A House for Mr. Biswas (70 page)

‘The old bitch can’t throw me out like that,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I still have some rights. She has got to provide me with alternative accommodation.’ And: ‘Die, you bitch!’ he hissed towards the verandah. ‘Die!’

‘Man!’

‘Die! Sending poor little Myna to pick her lice. That did you any good? Eh? Think she would throw out the little god like that? O no. The god must have a room to himself. You and me and my children can sleep in sugarsacks. The Tulsi sleeping-bag. Patents applied for. Die, you old bitch!’

They heard Mrs Tulsi mumbling placidly to Sushila.

‘I have my rights,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘This is not like the old days. You can’t just stick a piece of paper on my door and throw me out. Alternative accommodation, if you please.’

But Mrs Tulsi had provided alternative accommodation: a room in one of the tenements whose rents Shama had collected years before. The wooden walls were unpainted, grey-black, rotting; at every step on the patched, shaky floor wood dust excavated by woodlice showered down; there was no ceiling and the naked galvanized roof was fluffy with soot; there was no electricity. Where would the furniture go? Where would they sleep, cook, wash? Where would the children study?

He vowed never to talk to Mrs Tulsi again; and she, as though sensing his resolve, did not speak to him. Morning after morning he went from house to house, looking for rooms to rent, until he was exhausted, and exhaustion burned out his anger. Then in the afternoons he drove to his area, where he stayed until evening.

Returning late one night to the house, which seemed to him more and more ordered and sheltering, he saw Mrs Tulsi sitting in the verandah in the dark. She was humming a hymn, softly, as though she were alone, removed from the world. He did not greet her, and was passing into his room when she spoke.

‘Mohun?’ Her voice was groping, amiable.

He stopped.

‘Mohun?’

‘Yes, Mother.’

‘How is Anand? I haven’t heard his cough these last few days.’

‘He’s all right.’

‘Children, children. Trouble, trouble. But do you remember how Owad used to work? Eating and reading. Helping in the store and reading. Checking money and reading. Helping head and head with everybody else, and still reading. You remember Hanuman House, Mohun?’

He recognized her mood, and did not wish to be seduced by it. ‘It was a big house. Bigger than the place we are going to.’

She was unruffled. ‘Did they show you Owad’s letter?’

Those of Owad’s letters which went the rounds were mainly about English flowers and the English weather. They were semi-literary, and were in a large handwriting with big spaces between the words and big gaps between the lines. ‘The February fogs have at last gone,’ Owad used to write, ‘depositing a thick coating of black on every window-sill. The snowdrops have come and gone, but the daffodils will be here soon. I planted six daffodils in my tiny front garden. Five have grown. The sixth appears to be a failure. My only hope is that they will not turn out to be blind, as they were last year.’

‘He never took much interest in flowers when he was a boy,’ Mrs Tulsi said.

‘I suppose he was too busy reading.’

‘He always liked you, Mohun. I suppose that was because you were a big reader yourself. I don’t know. Perhaps I should have married all my daughters to big readers. Owad always said that. But Seth, you know –’ She stopped; it was the first time he had heard her speak the name for years. ‘The old ways have become oldfashioned so quickly, Mohun. I hear that you are looking for a house.’

‘I have my eye on something.’

‘I am sorry about the inconvenience. But we have to get the house ready for Owad. It isn’t his father’s house, Mohun. Wouldn’t it be nice if he could come back to his father’s house?’

‘Very nice.’

‘You wouldn’t like the smell of paint. And it’s dangerous too. We are putting up some awnings and louvres here and there. Modern things.’

‘It sounds very nice.’

‘Really for Owad. Though I suppose it would be nice for you to come back to.’

‘Come back to?’

‘Aren’t you coming back?’

‘But yes,’ he said, and couldn’t keep the eagerness out of his voice. ‘Yes, of course. Louvres would be very nice.’

Shama was elated at the news.

‘I never did believe,’ she said, ‘that Ma did want us to stay away for good.’ She spoke of Mrs Tulsi’s regard for Myna, her gift of brandy to Anand.

‘God!’ Mr Biswas said, suddenly offended. ‘So you’ve got the reward for lice-picking? You’re sending back Myna to pick some more, eh? God! God! Cat and mouse! Cat and mouse!’

