A House for Mr. Biswas (31 page)

And just before the school holidays all quarrels were forgotten. The house was scrubbed and cleaned, the brass polished and the yard tidied, as though to receive passing royalty; and the brothers-in-law vied with one another in laying aside offerings for the god: a Julie mango, a bunch of bananas, an especially large purple-skinned avocado pear.

Mr Biswas brought nothing. Shama complained.

‘And what about my son, eh?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘He lost in the crowd? Who looking after him? He not studying too?’

For, halfway through the term, Anand had begun to go to the mission school. He hated it. He soaked his shoes in water; he was flogged and sent to school in wet shoes. He threw away Captain Cutteridge’s
First Primer
and said it had been stolen; he was flogged and given another copy.

‘Anand is a coward,’ Savi told Mr Biswas. ‘He still frightened of school. And you know what Aunt Chinta say to him yesterday? “If you don’t look out you will come a grass-cutter just like your father.” ’

‘Grass-cutter! Look, look, Savi. The next time your aunt Chinta open that big mouth’ – he broke off, remembering grammar – ‘the next time she opens her big mouth –’

Savi smiled.

‘– you just ask her whether she has ever read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.’

These were household names to Savi.

‘Munnih-munnih-munnih,’ Mr Biswas muttered.

‘Munnih-munnih?’

‘Money. Checking munnih-munnih-munnih. That is the only way your mother’s family like to get their fat little hands dirty. Look, the next time Chinta or anybody else says I am a grass-cutter, you just tell them that it is better to be a grass-cutter than a crab-catcher. You got that? Better to be a grass-cutter than a crab-catcher.’

And he opened the campaign himself. He had seen some large blue-backed crabs scrambling awkwardly about the black tank in the yard. ‘Whoo!’ he said in the hall. ‘Those are big crabs in the tank. Where did they come from?’

‘Govind bought them for Mai and Owad,’ Chinta said proudly.

‘Bought them?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Anybody would say that he caught them.’

When he next went to Hanuman House he found that Savi had delivered all his messages.

Chinta came straight up to him and said, with the mannishness she put on when Mrs Tulsi was away, ‘Brother-in-law, I want you to know that until you came to this house there were no crab-catchers here.’

‘Eh? No what?’

‘Crab-catchers.’

‘Crab-catchers? What about crab-catchers? You don’t have enough here?’

‘Marcus Aurelius-Aurelius,’ Chinta said, retreating to the kitchen. ‘Shama sister, I don’t want to meddle in the way you are bringing up your children, but you are turning them into men and women before their time.’

Mr Biswas winked at Savi.

Presently Chinta came out to the hall again. She had obviously thought of something to say. Sternly and needlessly she rearranged chairs and benches and straightened the photographs of Pundit Tulsi and a huge Chinese calendar which showed a woman of sly beauty against a background of tamed trees and waterfalls. ‘Savi,’ Chinta said at last, and her voice was gentle, ‘you reach first standard at school and you must know the poetry Captain Cutteridge have in that book. I don’t think your father know it because I don’t think your father reach first standard.’

Mr Biswas had not been brought up on Captain Cutteridge but on the
Royal Reader.
Nevertheless he said, ‘First standard? I skipped that one. I went straight from Introductory to second standard.’

‘I thought so, brother-in-law. But you, Savi, you know the poetry I mean. The one about
felo-de-se.
The little pigs. You know it?’

‘I know it! I know it!’ a boy exclaimed. This was Jai, the expert lace-knotter, fourteen months younger than Savi. He had developed into something of an exhibitionist. He ran to the centre of the hall, held his hands behind his back and said, ‘The Three Little Piggies. By Sir Alfred Scott-Gatty.’

While Jai recited Chinta moved her head up and down in time to the rhythm and stared smilingly at Savi.

‘So after a time,’ Jai went on,

‘A moral there is to this little song,’ Chinta said, continuing the poem with Jai and wagging her finger at Savi. ‘A moral that’s easy to see.’

‘Felo-de-se?’
Mr Biswas said. ‘Sounds like the name of a crab-catcher to me.’

