A House for Mr. Biswas (11 page)

There were the days when he became a conductor on one of Ajodha’s buses which ran in competition with other buses on a route without fixed stops. He enjoyed the urgent motion and noisy rivalry, and endangered himself needlessly by hanging far out from the running-board to sing to people on the
road, ‘Tunapuna, Naparima, Sangre Grande, Guayaguayare, Chacachacare, Mahatma Gandhi and back,’ the glorious Amerindian names forming an imaginary route that took in the four corners of the island and one place, Chacachacare, across the sea.

And there were times when elusive Alec, with a face that hinted of debauch, came to Pagotes, spoke of pleasures and took Mr Biswas to certain houses which terrified, then attracted, and finally only amused him. With Bhandat’s boys he also went; but they seemed to get most of their pleasure from the thought that they were being vicious.

And now too there were other occasions of excitement, unrelated to the excitements of books and magazines, unrelated to the visits to those houses: the glimpse of a face, a smile, a laugh. But his experiences had taken him beyond the stage when a girl was something of painful loveliness, and it was a marvel that any creature so soft and lovely could welcome the attentions of hard, ugly men; and few persons now held him. Some features always finally repelled, a tone of voice, a quality of skin, an over-sensuous hang of lip; one such lip had grown gross and obscene in a dream which left him feeling unclean. Love was something he was embarrassed to think about; the very word he mentioned seldom, and then as mockingly as Alec and Bhandat’s boys. But secretly he believed.

Alec, misunderstanding, said, ‘You worry too much. These things come when you least expect them.’

But he never ceased to worry. He no longer simply lived. He had begun to wait, not only for love, but for the world to yield its sweetness and romance. He deferred all his pleasure in life until that day. And it was in this mood of expectation that he went to Hanuman House at Arwacas, and saw Shama.

AMONG THE
tumbledown timber-and-corrugated-iron buildings in the High Street at Arwacas, Hanuman House stood like an alien white fortress. The concrete walls looked as thick as they were, and when the narrow doors of the Tulsi Store on the ground floor were closed the House became bulky, impregnable and blank. The side walls were windowless, and on the upper two floors the windows were mere slits in the façade. The balustrade which hedged the flat roof was crowned with a concrete statue of the benevolent monkey-god Hanuman. From the ground his whitewashed features could scarcely be distinguished and were, if anything, slightly sinister, for dust had settled on projections and the effect was that of a face lit up from below.

The Tulsis had some reputation among Hindus as a pious, conservative, landowning family. Other communities, who knew nothing of the Tulsis, had heard about Pundit Tulsi, the founder of the family. He had been one of the first to be killed in a motorcar accident and was the subject of an irreverent and extremely popular song. To many outsiders he was therefore only a creature of fiction. Among Hindus there were other rumours about Pundit Tulsi, some romantic, some scurrilous. The fortune he had made in Trinidad had not come from labouring and it remained a mystery why he had emigrated as a labourer. One or two emigrants, from criminal clans, had come to escape the law. One or two had come to escape the consequences of their families’ participation in the Mutiny. Pundit Tulsi belonged to neither class. His family still flourished in India – letters arrived regularly – and it was known that he had been of higher standing than most of the Indians who had come to Trinidad, nearly all of whom, like Raghu, like Ajodha, had lost touch with their families and wouldn’t have known in what province to find
them. The deference paid Pundit Tulsi in his native district had followed him to Trinidad and now that he was dead attached to his family. Little was really known about this family; outsiders were admitted to Hanuman House only for certain religious celebrations.

Mr Biswas went to Hanuman House to paint signs for the Tulsi Store, after a protracted interview with a large, moustached, overpowering man called Seth, Mrs Tulsi’s brother-in-law. Seth had beaten down Mr Biswas’s price and said that Mr Biswas was getting the job only because he was an Indian; he had beaten it down a little further and said that Mr Biswas could count himself lucky to be a Hindu; he had beaten it down yet further and said that signs were not really needed but were being commissioned from Mr Biswas only because he was a Brahmin.

