Free A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

face and he now had a perpetual air of abstraction and debauch.
    Mr Biswas did not join Alec in the garage. Tara sent him to the rumshop. This had been Ajodha’s first business venture and had provided the money for some of his subsequent exploits. But, with Ajodha’s growing success, the importance of the rumshop had declined and it was now run by his brother Bhandat, about whom there were unpleasant rumours: Bhandat apparently drank, beat his wife and kept a mistress of another race.
    Bipti, who had not been consulted, was very grateful to Tara. And Mr Biswas was thrilled at the thought of earning money. He was not going to earn much. He was to live at the shop and be fed by Bhandat’s wife; he was to be given suits of clothes every now and then; and he was to get two dollars a month.
    The rumshop was a long high building of simple design, flat to the ground, with a pitched roof of corrugated iron rising from concrete walls. Swing doors exposed only the wet floor of the shop and the feet of drinkers, and, in a land where all doors are wide open, gave a touch of vice to the building. The doors were needed, for many of the people who came past them meant to drink themselves into insensibility. At any time of the day there were people who had collapsed on the wet floor, men who looked older than they were, women too; useless people crying in corners, their anguish lost in the din and press of the standing drinkers who swallowed their rum at a gulp, made a face, hastily swallowed water, and bought more rum. There was swearing, boasting, threatening; fights, broken bottles, policemen; and steadily the coppers and the silver and the notes went into the greasy drawer below the shelves.
    And every evening, when the shop was emptied, when the sleepers had been put outside and the broken bottles and glasses swept up, and the floor washed down – though no amount of water could get rid of the smell of raw rum – thedrawer was pulled out and the Petromax gas lamp, taken down from the long wire hook that hung from the ceiling, was placed next to the drawer on the counter. The money was arranged in neat piles and Bhandat noted the day’s takings on a sheet of stiff brown paper, smooth on one side, rough on the other. Bhandat wrote on the smooth side with a soft pencil that smudged easily. The shop had thick edges of darkness; the smell of dirty boards and stale rum was sharp; and Bhandat made his calculation in whispers against the noise of the Petromax whose hiss, lost in the din of the evening, had now in the silence swollen into a roar.
    Bhandat’s voice, even when low, was a whine with a querulous edge. He was a small man, with a nose as sharp as Ajodha’s and a face as thin; but this face could never express benignity; always it looked harassed and irritable, and more so than ever at the end of the evening. He was going bald and the curve of his forehead repeated the curve of his nose. His thin upper lip was heavily outlined and had two neat and equal bumps in the middle which pressed in a swollen way over the lower lip and practically hid it. While Bhandat calculated Mr Biswas studied these bumps.
    Bhandat made it clear that he regarded Mr Biswas as Tara’s spy and distrusted him. And it was not long before Mr Biswas realized that Bhandat was stealing, and that these feverish nightly calculations were meant to frustrate Tara’s weekly checks. He was not surprised or critical. Only, he was embarrassed by some of Bhandat’s methods.
    ‘When these people have three or four drinks and want another,’ Bhandat said, ‘don’t give them full measure.’
    Mr Biswas asked no questions.
    Bhandat looked away and explained, ‘It is for their own good really.’
    Mr Biswas got to know when Bhandat felt he had given short measure often enough to risk pocketing the price of a drink. Bhandat stared straight at the man who had paid him, talked absurdly for a moment, then began to spin the coin. Whenever Mr Biswas saw a coin rising and