksh said, ‘But what happen to the man at all? That is my ironing.’

Baksh said, ‘Carol, take your mother ironing inside.’

Carol took the clothes away.

Harbans sat down and studied the back of his hands.

Mrs Baksh valued the status of her family and felt it deserved watching. She saw threats everywhere; this election was the greatest. She couldn’t afford new enemies; too many people were already jealous of her and she suspected nearly everybody of looking at her with the evil eye, the mal yeux of the local patois. Harbans, with his thin face and thin nose, she suspected in particular.

Harbans, looking down at the grey hairs and ridge-like veins of his hands and worrying about the loudspeaker van and the seventy-five dollars a month, didn’t know how suspect he was.

Foam came back with two bottles of coloured aerated water and a paper bag with two rock cakes.

‘Zilla, go and get a glass,’ Baksh ordered.

‘Don’t worry with glass and thing,’ Harbans said appeasingly. ‘I ain’t all that fussy.’ He was troubled. The aerated water and the rock cakes were sure not to agree with him.

The little Bakshes, bored up till then, began to look at Harbans with interest now that he was going to eat.

Zilla brought a glass. Foam opened a bottle and poured the bright red stuff. Zilla held the paper bag with the rock cakes towards Harbans. Foam and Zilla, the eldest Baksh children, behaved as though they had got to the stage where food was something to be handled, not eaten.

The little Bakshes hadn’t reached that stage.

Baksh left the veranda and came back with a cellophane-wrapped