The Tulsi Store was disappointing. The façade that promised such an amplitude of space concealed a building which was trapezoid in plan and not deep. There were no windows and light came only from the two narrow doors at the front and the single door at the back, which opened on to a covered courtyard. The walls, of uneven thickness, curved here and jutted there, and the shop abounded in awkward, empty, cobwebbed corners. Awkward, too, were the thick ugly columns, whose number dismayed Mr Biswas because he had undertaken, among other things, to paint signs on all of them.

He began by decorating the top of the back wall with an enormous sign. This he illustrated meaninglessly with a drawing of Punch, who appeared incongruously gay and roguish in the austere shop where goods were stored rather than displayed and the assistants were grave and unenthusiastic.

These assistants, he had learned with surprise, were all members of the House. He could not therefore let his eyes rove as freely as usual among the unmarried girls. So, as circumspectly as he could, he studied them while he worked, and decided that the most attractive was a girl of about sixteen, whom the others called Shama. She was of medium height, slender but firm, with fine features, and though he disliked her voice, he was enchanted by her smile. So enchanted,
that after a few days he would very much have liked to do the low and possibly dangerous thing of talking to her. The presence of her sisters and brothers-in-law deterred him, as well as the unpredictable and forbidding appearances of Seth, dressed more like a plantation overseer than a store manager. Still, he stared at her with growing frankness. When she found him out he looked away, became very busy with his brushes and shaped his lips as though he were whistling softly. In fact he couldn’t whistle; all he did was to expel air almost soundlessly through the lecherous gap in his top teeth.

When she had responded to his stares a few times he felt that a certain communion had been established between them; and, meeting Alec in Pagotes, where Alec was working in Ajodha’s garage once again, as a mechanic and a painter of buses and signs, Mr Biswas said, ‘I got a girl in Arwacas.’

Alec was congratulatory. ‘Like I did say, these things come when you least expect them. What you was fussing so for?’

And a few days later Bhandat’s eldest boy said, ‘Mohun, I hear you got a girl at long last, man.’ He was patronizing; it was well known that he was having an affair with a woman of another race by whom he had already had a child; he was proud both of the child and its illegitimacy.

The news of the girl at Arwacas spread and Mr Biswas enjoyed some glory at Pagotes until Bhandat’s younger son, a prognathous, contemptuous boy, said, ‘I feel you lying like hell, you know.’

When Mr Biswas went to Hanuman House the next day he had a note in his pocket, which he intended to give to Shama. She was busy all morning, but just before noon, when the store closed for lunch, there was a lull and her counter was free. He came down the ladder, whistling in his way. Unnecessarily, he began stacking and restacking his paint tins. Then, preoccupied and frowning, he walked about the store, looking for tins that were not there. He passed Shama’s counter and, without looking at her, placed the note under a bolt of cloth. The note was crumpled and slightly dirty and looked ineffectual. But she saw it. She looked away and smiled. It was not a smile of complicity or pleasure; it was a smile that told Mr Biswas he had made a fool of himself. He
felt exceedingly foolish, and wondered whether he shouldn’t take back his note and abandon Shama at once.

While he hesitated a fat Negro woman went to Shama’s counter and asked for flesh-coloured stockings, which were then enjoying some vogue in rural Trinidad.

Shama, still smiling, took down a box and held up a pair of black cotton stockings.

‘Eh!’
The woman’s gasp could be heard throughout the shop. ‘You playing with me? How the hell all-you get so fresh and conceited?’ She began to curse.
‘Playing
with me!’ She pulled boxes and bolts of cloth off the counter and hurled them to the floor and every time something crashed she shouted,
‘Playing
with me!’ One of the Tulsi sons-in-law ran up to pacify her. She cuffed him back. ‘Where the old lady?’ she called, and screamed, ‘Mai! Mai!’ as though in great pain.

Shama had ceased to smile. Fright was plain on her face. Mr Biswas had no desire to comfort her. She looked so much like a child now that he only became more ashamed of the note. The bolt of cloth which concealed it had been thrown to the ground, and the note was exposed, caught at the end of the brass yardstick that was screwed to the counter.

He moved towards the counter, but was driven back by the woman’s fat flailing arms.

Then silence fell on the shop. The woman’s arms became still. Through the back doorway, to the right of the counter, Mrs Tulsi appeared. She was as laden as Tara with jewellery; she lacked Tara’s sprightliness but was statelier; her face, though not plump, was slack, as if unexercised.