It sickened him that he had fallen into Mrs Tulsi’s trap and shown himself grateful to her. She was keeping him, like her daughters, within her reach. And he was in her power, as he had been ever since he had gone to the Tulsi Store and seen Shama behind the counter.

‘Cat and mouse!’

At any moment she might change her mind. Even if she didn’t, to what would they be allowed to come back? Two rooms, one room, or only a camping place below the house? She had shown how she could use her power; and now she had to be courted and pacified. When she was nostalgic he had to share her nostalgia; when she was abusive he had to forget.

To escape, he had only six hundred dollars. He belonged to the Community Welfare Department: he was an unestablished civil servant. Should the department be destroyed, so would he.

‘Trap!’ he accused Shama. ‘Trap!’

He sought quarrels with her and the children.

‘Sell the damn car!’ he shouted. And knowing how this humiliated Shama, he said it downstairs, where it was heard by sisters and the readers and learners.

He became surly, constantly in pain. He threw things in his room. He pulled down the pictures he had framed and broke them. He threw a glass of milk at Anand and cut him
above the eye. He slapped Shama downstairs. So that to the house he became, like Govind, an object of contempt and ridicule. Beside him, the Community Welfare Officer, the absent Owad shone with virtue, success and the regard of everyone.

They moved the glass cabinet, Shama’s dressingtable, Théophile’s bookcase, the hatrack and the Slumberking to the tenement. The iron fourposter was dismantled and taken downstairs with the destitute’s diningtable and the rockingchair, whose rockers splintered on the rough, uneven concrete. Life became nightmarish, divided between the tenement room and the area below the house. Shama continued to cook below the house. Sometimes the children slept there with the readers and learners; sometimes they slept with Mr Biswas in the tenement.

And every afternoon Mr Biswas drove to his area to spread knowledge of the finer things in life. He distributed booklets; he lectured; he formed organizations and became involved in the complicated politics of small villages; and late at night he drove back to Port of Spain, to the tenement which was far worse than any of the houses he had visited during the day. The Prefect became coated with dust which rain had hardened and dappled; the floormats were dirty; the back seat was dusty and covered with folders and old, brown newspapers.

His duties then took him to Arwacas, where he was organizing a ‘leadership’ course. And, to avoid the long late drive to Port of Spain, to avoid the tenement and his family, he decided to spend the time at Hanuman House. The back house had been vacant for some time, and no one lived there except a widow who, pursuing an undisclosed business scheme, had stolen back from Shorthills, trusting to her insignificance to escape Seth’s notice. There was little need for her to worry. For some time after the death of his wife Seth had acted wildly. He had been charged with wounding and using insulting behaviour, and had lost much local support. His skills appeared to have left him as well. He had tried to insuranburn one of his old lorries and had been caught and charged with conspiracy. He had been acquitted but it had
cost much money; and he had thereafter grown quiescent. He looked after his dingy foodshop, sent no threats, and no longer spoke of buying over Hanuman House. The family quarrel, never bursting into incident, had become history; neither Seth nor the Tulsis were as important in Arwacas as they had been.

In the store the Tulsi name had been replaced by the Scottish name of a Port of Spain firm, and this name had been spoken for so long that it now fully belonged and no one was aware of any incongruity. A large red advertisement for Bata shoes hung below the statue of Hanuman, and the store was bright and busy. But at the back the house was dead. The courtyard was littered with packing cases, straw, large sheets of stiff brown paper, and cheap untreated kitchen furniture. In the wooden house the doorway between the kitchen and hall had been boarded over and the hall used as a storeroom for paddy, which sent its musty smell and warm tickling dust everywhere. The loft at one side was as dark and jumbled as before. The tank was still in the yard but there were no fish in it; the black paint was blistered and flaked, and the brackish rainwater, with iridescent streaks as of oil on its surface, jumped with mosquito larvae. The almond tree was still sparse-leaved, as though it had been stripped by a storm in the night; the ground below was dry and fibrous. In the garden the Queen of Flowers had become a tree; the oleander had grown until its virtue had been exhausted and it was flowerless; the zinnias and marigolds were lost in bush. All day the Sindhis who had taken over the shop next door played mournful Indian film songs on their gramophone; and their food had strange smells. Yet there were times when the wooden house appeared to be awaiting reanimation: when, in the still hot afternoons, from yards away came the thoughtful cackling of fowls, the sounds of dull activity; when in the evenings oil lamps were lit, and conversation was heard, and laughter, a dog being called, a child being flogged. But Hanuman House was silent. No one stayed when the store closed; and the Sindhis next door slept early.

