A House for Mr. Biswas (61 page)

A quarrel between Govind and Mr Biswas upstairs was invariably accompanied by a quarrel between their children downstairs.

Once Savi said, ‘I wonder why Pa doesn’t buy a house.’

Govind’s eldest daughter replied, ‘If some people could put money where their mouth is they would be living in palaces.’

‘Some people only have mouth and belly.’

‘Some people at least have a belly. Other people have nothing at all.’

Savi took these defeats badly. As soon as the quarrel upstairs subsided she went to the inner room and lay down on the fourposter. Not wishing to hurt herself again or to hurt her father, she could not tell him what had happened; and he was the only person who could have comforted her.

In the circumstances W. C. Tuttle came to be regarded as a useful ally. His physical strength matched Govind’s (though this was denied by Govind’s children), and their dispute about the garage still stood. It helped, too, that W. C. Tuttle and Mr Biswas had something in common: they both felt that by
marrying into the Tulsis they had fallen among barbarians. W. C. Tuttle regarded himself as one of the last defenders of brahmin culture in Trinidad; at the same time he considered he had yielded gracefully to the finer products of Western civilization: its literature, its music, its art. He behaved at all times with a suitable dignity. He exchanged angry words with no one, contenting himself with silent contempt, a quivering of his longhaired nostrils.

And, indeed, apart from the unpleasantness caused by the gramophone, there was between Mr Biswas and W. C. Tuttle only that rivalry which had been touched off when Myna broke the torchbearer’s torchbearing arm and Shama bought a glass cabinet. The battle of possessions Mr Biswas lost by default. After the acquisition of the glass cabinet (its broken door unrepaired, its lower shelves filled with schoolbooks and newspapers) and the grateful destitute’s diningtable, Mr Biswas had no more room. W. C. Tuttle had the whole of the front verandah: he bought two moms rockingchairs, a standard lamp, a rolltop desk and a bookcase with sliding glass doors. Mr Biswas had gained a slight advantage by being the first to enrol his children in the
Guardian
Tinymites League; but he had squandered this by imitating W. C. Tuttle’s khaki shorts. W. C. Tuttle’s shorts were proper shorts, and he had the figure for them. Mr Biswas lacked this figure, and his khaki shorts were only long khaki trousers which Shama, against her judgement, had amputated, and hemmed on her machine with a wavering line of white cotton. Mr Biswas suffered a further setback when the Tuttle children revealed that their father had taken out a life insurance policy. ‘Take out one too?’ Mr Biswas said to Myna and Kamla. ‘If I start paying insurance every month, you think any of you would live to draw it?’

The picture war started when Mr Biswas bought two drawings from an Indian bookshop and framed them in passepartout. He found he liked framing pictures. He liked playing with clean cardboard and sharp knives; he liked experimenting with the colours and shapes of mounts. He saw the glass cut to his measurements, he cycled tremulously home with it, and a whole evening was transformed. Framing a picture was
like writing a sign: it required neatness and precision; he could concentrate on what his hands did, forget the house, subdue his irritations. Soon his two rooms were as hung with pictures as the barrackroom in Green Vale had been with religious quotations.

W. C. Tuttle began with a series of photographs, in large wooden frames, of himself. In one photograph W. C. Tuttle, naked except for dhoti, sacred thread and caste-marks, head shown except for the top-knot, sat crosslegged, fingers bunched delicately on his upturned soles, and meditated with closed eyes. Next to this W. C. Tuttle stood in jacket, trousers, collar, tie, hat, one well-shod foot on the running-board of a motorcar, laughing, his gold tooth brilliantly revealed. There were photographs of his father, his mother, their house; his brothers, in a group and singly; his sisters, in a group and singly. There were photographs of W. C. Tuttle in various transitory phases: W. C. Tuttle with beard, whiskers and moustache, W. C. Tuttle with beard alone, moustache alone; W. C. Tuttle as weight-lifter (in bathing trunks, glaring at the camera, holding aloft the weights he had made from the lead of the dismantled electricity plant at Shorthills); W. C. Tuttle in Indian court dress; W. C. Tuttle in full pundit’s regalia, turban, dhoti, white jacket, beads, standing with a brass jar in one hand, laughing again (a number of blurred, awestruck faces in the background). In between there were pictures of the English countryside in spring, a view of the Matterhorn, a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, and a picture entitled ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’ It was W. C. Tuttle’s way of blending East and West.

