A House for Mr. Biswas (24 page)

‘Shoulda give him ten dollars.’

‘Is not too late. Why you don’t empty the drawer and run after him?’

And having stimulated his rage and his appetite for argument, she left the doorway and went to the back room, where after much thumping and sighing she began to sing a popular Hindi song:

He didn’t have the Hindu delight in tragedy and the details of death, and he had often asked Shama not to sing this cremation song. Now he had to listen while she sang with sweet lugubriousness to the end. And when, fretted to defeat, he went to the back room, he found Shama, in her best satin bodice and most elaborately worked veil, putting bootees on a fully dressed Savi.

‘Hello!’ he said.

Shama tied one bootee and slipped on the other.

‘Going somewhere?’ She tied the other bootee.

At last she said in Hindi, ‘You may have lost all shame. But everyone hasn’t. Just remember that.’

He knew that the Tulsi daughters who lived with their husbands often went back after a quarrel to Hanuman House, where they complained and got sympathy and, if they didn’t stay too long, respect. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Pack up and go. I suppose they are going to give you some medal at the monkey house.’

After she left, he stood in the shop doorway, fondling his belly and watching his creditors coming back from the fields. The only thing that gave him pleasure was the thought of the surprise these people were going to get in a few days: a flutter of disturbances throughout The Chase for which he, inactive in his shop, would be responsible.

*

‘Biswas!’ Mungroo shouted from the road. ‘Come out, before I come in.’

The day had arrived. Mungroo was holding a sheet of paper in one hand and slapping at it with the other.

‘Biswas!’

A crowd was beginning to gather. Many held papers.

‘Paper,’ Mungroo said. ‘He has sent me a paper. I am going to make him eat this piece of paper. Biswas!’

Unhurriedly Mr Biswas lifted the counter-flap, pulled the little door open and passed to the front of the shop. The law was on his side – he had, indeed, brought it into play – and he felt this gave him complete protection. He leaned against the doorpost, felt the wall quiver, stifled his fear about the wall tumbling down, and crossed his legs.

‘Biswas! I am going to make you eat this paper.’

Women screamed from the road.

‘Touch me,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘Paper,’ Mungroo said, stepping into the yard.

‘Touch me and I bring you up.’

Still Mungroo advanced.

‘I bring you up and you spend Carnival in jail.’

The effect was startling. Carnival was less than a month away. Mungroo halted. His followers, seeing themselves leaderless during the two most important days of the stick-fighting year, at once ran to Mungroo and held him back.

‘I call all of all-you as witnesses,’ Mr Biswas said, unaware of the reasons for his deliverance. ‘Let him touch me. And all of all-you have to come to court to be
my
witnesses.’ He believed that by being the first to ask them he had bound them legally. ‘Can’t ask my wife,’ he went on. ‘They don’t take wife as witness. But I asking all of all-you here.’

‘Paper. The man has sent me a paper,’ Mungroo muttered, while he allowed himself, without loss of prestige, to be pushed slowly back to the road by his followers.

‘Well,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘One man get his paper. He had it coming to him a long time. Let me tell you, eh. Don’t let Tom, Dick or Harry think he can play with me, you hear. One man get his paper. A lot more going to get
their
paper
before I finish. And don’t come to talk to me. Go and talk to Seebaran.’

When he came to the shop, a week later, Moti was businesslike. As soon as he greeted Mr Biswas he took out a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, spread it on the counter and began ticking off names with his fountain pen. ‘Well, Ratni pay up,’ he said. ‘Dookhni pay. Sohun pay. Godberdhan pay. Rattan pay.’

‘We frighten them, eh? So, no legal proceedings against them, then?’

‘Jankie ask for time. Pritam too. But they going to pay, especially as they see the others paying up.’

‘Good, good,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I could do with their money right now.’

Moti folded the sheet of paper.

‘So?’ Mr Biswas said.

Moti put the paper in his pocket.

Mr Biswas pretended he hadn’t been waiting for anything. ‘And Mungroo?’

‘I glad you ask about him. As a matter of fact, he giving us a little trouble.’ Moti took out a long envelope from his trouser pocket and handed it to Mr Biswas. ‘This is for you.’

