A House for Mr. Biswas (30 page)

He immediately took out the green table to the yard, setting it some distance away from the room, and the labourers queued up, screening him from Shama. While he sat beside Seth, calling out tasks and wages and making entries in the ledger, he listened to Savi talking excitedly to Shama and Anand. He heard Shama’s cooing replies. Soon she was so
sure of the children’s affection that she was even scolding them. What a difference there was, though, in the voice she used now and the voice she used at Hanuman House!

And even while he noted Shama’s duplicity, he felt that Savi had betrayed him.

The labourers were paid. Seth said he wanted to have a look at the fields; it was not necessary for Mr Biswas to come with him.

Shama was sitting in the kitchen area. She held Myna in her arms and was playing with her, talking baby-talk. Savi and Anand looked on. When Mr Biswas passed, Shama glanced at him but did not stop talking to Myna.

Savi and Anand looked up apprehensively.

Mr Biswas went into the room and sat in the rockingchair.

Shama said loudly, ‘Anand, go and ask your father if he would like a cup of tea.’

Anand came, shy and worried, and mumbled the message.

Mr Biswas did not reply. He studied Anand’s big head and thin arms. The skin at the elbow was baggy, and scarred purple with eczema. Had he too been fed on sulphur and condensed milk?

Anand waited, then went outside.

Mr Biswas rocked. The floor-planks were wide and rough. One had cambered and cracked; whenever the rockers came down on it, it squeaked and snapped.

Savi, not looking at Mr Biswas, brought Myna into the room and laid her carefully on the bed.

Shama was fanning the coal-pot.

Savi, her pyromaniacal instincts aroused, hurried out of the room, saying, ‘Ma, you getting coal all over your clothes. Let me.’

So. They had all forgotten the doll’s house. He drew up his feet on to the chair, leaned his head back, closed his eyes and rocked. The board replied.

‘Anand, take this to your father.’

He heard Anand approaching but didn’t open his eyes. He wondered whether he shouldn’t take the tea and fling it over Shama’s fussy embroidered dress and smiling, uncertain face.

He opened his eyes, took the cup from Anand, and sipped.

When Seth came back he smiled at everyone benevolently and sat down on the steps. Shama gave him a large cup of tea and he drank it in three gurgling draughts, snorting and sighing in between. He took off his hat and smoothed his damp hair. Suddenly he began to laugh. ‘Mohun, I hear you have a case.’

‘Case? Oh,
case!
Small one. Tiny tiny. Baby case, really.’

‘You are a funny sort of paddler. Get your summons yet?’

‘Waiting for it.’

‘And Savi. You get your summons yet?’

Savi smiled, as though there had been no terror in the dark road and the flash of the policeman’s torch.

‘Well, don’t worry.’ Seth got up. ‘These people just want to see whether your dollar-notes look any different from theirs. I settle it up. Wouldn’t do anybody any good for your case to come up.’

And he was gone.

Mr Biswas closed his eyes, rocked on the noisy board, and the children became anxious again.

He remained in the chair until it was dark and time to eat. Oil lamps were lighted in many barrackrooms. Far down a drunk man was swearing.

Savi and Anand ate sitting on the steps. As he ate at the green table Mr Biswas became less torpid, and Shama correspondingly gloomier. Towards the end of the meal he even began to clown. He squatted on the chair, with his left hand squashed between calf and thigh, and asked banteringly, ‘Why you didn’t stay at the monkey house, eh?’

She didn’t reply.

After he had washed his hands and gargled out of the side window, Shama sat down on the steps to eat. He watched her.

‘Crying, eh?’

Slowly the tears flowed out of her wide eyes.

‘So you vex up then?’

One tear raced down her cheek and hung trembling over her top lip.

‘It tickling?’

Her mouth was half full but she stopped chewing. ‘Don’t tell me the food so bad.’

She said, as though to herself, ‘If it wasn’t for the children –’

‘If it wasn’t for the children, what?’

She continued to chew with a loud and morose deliberation.

In one corner Savi and Anand were rolling out sacks and sheets on which to sleep.

‘You come,’ Shama said. ‘You come, you didn’t look right, you didn’t look left, you start getting on, you curse me upside down –’

It was the beginning of her apology. He didn’t interrupt.

