A House for Mr. Biswas (47 page)

Owad said, ‘Anyway, you’ve got the record for ducking, Shompo.’

‘Shut up!’ Anand screamed. He began to cry, rubbing his legs on the hard, cracked ground, then turning over on his belly.

Mr Biswas took up the shirt with the safetypin and handed it to Anand.

Anand snatched the shirt and said, ‘Leave me.’

‘We shoulda leave you,’ Mr Biswas said, ‘when you was there, ducking.’ As soon as he spoke the last word he regretted it.

‘Yes!’ Anand screamed. ‘You shoulda leave me.’ He got up and, going to his heap of clothes, began to dress furiously, forcing his clothes over his wet and gritty skin. ‘I am never going to come out with any of you again.’ His eyes were small and red, the lids swollen.

He walked away from them, quickly, his small body silhouetted against the sun, across the weed-ridden mud flat. Unused, his towel remained rolled, a large bundle below his arm.

‘Well,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Back for a little duck?’

Owad and Shekhar smiled. Then, slowly, they all dressed.

‘I never thought the day would come when I would be glad that I was a sea scout,’ Shekhar said. ‘It was just like a hole in the sea, you know. And there was a helluva pull. By tomorrow little Anand would really have been in Venezuela.’

They found Shama anxious to know why Anand had been sent back. He had said nothing and had locked himself in his room.

Savi and Myna burst into tears when they heard.

The lunch was the climax of the week-end festivities, but Anand did not come out of his room. He ate only a slice of water melon which Savi took to him.

Later that afternoon, after Shekhar had left, Shama gave vent to her annoyance. Anand had spoiled the week-end for everybody and she was going to flog him. She was dissuaded only by Owad’s pleas.

‘My children! My children!’ Shama said. ‘Well, the example set. They just following.’

The next day Mr Biswas wrote an angry article about the lack of warning notices at Docksite. In the afternoon Anand came home from school a little more composed and, extraordinarily, without being asked, took out a copy book from his bag and handed it to Mr Biswas, who was in the hammock in the back verandah. Then Anand went to change.

The copy book contained Anand’s English compositions, which reflected the vocabulary and ideals of Anand’s teacher as well as Anand’s obsession with the stylistic device of the noun followed by a dash, an adjective and the noun again: for example, ‘the robbers – the ruthless robbers’.

The last composition was headed ‘A Day by the Seaside’. Below that the phrases supplied by the teacher had been copied down: project a visit – feverish preparations – eager anticipation – laden hampers – wind blowing through open car – spirits overflowing into song – graceful curve of coconut trees – arc of golden sand – crystalline water – pounding surf

–majestic rollers – energetically battling the waves – cries of delirious joy – grateful shade of coconut trees – glorious sunset – sad to leave – memory to be cherished in future days – looking forward in eager anticipation to paying a return visit.

Mr Biswas was familiar with the clarity and optimism of the teacher’s vision, and he expected Anand to write: ‘With anticipation – eager anticipation – we projected a visit to the seaside and we made preparations – feverish preparations – and then on the appointed morning we struggled with hampers – laden hampers – into the motorcar.’ For in these compositions Anand and his fellows knew nothing but luxury.

But in this last composition there were no clashes and repetitions; no hampers, no motorcar, no golden arcs of sand; only a walk to Docksite, a concrete sea-wall and liners in the distance. Mr Biswas read on, anxious to share the pain of the previous day. ‘I raised my hand but I did not know if it got to the top. I opened my mouth to cry for help. Water filled it. I thought I was going to die and I closed my eyes because I did not want to look at the water.’ The composition ended with a denunciation of the sea.

None of the teacher’s phrases had been used but the composition had been given twelve marks out often.

Anand had come back to the verandah and was having his tea at the table.

Mr Biswas wished to be close to him. He would have done anything to make up for the solitude of the previous day. He said, ‘Come and sit down here and go through the composition with me.’

Anand became impatient. He was pleased by the marks but was fed up with the composition and even a little ashamed of it. He had been made to read it out to the class, and the confession that he had not struggled with laden hampers into a car and driven to palm-fringed beaches but had walked to common Docksite had caused some laughter. So had the sentences: ‘I opened my mouth to cry for help. Water filled it.’

