A House for Mr. Biswas (53 page)

So the Tulsis left Arwacas. The lands were rented out and it fell to the tenants to contend with Seth’s claims. The Tulsi Store was leased to a firm of Port of Spain merchants. At Port of Spain one of the tenements was sold and Shama relieved of her rent-collecting duties. It was only then that Shama, still sulking after her victory, disclosed that Mrs Tulsi had decided to raise the rent of the Port of Spain house. Mr Biswas was shocked, and to shock him further Shama brought down her account books and showed how his salary went to the grocer almost as soon as it came, how her debts were rising.

The solitude and silence of Shorthills was violated. The villagers bore the invasion without protest and almost with indifference. They were an attractive mixture of French and Spanish and Negro and, though they lived so near to Port of Spain, formed a closed, distinctive community. They had a rural slowness and civility, and spoke English with an accent derived from the French patois they spoke among themselves. They appeared to exercise some rights on the grounds of the house. They played cricket on the cricket field most afternoons and there was a match every Sunday, when the grounds were virtually taken over by the villagers. For some time after the coming of the Tulsis courting couples strolled about the orange walks and the drive in the afternoon, disappearing from time to time into the cocoa woods. But this custom soon ceased. The couples, finding themselves surprised at every turn by a Tulsi, moved further up the gully.

Mr Biswas’s first impression on moving to Shorthills was that the Tulsi family had increased. Seth and his family were absent; but those sisters who for one reason and another had lived away from Hanuman House had brought their families;
and there were many married grandchildren as well, and their families.

Mr Biswas was given a room on the upper floor, one of six rooms of equal size about a central corridor. It was a hotel-like arrangement, with a couple in each room, and widows and children moving about the common area downstairs. Mr Biswas’s room became the headquarters of his family; it was there that Anand did his homework, there that the children came to complain, there that Mr Biswas gave them delicacies to eat in private. The fourposter, Shama’s dressingtable, the bookcase and desk and the table were in this room; the rest of his furniture, rockingchair, hatrack, kitchen safe, was disposed, like his children at night, about the house.

The drawingroom furnishings of Hanuman House had been similarly scattered. There could be no division of this house into the used and the unused, and the thronelike chairs, the statuary and the vases were left in the drawingroom, which in appearance and purpose presently became the equivalent of the Hanuman House hall.

A certain unpleasantness was added to Mr Biswas’s situation by the presence directly across the corridor of a brother-in-law he had never seen at Hanuman House, a tall, contemptuous man who had taken an immediate dislike to him and expressed this dislike by a quivering of the nostrils.

Anand said, ‘Prakash say his pappa got more books than you.’

Mr Biswas sent Anand to find out what books Prakash’s father had.

Anand reported, ‘All the books exactly the same size. On the cover they have a green shield marked “Boots”. And they are all by a man called W. C. Turtle.’

‘Trash,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘Trash,’ Anand told Prakash.

‘You call my books trash?’ Prakash’s father asked Mr Biswas some mornings later, when they opened their doors at the same time.

‘I didn’t call your books trash.’

The nostrils quivered. ‘What about your Epictetus and
Manxman
and Samuel Smiles?’

‘How do you know about my Epictetus?’

‘How do you know about my books?’

Thereafter Mr Biswas locked his room whenever he left it. The news spread and there were comments.

‘So you start up already?’ Shama said.

And having got to Shorthills, everyone waited, for the sheep, the horses, for the swimming pool to be repaired, the drive weeded, the gardens cleaned, the electricity plant fixed, the house repainted.

Waiting, the children stripped the saman tree of its lianas. But there was no use to which they could put these improbable and pleasing growths; they were not good for skipping, as Mrs Tulsi had said: the thin ones frayed easily, the fat ones were unwieldy. Hari cut down the Julie mango tree on the raised bed at the end of the garden and built a small, kennel-like box-board hut; this was the temple. The reader of W. C. Tuttle put up a large framed print of the goddess Lakshmi in the drawingroom and offered up his own prayers before it every evening; Prakash said his father knew more of these matters than Hari. The brick oven in the kitchen was levelled; the roofed way between the house and kitchen was pulled down and the open area roofed with old corrugated iron and tree-branches from the hillside at the back.

Anand’s patience broke. Spreading a rumour among the children that the house was going to be repainted right away but that the old paint had to be scraped off first, he soon had more than a dozen helpers working on the granite blocks. They made many pink and cream scars on the grey verandah walls before they were noticed; and this effort to force improvements ended in a mass flogging.