‘You didn’t know what I had to put up with. Talking night and day. Puss-puss here. Puss-puss there. Chinta dropping remarks all the time. Everybody beating their children the moment they start talking to Savi. Nobody wanting to talk to me. Everybody behaving as though I kill their father.’ She stopped, and cried. ‘So I had to satisfy them. I break up the dolly-house and everybody was satisfied. And then you come. You didn’t look right, you didn’t look left –’

‘Charge of the Light Brigade. You think Chinta would break up a dolly-house Govind buy? If you could imagine Govind doing anything like that. Tell me, what does that brother-in-law of yours use for food, eh? Dirt? You think Chinta would break up a dolly-house Govind buy?’

She wept over her plate.

Later she wept over the washingup, repeatedly interrupting her tears, first to blow her nose, then to sing sad songs softly, and finally to ask about Savi’s behaviour during the week.

He told how Savi had thrown away the old woman’s food. Shama was gratified, and told other stories of the girl’s sensibility. Savi, still anxiously awake and only pretending to be asleep, listened with pleasure. Again Shama told of Savi’s dislike for fish and how Mrs Tulsi had overcome that dislike. She also spoke of Anand, who was so sensitive that biscuits made his mouth bleed.

Mr Biswas, his mood now soft as hers, did not say that he thought this to be a sign of undernourishment. Instead he began to talk about his house and Shama listened without enthusiasm but without objection.

‘And as soon as the house finish, going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl!’

‘I would like to see the day.’

They had come on Saturday. On Monday Savi had to go back to school.

‘Stay here,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘They don’t teach much on the first day.’

‘How you know?’ Savi said. ‘You ever went to school?’

‘Yes, miss. I went to school. You are not the only one to go to school, you know.’

‘If I stay I will have to have an excuse to give Teacher.’

‘I will write one for you in two twos. Dear Teacher, My daughter Savi is unable to attend school for the first week because she has been staying with her grandmother and is suffering from serious undernourishment.’

On Sunday evening Shama took Savi and Anand back to Arwacas. She went to Hanuman House again. And so for the rest of the term she came and left; and he never ceased to feel that he was alone, with the trees, the newspapers on the wall, the religious quotations, his books.

One thing gave him comfort. He had claimed Savi.

At Easter he learned that Shama was pregnant for the fourth time.

One child claimed; one still hostile; one unknown. And now another.

Trap!

The future he feared was upon him. He was falling into the void, and that terror, known only in dreams, was with him as he lay awake at nights, hearing the snores and creaks and the occasional cries of babies from the other rooms. The relief that morning brought steadily diminished. Food and tobacco were tasteless. He was always tired, and always restless. He went often to Hanuman House; as soon as he was there he wanted to leave. Sometimes he cycled to Arwacas without going to the house, changing his mind in the High Street,
turning round and cycling back to Green Vale. When he closed the door of his room for the night it was like an imprisonment.

He talked to himself, shouted, did everything as noisily as he could.

Nothing replied. Nothing changed.
Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday when.
The newspapers remained as jaunty as they had been, the quotations as sedate.
Of him I will never lose hold and he shall never lose hold of me.
But now in the shape and position of everything around him, the trees, the furniture, even those letters he had made with brush and ink, there was an alertness, an expectancy.

Seth announced one Saturday that there were to be changes on the estate at the end of the crop season. Some twenty acres which had for many years been rented to labourers were to be taken over. Seth and Mr Biswas went from hut to hut, breaking the news. As soon as he entered a labourer’s hut Seth lost his briskness. He looked tired and sounded tired; he accepted a cup of tea and drank it wearily; then he spoke, as though the matter was trivial, burdensome only to him, and the land was being taken from the labourers purely for their benefit. The labourers listened politely and asked Seth and Mr Biswas whether they wanted more tea. Seth accepted at once, saying it was very good tea. He played with the thin-limbed, big-eyed children, made them laugh and gave them coppers to buy sweeties. Their parents protested he was spoiling them.

Afterwards Seth said to Mr Biswas, ‘You can’t trust those buggers. They are going to give a lot of trouble. You better watch out.’

The labourers never spoke about the land to Mr Biswas, and while the crop was being reaped there was no trouble.