It was a communication, on stiff paper, from the Attorney-General.

Mr Biswas read with disbelief, annoyance and distress.

‘Who is this damn Muslim Mahmoud who stamp his dirty name down here? He is a solicitor and conveyancer too, eh? I thought Seebaran was handling all the work in the Petty Civil’

‘No, no,’ Moti said soothingly. ‘This is Assize Court business.’

‘Assize.
Assize!
So this is what Seebaran land me up in!’

‘Seebaran ain’t land you up in nothing. You land yourself. Read the schedule.’

‘O God! Look, look. Mungroo bringing
me
up for damaging
his
credit!’

‘And he have a good case too. You shouldn’t go around telling people he owe you money. Over and over I hear Seebaran
telling clients, “Leave everything to me and keep your mouth shut. Keep your mouth shut. Keep your mouth shut and leave everything to me.” Over and over. But clients don’t listen. I know clients who talk their way straight to the gallows.’

‘Seebaran didn’t tell me a damn thing. I ain’t even see the blasted man yet.’

‘He want to see you now.’

‘Just let me get this straight. Mungroo owe me money. I say so and I damage his credit. So now he can’t go around taking goods on trust and not paying. So he bring me up. Exactly what the hell this is? And what about those slips?’

‘They wasn’t signed. I did warn you about that, remember. But you didn’t listen. Clients don’t listen. Is a serious business, man. It got Seebaran worried like anything. I could tell you.’

‘Hear you. It got Seebaran worried. What about me?’

‘Seebaran don’t think you would have a chance in court. He say it would be better to settle outside.’

‘You mean shell out. All right. Pounds, shillings and pence, dollars and cents. Let me hear who have to get how much. This is the way Seebaran handling all the work in the Petty Civil, eh?’

‘Seebaran only want to help you out, you know. You could take your case to some K C or the other and pay him a hundred guineas before he ask you to sit down. Nobody stopping you.’

Mr Biswas listened. He learned with surprise that there had already been friendly discussions between Mungroo’s lawyer, Mahmoud, and Seebaran; so that the case had been raised and virtually settled without his knowing anything about it at all. It appeared that Mungroo was willing, for one hundred dollars, to call off the action. The fees of both lawyers came to a hundred dollars as well, though Seebaran, appreciating Mr Biswas’s position, had said he would accept only such money as he could recover from Mr Biswas’s creditors.

‘Suppose,’ Mr Biswas said, ‘that all the others decide to behave like Mungroo. Suppose that every manjack bring me up.’

‘Don’t think about it,’ Moti said. ‘You would make yourself sick.’

As soon as he could, Mr Biswas cycled to Arwacas to ask Shama to come back. He did not tell her what had happened. And it was not from Mrs Tulsi or Seth that he borrowed the money, but from Misir, who, in addition to his journalistic, literary and religious activities, had set up as a usurer, with a capital of two hundred dollars.

More than half the time that remained to Mr Biswas in The Chase was spent in paying off this debt.

In all Mr Biswas lived for six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that at the end they could be comprehended in one glance. But he had aged. The lines which he had encouraged at first, to give him an older look, had come; they were not the decisive lines he had hoped for that would give a commanding air to a frown; they were faint, fussy, disappointing. His cheeks began to fall; his cheek bones, in a proper light, jutted slightly; and he developed a double chin of pure skin which he could pull down so that it hung like the stiff beard on an Egyptian statue. The skin loosened over his arms and legs. His stomach was now perpetually distended; not fat: it was his indigestion, for that affliction had come to stay, and bottles of Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder became as much part of Shama’s purchases as bags of rice or flour.

Though he never ceased to feel that some nobler purpose awaited him, even in this limiting society, he gave up reading Samuel Smiles. That author depressed him acutely. He turned to religion and philosophy. He read the Hindus; he read the Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus which Mrs Weir had given him; he earned the gratitude and respect of a stall-keeper at Arwacas by buying an old and stained copy of
The Supersensual Life;
and he began to dabble in Christianity, acquiring a volume, written mostly in capital letters, called
Arise and Walk.
As a boy he had liked to read descriptions of bad weather in foreign countries; they made him forget the heat and sudden rain which was all he knew. But now, though his philosophical books gave him solace, he could never lose the
feeling that they were irrelevant to his situation. The books had to be put down. The shop awaited; money problems awaited; the road outside was short, and went through flat fields of dull green to small, hot settlements.

