A House for Mr. Biswas (57 page)

‘All right,’ Mr Biswas said.
‘Puja
over. Books now.’

They retired to the bare drawingroom. From time to time they went to the window. The hill was black against a lighter
sky. Here and there it showed red and occasionally burst into yellow flame, which seemed unsupported, dancing in the air.

Anand was in a bus, one of those dilapidated, crowded buses that ran between Shorthills and Port of Spain. Something was wrong. He was lying on the floor of the bus and people were looking down at him and chattering. The bus must have been running over a newly-repaired road: the wheels were kicking up pebbles against the wings.

Myna and Kamla stood over him, and he was being shaken by Savi. He lay on his bedding in the drawingroom.

‘Fire!’ Savi said.

‘What o’clock it is?’

‘Two or three. Get up. Quick.’

The chattering, the pebbles against the wings, was the noise of the fire. Through the window he saw that the hill had turned red, and the land was red in places where no fire had been intended.

‘Pa? Ma?’ he asked.

‘Outside. We have to go to the big house to tell them.’

The house appeared to be encircled by the red, unblazing bush. The heat made breathing painful. Anand looked for the two
poui
trees at the top of the hill. They were black and leafless against the sky.

Hurriedly he dressed.

‘Don’t leave us,’ Myna said.

He heard Mr Biswas shouting outside, ‘Just beat it back. Just beat it back from the kitchen. House safe. No bush around it. Just keep it back from the kitchen.’

‘Savi!’ Shama called. ‘Anand wake?’

‘Don’t leave us,’ Kamla cried.

All four children left the house and walked past the newly-forked land in front to the path that led to the road. Just below the brow of the hill they were surprised by an absolute darkness. Between the path and the road there was no fire.

Myna and Kamla began to cry, afraid of the darkness before them, the fire behind them.

‘Leave them,’ Shama called. ‘And hurry up.’

Savi and Anand picked their way down the earth steps they couldn’t see.

‘You can hold my hand,’ Anand said.

They held hands and worked their way down the hill, into the gully, up the gully and into the road. Trees vaulted the blackness. The blackness was like a weight; it was as if they wore hats that came down to their eyebrows. They didn’t look up, not willing to be reminded that darkness lay above them and behind them as well as in front of them. They fixed their eyes on the road and kicked the loose gravel for the noise. It was chilly.

‘Say
Rama Rama,’
Savi said. ‘It will keep away anything.’

They said
Rama Rama.

‘Is Pa to blame for this,’ Savi said suddenly.

The repetition of
Rama Rama
comforted them. They became used to the darkness. They could distinguish trees a few yards ahead. The squat concrete box, where behind a steel door estate explosives were kept, was a reassuring white blur on the roadside.

At last they came to the bridge of coconut trunks. The white fretwork along the eaves of the house were visible. In Mrs Tulsi’s room, as always at night, a light burned. They made their way across the dangerous bridge and emerged into the open, grateful at that moment for the tree-cutting of Govind and W. C. Tuttle. The tall wet weeds on the drive stroked their bare legs. They sniffed, alert for the smell of snakes.

They heard a heavy breathing. They could not tell from which direction it came. They stopped muttering
Rama Rama,
came close together and began to run towards the concrete steps, a distant grey glow. The breathing followed, and a dull, unhurried tramp.

Glancing to his left, Anand saw the mule in the cricket field. It was following them, moving along the snarled fence-wires. They reached the end of the drive. The mule reached the corner of the field and stopped.

They ran up the concrete steps, avoiding the overhanging nutmeg tree. They fumbled with the bolt on the verandah gate and the noise frightened them. They scratched at doors
and windows, tapped the wall of Mrs Tulsi’s room, rattled the tall drawingroom doors. They called. There was no reply. Every noise they made seemed to them an explosion. But in the silence and blackness they were only whispering. Their footsteps, their knockings, Anand’s stumbling among the stale cakes and the widow’s corn, sounded only like the scuttling of rats.

Then they heard voices: low and alarmed: one aunt whispering to another, Mrs Tulsi calling for Sushila

Anand shouted: ‘Aunt!’

