A House for Mr. Biswas (44 page)

They were in the front verandah. Ferns in baskets hung from the eaves, softening the light, cooling the air. Mr Biswas reclined on his morris chair. It was an experience, so new he could not yet savour it, to find himself turned all at once from a visitor into a dweller, in a house that was solid and finished and painted and elegant all over, with a level, gapless floor, straight concrete walls, panelled doors with locks, a complete roof, a ceiling varnished in the drawingroom, painted elsewhere. Finishing details, which up to a few minutes before he had taken for granted, he now noted, one by one, as for the first time. Nothing had to be added, nothing was makeshift; there were no surprises of mud walls or tree-branches, no secret ways of doing anything; everything worked as it was meant to.

The house stood on high pillars and was one of the newest and most imposing in the street. The district had been recently redeveloped and was rising fast, though in every street there were still a number of dwellings of the stubborn poor, unfenced wooden huts which spoke of the time when the district was part of a sugar-estate. The streets were straight; every lot measured one hundred feet by fifty; and a sewerage
trace, almost a street itself, ran down the middle of each block, separating back fences. So there was space; space below the floor of the house itself, space at the back, space at the sides, space for a garden at the front.

Could this luck have been more complete?

Ramchand and Dehuti were delighted. The camplife which Mr Biswas’s presence enforced on them in their two rooms, though pleasant at first, had begun to be irksome. They were glad, too, that Mr Biswas had been settled. They felt responsible for that as well as the reconciliation. One unexpected result of the negotiations was that Dehuti attached herself to Hanuman House, joining the dozens of strange women who, to Mr Biswas’s surprise, were always willing to turn up days before any large function at Hanuman House, abandoning husbands and children, to cook and clean and generally serve, without payment. Dehuti worked hard and was always invited. She often went with the Tulsi sisters to other functions; and at weddings sang the sad songs which had not been sung for her. In time no one thought of her as Mr Biswas’s sister, not even Mr Biswas, to whom she became only one of the women attached to the Tulsis.

Once more, then, the furniture moved. And what had choked the barrackroom made little impression on the house at Port of Spain. The fourposter and Shama’s dressingtable went into a bedroom; the kitchen safe with the coffee-set remained in the back verandah with the green table. The hatrack and the rockingchair alone had places of honour, in the front verandah; they were put out every morning and brought in every night, to prevent them being stolen. For the rest, the house remained furnished in the manner which Mrs Tulsi had thought appropriate to the city. In the drawingroom four cane-bottomed bentwood chairs stood stiffly around a marble topped three-legged table which carried a potted fern on a crocheted and tasselled white cloth. In the diningroom there was a frigid-looking washstand with a ewer and basin. Mrs Tulsi had brought none of the statuary from Hanuman House but many of the brass vases, which, filled
with potted plants, were disposed about the verandah and brought in every night.

Anand and Savi were not easily persuaded to leave Hanuman House. They remained there for some weeks after Shama had left with Myna and Kamla. Then Savi came one Sunday evening with Mrs Tulsi and the god. She saw the street lamps and the lights of the ships in the harbour. Mrs Tulsi took her to the Botanical Gardens; she saw the ponds and grassy slopes of the sunken Rock Gardens; she heard the band play; and she stayed. Anand, however, refused to be allured, until the younger god said, ‘They have a new sweet drink in Port of Spain. Something called Coca Cola. The best thing in the world. Come with me to Port of Spain, and I will get your father to buy you a Coca Cola and some real icecream. In cardboard cups. Real icecream. Not home-made.’

To the children of Hanuman House home-made was not a word of commendation. Home-made icecream was the flavourless (officially coconut) congelation churned out by Chinta after lunch on Christmas Day. She used an old, rusted freezer; she said it ‘skipped’; and to hasten the freezing she threw lumps of ice into the mixture. The rust from the freezer dripped on the icecream and penetrated it, like a ripple of chocolate.

And it was purely this promise of real icecream and Coca Cola that drew Anand to Port of Spain.

