A House for Mr. Biswas (69 page)

Mr Biswas’s hopes of renting the rooms the Tuttles had vacated were dashed when it was announced that Mrs Tulsi was coming from Shorthills to take them over. The news cast a gloom over the whole house. Her daughters now accepted that Mrs Tulsi’s active life was finished, that only death awaited her. But she still controlled them all in varying ways, and her caprices had to be endured. Miserable herself, Basdai made the readers and learners miserable by threats of what Mrs Tulsi would do to them.

She came with Sushila, the sickroom widow, and Miss Blackie; and at once the house became quieter. The readers and learners were quelled, but Mrs Tulsi’s presence brought them an unexpected advantage: they knew that if they howled loud enough beforehand they would be spared floggings.

Mrs Tulsi had no precise illness. She was simply ill. Her eyes ached; her heart was bad; her head always hurt; her stomach was fastidious; her legs were unreliable; and every other day she had a temperature. Her head had continually to be soaked in bay rum; she had to be massaged once a day; she needed poultices of various sorts. Her nostrils were stuffed with soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub; she wore dark glasses; and she was seldom without a bandage around her forehead. Sushila was kept on the go all day. At Hanuman House Sushila had sought to gain power by being Mrs Tulsi’s nurse; now that the organization of the house had been broken up, the position carried no power, but Sushila was bound to it, and she had no children to rescue her.

Time hung heavily on Mrs Tulsi’s hands. She did not read. The radio offended her. She was never well enough to go
out. She moved from her room to the lavatory to the front verandah to her room. Her only solace was talk. Daughters were always at hand, but talk with them seemed only to enrage her; and as her body decayed so her command of invective and obscenity developed. Her rages fell oftenest on Sushila, whom she ordered out of the house once a week. She cried out that her daughters were all waiting for her to die, that they were sucking her blood; she pronounced curses on them and their children, and threatened to expel them from the family.

‘I have no luck with my family,’ she told Miss Blackie. ‘I have no luck with my race.’

And it was Miss Blackie who received her confidences, Miss Blackie who reported and comforted. And there was the Jewish refugee doctor. He came once a week and listened. The house was always specially prepared for him, and Mrs Tulsi treated him with love. He resurrected all that remained of her softness and humour. When he left, she said to Miss Blackie, ‘Never trust your race, Black. Never trust them.’ And Miss Blackie said, ‘No’m.’ Gifts of fruit were sent regularly to the doctor and sometimes Mrs Tulsi would suddenly order Basdai and Sushila to prepare an elaborate meal and take it to the doctor’s house, treating the matter as one of urgency, as though she was satisfying some craving of her own.

Still her daughters came to the house. They knew they all had some small hold on her: they knew that she feared loneliness and never wished to push them beyond her reach; they knew they could hurt her by staying away. If Miss Blackie reported that one daughter had been particularly upset, then Mrs Tulsi made overtures, and made promises. In such moods she might give a piece of jewellery, she might take off a ring or a bracelet and give it. So the daughters came, and none was willing to let Mrs Tulsi be alone with any other. The visits of Mrs Tuttle were especially distrusted. She bore abuse with unexampled patience and was able at the end to suggest that Mrs Tulsi should look at plants, because green nourished the eyes and soothed the nerves.

Though she abused her daughters, she took care not to offend her sons-in-law. She greeted Mr Biswas briefly but
politely. And she never attempted to remonstrate with Govind, who continued to behave as before. He beat Chinta when the mood took him, and, ignoring pleas for silence for Mrs Tulsi’s headaches, sang from the
Ramayana.
It was left to the sisters to comment on Govind’s behaviour.

There were times when she wished to have children about her. Then she summoned the readers and learners to scrub the floor of the drawingroom and verandah, or she made them sing Hindi hymns. Her mood changed without warning, and the readers and learners were perpetually apprehensive, never knowing whether they were required to be solemn or amusing. Sometimes she stood them in lines in her room and made them recite arithmetic tables, flogging the inaccurate with as much vigour as her arms would allow, flabby, muscleless arms, broad and loose towards the armpit, and swinging like dead flesh. Miss Blackie burst into squelchy laughter when a child made a stupid mistake or when Mrs Tulsi made a witticism; and Mrs Tulsi, her eyes masked by dark glasses, would give a pleased, crooked smile. In sterner moments Miss Blackie grew stern as well and moved her jaws up and down quickly, saying ‘Mm!’ at every blow Mrs Tulsi gave.