When the land was bare Seth said, ‘They will want to dig up the roots. Don’t let them.’

It was not long before Mr Biswas had to report that some roots had been dug up.

Seth said, ‘It looks as though I will have to horsewhip one or two of them.’

‘No, not that. You go back every night to sleep safe and sound in Arwacas. I have to stay here.’

In the end they decided to employ a watchman, and the land was prepared, without further trouble, for the new crop.

‘You think the whole thing worth it?’ Mr Biswas asked. ‘Paying watchman and everything?’

‘In a year or so we wouldn’t have any trouble,’ Seth said. ‘People get used to everything.’

And it seemed that Seth was right. The dispossessed labourers, though they saw Mr Biswas every day, contented themselves with sending him messages by other labourers.

‘Dookinan says that he know you have a kind heart and wouldn’t want to do anything to harm him. Five children, you know.’

‘Is not me,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Is not my land. I just doing a job and drawing a salary.’

The labourers’ acceptance, at first touched with hope, turned to resignation. And resignation turned to hostility, directed not against Seth, who was feared, but against Mr Biswas. He was no longer mocked; but no one smiled at him, and outside the fields he was ignored.

Every night he bolted himself in his room. As soon as he was still he felt the stillness around him and he had to make movements to destroy the stillness, to challenge the alertness of the room and the objects in it.

He was rocking hard on the creaking board one night when he thought of the power of the rockers to grind and crush and inflict pain, on his hands and toes and the tenderer parts of his body. He rose at once in agony, covering his groin with his hands, sucking hard on his teeth, listening to the chair as, rocking, it moved sideways along the cambered plank. The chair fell silent. He looked away from it. On the wall he saw a nail that could puncture his eye. The window could trap and mangle. So could the door. Every leg of the green table could press and crush. The castors of the dressingtable. The drawers. He lay face down on the bed, not wanting to see and, to drive out the shapes of objects from his head, he concentrated on the shapes of letters, working out design
after design for the letter R. At last he fell asleep, with his hands covering the vulnerable parts of his body, and wishing he had hands to cover himself all over. In the morning he was better; he had forgotten his fears.

There had been many changes at Hanuman House, but though he went there two or three times a week he noticed the changes as from a distance and felt in no way concerned. Marriage had taken away one wave of children, among them the contortionist. Marriage had also overtaken the elder god, though for some time it had looked as though he might be reprieved. The search among the eligible families had failed to provide someone beautiful and educated and rich enough to satisfy Mrs Tulsi or her daughters, who, notwithstanding the chancy haste of their own marriages, based solely on caste, thought that their brother’s bride should be chosen with a more appropriate concern. For a short time afterwards a search was made for an educated, beautiful and rich girl from a caste family who had been converted to Christianity and had lapsed. Finally, it was agreed that any educated, beautiful and rich Indian girl would do, provided she had no Muslim taint. The oil families, whatever their original condition, were too grand. So they searched among the families in soft drinks, the families in ice, the transport families, the cinema families, the families in filling stations. And at last, in a laxly Presbyterian family with one filling station, two lorries, a cinema and some land, they found a girl. Each side patronized the other and neither suspected it was being patronized; after smooth and swift negotiations the marriage took place in a registry office, and the elder god, contrary to Hindu custom and the traditions of his family, did not bring his bride home, but left Hanuman House for good, no longer talking of suicide, to look after the lorries, cinema, land and filling station of his wife’s family.

His departure was followed by another. Mrs Tulsi went to live in Port of Spain, not caring for the younger god to be in that city by himself, and not trusting anyone else to look after him. She bought not one house, but three: one to live in, two to rent out. She travelled up to Port of Spain with the god
every Sunday evening and came down with him every Friday afternoon.

During her absences the accepted degrees of precedence at Hanuman House lost some of their meaning. Sushila, the widow, was reduced to nonentity. Many sisters attempted to seize power and a number of squabbles ensued. Offended sisters ostentatiously looked after their own families, sometimes even cooking separately for a day or two. Padma, Seth’s wife, alone continued to be respected, but she showed no inclination to assert authority. Seth exacted the obedience of everyone; he could not impose harmony. That was reestablished every week-end, when Mrs Tulsi and the younger god returned.