‘Come,’ Mr Biswas said, making room in the hammock.

‘No!’ Anand shouted.

But there was no one to laugh.

Mr Biswas’s hurt turned to anger. ‘Go and cut me a whip,’ he said, getting out of the hammock. ‘Go on. Quick sharp.’

Anand stamped down the back stairs. From the neem tree that grew at the edge of the lot and hung over into the sewerage trace he cut a thick rod, far thicker than those he normally cut. His purpose was to insult Mr Biswas. Mr Biswas recognized the insult and was further enraged. He seized the rod and beat Anand savagely. In the end Shama had to intervene.

‘I can’t stand this,’ Savi cried. ‘I can’t stand you people. I am going back to Hanuman House.’

Myna was crying as well.

Shama said to Anand, ‘You see what you cause?’

He said nothing.

‘Good!’ Savi said. ‘All this shouting and screaming make this house sound like every other house in the street. I hope the low minds of some people are satisfied.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Biswas said calmly. ‘Some people are satisfied.’

His smile drove Savi to fresh tears.

But Anand had his revenge that evening.

Now that there were only a few days left to Owad in Trinidad, and very few before the family came to Port of Spain for the farewell, Mr Biswas and Anand ate as many meals as possible with him. They ate formally, in the diningroom. And that evening, just before Mr Biswas sat at the table, Anand pulled the chair from under him, and Mr Biswas fell noisily to the floor.

‘Shompo! Lompo! Gomp!’ Owad said, roaring with laughter.

Savi said, ‘Well, some people are satisfied.’

Mr Biswas didn’t talk during the meal. Afterwards he went for a walk. When he came back he went directly to his room and never once called to anyone to get his cigarettes or matches or books.

It was his habit to walk through the house at six in the morning, rustling the newspaper and getting everyone up. Then he himself went back to bed: he had the gift of enjoying sleep in snatches. He woke no one the next morning and didn’t show himself while the children were getting ready for school.

But before Anand left, Shama gave him a six-cents piece.

‘From your Father. For milk from the Dairies.’

At three that afternoon, when school was over, Anand walked down Victoria Avenue, past the racketing wheels and straps of the Government Printery, crossed Tragarete Road for the shade of the ivory-covered walls of Lapeyrouse Cemetery, and turned into Phillip Street where, in the cigarette factory, was the source of the sweet smell of tobacco which hung over the district. The Dairies looked expensive and forbidding in white and pale green. Anand tiptoed to the caged desk, said to the woman, ‘A small bottle of milk, please,’ paid, got his voucher, and sat on a tall pale green stool at the milky-smelling bar. The white-capped barman tried to stab off the silver top a little too nonchalantly and, failing twice, pressed it out with a large thumb. Anand didn’t care for the ice-cold milk and the cloying sweetness it left at the back of his throat; it also seemed to have the tobacco smell, which he associated with the cemetery.

When he got home Shama gave him a small brown paper parcel. It contained prunes. They were his, to eat as and when he pleased.

Both he and Savi were told to keep the milk and the prunes secret, lest Owad should hear of it and laugh at them for their presumptuousness.

And almost immediately Anand began to pay the price of the milk and prunes. Mr Biswas went to the school and saw the headmaster and the teacher whose vocabulary he knew so well. They agreed that Anand could win an exhibition if he worked, and Mr Biswas made arrangements for Anand to be
given private lessons after school, after milk. To balance this, Mr Biswas also arranged for Anand to have unlimited credit at the school shop; thus deranging Shama’s accounts further.

Savi’s heart went out to Anand.

‘I am too glad,’ she said, ‘that God didn’t give me a brain.’

In the week before Owad’s departure the house filled up with sisters, husbands, children and those of Mrs Tulsi’s retainers who remained faithful. The women came in their brightest clothes and best jewellery and, though only twenty miles from their villages, looked exotic. Heedless of stares, they stared; and made comments in Hindi, unusually loud, unusually ribald, because in the city Hindi was a secret language, and they were in holiday mood. A tent covered the back of the yard where Anand and Owad had sometimes played cricket. Fire-holes had been dug on the pitch itself, and over these food was always being cooked in large black cauldrons specially brought from Hanuman House. The visitors had come with musical instruments. They played and sang late into the night, and neighbours, too fascinated to object, peeped through holes in the corrugated iron fences.

