A House for Mr. Biswas (21 page)

In the tent Hari intoned. From the set of Shama’s back Mr Biswas could divine her displeasure.

‘House-blessing party!’ Mr Biswas said.

The beating went on.

‘Is just a form of showing-off,’ Mr Biswas said. He had seen enough of these beatings to know that later it would be said admiringly, ‘Sumati beats her children really well’ and that the sisters would say to their children, ‘Do you want to be beaten the way Sumati beat her son that day at The Chase?’

The boy, no longer crying, was at last released. He sought comfort from an aunt, who calmed her baby, calmed the boy, said to the baby, ‘Come, kiss him. His mother has beaten him really badly today’; then to the boy, ‘Come, look how you are making him cry.’ The whimpering boy kissed the crying baby and slowly the noise subsided.

‘Good!’ Sumati said, tears in her eyes. ‘Good! Everyone is satisfied now. And I suppose the soda water bottles have been made whole again. Nobody is losing eight cents a bottle now.’

‘I didn’t ask anybody to beat their child, you hear,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘Nobody asked,’ Sumati said, to no one in particular. ‘I am just saying that everybody is now satisfied.’

She went to the tent and sat down in the section set aside for women and girls. The boy sat among the men.

The road was now lined with villagers and a few outsiders as well. They had not been attracted by the flogging, though that had encouraged the children of the village to gather a little earlier than might have been expected. They came for the food that would be distributed after the ceremony. Among these expectant uninvited guests Mr Biswas noticed two of the village shopkeepers.

The cooking was being done, under the superintendence of Sushila, over an open fire-hole in the yard. Sisters stirred enormous black cauldrons brought for the occasion from Hanuman House. They sweated and complained but they were happy. Though there was no need for it, some had stayed awake all the previous night, peeling potatoes, cleaning rice, cutting vegetables, singing, drinking coffee. They had prepared bin after bin of rice, bucket upon bucket of lentils and vegetables, vats of tea and coffee, volumes of chapattis.

Mr Biswas had given up trying to work out the cost. ‘Just going to leave me a damn pauper,’ he said. He walked along the hibiscus hedge, plucked leaves, chewed them and spat them out.

‘You have a nice little property here, Mohun.’

It was Mrs Tulsi, looking tired after her rest on the cast iron fourposter. She had used the English word ‘property’; it had an acquisitive, self-satisfied flavour; he would have preferred it if she had said ‘shop’ or ‘place’.

‘Nice?’ he said, not sure whether she was being satirical or not.

‘Very nice little property.’

‘Walls falling down in the shop.’

‘They wouldn’t fall.’

‘Roof leaking in the bedroom.’

‘It doesn’t rain all the time.’

‘And I don’t sleep all the time either. Want a new kitchen.’

‘The kitchen looks all right to me.’

‘And who does eat all the time, eh? We could do with a extra room.’

‘What’s the matter? You want a Hanuman House right away?’

‘I don’t want a Hanuman House at all.’

‘Look,’ Mrs Tulsi said. They were in the gallery now. ‘You don’t want an extra room at all. You could just hang some sugarsacks on these posts during the night, and you have your extra room.’

He looked at her. She was in earnest.

‘Take them away in the morning,’ she said, ‘and you have your gallery again.’

‘Sugarsack, eh?’

‘Just six or seven. You wouldn’t need any more.’

I would like to bury you in one, Mr Biswas thought. He said, ‘You going to send me some of these sugarsacks?’

‘You’re a shopkeeper,’ she said. ‘You have more than me.’

‘Don’t worry. I was just joking. Just send me a coal barrel. You could get a whole family in a coal barrel. You didn’t know that?’

She was too surprised to speak.

‘I don’t know why they still building houses,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Nobody don’t want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn’t see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.’

Mrs Tulsi patted her lips with her veil, turned away and stepped into the yard. Faintly she called, ‘Sushila.’

‘And you could get Hari to bless the barrels right in Hanuman House,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘No need to bring him all the way to The Chase.’

Sushila came and, giving Mr Biswas a hard stare, offered her arm to Mrs Tulsi. ‘What has happened, Mai?’

