A House for Mr. Biswas (56 page)

With the disappearance of the gospo tree the cricket field shrank rapidly. After every shower part of it was carved away, leaving a grass-covered overhang which collapsed in a day or two and was carried off by the next downpour. The drive
became tall with weeds, and through the weeds a narrow, curiously wavering path led to the concrete steps, now cracked and sagging and bursting into vegetation at every crack. The evergreen hedge was a tangle of small trees, and whenever it rained the grounds smelled fresh, as of fish, telling that snakes were about.

No one had time to fight the bush. The widows, when not cooking or washing or cleaning or looking after the cows, were making coffee or chocolate or coconut oil or grinding maize. Their clothes became patched, their arms hard. They looked like labourers, and they had to bear with the exulting comments Seth sent through common friends. He had given his life to the family; then he had been rejected and slandered. Their punishment was only beginning. Had he not said that when he left them they would all start catching crabs?

And the widows worked like men. When the gully became a gorge they threw a bridge of coconut trunks across it. The gorge widened; the trunks collapsed. The widows built another bridge; that collapsed too. The widows prevailed on Mrs Tulsi to buy lengths of rail. The rails were laid across the gorge, coconut trunks laid across the rails, and for a time this structure survived, shaky, slippery, with gaps through which a child might fall to the rocks below.

Mr Biswas could no longer ignore the dereliction about him; yet when he spoke about moving, Shama, though excluded from the councils of the widows and the confidences of the other sisters, became sullen and sometimes cried.

Then came the scandal of the eighty dollars.

Chinta announced one day that someone had stolen eighty dollars from her room. It was an astonishing announcement, not only because an accusation of theft had never been made in the family before, but also because no one knew that Chinta and Govind had so much money. Chinta told again and again of the last time she had checked the money, and of the accident that had led her to find out that the money was missing. She said she knew who had stolen the money, but was waiting for the thief to trip himself up.

After a few days the thief had not tripped himself up, and Chinta went on searching, drawing crowds wherever she went. Sometimes she spoke Hindi incantations; sometimes she searched with a candle in one hand and a crucifix in the other; sometimes she spat on her left palm, struck the spittle with a finger, and searched in the direction indicated by the flight of the spittle. Finally she decided to hold a trial by Bible and key.

‘The old Roman cat and kitten,’ Mr Biswas said to Shama. ‘Like mother, like daughter. But look, eh, I don’t want my children meddling in that sort of tomfoolery.’

This was repeated throughout the house.

Chinta said, ‘I don’t blame him.’

The Bible-and-key trial lasted the whole of one afternoon. Chinta invoked the names of Saints Peter and Paul and spoke the accusations; Miss Blackie, invoking the same names, defended; and the innocence of everyone except Mr Biswas and his family was established.

Mr Biswas refused to have his room searched and ignored Shama’s pleas that he should allow the children to be tried. ‘She is a Roman cat,’ he said. ‘So what? I look like a Hindu mouse?’ For some time he and Govind had not spoken; now he and Chinta did not speak. Shama attempted to maintain relations with Chinta, but was rebuffed.

‘I am not blaming anybody,’ Chinta said. ‘I am only blaming the man who set the example.’

Then the whisperings began.

‘Don’t talk to them. But watch them.’

‘Vidiadhar! Quick! I left my purse on the table in the diningroom.’

‘Anand likes his nose to run. He swallows the snot. It is like condensed milk to him.’

‘Savi does eat the scabs of sores.’

‘You ever see Kamla’s head? Crawling with lice. But she is like a monkey. She eats them.’

And the girls begged Mr Biswas to move.

He had found a site such as he always wanted, isolated, unused and full of possibilities. It was some way from the estäte
house, on a low hill buried in bush and well back from the road. The house was begun and, unblessed, completed in less than a month. Its pattern was precisely that of the house he had attempted in Green Vale, precisely that of thousands of houses in rural Trinidad. It had a verandah, two bedrooms and a drawingroom, and stood on tall pillars. Estate trees provided the timber; he had to pay only for the sawing. He bought corrugated iron for the roof, plain glass and frosted glass for the windows, coloured glass for the drawingroom door, and cement for the pillars.