And at least once a week he thought of leaving the shop, leaving Shama, leaving the children, and taking that road.

Religion was one thing. Painting was the other. He brought out his brushes and covered the inside of the shop doors and the front of the counter with landscapes. Not of the abandoned field next to the shop, the intricate bush at the back, the huts and trees across the road, or the low blue mountains of the Central Range in the distance. He painted cool, ordered forest scenes, with gracefully curving grass, cultivated trees ringed with friendly serpents, and floors bright with perfect flowers; not the rotting, mosquito-infested jungle he could find within an hour’s walk. He attempted a portrait of Shama. He made her sit on a fat sack of flour – the symbolism pleased him: ‘Suit your family to a T,’ he said – and spent so much time on her clothes and the sack of flour that before he could begin on her face Shama abandoned him and refused to sit any more.

He read innumerable novels, particularly those in the Reader’s Library; and he even tried to write, encouraged by the appearance in a Port of Spain magazine of a puzzling story by Misir. (This was a story of a starving man who was rescued by a benefactor and after some years rose to wealth. One day, driving along the beach, the man heard someone in the sea shouting for help, and recognized his former benefactor in difficulties. He instantly dived into the water, struck his head on a submerged rock and was drowned. The benefactor survived.) But Mr Biswas could never devise a story, and he lacked Misir’s tragic vision; whatever his mood and however painful his subject, he became irreverent and facetious as soon as he began to write, and all he could manage were distorted and scurrilous descriptions of Moti, Mungroo, Seebaran, Seth and Mrs Tulsi.

And there were whole weeks when he devoted himself to some absurdity. He grew his nails to an extreme length and held them up to startle customers. He picked and squeezed at
his face until his cheeks and forehead were inflamed and the rims of his lips were like welts. When his skin became pitted with little holes, he studied these with interest and found the perfection of their shape pleasing. And once he dabbed healing ointments of various colours on his face and went and stood in the shop doorway, greeting people he knew.

He did these things when Shama was away. And more and more frequently she went to Hanuman House, even when there was no quarrel, and stayed longer.

Three years after Savi was born, Shama gave birth to a son. He was not given the names that had been written on the endpaper of the
Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare.
Seth suggested that the boy should be called Anand, and Mr Biswas, who had prepared no new names, agreed. Then it was Anand who travelled with Shama. Savi stayed at Hanuman House. Mrs Tulsi wanted this; so did Shama; so did Savi herself. She liked Hanuman House for its activity and its multitude of children; at The Chase she was restless and badly behaved.

‘Ma,’ Savi said to Shama one day, ‘couldn’t you give me to Aunt Chinta and take Vidiadhar in exchange?’

Vidiadhar was Chinta’s newest baby, born a few months before Anand. And the reason for Savi’s request was this: by virtue of a tradition whose beginnings no one could trace, Chinta was the aunt who distributed all the delicacies that were given to the House by visitors.

Shama told the story as a joke, and couldn’t understand it when Mr Biswas became annoyed.

Once a week he rode his Royal Enfield bicycle to Hanuman House to see Savi. Often he didn’t have to go inside; Savi was waiting for him in the arcade. At every visit he gave her a silver six-cents piece and asked anxious questions.

‘Who beat you?’

Savi shook her head.

‘Who shouted at you?’

‘They shout at everybody.’

She didn’t seem to need a protector.

One Saturday he found her wearing heavy boots with long iron bands down the side of her legs and straps over her knees.

‘Who put these on you?’

‘Granny.’ She was not aggrieved. She was proud of the boots, the iron, the straps. ‘They are heavy, heavy.’

‘Why did she put them on? To punish you?’

‘Only to straighten my legs.’

She had bow-legs. He didn’t believe anything could be done about them and had never tried to find out.

‘They are ugly.’ That was all he could say. ‘They make you look like a cripple.’

She frowned at the word. ‘Well, I like it.’ Then, taking the six cents, ‘At least, I don’t mind.’ She threw out her hands, then put them on her hips and looked away, just like one of the aunts.