Another trial for the readers and learners was Mrs Tulsi’s concern for their health. Every five Saturdays or so she called them to her room and dosed them with Epsom salts; and between these gloomy, wasted week-ends she listened for coughs and sneezes. There was no escaping her. She had learned to recognize every voice, every laugh, every footstep, every cough and almost every sneeze. She took a special interest in Anand’s wheeze and doglike cough. She bought him some poisonous herb cigarettes; when these had no effect she prescribed brandy and water and gave him a bottle of brandy. Anand, while hating the brandy and water, drank it for its literary associations: he had read of the mixture in Dickens.

Sometimes she sent for old friends from Arwacas. They came and camped for a week or so, and listened to Mrs Tulsi. She, refreshed, talked all day and late into the night, while the friends, lying on bedding on the floor, made drowsy mechanical affirmations: ‘Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother.’ Some visits were cut short by illness, some by carefully documented
dreams of bad omen; those visitors who stayed to the end went away fatigued, doped, bleary-eyed.

Regularly too, she had
pujas,
austere rites aimed at God alone, without the feasting and gaiety of the Hanuman House ceremonies. The pundit came and Mrs Tulsi sat before him; he read from the scriptures, took his money, changed in the bathroom and left. More and more prayer flags went up in the yard, the white and red pennants fluttering until they were ragged, the bamboo poles going yellow, brown, grey. For every
puja
Mrs Tulsi tried a different pundit, since no pundit could please her as well as Hari. And, no pundit pleasing her, her faith yielded. She sent Sushila to burn candles in the Roman Catholic church; she put a crucifix in her room; and she had Pundit Tulsi’s grave cleaned for All Saints’ Day.

The more she was recommended not to exert herself the less she was able to exert herself, until she appeared to live only for her illness. She became obsessed with the decay of her body, and finally wanted the girls to search her head for lice. No louse could have survived the hourly dousing with bay rum which her head received, but she was enraged when the girls found nothing. She called them liars, pinched them, pulled their hair. Sometimes she was only hurt; then she shuffled out to the verandah and sat, taking her veil to her lips, feeding her eyes on the green, as Mrs Tuttle had recommended. She would speak to no one, refuse to eat, reject all care. She would sit, feeding her eyes on the green, the tears running down her slack cheeks below her dark glasses.

Of all hands she liked Myna’s best. She wanted Myna to search her head for lice, wanted Myna to kill them, wanted to hear them being squashed between Myna’s fingernails. This preference created some jealousy, upset Myna, annoyed Mr Biswas.

‘Don’t go and pick her damn lice,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘Don’t worry with your father,’ Shama said, unwilling to lose this unexpected hold over Mrs Tulsi.

And Myna went and spent hours in Mrs Tulsi’s room, her slender fingers exploring every strand of Mrs Tulsi’s thin, grey, bay-rum-scented hair. From time to time, to satisfy Mrs
Tulsi, Myna clicked her fingernails, and Mrs Tulsi swallowed and said, ‘Ah,’ pleased that one of her lice had been caught.

An additional constraint came upon the house when Shekhar and his family paid one of their visits to Mrs Tulsi. If Shekhar had come alone he would have been more warmly welcomed by his sisters. But the antagonism between them and Shekhar’s Presbyterian wife Dorothy had deepened as Shekhar had prospered and Dorothy’s Presbyterianism had become more assertive and excluding. There had almost been an open quarrel when Shekhar, approached by the widows for a loan to start a mobile restaurant, had offered them jobs in his cinemas instead. They regarded this as an insult and saw in it the hand of Dorothy. Of course they refused: they did not care to be employed by Dorothy and they would never work in a place of public entertainment.

Shekhar could never appear as more than a visitor. He came in his car, led his wife and five elegant daughters upstairs, and for a long time nothing was heard except occasional footsteps and Mrs Tulsi’s low voice going evenly on. Then Shekhar came downstairs by himself, forbiddingly correct in white short sleeved sports shirt and white slacks. Having listened to his mother, he now listened to his sisters, staring them in the eye and saying, ‘Hm – hm,’ his top lip hanging over his lower lip and almost concealing it. He spoke little, as though unwilling to disturb the set of his mouth. His words came out abruptly, his expression never changed, and everything he said seemed to have an edge. When he tried to be friendly with the readers and learners he only frightened them. Yet he never appeared unkind; only preoccupied.