On a Sunday afternoon, when shadows had withdrawn to under the eaves of houses, when the city was hard and bright and empty, with doors closed everywhere, and the glass windows of shops reflected only those opposite, Mr Biswas took Anand on a tour of Port of Spain. They walked with a sense of adventure in the middle of empty streets; they heard their footsteps; like this, the city could be known; it held no threat. They looked at café after café, rejecting, at Anand’s insistence, all those which claimed to sell only home-made cakes and icecream. At last they found one which was suitable. On a high red stool, a revelation and luxury in itself, Anand sat at the counter, and the icecream came. In a cardboard tub, frosted, cold to the touch. With a wooden spoon. The cover
had to be taken off and licked; the icecream, light pink and spotted with red, steamed: one preparatory delight after another.

‘It don’t taste like icecream at all,’ Anand said. He cleaned the tub, and it was such a perfectly made thing he would have liked to keep it.

When he sipped the Coca Cola he said, ‘It is like horse pee.’ Which was what some cousin had said of a drink at Hanuman House.

‘Anand!’ Mr Biswas said, smiling at the man behind the counter. ‘You’ve got to stop talking like that. You are in Port of Spain now.’

The house faced east, and the memories that remained of these first four years in Port of Spain were above all memories of morning. The newspaper, delivered free, still warm, the ink still wet, sprawled on the concrete steps, down which the sun was moving. Dew lay on trees and roofs; the empty street, freshly swept and washed, was in cool shadow, and water ran clear in the gutters whose green bases had been scratched and striped by the sweepers’ harsh brooms. Memories of taking the Royal Enfield out from under the house and cycling in a sun still cool along the streets of the awakening city. Stillness at noon: stripping for a short nap: the window of his room open: a square of blue above the unmoving curtain. In the afternoon, the steps in shadow; tea in the back verandah. Then an interview at a hotel, perhaps, and the urgent machinery of the
Sentinel.
The promise of the evening; the expectation of the morning.

With Mrs Tulsi and Owad away on week-ends and during the holidays it was possible at times for Mr Biswas to forget that the house belonged to them. And their presence was hardly a strain. Mrs Tulsi never fainted in Port of Spain, never stuffed soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub into her nostrils, never wore bay-rum-soaked bandages around her forehead. She was neither distant nor possessive with the children, and her relations with Mr Biswas became less cautious and formal as his friendship with Owad grew. Owad appreciated Mr Biswas’s work and Mr Biswas, flattered to be established as a
wit and a madman, developed a respect for the young man who read such big books in foreign languages. They became companions; they went to the cinema and the seaside; and Mr Biswas showed Owad transcripts, which no paper printed, of court proceedings in cases of rape and brothel-keeping.

Mr Biswas ceased to ridicule or resent the excessive care Mrs Tulsi gave to her younger son. Mrs Tulsi believed that prunes, like fish brains, were especially nourishing for people who exercised their brains, and she fed Owad prunes every day. Milk was obtained for him from the Dairies in Phillip Street; it came in proper milk bottles with silver caps; not like the milk Shama got from a man six lots away who, oblivious of the aspirations of the district, kept cows and delivered milk in rum bottles stopped with brown paper.

Though with Owad and Mrs Tulsi Mr Biswas’s attitude towards his children was gently deprecatory, he was watching and learning, with an eye on his own household and especially on Anand. Soon, he hoped, Anand would qualify to eat prunes and drink milk from the Dairies.

His household established, Mr Biswas set about establishing his tyrannies.

‘Savi!’

No answer.

‘Savi! Savi! Oh-Savi-yah! Oh, you there. Why you didn’t answer?’

‘But I come.’

‘Is not enough. You must come
and
answer.’

‘All right.’

‘All right what?’

‘All right, Pa.’

‘Good. On that table in the corner you will find cigarettes, matches and a
Sentinel
notebook. Hand them to me.’

‘O
God!
That is all you call me for?’

‘Yes. That is all. Answer back again, and I make you read out something for me to take down in shorthand.’

Savi ran out of the room.

‘Anand! Anand!’

‘Yes, Pa.’

‘That is better. You are getting a little training now. Sit down there and call out this speech.’

Anand snatched
Bell’s Standard Elocutionist
and angrily read out some Macaulay.

‘You reading too fast.’

‘I thought you was writing shorthand.’

‘You answering back too! You see what happen to you children, spending all that time at Hanuman House. Just for that, check while I read back.’

‘
O God!’
And Anand stamped, regretting the dying day.

But the checking went on.

Then Mr Biswas said, ‘Anand, this is not a punishment. I ask you to do this because I want you to help me.’

