A House for Mr. Biswas (48 page)

Owad had passed on. He embraced the children; then Shekhar; then Seth, who cried copiously; and finally Mrs Tulsi, who didn’t cry at all.

He went into the ship. Presently he appeared at the rails and waved. A passenger joined him; they began to talk.

The passengers’ gangway was drawn up. Then there were shouts, raucous, unsustained singing, and three Germans with bruised faces and torn and dirty clothes came staggering along the wharf, comically supporting one another, drunk.
Someone from the ship called to them harshly; they shouted back and, drunk and collapsing though they were, and without touching the rope-rail, they walked up the narrow gang-board at the stern. All the doubts about the ship were re-excited.

Whistles: waves from ship, from shore: the ship edging away: the dock less protected, the dark, dirty water surfaced with litter. And soon they stood quite exposed in front of the customs shed, staring at the ship, staring at the gap it had left.

The weakness that had come to him at the touch of Owad’s hands remained with Mr Biswas. There was a hole in his stomach. He wanted to climb mountains, to exhaust himself, to walk and walk and never return to the house, to the empty tent, the dead fire-holes, the disarrayed furniture. He left the wharves with Anand and they walked aimlessly through the city. They stopped at a café and Mr Biswas bought Anand icecream in a tub and a Coca Cola.

The paper would sprawl on the sunny steps in the morning; there would be stillness at noon and shadow in the afternoon. But it would be a different day.

HAVING NO
further business in Port of Spain, Mrs Tulsi returned to Arwacas. The tent was taken down and after a few days the house was cleared of stragglers. Mr Biswas set about restoring his rose-beds and the lily-pond, whose edges had collapsed, turning the water into bubbling mud. He worked without heart, feeling the emptiness of the house and not knowing how much longer he would be allowed to stay there. None of Mrs Tulsi’s furniture had been removed: the house there seemed to be awaiting change. Some of the savour went out of his job at the
Sentinel.
He needed to address his work mentally to someone. At first this had been Mr Burnett; then it had been Owad. Now there was only Shama. She seldom read his articles; when he read them aloud to her she showed neither interest nor amusement and made no comments. Once he gave her the typescript of an article and she infuriated him by turning over the last page and looking for more. ‘No more, no more,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to strain you.’

And from Hanuman House came more reports of disturbance. Govind, the eager, the loyal, was discontented; Shama reported his seditious sayings. Nothing had outwardly changed, but Mrs Tulsi no longer directed and her influence was beginning to be felt more and more as only that of a cantankerous invalid. With her two sons settled, she appeared to have lost interest in the family. She spent much of her time in the Rose Room, acquiring illnesses, grieving for Owad. As for Seth, he still controlled; but his control was superficial. Though nothing had been said openly, Shekhar’s reported displeasure, uncontradicted, lay against him and made him suspect to the sisters. When all was said and done Seth was not of the family and he alone could not maintain its harmony, as had been shown by his helplessness when squabbles had arisen
between sisters during Mrs Tulsi’s absences in Port of Spain. Seth ruled effectively only in association with Mrs Tulsi and through her affection and trust. That trust, not officially withdrawn, was no longer so fully displayed; and Seth was even beginning to be resented as an outsider.

Then came rumours that Seth had been inspecting properties.

‘Buying it for Mai, you think?’ Mr Biswas asked.

Shama said, ‘I glad it make somebody happy.’

And Mr Biswas was soon to regret his jubilation. The Christmas school holidays came and Shama took the children to Hanuman House. By now they were complete strangers there. The old crêpe paper decorations and the goods in the dark, choked Tulsi Store were petty country things after the displays in the Port of Spain shops, and Savi felt pity for the people of Arwacas, who had to take them seriously. At last on Christmas Eve the store was closed and the uncles went away. Savi, Anand, Myna and Kamla hunted for stockings and hung them up. And got nothing. There was no one to complain to. Some of the sisters had secretly provided gifts for their children; and on Christmas morning in the hall, where Mrs Tulsi was not waiting to be kissed, the gifts were displayed and compared. With Owad in England, Mrs Tulsi in her room, all the uncles away, and Shekhar spending the day with his wife’s family, there was no one to organize games, to give a lead to the gaiety. And Christmas was reduced to lunch and Chinta’s icecream, as tasteless and rust-rippled as ever. The sisters were sullen; the children quarrelled, and some were even flogged.