Chinta stamped, irritated as when she lost at cards, and, looking as though she was about to cry, went back to the kitchen.

‘Shama sister,’ Mr Biswas heard her say in a breaking voice, ‘I want you to ask your husband to stop provoking me. Otherwise I will just have to tell
him’ –
her husband, Govind – ‘and you know what happened when
he
had a little falling-out with your husband.’

‘All right, Chinta sister, I will tell him.’

Shama came out and said, with annoyance, ‘Man, stop provoking C. You know she can’t take jokes.’

‘Jokes? What jokes? Crab-catching is no joke, you hear.’

Chinta had her revenge a few days later.

Mr Biswas arrived at Hanuman House when the evening meal was over and the children were sitting about the hall in groups of three or four, reading primers or pretending to read. One of the economies of the house was that as many children as possible shared a book; and the children were talking among themselves and trying to hide the fact by holding their hands over their mouths and turning pages regularly. When Mr Biswas came they looked at him with amusement and expectancy.

Chinta smiled. ‘You have come to see your son, brother-in-law?’

A rustle of turning pages coincided with many muffled titters.

Savi left a group around a book and came to Mr Biswas. She looked unhappy. ‘Anand upstairs.’ When they were halfway up she whispered, ‘He kneeling down.’

In the hall Chinta was singing.

‘Kneeling down? What for?’

‘He mess up himself at school today and had to leave.’

They went through the Book Room to the long room, which he and Shama had occupied after their marriage. The lotus decorations on the wall were as faded as before; the Demerara window through which he had gargled was propped open with a section of a broomstick.

Anand was kneeling in a corner with his face to the wall.

‘He kneeling down since this afternoon,’ Savi said.

Mr Biswas didn’t feel this was true. Anand had been left to himself, and was now kneeling upright, without a sign of fatigue, as though he had just begun.

‘Stop kneeling,’ Mr Biswas said.

He was surprised at Anand’s outraged and querulous reply. ‘They
tell
me to kneel down and I
going
to kneel down.’

It was the first time he had seen Anand in a temper. He looked at the boy’s narrow shoulder blades below the thin cotton shirt; the slender neck, the large head; the thin eczema-stained legs in small, loose trousers; the blackened soles – shoes were to be worn only outside the house – and the big toes.

‘He was frightened,’ Savi said.

‘To do what?’

‘Frightened to ask Teacher permission to leave the room. And when he leave the room he was frightened again. Frightened to use the school wc.’

‘Is a
nasty, stinking
place,’ Anand burst out, getting off his knees and turning to face them.

‘It really is,’ Savi said. ‘And then – well –’

Anand cried.

‘He went back to the classroom and Teacher ask him to leave.’

Anand looked down at the floor, sniffing and running his fingers along the grooves between the floorboards.

‘Well, just then school was over and everybody walk behind Anand. Everybody was laughing.’

‘And when I come home Ma beat me,’ Anand said. He wasn’t complaining. He was angry. ‘Ma
beat
me.
She
beat me.’ Repeated, the words lost their anger and became pleas for sympathy.

Mr Biswas became the buffoon. He told about his own misadventure at Pundit Jairam’s, caricaturing himself, and ridiculing Anand’s shame.

Anand didn’t look up or smile. But he had ceased to cry. He said, ‘I don’t want to go back to that school.’

‘You want to come with me?’

Anand didn’t reply.

They all went down to the hall.

Mr Biswas said, ‘Look, Shama, don’t make this boy kneel down again, you hear.’

Sushila, the widow, said, ‘When we were small Mai used to make us kneel on graters for a thing like that.’

‘Well, I don’t want my children to grow up like you, that is all.’

Sushila, childless, husbandless and now without the protection of Mrs Tulsi, swept upstairs, complaining that advantage was being taken of her situation.

Chinta said, ‘You are taking your son home with you, brother-in-law?’

Shama, noting Mr Biswas’s serene mood, said sternly, ‘Anand not going anywhere. He got to stay here and go to school.’

‘Why?’ Chinta asked. ‘Brother-in-law could teach him. I sure he know the
ABC’

‘A for apple, B for bat, C for crab,’ Mr Biswas said.