He had discovered, with surprise, that this sentence soothed Anand, and he always offered it at the end of these sessions as a consolation.

It was soon established that he did much of his work in bed and was to be expected to call constantly for paper, pencils to be sharpened, matches, cigarettes, ashtrays to be emptied, books to be brought, books to be taken away. It was also established that his sleep was important. He flew into terrible rages when awakened, even at a time he had fixed.

‘Savi,’ Shama would say, ‘go and wake your father.’

‘Let Anand go.’

‘No, the both of you go.’

To Shama, who began to complain of his ‘strictness’ – a word which gave him a curious satisfaction – he said, ‘It is not strictness. It is training.’

Mrs Tulsi, approving if a little surprised, told tales of the severe training to which Pundit Tulsi had submitted his children.

And whenever Mrs Tulsi was away Shama made claims of her own. She was unable to faint like Mrs Tulsi but she complained of fatigue and liked to be attended by her children. She got Savi and Anand to walk on her and said in Hindi, ‘God will bless you,’ with such feeling that they considered it a sufficient recompense. Soon, and without this recompense, it became the duty of Savi and Anand to walk on Mr Biswas as well.

Shama herself did not escape training. She had to file all the stories Mr Biswas wrote. Mr Biswas said she did this inefficiently. He gave her his pay-packet unopened and when she said that the money was insufficient he accused her of incompetence. And so Shama started on her laborious, futile practice of keeping accounts. Every evening she sat down at the green table in the back verandah and noted every penny she had spent during the day, slowly filling both sides of the pages of a bloated, oilstained
Sentinel
notebook with her Mission-school script.

‘Your little daily
puja,
eh?’ Mr Biswas said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I only trying to give you a raise.’

Mr Biswas never asked to see Shama’s accounts, but she did them partly as a reproach to Mr Biswas and partly because she enjoyed it. Whatever his other qualities, Mr Burnett didn’t believe in paying generously and while he edited the
Sentinel
Mr Biswas’s salary never rose above fifty dollars a month, money which went almost as soon as it came. Shama’s household accounts were complicated by the rents she collected. She spent the rent money on the household and then had to make it up with the household money. The figures nearly always came out wrong. And every other week-end Shama’s accounting reached a pitch of frenzy, and she was to be seen in the back verandah puzzling over the
Sentinel
notebook, the rent book, the receipt book, doing innumerable little addition and subtraction sums on scraps of paper and occasionally making memoranda. Shama wrote curious memoranda. She wrote as she spoke and once Mr Biswas came on a note that said, ‘Old creole woman from 42 owe six dollars.’

‘I always did say that you Tulsis were a pack of financial geniuses,’ he said.

She said, ‘I would like you to know that I used to come first in arithmetic’

And when Savi and Anand came to her for help with their arithmetic homework she said, ‘Go to your father. He was the genius in arithmetic’

‘Know more than you anyway,’ he said. ‘Savi, ought twos are how much?’

‘Two.’

‘You are your mother’s daughter all right. Anand?’

‘One.’

‘But what happening these days? They are not teaching as they used to when I was a boy.’

He found fault with all the textbooks.

‘Readers by Captain Cutteridge! Listen to this. Page sixty-five, lesson nineteen. Some of Our Animal Friends.’ He read in a mincing voice: ‘ “What should we do without our animal friends? The cow and the goat give us milk and we eat their flesh when they are killed.” You hear the savage? And listen. “Many boys and girls have to tie up their goats before going to school in the morning, and help to milk them in the afternoon.” Anand, you tie up your goat this morning? Well, you better hurry up. Is nearly milking time. That is the sort of stuff they fulling up the children head with these days. When I was a boy it used to be the
Royal Reader
and
Blackie’s Tropical Reader. Nesfield’s Grammar!’
he exclaimed. ‘I used to use Macdougall’s.’ And he sent Anand hunting for the Macdougall’s, a typographical antique, its battered boards hinged with strips of blue tape.

From time to time he called for their exercise books, said he was horrified, and set himself up as their teacher for a few days. He cured Anand of a leaning towards fancy lettering and got him to abridge the convolutions of his C and J and S. With Savi he could do nothing. As a teacher he was exacting and short-tempered, and when Shama went to Hanuman House she was able to tell her sisters with pride, ‘The children are afraid of him.’