The voices were silenced. Then they were raised again, this time defiantly. Anand knocked hard on a window. A woman’s voice said, ‘Two of the little people!’ There was an exclamation.

They were thought to be the spirits of Hari and Padma.

Mrs Tulsi groaned and spoke a Hindi exorcism. Inside, doors were opened, the floor pounded. There was loud aggressive talk about sticks, cutlasses and God, while Sushila, the sickroom widow, an expert on the supernatural, asked in a sweet conciliatory voice, ‘Poor little people, what can we do for you?’

‘Fire!’ Anand cried.

‘Fire,’ Savi said.

‘Our house on fire!’

And Sushila, though she had taken part in the whisperings against Savi and Mr Biswas, found herself obliged to continue talking sweetly to Savi and Anand.

The apprehension of the house turned to joyous energy at the news of the fire.

‘But really,’ Chinta said, as she happily got ready, ‘what fool doesn’t know that to set fire to land in the night is to ask for trouble?’

Lights went on everywhere. Babies squealed, were hushed. Mrs Tuttle was heard to say, ‘Put something on your head, man. This dew isn’t good for anyone.’ ‘A cutlass, a cutlass,’ Sharma’s widow called. And the children excitedly relayed the news: ‘Uncle Mohun’s house is burning down!’ Some thrilled alarmists feared that the fire might spread through the woods to the big house itself; and
there was speculation about the effects of the fire on the explosives.

The journey to the fire was like an excursion. Once there, the Tulsi party fell to work with a will, cutting, clearing, beating. It became a celebration. Shama, host for the second time to her family, prepared coffee in the kitchen, which was untouched. And Mr Biswas, forgetful of animosities, shouted to everyone, ‘Is all right. Is all right. Everything under control.’

Some eggs were discovered, burnt black, and dry inside. Whether they were snakes’ eggs or the eggs of the widows’ errant hens no one knew. A snake was found burnt to death less than twenty yards from the kitchen. ‘The hand of God,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Burning the bitch up before it bite me.’

Morning revealed the house, still red and raw, in a charred and smoking desolation. Villagers came running to see, and were confirmed in their belief that their village had been taken over by vandals.

‘Charcoal, charcoal,’ Mr Biswas called to them. ‘Anybody want charcoal?’

For days afterwards the valley darkened with ash whenever the wind blew. Ash dusted the plot Bipti had forked.

‘Best thing for the land,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Best sort of fertilizer.’

HE COULD
not simply leave the house in Shorthills. He had to be released from it. And presently this happened. Transport became impossible. The bus service deteriorated; the sports car began to give as much trouble as its predecessor and had to be sold. And just about this time Mrs Tulsi’s house in Port of Spain fell vacant. Mr Biswas was offered two rooms in it, and he immediately accepted.

He considered himself lucky. The housing shortage in Port of Spain had been aggravated by the steady arrival of illegal immigrants from the other islands in search of work with the Americans. A whole shanty town had sprung up at the east end of the city; and even to buy a house was not to assure yourself of a room, for there were now laws against the indiscriminate eviction Shama had so coolly practised.

He put up a sign in the midst of the desolation he had created:
HOUSE FOR RENT OR SALE
, and moved to Port of Spain. The Shorthills adventure was over. From it he had gained only two pieces of furniture: the Slumberking bed and Théophile’s bookcase. And when he moved back to the house in Port of Spain, he did not move alone.

The Tuttles came, Govind and Chinta and their children came, and Basdai, a widow. The Tuttles occupied most of the house. They occupied the drawingroom, the diningroom, a bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom; this gave them effective control of both the front and back verandahs, for which they paid no rent. Govind and Chinta had only one room. Chinta hinted that they could afford more, but were saving and planning for better things; and, as if in promise of this, Govind suddenly gave up wearing rough clothes, and for six successive days, during which he smiled maniacally at everyone, appeared in a different threepiece suit. Every morning Chinta hung out five of Govind’s suits in the sun, and brushed them.
She cooked below the tall-pillared house, and her children slept below the house, on long cedar benches which Théophile had made at Shorthills. Basdai, the widow, lived in the servantroom, which stood by itself in the yard.