But Govind, taxi-driving,
Ramayana
-grunting, remained untouched by this or any other rivalry and continued as menacing and offensive as before. The readers and learners openly wished that he would be maimed or killed in a motor accident. Instead, he won a safety award and had his hand shaken by the mayor of Port of Spain. This appeared to free him of all inhibitions, and both Basdai and Mr Biswas began to talk of calling in the police.

But the police were never called. For, quite suddenly, Govind ceased to be a problem.

An abrupt, stunning silence fell on the house one evening. The learners and readers stopped buzzing. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone went dead. The
Ramayana
singing broke off in mid-couplet. And from Govind’s room came a series of grunts, thumps, cracks and crashes.

Anand came running on tiptoe into Mr Biswas’s room and whispered joyfully, ‘Daddy is beating Mummy.’

Mr Biswas sat up and listened. It sounded true. Vidiadhar’s Daddy was beating Vidiadhar’s Mummy.

The whole house listened. And when the noises from Govind’s room died down, and Govind resumed whining out the
Ramayana,
the buzzing downstairs built up again, a new, satisfied sound, and W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone played, music of celebration.

So it was whenever Chinta was beaten by Govind. Which was often. The readers and learners recovered from their terror, for having found this outlet, Govind sought no other. Her beatings gave Chinta a matriarchal dignity and, curiously, gained her a respect she had never had before. They had the subsidiary effects of quelling her children, killing her song, and rousing her to cultural rivalry.

Vidiadhar was also in the exhibition class. He was not in the star section, like Anand; but Chinta put this down only to bribery and corruption. And one afternoon, while Anand was sitting on the end stool at the bar in the Dairies, an Indian boy came in. It was Vidiadhar. Anand was surprised. Vidiadhar looked surprised as well. And in their surprise, neither boy spoke to the other. Vidiadhar walked past Anand to the stool at the other end of the bar and asked for a half-pint of milk. Anand was pleased to see him making this mistake: money was first paid at the desk, and the receipt presented to the barman. So Vidiadhar had to walk past the whole row of high stools again, get his receipt from the cashier, and walk past the stools once more to the end he had chosen. Without looking at one another, they drank their milk, slowly, each unwilling to be the first to leave. Neither had intended to cut the other; the cutting had simply happened. But each boy considered he had been cut; and never again, until they were men, did they speak. In the shifting, tangled, multifarious relationships in
that crowded house, this silence remained constant. It became historic. Then Vidiadhar said that he had done the cutting that afternoon, and Anand said that
he
had done it. And every afternoon, at five minutes past three, the people in the Dairies saw two Indian boys sitting at opposite ends of the milk bar, drinking half-pints of milk through straws, not looking at one another, never speaking.

Myna and Kamla, resenting the challenge of Vidiadhar, who was now openly eating prunes, began to claim astounding scholastic achievements for Anand.

‘My brother read more books than all of all-you put together.’

‘Hear you. But all right. If Anand read so much, let him tell me who is the author of
Singing Guns.’
This from a young Tuttle.

‘Tell him, Anand. Tell him who is the author of
Singing Guns.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ah-ah-ah!’

‘But how you could expect him to know that?’ Myna said. ‘He does only read books of common sense.’

‘Okay. Anand does read a lot of books. But my brother
write
a book. A
whole
book. And he writing another right now.’

The writer had indeed done that. He was the eldest Tuttle boy. He had impressed his parents by a constant demand for exercise books and by a continuous show of writing. He said he was making notes. In fact, he had copied out every word of
Nelson’s West Indian Geography,
by Captain Cutteridge, Director of Education, author
of Nelson’s West Indian Readers
and
Nelson’s West Indian Arithmetics.
He had completed the
Geography
in more than a dozen exercise books, and was at the moment engaged on the first volume of
Nelson’s West Indian History,
by Captain Daniel, Assistant Director of Education.

