“The Suffrage of Elvira”: 23 Slides
Years later scholars and critics would preoccupy themselves with Naipaul’s “politics”, his hybrid “identity”; or his satiric scalpel so merciless on a society too fragile. But as young readers in we marveled at his craftsmanship.Guyana’s realist prose masters, Jan Carew and Edgar Mittelholzer, had written serious novels, but nothing as sparkling and entertaining (yet serious in purpose) as The Suffrage of Elvira.
An academic writing about the experience of reading, about the state a book puts you in, describes precisely what many of us felt: “a peculiar process of immersion, of filtered double-consciousness, a two-way involution of self into character and text into voice.” A few readers thought Naipaul exposed too much (of the East Indian community) too brilliantly; others were irked by his “treatment” of non-Indians. The more creatively ambitious paid attention to his shaping of sentences and paragraphs, his characters’ pan-beating speech rhythms; how Naipaul ‘captured’ the frustration and desire churning beneath the surface of everyday existence. The Suffrage of Elvira dealt with “the coming of democracy” to colonial society. While we await fresh talent and new fiction that explores the dislocations in our lives after “the coming of Independence ” or “the coming of Socialism”, here from pages of crystal-clear prose, illustrating one way it could be done, 23 slides. – W.W.
1. Elvira was stirring before dawn. A fine low mist lay over the hills, promising a hot thundery day. As the darkness waned the mist lifted, copying the contours of the land, and thinned, layer by layer. Every tree was distinct. Soon the sun would be out, the mist would go, the trees would become an opaque green tangle, and polling would begin.
2. “You shy, Mr. Harbans,” Foam said. “I know how it is. But you going to get used to this waving. Ten to one, before this election over, we going to see you waving and shouting to everybody, even to people who ain’t going to vote for you.”
Harbans shook his head sadly.
Foam settled into the angle of the seat and the door. “Way I see it is this. In this Trinidad this democracy is a brand-new thing. We is still creeping. We is a creeping nation.”
3. “I don’t control no votes, so nobody ain’t want me. Just because I don’t control no votes.” He stopped for breath, and added with spirit: “Chittaranjan, the next time one of your wife chicken come in my yard, don’t bother to look for it. Because that night I eating good.” He became maudlin again: “I don’t control no votes. Nobody don’t want me. But everybody chicken think they could just walk in my yard, as if my yard is a republic.”
4. “Funny man,” Harbans said, driving off.
“He always ready to play brave brave, but you never know when he going to start crying,” Foam said. “He lonely really. Wife dead long time. Daughters don’t come to see him.”
5. Mrs. Baksh didn’t like it at all. “Nobody ain’t listening to me,” she said. “Everybody just washing their foot and jumping in this democracy business. But I promising you, for all the sweet it begin sweet, it going to end damn sour.”
6. “How Hari?” Baksh asked. “He write yet?”
Hari was Dhaniram’s son.
“Boy in England, man,” Dhaniram said. “Studying. Can’t study and write letters.”
7. To get the van into the yard they had to pull down part of the rotting wooden fence and build a bridge over the gutter. Some poorer people and their children came to watch. Baksh and Foam stopped talking; frowned and concentrated and spat, as though the van was just a big bother. And though it wasn’t strictly necessary then, they put up the loudspeaker on the van.
8. Pundit Dhaniram had been educated at one of the Presbyterian schools of the Canadian Mission where he had been taught hymns and other Christian things. He cherished the training. “It makes me see both sides,” he used to say; and even now, although he was a Hindu priest, he often found himself humming hymns like “Jesus loves me, yes, I know.”
9. Harbans had come in a brand-new, blue-and-black Jaguar.
“Lorry! What happen to Harbans?”
He wasn’t the candidate they knew. Gone was the informality of dress, the loose trousers, the tie around the waist, the open shirt. He was in a double-breasted grey suit. The coat was a little too wide and a little too long; but that was the tailor’s fault. Harbans didn’t wave. He look preoccupied, kept his eye on the ground, and when he hawked and spat in the gutter, pulled out an ironed handkerchief and wiped his lips – not wiped even, patted them – in the fussiest way.