The speed with which the house went up took him by surprise. The builders had given him no opportunity to withdraw, and at the end he found that his savings were nearly all gone. He felt uneasy. His circumstances had changed; but his ambition had remained steady, and now seemed only idyllic and absurd. He had built his own house, in a place as wild and out-of-the-way as he could have wished. But Shama had to walk a mile to the village to do her shopping, water had to be brought up the hill from a spring in the cocoa woods. And there was the problem of transport. He had to cycle long distances every day, and though he had cut himself off from the family, his children had to go to school in the family car.

After he had bought a Slumberking bed (delivered by two Port of Spain vanmen who swore as they made their various trips up and down the improperly cleared and precipitous path) his money was exhausted. The house was not painted. It stood red-raw in its unregulated green setting, not seeming to invite habitation so much as decay.

Shama, though pained by the quarrel with Chinta, did not approve of the move. She regarded it as provocative, and like the children, she had watched the house rise and wished it not to be completed. The children wanted to go back to Port of Spain, to the life they had had before Shorthills. They knew about the housing shortage but blamed Mr Biswas for not trying hard enough. The new house imprisoned them in silence and bush. They had no pleasures, no cinema shows, no walks, no games even, for the land around the house still smelled of snakes. The nights seemed longer and blacker. The girls stayed close to Shama, as though frightened to be by
themselves; and in her shanty kitchen Shama sang sad Hindi songs.

Late one afternoon, not long after they had moved, Anand found himself alone in the house. Mr Biswas was out, the girls were in the kitchen with Shama. The house felt bare, unused and still exposed; corners held no secrets; none of the furniture seemed to have found its place. Moved by boredom more than curiosity, Anand opened the bottom drawer of Shama’s dressingtable. In an envelope he found his parents’ marriage certificate and the birth certificates of his sisters and himself. On a birth certificate, which he did not at first recognize as Savi’s, he saw a name, Basso, which he had never heard used. He saw Mr Biswas’s harsh scrawl:
Real calling name: Lakshmi.
In the column headed ‘Father’s Occupation’
labourer
had been energetically scratched out and
proprietor
written in. No other birth certificate had been so scribbled over. Some photographs were wrapped in crinkled brown paper. One was of the Tulsi sisters standing in a straight line and scowling; the others were of the entire Tulsi family, of Hanuman House, of Pundit Tulsi, of Pundit Tulsi in Hanuman House.

In the kitchen Shama was singing her doleful song and slapping dough between her palms.

Anand came upon a bundle of letters. They were all still in their envelopes. The stamps were English and bore the head of George V. From one envelope fell small brown photographs of an English girl, a dog, a house with a faded X on a window; in another envelope there was a newspaper clipping with one name underlined in ink in a long paragraph of names. The letters were neatly written and said little at great length. They spoke about letters received, about school, about holidays; they thanked for photographs. Abruptly they were touched with feeling; they expressed surprise that arrangements for marriage had been made so soon; they attempted to soften surprise with congratulation. Then there were no more letters.

Anand closed the drawer and went to the drawingroom. He rested his elbows on the window-sill and looked out. The sun had just set and the bush was turning black against a sky that was still clear. Smoke came through the kitchen door and
window and Anand listened to Shama singing. Darkness filled the valley.

That evening Shama discovered the ransacked drawer. ‘

Thief!’ she said. ‘Some thief was in the house.’

Refusing to yield to the gloom of his family and his own feeling that he had been rash, Mr Biswas set about clearing the land. He spared only the
poui
trees, for their branches and their yellow flowers, which came out bright and pure for one week in the year. The integrity of living bush was replaced by a brown chaos of collapsed and dying trees. Through this Mr Biswas made a winding path from the house down to the road, cutting steps into the earth and shoring them with bamboo. The debris could not be immediately fired, for though the leaves were dead and brittle the wood was green. Waiting, Mr Biswas cut
poui
sticks and roasted them in bonfires. And he was reminded of a duty.

He sent for his mother. He had for so long been telling her – ever since he was a boy in the back trace – that she was to come to stay with him when he had built his own house, that he now doubted whether she would come. But she came, for a fortnight. Her feelings could not be read. He was at first extravagantly affectionate. But Bipti remained calm, and Mr Biswas followed her example. It was as if the relationship between them had been granted without their asking, and had only to be accepted.