With the exhibition examination less than two months away, Anand lived a life of pure work. Private lessons were given in the morning for half an hour before school; private lessons were given in the afternoon for an hour after school;
private lessons were given for the whole of Saturday morning. Then in addition to all these private lessons from his class teacher, Anand began to take private lessons from the headmaster, at the headmaster’s house, from five to six. He went from school to the Dairies to school again; then he went to the headmaster’s, where Savi waited for him with sandwiches and lukewarm Ovaltine. Leaving home at seven in the morning, he returned at half past six. He ate. Then he did his school homework; then he prepared for all his private lessons.

All the boys in the star section of the exhibition class endured almost similar privation, but they strove to maintain the fiction that they were schoolboys given to pranks, enjoying the most carefree days of their lives. There were a few anxious boys who talked of nothing but work. But most talked of the football season just beginning, the Santa Rosa race meeting just concluded, giving one another to understand that their Daddies had taken them to the races in cars with laden hampers and that they had proceeded to bet, and lose, vast sums on the pari mutuel. They discussed the prospects of Brown Bomber and Jetsam at the Christmas meeting (the examination was in early November and this was a means of looking beyond it). Anand was not the most backward in these conversations. Though horseracing bored him to a degree, he had made it his special subject. He knew, for example, that Jetsam was by Flotsam out of Hope of the Valley; he claimed to have seen all three horses and spread a racetrack story that the young Jetsam used to eat clothes left out to dry. Retailing some more racetrack gossip, he maintained (and began to be known for this) that, in spite of a career of almost unmitigated disaster, Whitstable was the finest horse in the colony; it was a pity he was so erratic, but then these greys were temperamental.

The talk turned one Monday lunchtime to films, and it appeared that nearly every boy who lived in Port of Spain had been to see the double programme at the London Theatre over the week-end:
Jesse James
and
The Return of Frank James.

‘What a double!’ the boys exclaimed. ‘A major double!’

Anand, whose championship of Whitstable had established him as the holder of the perverse opinion, said he didn’t care for it.

The boys rounded on him.

Anand, who had not seen the double, repeated that he didn’t care for it. ‘Give me
When the Daltons Rode
and
The Daltons Ride Again.
Any day, old man.’

It was just his luck for one boy to say then, ‘I bet you he didn’t go to see it! You could see that old crammer going to a theatre?’

‘You are a hypocritical little thug,’ Anand said, using two words he had got from his father. ‘You are a bigger crammer than me.’

The boy wished to shift the conversation: he was a tremendous crammer. He repeated, less warmly, ‘I bet you didn’t go.’ By now, however, the other boys had prepared to listen, and the accuser, gaining confidence, said, ‘All right-all right. He went. Just let him tell me what happened when Henry Fonda –’

Anand said, ‘I don’t like Henry Fonda.’

This created a minor diversion.

‘How you mean, you don’t like Fonda. Anybody would think that you never see Fonda walk.’ ‘
That
is walk, old man.’

‘All right-all right,’ the accuser went on. ‘What happened when Henry Fonda and Brian Donlevy –’

‘I don’t like him either,’ Anand said. And, to his great relief, the bell rang.

He could tell from the annoyance of his accuser that the cross-examination would be continued. He went straight after school to the Dairies; when he came back it was time for private lessons; and after private lessons he managed to slip away to the headmaster’s. When he got home he said he could do no work that evening and wanted to go to the London Theatre, to give his brain a rest.

‘I have no money,’ Shama said. ‘You will have to ask your father.’

Mr Biswas said, ‘When you get to my age you wouldn’t care for Westerns.’

Anand lost his temper. ‘When I get to your age I don’t want to be like you.’

He regretted what he had said. He was, indeed, fatigued; and Mr Biswas’s dismissing manner had seemed to him callous. But he made no apology. He talked instead about the headaches he was getting and said he was sure he was suffering from brainfag and brainfever, crammer’s afflictions, which his rivals at school had often prophesied for him.

Mr Biswas said, ‘I haven’t got a red cent on me. I don’t get pay till the day after tomorrow. Right now I am dipping into the Deserving Destees’ petty cash at the office. Go and ask your mother.’

As usual, it turned out that she did have some money. ‘How much you want?’