In the shop a baby woke and screamed and drowned Mrs Tulsi’s words.

Sushila led Mrs Tulsi to the tent.

Mr Biswas went to the bedroom. The window was closed and the room was dark, but enough light came in to make everything distinct: his clothes on the wall, the bed rumpled from Mrs Tulsi’s rest. Violating his fastidiousness, he lay down on the bed. The musty smell of old thatch was mingled with the smell of Mrs Tulsi’s medicaments: bay rum, soft candles, Canadian Healing Oil, ammonia. He didn’t feel a
small man, but the clothes which hung so despairingly from the nail on the mud wall were definitely the clothes of a small man, comic, make-believe clothes.

He wondered what Samuel Smiles would have thought of him.

But perhaps he could change. Leave. Leave Shama, forget the Tulsis, forget everybody. But go where? And do what? What could he do? Apart from becoming a bus-conductor, working as a labourer on the sugar-estates or on the roads, owning a shop. Would Samuel Smiles have seen more than that?

He was in a state between waking and sleeping when there was a rattling on the door: no ordinary rattling: this was rattling with a purpose: he recognized Shama’s hand. He shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He heard the hook lift and fall. She came into the room and even on the earth floor her footsteps were heavy, meant to be noticed. He felt her standing at the side of the fourposter, looking down at him. He stiffened; his breathing changed.

‘Well, you make me really proud of you today,’ Shama said.

And, really, it wasn’t what he was expecting at all. He had grown so used to her devotion at The Chase that he expected her to take his side, if only in private. All the softness went out of him.

Shama sighed.

He got up. ‘The house done bless?’

She flung back her long hair, still damp and straight, and he could see the sandalwood marks on her forehead: so strange on a woman. They made her look terrifyingly holy and unfamiliar.

‘What you waiting for? Get out and make sure it properly bless.’

She was surprised by his vehemence and, without sighing or speaking, left the room.

He heard her making excuses for him.

‘He has a headache.’

He recognized the tone as the one used by friendly sisters to discuss the infirmities of their husbands. It was Shama’s plea to a sister to exchange intimacies, to show support.

He hated Shama for it, yet found himself anxiously waiting for someone to reply, to discuss his illness sympathetically, headache though it was.

But no one even said, ‘Give him an aspirin.’

Still, he was pleased that Shama had tried.

The house-blessing seriously depleted Mr Biswas’s resources; and after the ceremony, affairs in the shop began to go less well. One of the shopkeepers Mr Biswas had fed sold his establishment. Another man moved in; his business prospered. It was the pattern of trade in The Chase.

‘Well, one thing sure,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘The house bless. You think everybody was just waiting for all that free food to stop coming here?’

‘You give too much credit,’ Shama said. ‘You must get those people to pay you.’

‘You want me to go and beat them?’

And when she took out the Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook, he said, ‘What you want to bust your brains adding up accounts for? I could tell you straight off. Ought oughts are ought.’

She worked out the expenses of the house-blessing and added up the outstanding credit.

‘I don’t want to know,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I just don’t want to know. How about getting the house un-bless? You think Hari could manage that?’

She had a theory. ‘The people feeling shame. They owe too much. It used to happen in the store at home.’

‘You know what I think it is? Is my face. I don’t think I have the face of a shopkeeper. I have the sort of face of a man who does give credit but can’t get it.’ He got a mirror and studied his face. ‘That nose, with that ugly lump on top of it. Those Chinese eyes. Look, girl, suppose – I mean, just supposing you see me for the first time. Look at me and try to imagine that.’

She looked.

‘All right. Close your eyes. Now open them. First time you see me. You just see me. What you would say I was?’

She couldn’t say.

‘That is the whole blasted trouble,’ he said. ‘I don’t look like anything at all. Shopkeeper, lawyer, doctor, labourer, overseer – I don’t look like any of them.’

The Samuel Smiles depression fell on him.