After lunch, prepared by Basdai and Sushila and eaten upstairs, Dorothy and her daughters passed downstairs, Dorothy booming out her greetings, her daughters remaining close together and speaking in fine, almost inaudible voices. Then Dorothy would look at her watch and say,
‘Caramba! Ya son las tres. Dónde está tu Padre? Lena, va a llamarle. Vamos, vamos. Es demasiado tarde.
Well, all right, people,’ she would say, turning to the outraged sisters and the wondering readers and learners, ‘we got to go.’ Since they had taken to spending holidays in Venezuela and Colombia, Dorothy used Spanish
when she spoke to her children or to Shekhar in the presence of her sisters-in-law. Later the sisters agreed that Shekhar was to be pitied; they had all noted his unhappiness.

Before they left, Shekhar and Dorothy always called on Mr Biswas. Mr Biswas did not relish these calls. It wasn’t only that Shekhar’s party was campaigning against the Community Welfare Department. Shekhar had never forgotten that Mr Biswas was a clown, and whenever they met he tried to provoke an act of clowning. He made a belittling remark, and Mr Biswas was expected to extend this remark wittily and fancifully. To Mr Biswas’s fury, Dorothy had also adopted this attitude; and from this relationship there was no escape, since anger and retaliation were counted parts of the game. Shekhar came into the front room and asked in his brusque, humourless manner, ‘Is the welfare officer still well-fed?’ Then he hoisted himself on to the destitute’s diningtable and threatened Mr Biswas with the destruction of the department and joblessness. For a time Mr Biswas responded in his old way. He told stories about civil servants, spoke of the trouble he had making up his expense sheets, the work he had looking for work. But soon he made his annoyance plain. ‘You take these things too personally,’ Shekhar said, still playing the game. ‘Our differences are only political. You’ve got to be a little more sophisticated, man.’ ‘Be a little more sophisticated,’ Mr Biswas said, when Shekhar left. ‘On a hungry belly? The old scorpion. Wouldn’t care a damn if I lose my job tomorrow.’

For some time there had been rumours. And now at last the news was given out: Owad, Mrs Tulsi’s younger son, was returning from England. Everyone was excited. Sisters came up from Shorthills in their best clothes to talk over the news. Owad was the adventurer of the family. Absence had turned him into a legend, and his glory was undiminished by the numbers of students who were leaving the colony every week to study medicine in England, America, Canada and India. His exact attainments were not known, but were felt by all to be extraordinary and almost beyond comprehension. He was a doctor, a professional man, with letters after his name! And
he belonged to them! They could no longer claim Shekhar. But every sister had a story which proved how close she had been to Owad, what regard he had had for her.

Mr Biswas felt as proprietary as the sisters towards Owad and shared their excitement. But he was uneasy. Once, many years before, he had felt that he had to leave Hanuman House before Owad and Mrs Tulsi returned to it. Now he experienced the same unease: the same sense of threat, the same need to leave before it was too late. Over and over he checked the money he had saved, the money he was going to save. His additions appeared on cigarette packets, in the margins of newspapers, on the backs of buff government folders. The sum never varied: he had six hundred and twenty dollars; by the end of the year he would have seven hundred. It was a staggering sum, more than he had ever possessed all at once. But it couldn’t attract a loan to buy any house other than one of those wooden tenements that awaited condemnation. At two thousand dollars or so they were bargains, but only for speculators who could take the tenants to court, rebuild, or wait for the site to rise in value. Now, his anxiety growing with the excitement about him, Mr Biswas scanned agents’ lists every morning and drove about the city looking for places to rent. When for one whole week the City Council bought pages and pages in the newspapers to serialize the list of houses it was putting up for auction because their rates had not been paid, Mr Biswas turned up at the Town Hall with all the city’s estate agents; but he lacked the confidence to bid.

He could not avoid Mrs Tulsi when he returned to the house. She sat in the verandah, feeding her eyes on the green, patting her lips with her veil.

And though he had nerved himself for the blow, he grew frantic when it came.

It was Shama who brought the message.