A House for Mr. Biswas (20 page)

He thought of the tins on the top shelf – he had not got around to taking them down – and was as puzzled by his success as he was delighted by it. At the end of the first month he found he had made the vast profit of thirty-seven dollars. He knew nothing about keeping books and it was Shama who had suggested that he should make notes of goods given on credit on squares of brown shop-paper. It was Shama who suggested that these squares should be spiked. It was Shama who made the spike. And it was Shama who kept the accounts, writing in her round, stylish, slow Mission-school hand in a Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook (the words were printed on the cover).

During these weeks the strangeness of their solitude lessened. But they were as yet unused to their new relationship and though they never quarrelled their talk remained impersonal and constrained. The solitude embarrassed Mr Biswas by the intimacy it imposed, especially during the serving of food. The atmosphere of service and devotion was flattering, but at the same time unsettling. It strained Mr Biswas and he was even glad when abruptly, it broke.

One evening Shama said, ‘We must have a house-blessing ceremony, and get Hari to bless the shop and house, and have Mai and Uncle and everybody else here.’

He was taken completely by surprise, and lost his temper. ‘What the hell you think I look like?’ he asked in English. ‘The Maharajah of Barrackpore? And what the hell for I should get Hari to come and bless this place?
This
place? Look
for yourself.’ He pointed to the kitchen and slapped the wall of the shop. ‘Is bad enough as it is. To feed your family on top of all this is really going too damn far.’

And Shama did something he hadn’t heard for weeks: she sighed, the old weary Shama sigh. And she said nothing.

In the days that followed he learned something new: how a woman nagged. The very word, nag, was known to him only from foreign books and magazines. It had puzzled him. Living in a wife-beating society, he couldn’t understand why women were even allowed to nag or how nagging could have any effect. He saw that there were exceptional women, Mrs Tulsi and Tara, for example, who could never be beaten. But most of the women he knew were like Sushila, the widowed Tulsi daughter. She talked with pride of the beatings she had received from her short-lived husband. She regarded them as a necessary part of her training and often attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband.

To this class Mr Biswas belonged. So Shama nagged; and nagged so well that from the first he knew she was nagging. It amazed him that someone so young should show herself so competent in such an alien skill. But there were things which should have warned him. She had never run a house, but at The Chase she had always behaved like an experienced housewife. Then there was her pregnancy. She took that as easily as if she had borne many children; she never spoke about it, ate no special foods, made no special preparations, and generally behaved so normally that at times he forgot she was pregnant.

So Shama nagged. With her gloom and a refusal to speak, first of all; then with a precise, economical and noisy efficiency. She didn’t ignore Mr Biswas. She made it clear that she noted his presence, and that it filled her with despair. At nights, next to him, but without touching him, she sighed loudly and blew her nose just at those moments when he was dropping off to sleep. She turned heavily and impatiently from side to side.

For the first two days he pretended not to notice.

On the third day he asked, ‘What happen to you?’

She didn’t reply, sitting next to him at the table, sighing, watching him while he ate. He asked again.

She said, ‘Talk about ungrateful!’ and was up and out of the room.

He ate with diminished appetite.

That night Shama blew her nose repeatedly, and turned over in bed.

Mr Biswas prepared to stick it out.

Then Shama was silent.

Mr Biswas thought he had won.

Then Shama snuffled, very low, as though ashamed that the sound had escaped her.

Mr Biswas grew very still, and listened to his own breathing. It sounded regular and unnatural. He opened his eyes and looked up at the thatched roof. He could make out the rafters and the loose straws that hung straight down, threatening to fall into his eyes.

Shama groaned and blew her nose loudly, once, twice, three times. Then she got out of the cast iron fourposter and it rattled. Suddenly silent and energetic, she went out of the room. The latrine was right at the back of her yard.

When she came back, minutes later, he acknowledged defeat. ‘What happen, man?’ he asked. ‘You can’t sleep?’

‘I been sleeping sound sound,’ she said.

The next morning he said, ‘All right, send for the old queen and the big boss and Hari and the gods and everybody else and get the shop bless.’