Shama was a puzzle. Within the girl who had served in the Tulsi Store and romped up and down the staircase of Hanuman House, the wit, the prankster, there were other Shamas, fully grown, it seemed, just waiting to be released: the wife, the housekeeper, and now the mother. With Mr Biswas she continued to be brisk, uncomplaining and almost unaware of her pregnancy. But when she was visited by her sisters, who made it plain that the pregnancy was their business, Tulsi business, and had little to do with Mr Biswas, a change came over her. She did not cease to be uncomplaining; but she also became someone who not so much suffered as endured. She fanned herself and spat often, which she never did when she was alone; but pregnant women were supposed to behave in this way. It was not that she was trying to impress the sisters and get their sympathy; she was anxious not to disappoint them or let herself down. And when her feet began to swell, Mr Biswas wanted to say, ‘Well, you are complete and normal now. Everything is going as it should. You are just like your sisters.’ For there was no doubt that this was what Shama expected from life: to be taken through every stage, to fulfil every function, to have her share of the established emotions: joy at a birth or marriage, distress during illness and hardship, grief at a death. Life, to be full, had to be this established pattern of sensation. Grief and joy, both equally awaited, were one. For Shama and her sisters and women like them, ambition, if the word could be used, was a series of negatives: not to be unmarried, not to be childless, not to be an undutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow.

Secretly, with the help of her sisters, the baby clothes were made. A number of Mr Biswas’s floursacks disappeared; later they turned up as diapers. And the time came for Shama to go to Hanuman House. Sushila and Chinta came to fetch her;
the pretence was still maintained that Mr Biswas didn’t know why.

Then he discovered that Shama had made preparations for him as well. His clothes had been washed and darned; and he was moved, though not surprised, to find on the kitchen shelf little squares of shop-paper on which, in her Mission-school script that always deteriorated after the first two or three lines, Shama had pencilled recipes for the simplest meals, writing with a disregard for grammar and punctuation which he thought touching. How quaint, too, to find phrases he had only heard her speak committed to paper in this handwriting! In her instructions for the boiling of rice, for example, she told him to ‘throw in just a little pinch of salt’ – he could see her bunching her long fingers – and to use ‘the blue enamel pot without the handle’. How often, crouched before the
chulha
fire, she had said to him, ‘Just hand me the blue pot without the handle.’

During the idle hours in the shop he had begun to choose names, mostly male ones: he never thought anything else likely. He wrote them on shop-paper, rolled them on his tongue, and tried them out on customers.

‘Krishnadhar Haripratap Gokulnath Damodar Biswas. What do you think of that for a name? K. H. G. D. Biswas. Or what about Krishnadhar Gokulnath Haripratap Damodar Biswas. K. G. H. D.’

‘You are not leaving much room for the pundit to give the child a name.’

‘No pundit is giving any name to any child of mine.’

And on the back endpaper of the
Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare,
a work of fatiguing illegibility, he wrote the names in large letters, as though his succession had already been settled. He would have used
Bell’s Standard Elocutionist,
still his favourite reading, if it had not suffered so much from the kick he had given it in the long room at Hanuman House; the covers hung loose and the endpapers had been torn, exposing the khaki-coloured boards. He had bought the
Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare
for the sake of
Julius Caesar,
parts of which he had declaimed at Lal’s school. Every other play defeated him; the volume remained virtually unread and now, as a
repository of the family records, proved to be a mistake. The endpaper blotted atrociously.

And the baby was a girl. But it was born at the correct time; it was born without difficulty; it was healthy; and Shama was absolutely well. He expected no less from her. He closed the shop and cycled to Hanuman House, and found that his daughter had already been named.

‘Look at Savi,’ Shama said.

‘Savi?’

They were in Mrs Tulsi’s room, the Rose Room, where all the sisters spent their confinements.

‘It is a nice name,’ Shama said.

Nice name; when all the way from The Chase he had been working on names, and had decided on Sarojini Lakshmi Kamala Devi.

‘Seth and Hari chose it.’

‘You don’t have to tell me.’ Jerking his chin towards the baby, he asked in English, ‘They had it register?’

On the marble topped table next to the bed there was a sheet of paper under a brass plate. She handed that to him.

‘Well! I glad she register. You know the government and nobody else did want to believe that I was even born. People had to swear and sign all sort of paper.’

‘All of we was register,’ Shama said.