A House for Mr. Biswas (52 page)

Though it was never clear afterwards why this large decision had been taken so suddenly, and puzzling that the last corporate effort of the Tulsis should have been directed towards this uprooting, Shama left for Port of Spain full of enthusiasm. She wanted to be part of her family again, to share the adventure.

‘Horses?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I bet you when you go there all you find is one old monkey swinging from the liana on the saman tree. I can’t understand this craziness that possess your family.’

Shama spoke about the sheep.

‘Sheep?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘To ride?’

She said that Seth was no longer part of the family and that two husbands who had left Hanuman House after disagreements with Seth had rejoined the family for the move to Shorthills.

Mr Biswas didn’t listen. ‘About those sheep. Savi get one, Anand get one, Myna get one, Kamla get one. Make four in all. What are we going to do with four sheep. Breed more? To sell and kill? Hindus, eh? Feeding and fattening just in order to kill. Or you see the six of us sitting down and making wool from four sheep? You know how to make wool? Any of your family know how to make wool?’

The children did not want to move to a place they didn’t know, and they were a little frightened of living with the Tulsis again. Above all, they did not want to be referred to as ‘country pupils’ at school; the advantages – being released fifteen minutes earlier in the afternoon – could not make up for the shame. And Mr Biswas turned Shama’s propaganda into a joke. He read out ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ from
Bell’s Standard Elocutionist;
he drove imaginary flocks of sheep through the drawingroom, making bleating noises. As always during the holidays, he announced his arrival by ringing his bicycle bell from the road; then the children walked out in single file to meet him, staggering under imaginary loads. ‘Watch it, Savi!’ he would call. ‘Those tonka beans are heavy like hell, you know.’ Later he would ask, ‘Make a lot of wool today?’ And once, when Anand came into the drawingroom just as the lavatory chain was pulled, Mr Biswas said, ‘Walking back? What’s the matter? Forgot your horse at the waterfall?’

Shama sulked.

‘Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! Anand, Savi, Myna! Come and sing a Christmas carol for your mother.’

They sang ‘While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night’.

Shama’s gloom, persisting, defeated them all. And that Christmas, the first they spent by themselves, was made more memorable by Shama’s gloom. She could not make icecream because she didn’t have a freezer, but she did what she could to turn the day into a miniature Hanuman House Christmas. She got up early and waited to be kissed, like Mrs Tulsi. She spread a white cloth on the table and put out nuts and dates and red apples; she cooked an extravagant meal. She did everything punctiliously, but as one martyred. ‘Anybody would think you were making another baby,’ Mr Biswas said. And in his diary, a
Sentinel
reporter’s notebook which he had begun to fill at Mr Biswas’s suggestion, as an additional exercise in English Composition and as practice in natural writing, Anand wrote, ‘This is the worst Christmas Day I have ever spent;’ and, not forgetting the literary purpose of the diary, added, ‘I feel like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.’

But Shama never relented.

Soon she received impressive assistance. The house became full of sisters and husbands on their way to and from Shorthills. The fine dresses, veils and jewellery of the sisters contrasted with their mood, which they seemed to get from Shama. They fixed Mr Biswas with injured, helpless, accusing
woman’s looks which he found difficult to ignore. The jokes about sheep and waterfalls and tonka beans stopped; he locked himself in his room. Sometimes Shama, after much coaxing from her sisters, dressed and went to Shorthills with them. She came back gloomier than ever, and when Mr Biswas said, ‘Well, tell me, girl, tell me,’ she did not reply and only cried silently. When Mrs Tulsi came Shama cried all the time.

Since the quarrel with Seth Mrs Tulsi had ceased to be an invalid. She had left the Rose Room to direct the move from Arwacas and was, indeed, the source of the new enthusiasm. She tried to persuade Mr Biswas to join the move, and Mr Biswas, flattered at this attention, listened sympathetically. There would be no Seth, Mrs Tulsi said; one could live for nothing at Shorthills; Mr Biswas would be able to save his salary; there were many good sites for houses, and with timber from the estate Mr Biswas might even build himself a little house.

‘Leave him, leave him,’ Shama said. ‘All this talk about house was only to spite me.’

‘But if I keep my job in Port of Spain I don’t see how I would be able to do anything on the estate,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘Never mind,’ Mrs Tulsi said.

He wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to move for Shama’s sake; or whether, without Seth, she needed as many men as possible around her; or whether she wanted no one, by his coolness, to make her question her own enthusiasm. And he agreed to go to Shorthills with her one morning, to have a look at the estate.

He made Anand telephone the
Sentinel
and went with Mrs Tulsi to the bus stop. There he suffered some moments of anxiety, for with her long white skirt, her veil, her arms braceleted from wrist to elbow and a thick gold yoke around her neck, Mrs Tulsi was noticeable in any Port of Spain street, and Mr Biswas feared he would be spotted by someone from the office. He leaned against the lamp-post, hiding his face.

‘Regular bus service,’ he said after a time.

‘From Shorthills, the buses always leave on the dot.’

‘Instead of giving every child a sheep, better to give them a horse. Ride to school. Ride back.’

At last the bus came, empty except for the driver and the conductor. The body had been made locally, a crude jangling box of wood and tin and felt and large naked bolts. Mr Biswas bumped exaggeratedly up and down on the rough wooden seat. ‘Just practising,’ he said.

The city ended abruptly at the Maraval terminus. The road climbed and dipped; hills intermittently shut out the view. After half an hour Mr Biswas pointed to the bush on a roundabout. ‘Estate?’ They went past a puzzling huddle of three crumbling shacks. Two black water barrels stood in the hard yellow yard. ‘Cricket field?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Swimming pool?’

After many curves and climbs the road straightened out and ran steadily down into a widening valley. The hills looked wild, the tops of trees rising one behind the other: a coagulation of greenery. But here and there the faded thatch of a lean-to, warm against the still, dark green, showed that the wilderness had been charted. Houses and huts appeared on either side of the road, widely separated and so hidden by green that, from the bus, Shorthills was only flitting patches of colour: the rust of a roof, the pink or ochre of a wall.

‘Next bus to Port of Spain in ten minutes,’ the conductor said conversationally. Mr Biswas got up. Mrs Tulsi pulled him down. ‘They like to reverse first.’ The bus reversed in a dirt lane and came to rest on the verge, under an avocado pear tree.

The driver and conductor squatted under the tree, smoking. Across the road and next to the lane in which the bus had reversed Mr Biswas saw an open square of ground, mounds and faded wreaths alone indicating its purpose.

Mr Biswas waved at the forlorn little cemetery and the dirt lane which, past a few tumbledown houses, disappeared behind bush and apparently led only to more bush and the mountain which rose at the end. ‘Estate?’ he asked.

Mrs Tulsi smiled. ‘And on this side.’ She waved at the other side of the road.

Beyond a deep gully, whose sides were sheer, whose bed was strewn with boulders, stones and pebbles, perfectly graded, Mr Biswas saw more bush, more mountains. ‘A lot of bamboo,’ he said. ‘You could start a paper factory.’

It was easy to see just how far the buses went. Up to the dirt lane the road was smooth, its centre black and dully shining. Past that the road narrowed, was gravelly and dusty, its edges obscured by the untended verge.

‘I suppose we go along there,’ Mr Biswas said.

They began walking.

Mrs Tulsi bent down and tore up a plant from the verge. ‘Rabbit meat,’ she said. ‘Best food for rabbits. In Arwacas you have to buy it.’

Below the overarching trees the road was in soft shadow. Sunlight spotted the gravel in white blurs, spotted the wet green verges, the dark ridged trunks of trees. It was cool. And then Mr Biswas began seeing the fruit trees. Avocado pear trees grew at the side of the road as casually as any bush; their fruit, only just out of flower, were tiny but already perfectly shaped, with a shine they would soon lose. The land between the road and the gully widened; the gully grew shallower. Beyond it Mr Biswas saw the tall immortelles and their red and yellow flowers. And then the untrodden road blazed with the flowers. Mr Biswas picked one up, put it between his lips, tasted the nectar, blew, and the bird-shaped flower whistled. Even as they stood flowers fell on them. Under the immortelles he saw the cocoa trees, stunted, their branches black and dry, the cocoa pods gleaming with all the colours between yellow and red and crimson and purple, not like things that had grown, but like varnished wax models stuck on to dead branches. Then there were orange trees, heavy with leafand fruit. And always they walked between two hills. The road narrowed; they heard no sound except that of their feet on the loose gravel. Then, far away, they heard the bus starting on its journey back to bustling, barren, concrete and timber Port of Spain. Impossible that it was less than an hour away!

