A House for Mr. Biswas (51 page)

The school term ended and the children, forgetting the disappointment of the previous year, talked excitedly of going to Hanuman House for Christmas. Shama spent hours in the back verandah sewing clothes on an old hand machine which, mysteriously, was hers, how or since when no one knew. The broken wooden handle was swathed in red cotton and looked as though it had bled profusely from a deep wound; the chest, waist, rump and hind quarters of the animal-like machine, and its wooden stall, were black with oil and smelled of oil; and it was a wonder that cloth emerged clean and unmangled from the clanking, champing and chattering which Shama called forth from the creature by the touch of a finger on its bloody bandaged tail. The back verandah smelled of machine oil and new cloth and became dangerous with pins on the floor and pins between floorboards. Anand marvelled at the delight of his sisters in the tedious operations, and marvelled at their ability to put on dresses bristling with pins and not be pricked. Shama made him two shirts with long tails, the fashion among the boys at school (even exhibition pupils have their unscholarly moments) being for billowing shirts, barely tucked into the trousers.

But none of the clothes Shama made then were worn at Hanuman House.

One afternoon Mr Biswas came back from the
Sentinel
and as soon as he pushed his cycle through the front gate he saw that the rose garden at the side of the house had been destroyed and the ground levelled, red earth mingling with the black. The plants were in a bundle against the corrugated iron fence. The stems, hard and stained and blighted on the outside, yet showed white and wet and full of promise where they had been cleanly gashed; their ill formed leaves had not begun to quail; they still looked alive.

He threw his bicycle against the concrete steps.

‘Shama!’

He walked briskly, his footsteps resounding, through the drawingroom to the back verandah. The floor was littered with scraps of cloth and tangles of thread.

‘Shama!’

She came out of the kitchen, her face taut. Her eyes sought to still his voice.

He took in the table and the sewingmachine, the scraps of cloth, the thread, the pins, the kitchen safe, the rails, the banister. Below, in the yard, standing in a group against the fence, he saw the children. They were looking up at him. Then he saw the back of a lorry, a pile of old corrugated iron sheets, a heap of new scantlings, two Negro labourers with dusty heads, faces and backs. And Seth. Rough and managerial in his khaki uniform and heavy bruised bluchers, the ivory cigarette holder held down in one shirt pocket by the buttoned flap.

He saw it clearly. For what seemed a long time he contemplated it. Then he was running down the back steps; Seth looked up, surprised; the labourers, stooping on the lorry, looked up; and he was fumbling among the scantlings. He tried to take one up, had misjudged its size, abandoned it, Shama saying from the verandah, ‘No, no,’ picked up a large stained wet stone from the bleaching-bed and ‘Who tell you you could come and cut down my rose trees? Who?’ Scraping the words out of his throat so that they didn’t seem to come from where he stood, but from someone just behind him. A labourer jumped down from the lorry, there was surprise and even dread in Seth’s eyes. ‘Pa!’ one girl cried, and he hoisted
his arm, Shama saying ‘Man, man.’ His wrist was seized, roughly, by large hot gritty fingers. The stone fell to the ground.

Disarmed, he was without words. Beside the three men he felt his frailty, his baggy linen suit beside Seth’s tight khaki clothes and the labourers’ working rags. The cuffs of his jacket bore the imprints of dirty fingers; his wrist burned where it had been held.

Seth said, ‘You see. You make your children frighten like hell’ And to the loaders, ‘All right, all right.’

The unloading continued.

‘Rose trees?’ Seth said. ‘They did just look like black sage bush to me.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Yes! I know they just look like bush to you. Tough!’ he added. ‘Tough!’ As he turned he stumbled against the bed of bleaching stones.

‘Oops!’ Seth said.

‘Tough!’ Mr Biswas repeated, walking away.

Shama followed him.

Heads were withdrawn from the fence on either side. Curtains dropped back into place.

‘Thug!’ Mr Biswas said, going up the steps.

‘Eh, eh,’ Seth said, smiling at the children. ‘Helluva temper, man. But my lorries can’t sleep in the road.’

From the verandah Mr Biswas, unseen, said, ‘This is not the end of this. The old lady will have something to say about this, I guarantee you. And Shekhar.’