10. Ramlogan was striding ahead, flinging out his legs, shaking and jellying from his shoulders to his knees.
11. From the veranda Chittaranjan said, “Let them wait until I come down.” He clattered down the front steps. “Is this modern age. Everybody want something for nothing. I work for every penny I have, and now you have these people complaining that they is poor and behaving as though other people depriving them.”
Ramlogan, grasping the fence firmly, agreed. “The march of time, brothers. As the saying goes. Everybody equal. People who ain’t got brain to work and those who use their brain to work. Everybody equal.”
12. That day Dhaniram was not being a pundit. He was in his other, more substantial role as the owner of one-fifth of a tractor. No dhoti and sacred thread; but khaki trousers, yellow sports shirt, brown felt hat and brown patent leather shoes.
13. Foam said, “Is those Witnesses. They can’t touch nobody else, so they come to meddle with the poor Spanish people in Cordoba . Telling them not to vote, to go against the government. Who ever see white woman riding around on red red bicycle before, giving out green books?”
14. She spoke to Baksh kindly. “Man, let me see your belt a little bit, please.”
Baksh replied with equal civility: “Yes, man.”
He undid his leather belt, pulling it carefully through the loops of his khaki trousers as though he wanted to damage neither trousers nor belt. Mrs. Baksh took the belt. Herbert began to cry in advance. Mrs. Baksh didn’t look at him. She held the belt idle for some moments, looking down at it almost reflectively. On a sudden she turned; and lunged at Herbert, striking out with the belt, hitting him everywhere.
15. “Herbert,” Mrs. Baksh said. “You mustn’t tell your father he lie. What you must say?”
“I must say he tell stories,” Herbert said submissively. But he perked up, and a faint mocking smile – which made him look a bit like Foam – came to his lips.
“No, Herbert, you mustn’t even say that your father does tell stories.”
“You mean I mustn’t say anything, Ma?”
“No, son, you mustn’t say anything.”
16. That happened just after noon. Less than three hours later a breadfruit from Ramlogan’s tree dropped so hard on Chittaranjan’s roof that the framed picture of King George V and Mahatma Gandhi in the drawing room fell.
Chittaranjan rushed to the kitchen window, pushed aside his wife from the enamel sink where she was scouring pots and pans with blue soap and ashes, and shot some elaborate Hindi curses at Ramlogan’s backyard.
17. Ramlogan, a big greasy man in greasy trousers and a greasy vest, was leaning against his shop door, his fat arms crossed, scowling at the world.
18. The D.M.O. was a young Indian with a handsome dissipated face. He hadn’t forgotten his association with England and continued to wear a Harris tweed jacket, despite the heat.
Foam asked, “You going to cut him up, Doctor?”
The D.M.O. pursed his lips and didn’t reply. He did two things. He took off Mr. Cuffy’s stout black boots, said, “Good boots,” turned up Mr. Cuffy’s right eye-lid, then closed both eyes.
“Heart,” he said, and filled the form.
“Was that self I did think,” Lutchman said.
19. Foam said, “Is not his fault, Ma. Is the gas.”
“Gas! And the other modern thing is appendicitis. Nobody did have gas and appendicitis when I was small. It ain’t gas. Is just the sort of gratitude I getting from my children, after all the pinching and scraping and saving I does do. And tell me, for who I pinching and scraping and saving?”
She got no reply.
20. Perhaps it was this that helped to make Baksh the Muslim leader, though the position should have gone in all fairness to Haq, a fierce black little man who wore a bristle of white beard and whiskers and whose eyes flashed behind steel-rimmed spectacles when he spoke of infidels. Haq was orthodox, or so he led people to believe, but Haq was poor.
21. 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.
22. “This democracy just make for people like Baksh. Fact, I say it just make for negro and Muslim. They is two people who never like to make anything for theyself, and the moment you make something, they start begging. And if you ain’t give them, they vex.”
Ramlogan, thinking of Haq, assented with conviction.
And if you give them,” Chittarajan went on, “they is ungrateful.”
“As the saying goes, however much you wash a pig, you can’t make it a cow. As the saying goes.”
23. When Harbans had left Elvira and was in County Caroni , he stopped the lorry and shook his small fist at the dark countryside behind him.
“Elvira!” he shouted. “You is a bitch! A bitch! A bitch!”
Extracts taken from The Mystic Masseur: V.S. Naipaul: Penguin Books,
England, 1969