Shekhar came on the morning of Boxing Day with a large bag of imported sweets. He went up to Mrs Tulsi’s room, had lunch in the hall, and then went away again. When Mr Biswas arrived later that afternoon he found that the talk among the sisters was not of Seth, but of Shekhar and his wife. The sisters felt that Shekhar had abandoned them. Yet no one blamed him. He was under the influence of his wife, and the fault was wholly hers.

Relations between the sisters and Shekhar’s wife had never been easy. Despite the untraditional organization of Hanuman
House, where married daughters lived with their mother, the sisters were alert to certain of the conventions of Hindu family relationships: mothers-in-law, for example, were expected to be hard on daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law were to be despised. But Shekhar’s wife had from the first met Tulsi patronage with arrogant Presbyterian modernity. She flaunted her education. She called herself Dorothy, without shame or apology. She wore short frocks and didn’t care that they made her look lewd and absurd: she was a big woman who had grown fat after the birth of her first child, and her dresses hung from her high, shelflike hips as from a hoop. Her voice was deep, her manner hearty; once, when she had damaged her ankle, she used a stick, and Chinta remarked that it suited her. Added to all this she sometimes sold the tickets at her cinema; which was disgraceful, besides being immoral. So far, however, from making any impression on Dorothy, the sisters continually found themselves defeated. They had said she wouldn’t be able to keep a house: she turned out to be maddeningly house-proud. They had said she was barren: she was bearing a child every two years. Her children were all girls, but this was scarcely a triumph for the sisters. Dorothy’s daughters were of exceptional beauty and the sisters could complain only that the Hindi names Dorothy had chosen – Mira, Léela, Lena – were meant to pass as Western ones.

And now old charges were made again and for the benefit of Shama and other attentive visiting sisters fresh details added. As the talk scratched back and forth over the same topic these details became increasingly gross: Dorothy, like all Christians, used her right hand for unclean purposes, her sexual appetite was insatiable, her daughters already had the eyes of whores. Over and over the sisters concluded that Shekhar was to be pitied, because he had not gone to Cambridge and had instead been married against his will to a wife who was shameless. Padma, Seth’s wife, was present, and Seth’s behaviour could not be discussed. Whenever Cambridge was mentioned looks and intonation made it clear to Padma that she was excluded from this implied criticism of her husband, that she, like Shekhar, was to be pitied for having such a
spouse. And Mr Biswas marvelled again at the depth of Tulsi family feeling.

Mr Biswas had always got on well with Dorothy; he was attracted by her loudness and gaiety and regarded her as an ally against the sisters. But on that hot still afternoon, when a holiday staleness lay over Arwacas, the hall, with its confused furniture, its dark loft and sooty green walls, with flies buzzing in and out of the white sunny spots on the long table, seemed abandoned, deprived of animation; and Mr Biswas, feeling Shekhar’s absence as a betrayal, could sympathize with the sisters.

Savi said, ‘This is the last Christmas I spend at Hanuman House.’

Change followed change. At Pagotes Tara and Ajodha were decorating their new house. In Port of Spain new lampposts, painted silver, went up in the main streets and there was talk of replacing the diesel buses by trolley-buses. Owad’s old room was let to a middle-aged childless coloured couple. And at the
Sentinel
there were rumours.

Under Mr Burnett’s direction the
Sentinel
had overtaken the
Gazette
and, though some distance behind the
Guardian,
it had become successful enough for its frivolity to be an embarrassment to the owners. Mr Burnett had been under pressure for some time. That Mr Biswas knew, but he had no head for intrigue and did not know the source of this pressure. Some of the staff became openly contemptuous and spoke of Mr Burnett as uneducated; a joke went around the office that he had applied from the Argentine for a job as a sub-editor and his letter had been misunderstood. As if in reply to all this Mr Burnett became increasingly perverse. ‘Let’s face it,’ he said. ‘Editorials from Port of Spain didn’t have much effect in Spain. They are not going to stop Hitler either.’ The
Guardian
responded to the war by starting a fighter fund: in a box on the front page twelve aeroplanes were outlined, and as the fund rose the outlines were filled in. Right up to the end the
Sentinel
had been headlining the West Indian cricket tour of England, and when the tour was abandoned it printed a drawing of Hitler which, when cut out and folded along certain dotted lines, became a drawing of a pig.