Mr Biswas, too, was waiting for improvements. But he did not greatly care about them. For him Shorthills was an adventure, an interlude. His job made him independent of the Tulsis; and Shorthills was an insurance against the sack. It also provided an opportunity to save, an opportunity to plunder. And secretly he was plundering: half a dozen oranges at a time, half a dozen avocado pears or grapefruit or lemons, sold to a café keeper in St Vincent Street with some story about
the variety of fruit trees he had in his backyard. The money was little but regular, the thrill of plundering delicious. Plunder! The very sound of the word excited Mr Biswas. Cycling to work in the cool of the morning and whistling in his way, he would suddenly jump off his bicycle, look right, look left, pull down oranges or avocado pears, drop them into his saddlebag, hop on to his saddle and cycle me asuredly away, whistling.

He came back one afternoon to find the cherry tree cut down, the artificial mound partly dug up, the swimming pool partly filled in. By the end of the week the mound was a flat black patch and the swimming pool did not exist. A tent was put up over the area occupied by the pool and sisters and husbands remarked again and again that it was wonderful not only to have so much bamboo so near but not to have to pay for it either, as they had had to at Arwacas.

The tent was for wedding guests. It appeared that a whole wave of Shama’s nieces was to be married off. One marriage had been arranged before the move, and during the idle weeks at Shorthills the idea had grown. Action was swift and sudden. Details – the bridegrooms and dowries – had been easily settled, and now the puzzling estate was forgotten and all energy went to preparing for the weddings. Days before the ceremony guests and retainers and dancers, singers and musicians came from Arwacas. They slept in the tent, the verandah, the garage, the covered space between the kitchen and house, and by day wandered through the grounds and woods, plundering.

Much bamboo was used in the decorations. The drive and walks were lined with bamboo poles placed horizontally on vertical bamboo poles; every horizontal section was filled with oil and fitted with a wick. On the night of the weddings many small flickering flames seemed to be suspended in the darkness; trees, outlined, not illuminated, looked solid; and the grounds felt protected, a warm cave in the night. The seven bridegrooms came in seven cavalcades with seven teams of drummers, followed by the stupefied villagers. At the foot of the concrete steps there were seven ceremonies of welcome, and in the wedding-tent, built over one of the
gardens flattened for the purpose, the seven wedding ceremonies went on all night, while in the tent over the swimming pool there was singing, dancing and feasting.

When the weddings were over, the population of the house temporarily reduced by seven, the guests gone away, and the tents over the ruined garden and swimming pool taken down, everyone began waiting again, for the small cricket pavilion to be restored, the drive cleaned, its culverts mended, the canal cleared of silt, for the evergreen hedges at the bottom of the hill to be trimmed, for the unruined garden to be replanted. Unasked, the children did what they could, but their scattered efforts made no impression on the grounds. They collected tonka beans from the hillside and, not knowing what to do with them, left them in the garage, where they presently rotted and smelled.

Then suddenly some sheep appeared. Haifa dozen scraggy, bare, bewildered sheep. The children had been promised sheep, but they had expected fleecy things, and there was no rush to claim these. The sheep remained nibbling in the cricket field, offending the children and the cricketers.

Nothing was done to the cocoa trees or the orange trees. Week by week the bush advanced and the estate, from looking neglected, began to look abandoned. There was still no one to plan or direct. As suddenly as she had emerged from her sickroom to supervise the move, so Mrs Tulsi had now withdrawn. She had a small room on the lower floor, overlooking the ruined garden and Hari’s box-board temple. But her window was closed, the room was sealed against light and air, and there, in an ammoniac darkness, she spent much of the day, looked after by Sushila and Miss Blackie. It was as though her energy had been stimulated only by the quarrel with Seth and, ebbing, had depressed her further into exhaustion and grief.

Govind tore down the cricket pavilion one day. A rough cowshed went up in its place, and Mr Biswas heard, with astonishment, that his cow was to be stabled there.

‘Cow? My cow?’

It turned out that the cow, whose name was Mutri, was one of Shama’s secret possessions, like her sewingmachine.

Mutri had been kept on the estate at Arwacas with all the other Tulsi cows. She was an old black cow, tired, with short bruised horns.

‘What about the milk?’ Mr Biswas asked. ‘The calves?’