Shama was determined to do things well. Three labourers worked for three days to put up a large tent in the yard. It was a simple affair, with bamboo uprights and a roof of coconut branches; but the bamboos had to be transported from a neighbouring village, and the labourers, after many aggrieved and unintelligible mutterings about the Workmen’s Compensation Act, had to be paid extra for climbing the coconut trees to get branches. Enormous quantities of food were bought; and, to assist in its preparation, sisters began arriving at The Chase three days before the house-blessing ceremony.
With their arrival Mr Biswas’s protests ceased. He consoled himself with the thought that not all of the Tulsis would come.

They all came, except Seth, Miss Blackie and the two gods.

‘Owad and Shekhar learning,’ Mrs Tulsi said in English, meaning only that the gods were at school.

She wandered about the yard, opening doors, inspecting, no expression on her face.

Hari, the holy man, who was to be the pundit that day, was just as Mr Biswas remembered him, just as soft-spoken and lymphatic. His felt hat sat softly on his head. He greeted Mr Biswas without rancour, without pleasure, without interest. Then he went into the bedroom that was reserved for him and changed into his pundit’s garb, which he had brought in a small cardboard suitcase. When he emerged as a pundit everyone treated him with a new respect.

Children, most of whom Mr Biswas could associate with no particular parent, swarmed everywhere, the girls in stiff satin dresses and with large rayon bows in long, dank hair, the boys in pantaloons and bright shirts. And there were babies: asleep in mothers’ arms, asleep on blankets and sacks under the tent, asleep in various corners of the shop; babies crying and being energetically walked in the yard; babies crawling, babies bawling, babies simply silent; babies performing every babylike function.

Govind nodded to Mr Biswas, but didn’t speak, and went and sat in the tent, where he talked and laughed loudly with the brothers-in-law.

Chinta and Padma asked without warmth after Mr Biswas’s health. Padma asked because it was her duty, as Seth’s representative; Chinta asked because Padma had done so. The two women were together for much of the time, and Mr Biswas suspected that an equally close relationship existed between Govind and Seth.

It seemed, too, that Sushila, the childless widow, was enjoying one of her periods of authority. She had now joined Mrs Tulsi and they both wandered about, peering and prodding and holding muted discussions in Hindi.

Mr Biswas found himself a stranger in his own yard. But was it his own? Mrs Tulsi and Sushila didn’t appear to think so. The villagers didn’t think so. They had always called the shop the Tulsi Shop, even after he had painted a sign and hung it above the door:

With one bedroom reserved for Hari, the other for Mrs Tulsi, and with the shop full of babies, Mr Biswas could retreat nowhere. He stood before the shop, fondling his belly under his shirt and working out the quarrel he would have with Shama afterwards.

A scampering and a series of cries came from the shop.

Then Sushila’s voice was heard, raised in undoubted authority. ‘Get away from here. Go and play in the open. Can’t you see you are waking up the babies? Why do you big children like the dark so much?’

Every sister was perpetually on the alert for any sign, however slight or veiled, of sexual inclination among the children.

Mr Biswas knew the disagreeable rumpus that would follow. He had no taste for it, and walked away from the shop to the boundary of the lot. Here, under a hedge, he came upon a group of children playing house.

‘You are Mai,’ a girl said to another girl. And to a boy, ‘You are Seth.’

Mr Biswas withdrew. But the girl – whose litter did she belong to? – saw him and, raising her voice from the whisper with which games of house should be played, said with unmistakable malice, ‘And who will be Mohun? You, Bhoj. You have three-quarter white pants. And you are a great fighter.’

There was a round of childish laughter which filled Mr Biswas’s mind with thoughts of murder, though even as he hurried away he felt some desire to see what Bhoj looked like.

For the last three days, since the arrival of her sisters, Shama had become a Tulsi and a stranger again. Now she was
unapproachable. The ceremony in the tent was about to begin and she sat in front of Hari, listening to his instructions with bowed head. Her hair was still wet from her ritual bath and she was dressed in white from top to toe. She looked like someone waiting to be sacrificed and Mr Biswas thought he could detect pleasure in the curve of her back. Her status, like Hari’s, was only temporary; but while the ceremony lasted, it was paramount.