Early in the new year the blow fell. Mr Biswas was lunching with Mr Burnett in a Chinese restaurant, in one of those cubicles weakly lit by a low-hanging naked bulb, with lengths of flex loosely attached to the flyblown, grimy celotex partitions, when Mr Burnett said, ‘Amazing scenes are going to be witnessed soon. I’m leaving.’ He paused. ‘Sacked.’ As if divining Mr Biswas’s thoughts, he added, ‘Nothing for you to worry about, though.’ Then, in quick succession, he displayed a number of conflicting moods. He was gay; he was depressed; he was glad to leave; he was sorry to go; he didn’t want to talk about it; he talked about it; he wasn’t going to talk any more about himself; he talked about himself. He ate in spasms, attacking the food as though it had done him some injury. ‘Shoots? Is that what they call this? There’ll be damned little bamboo left in China at this rate.’ He pressed the bell, which lay at the centre of a roughly circular patch of grime on the wall. They heard it ring in some distant cavern, above a multitude of other bells, the pattering of waitresses’ feet and talk in adjacent cubicles.

The harassed waitress came and Mr Burnett said, ‘Shoots? This is just plain bamboo. What do you think I have inside here?’ He tapped his belly. ‘A paper factory?’

‘That was one portion,’ the waitress said.

‘That was one bamboo.’

He ordered more lager and the waitress sucked her teeth and went out, leaving the swing door swinging rapidly to and fro.

‘One portion,’ Mr Burnett said. ‘They make it sound like hay. And this damned room is like a stall. I’m not worried. I’ve got other strings to my bow. You too. You could go back to your sign-writing. I leave, you leave. Let’s all leave.’

They laughed.

Mr Biswas returned to the office in a state of great agitation. He had been associated, and zestfully, with some of the most frivolous excesses of the
Sentinel.
Now at the thought of each he felt a stab of guilt and panic. He was expecting to be summoned to mysterious rooms and told by their secure occupants that his services were no longer required. He sat at his desk – but it belonged to him no more than the columns of
the
Sentinel
he filled – and listened to the noises made by the carpenters. Those were the noises he had heard on his first day in the office; building and rebuilding had gone on without interruption ever since. The newsroom came to its afternoon life. Reporters arrived, took off their jackets, opened notebooks and typed; groups gathered at the green water-cooler and broke up again; at some desks proofs were being corrected, the inner pages laid out. For more than four years he had been part of this excitement. Now, waiting for the summons, he could only observe it.

Getting to believe that by staying in the office he was increasing the risk of dismissal, he left early and cycled home. Fear led to fear. Suppose he had to send the children back to Hanuman House, would there be anyone to receive them? Suppose Mrs Tulsi gave him notice – as Shama did so often to the tenement people – where would he go? How would he live?

The years stretched ahead, dark.

When he got home he mixed and drank some Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, undressed, got into bed and began to read Epictetus.

But the days went by and no summons came. And at last it was time for Mr Burnett to leave. Mr Biswas wanted to make some gesture to show his gratitude and sympathy, but he could think of nothing. And after all Mr Burnett was escaping; he was staying behind. The
Sentinel
reported Mr Burnett’s departure on the society page. There was an unkind photograph of Mr Burnett looking uncomfortable in a dinner jacket, his small eyes popping in the flash of the camera, a cigar stuck in his mouth as if for comic effect. He was reported as being sorry to leave; he had to take up an appointment in America; he had learned much from his association with Trinidad and the
Sentinel,
and he would take a great interest in the progress of both; he thought the standards of local journalism ‘surprisingly high’. It was left to the other newspapers to reveal the other strings to his bow that Mr Burnett had spoken about. They reported that an Indian troupe, made up of dancers, a fire-walker, a snake-charmer and a man who could rest on a bed of nails, was accompanying
Mr Burnett, a former editor of a local newspaper, on his travels to America. One headline was
THE CIRCUS MOVES ON.

And the new régime started at the
Sentinel
The day after Mr Burnett’s departure the newsroom was hung with posters which said
DON’T BE BRIGHT, JUST GET IT RIGHT
and
NEWS NOT VIEWS
and
FACTS? IF NOT AXE
and
CHECK IT OR CHUCK IT
. Mr Biswas regarded them all as aimed at himself alone, and their whimsicality scared him. The office was subdued and everyone wore a look of earnestness, those who had gone up, those who had gone down. Mr Burnett’s news editor had been made a sub-editor. His bright reporters had been variously scattered. One went to Today’s Arrangements, Invalids and The Weather, one to Shipping, one to Diana’s Diary on the society page, one to Classified Advertisements. Mr Biswas joined Court Shorts.