‘What about the grass?’ Shama replied. ‘The water? The feed?’

Govind looked after the cows and for that reason alone Mr Biswas made no further inquiries. Govind was becoming increasingly surly. He scarcely spoke to anyone, and worked off his rages on the cows. He beat them with thick lengths of wood and at milking time the slightest misdemeanour threw him into a rage. The animals didn’t moan or wince or show anger; they only tried to move away. No one protested; there was no one to complain to.

Mr Biswas said, ‘Poor Mutri.’

Before cows and sheep the cricketers retreated. The cricket field turned to mud and manure, and someone planted a pumpkin vine at the edge of it.

Then the tree-cutting began. In less than a morning the reader of W. C. Tuttle cut down the gri-gri palms along the drive. He came back sweating to the house and, since none of the watertaps worked, had a bath at a waterbarrel. Mrs Tulsi ate the hearts of the trees, which had been recommended to her by one of her Arwacas friends, and the children consoled themselves with the red berries. Govind, asserting himself, then cut down the orange trees: they were blighted, encouraged snakes, and could conceal thieves.

‘Damn stupid thieves if they think they could find anything in this place,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘They cut down the trees only to make it easier to pick the oranges, that is all.’

The oranges were collected by Govind and Chinta and their children, put into sacks and sent to Port of Spain by bus. Everyone wondered who took the money. The trees were chopped into logs and burned in the kitchen, the moss-covered barks making excellent kindling.

The children lost heart. They now had to be compelled to gather tonka beans, to pick oranges and avocado pears to be sent to Port of Spain. On some Saturdays they pulled up
weeds from the drive, urged on by the adults to hollow competitions to see who could amass the highest pile of weeds.

The plumbing remained unrepaired. Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside. The house toilet, unused, became a sewingroom.

In place of the orange trees and the palm trees seedlings were planted along the drive and hedged around with bamboo stakes. The cows broke down the cricket field fence. The sheep, escaping, broke down the bamboo stakes and stripped the seedlings clean. The silt rose in the canal at the side of the drive. Weeds grew from the cracks in the concrete culvert and up the wide, shallow steps.

Every morning Hari said his prayers and rang his bell and beat his gong in his boxboard kennel in the ruined garden; and every evening the man Mr Biswas now thought of as W. C. Tuttle said his prayers before the framed print in the drawingroom. The rubbish heap started by the Tulsis at the foot of the hill grew higher and wider. The sheep, neglected, unfruitful, survived. The cows were milked. The pumpkin vine spread rapidly in the manured mud and broke into frail yellow flower. The first pumpkin, the first Tulsi fruit, was welcomed with enthusiasm; and since, because of a Hindu taboo no one could explain, women were forbidden to cut pumpkins open, a man was invited to do so. And the man was W. C. Tuttle.

It was W. C. Tuttle who dismantled the electricity plant and melted down the lead to make dumb-bells. And it was W. C. Tuttle who announced that a furniture factory was to be started. Scores of cedar trees were cut down, sawed and stacked in the garage, and W. C. Tuttle sent to his own village for a Negro called Théophile. Théophile was a blacksmith whose trade had declined with the coming of the motorcar. He was lodged in a small room below the drawingroom, fed three times a day and turned loose among the cedar planks. He made many benches; gaining confidence, he put together a vast, irregularly oval table; then a number of wardrobes like sentry-boxes. No joint was clean; no door fitted; and the soft wood showed many little clusters of hammer indentations. It was stated by W. C. Tuttle, his wife, his children
and Théophile himself that stain and varnish would hide these flaws. And, Tulsi excitement mounting, Théophile went to work on morris chairs. W. C. Tuttle ordered a bookcase. Mr Biswas ordered a bookcase. The doors of Mr Biswas’s bookcase sloped at the top and would have formed a peak if they could meet: Théophile said it was a style. By this time the planks on the oval table had shrunk, the joints were loose and the wax had dropped out, and the wardrobe doors could never close. Théophile worked with saw and hammer and nails on the table and wardrobes; then the chairs and bookcases needed attention; then the wardrobes gave trouble again. Théophile was dismissed to his village, and there was no further talk about the furniture factory. The morris chairs fell apart and were used as firewood; some of the more adventurous children slept on the table at night. W. C. Tuttle, acting as Mrs Tulsi’s agent, sold the cedar planks in the garage. Shortly afterwards he bought a lorry, and hired it out to the Americans.