The widow occupied the Book Room. This large room had always been bare. Stripped of its stacks of printed sheets,
surrounded by emptiness, the muted sounds of life from neighbouring houses, the paddy rising high in the hall downstairs, it seemed more desolate than ever. A cot was in one corner; religious and comforting pictures hung low on the walls about it; next to it was a small chest in which the widow kept her belongings.

The widow, pursuing her business, visiting, was seldom in. Mr Biswas welcomed the silence, the stillness. He requisitioned a desk and swivel-chair from government stores (strange, such proofs of power), and turned the long room into an office. In this room, where the lotuses still bloomed on the wall, he had lived with Shama. Through the Demerara window he had tried to spit on Owad and flung the plateful of food on him. In this room he had been beaten by Govind, had kicked
Bell’s Standard Elocutionist
and given it the dent on the cover. Here, claimed by no one, he had reflected on the unreality of his life, and had wished to make a mark on the wall as proof of his existence. Now he needed no such proof. Relationships had been created where none existed; he stood at their centre. In that very unreality had lain freedom. Now he was encumbered, and it was at Hanuman House that he tried to forget the encumbrance: the children, the scattered furniture, the dark tenement room, and Shama, as helpless as he was and now, what he had longed for, dependent on him.

On the baize-covered desk in the long room there were glasses and spoons stained white with Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, sheafs and sheafs of paper connected with his duties as Community Welfare Officer, and the long, half-used pad in which he noted his expenses for the Prefect, parked in the grounds of the court house.

The redecoration of the house in Port of Spain proceeded slowly. Frightened by the price, Mrs Tulsi had not handed over the job to a contractor. Instead, she employed individual workmen, whom she regularly abused and dismissed. She had no experience of city workpeople and could not understand why they were unwilling to work for food and a little pocketmoney. Miss Blackie blamed the Americans and said that rapaciousness was one of her people’s faults. Even after
wages had been agreed Mrs Tulsi was never willing to pay fully. Once, after he had worked for a fortnight, a burly mason, insulted by the two women, left the house in tears, threatening to go to the police. ‘My people, mum,’ Miss Blackie said apologetically.

It was nearly three months before the work was done. The house was painted upstairs and downstairs, inside and out. Striped awnings hung over the windows; and glass louvres, looking fragile and out of place in that clumsy, heavy house, darkened the verandahs.

And Mr Biswas’s nightmare came to an end. He was invited to return from the tenement. He did not return to his two rooms but, as he had feared, to one, at the back. The rooms he had surrendered were reserved for Owad. Govind and Chinta moved into Basdai’s room, and Basdai, able now only to board, moved under the house with her readers and learners. In his one room Mr Biswas fitted his two beds, Théophile’s bookcase and Shama’s dressingtable. The destitute’s diningtable remained downstairs. There was no room for Shama’s glass cabinet, but Mrs Tulsi offered to lodge it in her diningroom. It was safe there and made a pleasing, modern show. Sometimes the children slept in the room; sometimes they slept downstairs. Nothing was fixed. Yet after the tenement the new arrangement seemed ordered and was a relief.

And now Mr Biswas began to make fresh calculations, working out over and over the number of years that separated each of his children from adulthood. Savi was indeed a grown person. Concentrating on Anand, he had not observed her with attention. And she herself had grown reserved and grave; she no longer quarrelled with her cousins, though she could still be sharp; and she never cried. Anand was more than halfway through college. Soon, Mr Biswas thought, his responsibilities would be over. The older would look after the younger. Somehow, as Mrs Tulsi had said in the hall of Hanuman House when Savi was born, they would survive: they couldn’t be killed. Then he thought: ‘I have missed their childhoods.’

A LETTER
from London. A postcard from Vigo. Mrs Tulsi ceased to be ill and irritable, and spent most of her day in the front verandah, waiting. The house began to fill with sisters, their children and grandchildren, and shook with squeals and thumps. A huge tent was put up in the yard. The bamboo poles were fringed with coconut branches which curved to form arches, and a cluster of fruit hung from every arch. Cooking went on late into the night, and singing; and everyone slept where he could find a place. It was like an old Hanuman House festival. There had been nothing like it since Owad had gone away.