Mr Biswas didn’t want to witness the ceremony. It meant sitting with the brothers-in-law in the tent; and he was sure that the sight of Shama’s submissive and exultant back would eventually infuriate him. Also, it occurred to him that if he kept moving about he might prevent some of the Tulsi army from looting.

It was then that he thought of the shop.

He nearly ran there. It was dark, with the front doors closed, and he had to be careful. The shop smelled of babies, who were asleep everywhere: on the counter, flanked by pillows and boxes to keep them from rolling off; under the counter; on the floor planks behind the counter. Then, slowly in the darkness, a group of squatting children defined itself in one corner. They were silent and intent. With equal silence and intentness Mr Biswas picked his way past the babies to the counter.

The little group was methodically breaking soda water bottles and extracting the crystal marbles from the necks. The bottles were wrapped in sacking to muffle the noise. There was a deposit of eight cents on every bottle. The sweet jars on the bottom shelf were disarrayed. The Paradise Plums had dwindled substantially. So had the Mintips, a mint sweet with the elasticity and lastingness of rubber. So had the salted prunes. Many tin-lids had not been screwed on properly. Mr Biswas put out a hand to straighten a lid. It felt sticky. He dropped it. A baby bawled, the children in the corner became alert, and Mr Biswas shouted, ‘Get out of here before I lay my hand on some of you.’ And at the same time, with the dexterity of the practised shopkeeper, he lifted the flap of the counter and opened the little door, almost in one action, and was on the group in the corner.

He lifted a boy by the collar. The boy bawled, the girls with him bawled, the babies in the shop bawled.

From outside a woman asked, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’

Mr Biswas dropped the boy he had seized, and the boy ran outside, screaming louder than the babies.

‘Uncle Mohun beat me. Ma, Uncle Mohun beat me.’

Another woman, doubtless the mother, said, ‘But he wouldn’t touch you for nothing.’ Her tone indicated that Mr Biswas wouldn’t dare. ‘You must have been doing something.’

‘I wasn’t doing nothing, Ma,’ the boy wailed in English.

‘He wasn’t doing nothing, Ma.’ This was from one of the girls. Mr Biswas knew her: a dumpy little thing, with big contemptuous eyes and full, pendulous lips; she was capable of fantastic physical contortions and often performed for visitors at Hanuman House.

‘Blasted liar!’ Mr Biswas said. He ran out of the shop, past a woman who was coming, cooing, to a bawling baby. ‘Wasn’t doing nothing? And who break up all those soda water bottles?’

In the tent Hari droned imperturbably on. Shama remained bowed in her white cocoon. The brothers-in-law sat on their blankets, reverentially still.

Mr Biswas was lucid enough to hope that he wasn’t antagonizing a father.

Padma went into the shop in her slow way and came out and said judicially.
‘Some
bottles have been broken.’

‘And is eight cents a bottle,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Wasn’t doing nothing!’

The mother of the boy, suddenly enraged, flew to a hibiscus bush and began breaking off a switch. It was a tough bush and she had to bend the switch back and forth several times. Torn leaves fell on the ground.

The boy’s bawls were now touched with genuine anguish.

The mother broke two switches on the boy, speaking as she beat.
‘This
will teach you not to meddle with things that don’t belong to you.
This
will teach you not to provoke people who don’t make any allowances for children.’ She
caught sight of the marks left on the boy’s collar by Mr Biswas’s fingers, sticky from the tin-lid. ‘And
this
will teach you not to let big people make your clothes dirty.
This
will teach you that they don’t have to wash them.
You
are a big man. You know
right.
You know
wrong. You
are not a child.
That
is why I am beating
you
as though you are a
big
man and can take a
big
man’s blows.’

The beating had ceased to be a simple punishment and had become a ritual. Sisters came out to witness, rocking crying babies in their arms, and said without urgency, ‘You will damage the boy, Sumati.’ And: ‘Stop it now, Sumati. You have beaten him enough.’

Sumati continued to beat, and didn’t stop talking.