Seth laughed. ‘The old hen and the big god, eh?’ He looked up at the verandah and said in Hindi, ‘Too many people have the idea that everything belongs to the Tulsis. How do you think this house was bought?’

Mr Biswas appeared at the banister of the verandah.

Anand looked away.

‘You will be hearing from my solicitor,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘And those two
rakshas
you have with you. They too.’ He disappeared again.

The labourers, unaware of their identification with Hindu mythological forces of evil, unloaded.

Seth winked at the children. ‘Your father is a damn funny sort of man. Behaving as though he own the place. Let me tell
you that when you children born your father couldn’t feed you. Ask him. And see the gratitude I get? Everybody defying me these days. Or you don’t know?’

‘Savi! Myna! Kamla! Anand!’ Shama called.

‘You know what your father was doing when I pick him up and marry him to your mother? You know? He tell you? He wasn’t even catching crab. He was just catching flies.’

‘Savi! Anand!’

They hesitated, afraid of Seth, afraid of the house and Mr Biswas.

‘Today, look! White suit, collar and tie. And me. Still in the same dirty clothes you see me with since you born. Gratitude, eh? But I will tell you children that if I leave them today, all of them – your father, mother and all – all of them start catching crab tomorrow, I guarantee you.’

From somewhere in the house Mr Biswas’s voice came, raised, indistinct, heated.

Seth moved to the lorry.

‘Eh, Ewart?’ he said gently to one of the loaders. ‘They was nice roses, eh?’

Ewart smiled, his tongue over his top lip, and made sounds which committed him in no way.

Seth jerked his chin toward the house, still the source of angry, indistinct words. He smiled. Then he stopped smiling and said, ‘We mustn’t pay any mind to these damn jackasses.’

The children moved to the foot of the back steps, where they were hidden from Seth and the loaders.

Mr Biswas’s mutterings died away.

Suddenly an obscenity cracked out from the house. The children were quite still. There was silence, even from the lorry. Anand could have wept. Then the corrugated iron sheets jangled again.

A series of resonant crashes came from the kitchen.

‘Cut down the rose trees,’ Mr Biswas was shouting. ‘Cut them down. Break up everything else.’

The children, now below the house, heard his footsteps on the floor above as he went from room to room, pulling things down.

Anand walked under the house to the front, past Mr Biswas’s abandoned bicycle. The fence cast a shadow over the pavement and part of the road. Anand leaned against the fence and envied the calm of the other houses in the street, the group of boys and young men, the cricket players, the night chatterers, around the lamp-post.

Fresh noises came from the yard. It was not Mr Biswas pulling things down, but Seth and Ewart and Ewart’s colleague putting up a shed for Seth’s lorries at the side of the house, over Mr Biswas’s garden.

On the road the shadows of houses and trees quickly lengthened, were distorted, became unrecognizable and finally dissolved into darkness.

Mr Biswas came down the front steps.

‘Come with me for a walk.’

Anand would have liked to go, if only because he didn’t want to hurt by refusing. But he wanted more to inspect the damage and comfort Shama.

The damage was slight. Mr Biswas had ordered his destruction with economy. The mirror of Shama’s dressingtable had been unhinged and thrown on the bed, where it lay intact, reflecting the ceiling. The books had been knocked about a good deal;
Selections from Sankaracharya
had suffered especially. Mrs Tulsi’s marble topped tables had all been overturned; the marble tops, crashing, must have been responsible for some of the more frightening noises. Many of the brass vases had been dented, and two potted palms had lost their pots without in any way losing their shape. The hatrack was in a semi-recumbent position against the half-wall of the front verandah, but it had been thrown there gently: a few hooks had snapped, but the glass was whole. In the kitchen no glass or china had been thrown, only noisy things like pots and pans and enamel plates.

When Mr Biswas returned his mood had changed.

‘Shama,
how
did those marble tops break?’ he asked, mimicking Mrs Tulsi. Then he acted himself. ‘Break, Mai? What break? Oh, marble top. Yes, Mai. It really break. It
look
as if it break. Now I wonder how that happened.’ He examined the broken hooks of the hatrack. ‘Didn’t know metal was
such a funny thing. Come and look, Savi. Is not smooth inside, you know. Is more like packed sand.’ As for the rediffusion set, which he had kicked from room to room and disembowelled, he said, ‘I wanted to do that for a long time. The company always saying that they replace sets free.’