Though the children understood Hindi they could no longer speak it, and this limited communication between them and Bipti. From the start, however, Shama and Bipti got on well. Shama gave not a hint of the sullenness she used with Bipti’s sister Tara; to Mr Biswas’s surprise and pleasure, she treated Bipti with all the respect of a Hindu daughter-in-law. She had touched Bipti’s feet with her fingers when Bipti came, and she never appeared before Bipti with her head uncovered.

Bipti helped with the housework and on the land. When, after Bipti’s death, Mr Biswas wished to be reminded of her, he thought less of his childhood and the back trace than of this fortnight at Shorthills. He thought of one moment in
particular. The ground in front of the house had been only partly cleared, and one afternoon, when he had pushed his bicycle up the earth steps to the top of the hill, he saw that part of the ground, which he had left that morning cumbered and unbroken, had been cleared and levelled and forked. The black earth was soft and stoneless; the spade had cut cleanly into it, leaving damp walls as smooth as mason’s work. Here and there the prongs of the fork had left shallow parallel indentations on the upturned earth. In the setting sun, the sad dusk, with Bipti working in a garden that looked, for a moment, like a garden he had known a dark time ages ago, the intervening years fell away. Thereafter the marks of a fork in earth made him think of that moment at the top of the hill, and of Bipti.

The children looked forward to the firing of the land as to a celebration. The Civil Defence authorities had given them a taste for large conflagrations, and now they were to have a hill on fire in their own backyard. It would be almost as good as the mock air-raid on the Port of Spain race course. Of course there would be no dummy houses to burn, no ambulances, no nurses attending to people groaning at mock wounds, no Boy Scouts on motor bicycles dashing about through the thick smoke with dummy dispatches; but at the same time there would be none of those eager firefighters who, in spite of the public outcry, had rescued some of the dummy buildings before they were even scorched.

Mr Biswas, displaying manual skills which his children secretly distrusted, dug trenches and prepared little nests of twigs and leaves at what he called strategic points. On Saturday afternoon he summoned the children, soaked a brand in pitch-oil, set it alight, and ran from nest to nest, poking the brand in and jumping back, as though he had touched off an explosion. A leaf caught here and a twig there, blazed, shrank, smouldered, died. Mr Biswas didn’t wait to see. Ignoring the cries of the children, he ran on, leaving a trail of subsiding wisps of dark smoke.

‘Is all right,’ he said, coming down the hillside, the brand dripping fire. ‘Is all right. Fire is a funny thing. You think it out, but it blazing like hell underground.’

One of the smoke wisps shrank like a failing fountain. ‘That one take your advice and gone underground,’ Savi said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, rubbing one itching ankle against the other. ‘Perhaps it is a little too green. Perhaps we should wait until next week.’

There were protests.

Savi put her hand to her face and backed away.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘The heat,’ Savi said.

‘You just carry on. See if you don’t get hot somewhere else. Clowns. That’s what I’m raising. A pack of clowns.’

From the kitchen Shama shouted, ‘Hurry up, all-you. The sun going down.’

They went to examine the nests Mr Biswas had fired. They found them collapsed, reduced: shallow heaps of grey leaves and black twigs. Only one had caught, and from it the fire proceeded unspectacularly, avoiding thick branches and nibbling at lesser ones, making the bark curl, attacking the green wood with a great deal of smoke, staining it, then retreating to run up a twig with a businesslike air, scorching the brown leaves, creating a brief blaze, then halting. On the gound there were a few isolated flames, none higher than an inch.

‘Fireworks,’ Savi said.

‘Well, do it yourself.’

The children ran to the kitchen and seized the pitch-oil Shama had bought for the lamps. They poured the pitch-oil haphazardly on the bush and set it alight. In minutes the bush blazed and became a restless sea of yellow, red, blue and green. They exchanged theories about the various colours; they listened with pleasure to the chatter and crackle of the quick fire. Too soon the tall flames contracted. The sun set. Charred leaves rose in the air. After dinner they had the sad task of beating down the fire at the edge of the trench. The brown sea had turned black, with red glitters and twinkles.