Mr Biswas moved back to his tins and brushes.

‘Yes, ma’am, I want to see
you.’
The woman was breathless with anger. ‘I want to see
you.
I want you to beat that child, ma’am. I want you to beat that conceited, rude child of yours.’

‘All right, miss. All right.’ Mrs Tulsi pressed her thin lips together repeatedly. ‘Tell me what happened.’ She spoke English in a slow, precise way which surprised Mr Biswas and filled him with apprehension. She was now behind the counter and her fingers which, like her face, were creased rather than wrinkled, rubbed along the brass yardstick. From
time to time, while she listened, she pressed the corner of her veil over her moving lips.

Mr Biswas, now busily cleaning brushes, wiping them dry, and putting soap in the bristle to keep it supple, was sure that Mrs Tulsi was listening with only half a mind, that her eyes had been caught by the note:
I love you and I want to talk to you.

Mrs Tulsi spoke some abuse to Shama in Hindi, the obscenity of which startled Mr Biswas. The woman looked pacified. Mrs Tulsi promised to look further into the matter and gave the woman a pair of flesh-coloured stockings free. The woman began to retell her story. Mrs Tulsi, treating the matter as closed, repeated that she was giving the stockings free. The woman went on unhurriedly to the end of the story. Then she walked slowly out of the shop, muttering, exaggeratedly swinging her large hips.

The note was in Mrs Tulsi’s hand. She held it just above the counter, far from her eyes, and read it, patting her lips with her veil.

‘Shama, that was a shameless thing to do.’

‘I wasn’t thinking, Mai,’ Shama said, and burst into tears, like a girl about to be flogged.

Mr Biswas’s disenchantment was complete.

Mrs Tulsi, holding her veil to her chin, nodded absently, still looking at the note.

Mr Biswas slunk out of the store. He went to Mrs Seeung’s, a large café in the High Street, and ordered a sardine roll and a bottle of aerated water. The sardines were dry, the onion offended him, and the bread had a crust that cut the inside of his lips. He drew comfort only from the thought that he had not signed the note and could deny writing it.

When he went back to the store he was determined to pretend that nothing had happened, determined never to look at Shama again. Carefully he prepared his brushes and set to work. He was relieved that no one showed an interest in him; and more relieved to find that Shama was not in the store that afternoon. With a light heart he outlined Punch’s dog on the irregular surface of the whitewashed column. Below the dog he ruled lines and sketched
BARGAINS!
BARGAINS
! He painted the dog red, the first
BARGAINS!
black, the second blue. Moving a rung or two down the ladder he ruled more lines, and between these lines he detailed some of the bargains the Tulsi Store offered, in letters which he ‘cut out’, painting a section of the column red, leaving the letters cut out in the whitewash. Along the top and bottom of the red strip he left small circles of whitewash; these he gashed with one red stroke, to give the impression that a huge red plaque had been screwed on to the pillar; it was one of Alec’s devices. The work absorbed him all afternoon. Shama never appeared in the store, and for minutes he forgot about the morning’s happenings.

Just before four, when the store closed and Mr Biswas stopped work, Seth came, looking as though he had spent the day in the fields. He wore muddy bluchers and a stained khaki topee; in the pocket of his sweated khaki shirt he carried a black notebook and an ivory cigarette holder. He went to Mr Biswas and said, in a tone of gruff authority, ‘The old lady want to see you before you go.’

Mr Biswas resented the tone, and was disturbed that Seth had spoken to him in English. Saying nothing, he came down the ladder and washed out his brushes, doing his soundless whistling while Seth stood over him. The front doors were bolted and barred and the Tulsi Store became dark and warm and protected.

He followed Seth through the back door to the damp, gloomy courtyard, where he had never been. Here the Tulsi Store felt even smaller: looking back he saw lifesize carvings of Hanuman, grotesquely coloured, on either side of the shop doorway. Across the courtyard there was a large, old, grey wooden house which he thought must be the original Tulsi house. He had never suspected its size from the store; and from the road it was almost hidden by the tall concrete building, to which it was connected by an unpainted, new-looking wooden bridge, which roofed the courtyard.