Few of the visitors knew Mr Biswas or knew the position he held in the house. And all at once this position became uncertain. He found himself squeezed into one room, and for periods lost track of Shama and his children. ‘Eight dollars,’ he whispered to Shama. ‘That is the rent I pay every month. I have my rights.’

The rose-bushes and the lily-pond suffered.

‘Set up trip-wires,’ he told Shama. ‘Then let them carry on. “
Aré,
what have we here?” He imitated an old woman talking Hindi. ‘Then, oops! Trip! Bam! Fall. All the pretty clothes get dirty like hell. Face wet with mud. Let that happen a few times. Then they will learn that flowers don’t just grow like that.’

After two days he gave up his flowers as lost. He went for long walks in the evening and stayed out as late as possible, calling at various police stations on the chance of picking up a story. One night he stayed out until the street dogs began their round, futile creatures that hunted in packs, fled at the
sound of a human foot and left a trail of overturned dustbins and sifted garbage. The house was alive but subdued when he got back. He found four children on his bed. They were not his. Thereafter he occupied his room early in the evening, bolted the door and refused to answer knocks, calls, scratches and cries.

And all at once, too, the bond between Owad and himself seemed to have evaporated. Owad was out for much of the time making farewell calls; when he came to the house he was immediately besieged by friends and relations who gazed on him and wept and offered advice which they later discussed among themselves, to prove their concern: advice about money, the weather, food, alcohol, women.

The time came for photographs. Husbands, children and friends watched as Owad posed with Shekhar, with Mrs Tulsi, with Shekhar and Mrs Tulsi, with Shekhar, Mrs Tulsi and the whole array of the sisters who, because the occasion was sad, ignored the pleas of the Chinese photographer and scowled at the camera.

On the last day Seth arrived. He wore his khaki uniform; his bluchers rang on the floor; he dominated, imposing formality wherever he went. His absence had been noted, and now everyone was expectant. But after the final family council Owad, Shekhar, Mrs Tulsi and Seth looked only solemn, which could have been a sign of disagreement, or sorrow.

Mr Biswas achieved a minor notoriety when he brought the
Sentinel
photographer to the house, cleared the drawingroom and did his best to appear to be directing both Owad and the photographer. But on the following morning the story, on page three –
TRINIDAD MAN OFF TO U.K. FOR MEDICAL STUDIES –
was given little attention, for those who were not occupied with dressing their children for the wharf or getting wharf passes were at the service Hari was conducting in the tent.

Finally they went to the wharf. Only new-born babies and their mothers stayed behind. The Tulsi contingent stared at the ship; and the ship’s rails were presently lined with in-transit passengers and members of the ship’s company, getting an unusually exotic glimpse of Port of Spain harbour. The
word went around that well-wishers could go aboard and in a matter of minutes the Tulsis and their friends had overrun the ship. They stared at officers and passengers and the photographs of Adolf Hitler, and listened attentively to the guttural language around them, to mimic it later. The older women kicked at decks and rails and the sides of the ship, testing its seaworthiness. Some of the more susceptible took it in turns to sit on Owad’s bunk and weep. The men were shyer, and more respectful before the might of the ship; they wandered about silently with their hats in their hands. Whatever doubts remained about ship and crew vanished when an officer began giving out presents: lighters to the men, dolls in country dress to the women. And all the time, unnoticed by those he was seeking to impress, Mr Biswas scurried knowingly about the ship, talking to the foreigners and writing in his notebook.

They came out of the ship and massed formally in front of a magenta-coloured shed with French and English notices forbidding smoking. From somewhere a chair had been obtained and Mrs Tulsi sat on it, her veil pulled low over her forehead, a handkerchief crushed in one hand, with Sushila, the sickroom widow, at her side.

Owad started to kiss, strangers first. But they were too many; soon he abandoned them and concentrated on the family. He kissed each sister into a spurt of tears; he shook the men by the hand, and when it was Mr Biswas’s turn he smiled and said, ‘No more ducking.’

Mr Biswas was unaccountably moved. His legs shook; he felt unsteady. He said, ‘I hope war doesn’t break out – ’ Tears rushed to his eyes, he choked and could say no more.