The gully grew shallower and shallower, and then it was only a depression carpeted with a soft vine of a tender green.
Mrs Tulsi bent down and disturbed it. A vine hung from her fingers; it had a faint smell of mint.

‘Old man’s beard,’ she said. ‘In Arwacas they grow it in baskets.’

The house was partly hidden by a large, branching, towering saman tree. Swollen parasite vines veined its branches and massive trunk; wild pines sprouted like coarse hair from every crotch; and it was hung with lianas. Below the tree, beside the gully, there was a short walk lined with orange trees, and around the trunk there was a clump of wild tannia, pale green, four feet tall, nothing but stem and giant heart-shaped leaves, cool with quick beads of dew.

An old signpost stood slightly askew in the gully. The letters were bleached and faint:
Christopher Columbus Road.
It was fitting. The land, though fruitful from a former cultivation, felt new.

‘This used to be the old road,’ Mrs Tulsi said.

And Mr Biswas found it easy to imagine the other race of Indians moving about this road before the world grew dark for them.

Nothing in Shama’s accounts had prepared him for the view of the house from the gully, at the end of the tree-lined drive. It was a two-storeyed house with a long verandah on the lower floor; it stood far from the road on an escarpment on the hill, above a broad flight of concrete steps, white against the surrounding green.

And everything was as Shama had said. On one side of the drive there was a cricket field; the pitch was red and broken: obviously the village team did not use matting. On the other side, beyond the saman tree, the lianas, the wild tannia, there was a swimming pool, empty, cracked, sandy, plants pushing up through the concrete, but it was easy to see it mended and filled with clear water; and beyond that, on an artificial mound, a cherry tree, its thick branches trimmed level at the bottom above a wrought-iron seat. And in the drive the gri-gri palms, with their white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves; though they were perhaps too old: they had grown so tall they could not be seen whole, and could even be missed.

Then at the far end of the cricket ground Mr Biswas saw a mule. It looked old and dispirited. Untethered, it remained still, against a camouflage of cocoa-trees.

‘Ah!’ Mr Biswas said, breaking the silence. ‘Horses.’

‘That’s not a horse,’ Mrs Tulsi said.

They left the drive and stood among the wild tannia under the saman tree. Mrs Tulsi held a liana and offered it to Mr Biswas. While he felt it, she held a thinner liana and pulled it down. ‘As strong as rope,’ she said. ‘The children could skip with this.’

They walked along the weed-ridden drive. The narrow canal at one side was silted with fine, rippled sand. ‘You could just sell the sand from this place,’ Mrs Tulsi said. They came to the broad flight of shallow concrete steps. Mr Biswas went up slowly: impossible not to feel regal ascending steps like these.

On either side of the house there was an abandoned garden, flowerless except for some stray marigolds; but through the bush it was possible to see the pattern of the beds, edged with concrete and the stunted shrubs called ‘green tea’ and ‘red tea’. At the end of one garden a Julie mango tree stood on a concrete-walled circular bed more than three feet high.

‘Just the spot for a temple,’ Mrs Tulsi whispered.

The house was of timber, but the timber had been painted to look like blocks of granite: grey, flecked with black, red, white and blue, and marked with thin white lines. A folding screen separated the regal drawingroom from the regal diningroom; and there was a multiplicity of rooms whose purposes were uncertain. The house had its own electricity plant; not working at the moment, Mrs Tulsi said, but it could be fixed. There was a garage, servants’ quarters, an outdoor bathroom with a deep concrete tub. The kitchen, linked to the house by a roofed way, was vast, with a brick oven. The hill rose directly behind the kitchen; the view through the back window was of the green hillside just a few feet away. And tonka beans grew on the hill.

‘Who owned the house before?’ Mr Biswas asked.

‘Some French people.’

This, allied to a brief acquaintance during his Aryan days with the writings of Romain Rolland, gave Mr Biswas a respect for the French.

They walked and looked. The silence, the solitude, the fruitful bush in a broken landscape: it was an enchantment.

They heard the bus in the distance.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is time to go home now.’

‘Home?’ said Mrs Tulsi. ‘Isn’t this your home now?’