Mr Biswas’s two rooms could be entered only through the front verandah, which was Tuttle territory. At first Mr Biswas slept in the inner room. Light and noise from the Tuttles’ drawingroom came through the ventilation gaps at the top of the partition and drove him to the front room, where he was enraged by the constant passage of Shama and the children to and from the inner room. Shama, like Chinta, cooked below the house; and when Mr Biswas shouted for his food or his Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, it had to be taken to him up the front steps, in full view of the street.

The house was never quiet, and became almost unbearable when W. C. Tuttle bought a gramophone. He played one record over and over:

— and here W. C. Tuttle always joined in, whistling, singing, drumming; so that whenever the record came on, Mr Biswas was compelled to listen, waiting for W. C. Tuttle’s accompaniment to:

A dispute also arose between W. C. Tuttle and Govind. They both parked their vehicles in the garage at the side of the house, and in the morning one was invariably in the way of the other. They conducted this quarrel without ever speaking to one another. W. C. Tuttle told Mrs Tuttle that her brothers-in-law were unlettered, Govind grunted at Chinta, and both wives listened penitentially. And now, away from Mrs Tulsi, the sisters also had daily squabbles of their
own, about whose children had dirtied the washing, whose children had left the wc filthy. Basdai, the widow, often mediated, and sometimes there were maudlin reconciliations in the Tuttles’ back verandah. It was Chinta who remarked that these reconciliations had the habit of taking place after the Tuttles had acquired some new item of furniture or clothing.

Despite the strict brahminical régime of his household, W. C. Tuttle was all for modernity. In addition to the gramophone he possessed a radio, a number of dainty tables, a morris suite; and he created a sensation when he bought a four foot high statue of a naked woman holding a torch. An especially long truce followed the arrival of the torchbearer, and Myna, wandering about the Tuttles’ establishment one day, accidentally broke off the torchbearing arm. The Tuttles sealed their frontiers again. Myna, in response to wordless pressure, was flogged, and a frostiness came once more into the relations between the Tuttles and the Biswases. Matters were not helped when Shama announced that she had ordered a glass cabinet from the joiner in the next street.

The glass cabinet came.

Chinta shouted to her children in English. ‘Vidiadhar and Shivadhar! Stay away from the front gate. I don’t want you to go breaking other people things and have other people saying that is because I jealous.’

As the elegant cabinet was being taken up the front steps one of the glass doors swung open, struck the steps and broke. This was observed by the Tuttles, imperfectly concealed behind the jalousies on either side of the drawingroom door.

‘Oh! Oh!’ Mr Biswas said that evening. ‘Glass cabinet come, Shama. Glass cabinet come, girl. The only thing you have to do now is to get something to put inside it.’

She spread out the Japanese coffee-set on one shelf. The other shelves remained empty, and the glass cabinet, for which she had committed herself to many months of debt, became another of her possessions which were regarded as jokes, like her sewingmachine, her cow, the coffee-set. It was placed in the front room, which was already choked with the Slumberking, Théophile’s bookcase, the hatrack, the kitchen
table and the rockingchair. Mr Biswas said, ‘You know, Shama girl, what we want to put these rooms really straight is another bed.’

In the house the crowding became worse. Basdai, the widow, who had occupied the servantroom as a base for a financial assault on the city, gave up that plan and decided instead to take in boarders and lodgers from Shorthills. The widows were now almost frantic to have their children educated. There was no longer a Hanuman House to protect them; everyone had to fight for himself in a new world, the world Owad and Shekhar had entered, where education was the only protection. As fast as the children graduated from the infant school at Shorthills they were sent to Port of Spain. Basdai boarded them.

Between her small servantroom and the back fence Basdai built an additional room of galvanized iron. Here she cooked. The boarders ate on the steps of the servantroom, in the yard, and below the main house. The girls slept in the servantroom with Basdai; the boys slept below the house, with Govind’s children.

Sometimes, driven out by the crowd and the noise, Mr Biswas took Anand for long night walks in the quieter districts of Port of Spain. ‘Even the streets here are cleaner than that house,’ he said. ‘Let the sanitary inspector pay just one visit there, and everybody going to land up in jail. Boarders, lodgers and all. I mad to lay a report myself.’