Anand followed Mr Biswas outside and seemed unwilling to let him leave. He said nothing; he simply hung around the bicycle, occasionally rubbing up against it. Mr Biswas was irritated by his shyness, but he was again touched by the boy’s fragility and the carefully ragged ‘home clothes’ which Anand, like the other children, wore the minute he came from school. Anand’s washed-out khaki shorts were spectacularly patched, had slits but no pockets and a gaping empty fob. His shirt was darned and frayed and the collar was chewed; from the crooked stitches, the irregular cut, the weak and absurd decoration on the pocket Mr Biswas could tell that the shirt had been made by Shama.

He asked, ‘You want to come with me?’

Anand only smiled and looked down and spun the bicycle pedal with his big toe.

It would soon be dark. Mr Biswas had no lamp (every bicycle lamp and every bicycle pump he bought was promptly stolen) and he could never contrive, as some cyclists did, less to light their way than to appease the police, to ride with a lighted candle in an open paper-bag in one hand.

He cycled down the High Street. Just past the shop with the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign, he looked back. Anand was still under the arcade, next to one of the thick white pillars with the lotus-shaped base; standing and staring like that other boy Mr Biswas had seen outside a low hut at dusk.

When he got to Green Vale it was dark. Under the trees it was night. The sounds from the barracks were assertive and isolated one from the other: snatches of talk, the sound of frying, a shout, the cry of a child: sounds thrown up at the starlit sky from a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world. The dead trees ringed the barracks, a wall of flawless black.

He locked himself in his room.

That week he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. Unless he started his house now he never would. His children would stay at Hanuman House, he would remain in the barrackroom, and nothing would arrest his descent into the void. Every night he wound himself up to a panic at his inaction, every morning he reaffirmed his decision, and on Saturday he spoke to Seth about a site.

‘Rent you land?’ Seth said. ‘Rent? Look, man, there is the land. Why don’t you just choose a site and build? Don’t talk to me about renting.’

The site Mr Biswas had in mind was about two hundred yards from the barracks, screened from it by the trees and separated from it by a shallow damp depression which ran with muddy water after rain. Trees also screened the road. But when he thought of the land as the site of his house, the trees did not seem unfriendly; and he liked to think of the spot as a ‘bower’, a word that had come to him from Wordsworth by way of the
Royal Reader.

On Sunday morning, after he had had some cocoa, shop bread and red butter, he went to see the builder. The builder lived in a crumbling wooden house in a small Negro settlement not far from Arwacas. Just over the gutter a badly-written notice board announced that George Maclean was a carpenter and cabinet-maker; this announcement was choked by much subsidiary information scattered all over the board in small and wavering letters; Mr Maclean was also a blacksmith and a painter; he made tin cups and he soldered; he sold fresh eggs; he had a ram for service; and all his prices were keen.

Mr Biswas called, ‘Morning!’

From the shack in the hard yellow yard a Negro woman came out, a large calabash full of corn in one hand. Her tight cotton dress imperfectly covered her big body and her kinky hair was in curlers and twists of newspaper.

‘The carpenter home?’ Mr Biswas asked.

The woman called, ‘Géorgie!’ For a fat woman her voice was surprisingly thin.

Mr Maclean appeared above the half-door at the side of the house. He looked at Mr Biswas suspiciously.

The woman walked to the far end of the yard, scattering corn and clucking loudly, calling the poultry to feed.

Mr Biswas didn’t know how to begin. He couldn’t just say, ‘I want to build a house.’ He didn’t have all the necessary money and he didn’t want to deceive Mr Maclean or expose himself to his scorn. He said shyly, ‘I have a little business I want to talk to you about.’

Mr Maclean pushed open the lower half of the door and came down the concrete steps. He was middle-aged, tall and thin; he looked as eager and uncertain as his board. His profession was a frustrating one. The county abounded in work he had not been allowed to finish: exposed and rotting house-frames, houses that had begun with concrete and dressed wood and ended with mud walls and tree branches. Evidence of his compensating activities lay about the yard. In an open shed at the back a half-finished wheel stood amid shavings. Here and there Mr Biswas saw goat droppings.