When the engineers saw the battered box and asked what had happened, he said, ‘I feel we listen to it too hard.’ They left a brand-new set in exchange, of the latest design.

Every night Seth’s lorries rested in the shed at the side of the house. Mr Biswas had never thought of Tulsi property as belonging to any particular person. Everything, the land at Green Vale, the shop at The Chase, belonged simply to the House. But the lorries were Seth’s.

DESPITE THE
solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. Only the death of Pundit Tulsi had prevented them from going back to India; and ever since they had talked, though less often than the old men who gathered in the arcade every evening, of moving on, to India, Demerara, Surinam. Mr Biswas didn’t take such talk seriously. The old men would never see India again. And he could not imagine the Tulsis anywhere else except at Arwacas. Separate from their house, and lands, they would be separate from the labourers, tenants and friends who respected them for their piety and the memory of Pundit Tulsi; their Hindu status would be worthless and, as had happened during their descent on the house in Port of Spain, they would be only exotic.

But when Shama went hurrying to Arwacas to give her news of Seth’s blasphemies, she found Hanuman House in commotion. The Tulsis had decided to move on. The clay-brick house was to be abandoned, and everyone was full of talk of the new estate at Shorthills, to the northeast of Port of Spain, among the mountains of the Northern Range.

The High Street was bright and noisy as always at the Christmas season, though because of the war there were few imported goods in the shops. In the Tulsi Store there were no Christmas goods except for the antique black dolls, and no decorations except Mr Biswas’s faded, peeling signs. Many shelves were empty; everything that could be of use at Shorthills had been packed.

And Shama’s news was stale. The disagreement between Seth and the rest of the family had already turned to open war. He and his wife and children had left Hanuman House
and were living in a back street not far away; they were taking no part in the move to Shorthills. The cause of the quarrel remained obscure, each side accusing the other of ingratitude and treachery, and Seth abusing Shekhar in particular. Neither Mrs Tulsi nor Shekhar had made any statement. Shekhar, besides, was seldom in Arwacas, and it was the sisters who carried on the quarrel. They had forbidden their children to speak to Seth’s children; Seth had forbidden his children to speak to the Tulsi children. Only Padma, Seth’s wife, was welcome, as Mrs Tulsi’s sister, at Hanuman House; she could not be blamed for her marriage and continued to be respected for her age. Since the breach she had paid one clandestine visit to Hanuman House. The sisters regarded her loyalty as a tribute to the lightness of their cause; that she had had to come secretly was proof of Seth’s brutality.

The crop season was at hand and the sugarcane fields, managerless, were open to the malice of those who bore the Tulsis grudges. Two fires had already been started and there were rumours that Seth was stirring up fresh trouble, claiming Tulsi property as his own. The husbands of some sisters said they had been threatened.

Yet the talk was less of Seth than of the new estate. Shama heard its glories listed again and again. In the grounds of the estate house there was a cricket field and a swimming pool; the drive was lined with orange trees and gri-gri palms with slender white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves. The land itself was a wonder. The saman trees had lianas so strong and supple that one could swing on them. All day the immortelle trees dropped their red and yellow bird-shaped flowers through which one could whistle like a bird. Cocoa trees grew in the shade of the immortelles, coffee in the shade of the cocoa, and the hills were covered with tonka bean. Fruit trees, mango, orange, avocado pear, were so plentiful as to seem wild. And there were nutmeg trees, as well as cedar,
poui,
and the
bois-canot
which was light yet so springy and strong it made you a better cricket bat than the willow. The sisters spoke of the hills, the sweet springs and hidden waterfalls with all the excitement of people who had known only the hot, open plain, the flat acres of sugarcane and the muddy
ricelands. Even if one didn’t have a way with land, as they had, if one did nothing, life could be rich at Shorthills. There was talk of dairy farming; there was talk of growing grapefruit. More particularly, there was talk of rearing sheep, and of an idyllic project of giving one sheep to every child as his very own, the foundation, it was made to appear, of fabulous wealth. And there were horses on the estate: the children would learn to ride.