A House for Mr. Biswas (72 page)

‘Those Russian names are ugly like hell,’ Mr Biswas ventured one evening.

The sisters looked at Mr Biswas, then looked at Owad.

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ Owad said. ‘Biswas is a funny name, if you say it in a certain way.’

The sisters looked at Mr Biswas.

‘Rokossovsky and Coca-cola-kowsky,’ Mr Biswas said, a little annoyed. ‘Ugly like hell.’

‘Ugly? Vyacheslav Molotov. Does that sound ugly to you, Ma?’

‘No, son.’

‘Joseph Dugashvili,’ Owad said.

‘That’s the one I had in mind,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Don’t say you think
that
pretty.’

Owad replied scathingly, ‘
I
think so.’

The sisters smiled.

‘Gawgle,’ Owad said, raising his chin (he was lying in bed) and making a strangulated noise.

Mrs Tulsi passed her hand from his chin to his Adam’s apple.

‘What was that?’ Mr Biswas asked.

‘Gogol,’ Owad said. ‘The world’s greatest comic writer.’

‘It sounded like a gargle.’ Mr Biswas waited for the applause, but Shama only looked warningly at him.

‘You couldn’t say that in Russia,’ Chinta said.

This led Owad from the beauty of Russian names to Russia itself. ‘There is work for everyone and everyone must work. It is distinctly written in the Soviet Constitution – Basdai, pass me that little book there – that he who does not work shall not eat.’

‘That is fair,’ Chinta said, taking the copy of the Soviet Constitution from Owad, opening it, looking at the title page, closing it, passing it on. ‘Is exactly the sort of law we want in Trinidad.’

‘He who does not work shall not eat,’ Mrs Tulsi repeated slowly.

‘I just wish they could send some of
my
people to Russia,’ Miss Blackie said, sucking her teeth, shaking her skirt and shifting in her chair to express the despair to which her people reduced her.

Mr Biswas said, ‘How can he, who does not eat, work?’

Owad paid no attention. ‘In Russia, you know, Ma’ – it was his habit to address many of his sentences to her – ‘they grow cotton of different colours. Red and blue and green and white cotton.’

‘Just growing like that?’ Shama asked, making up for Mr Biswas’s irreverence.

‘Just growing like that. And you,’ Owad said, speaking to a widow who had been trying without success to grow an acre of rice at Shorthills, ‘you know the labour it is to plant rice. Bending down, up to your knees in muddy water, sun blazing, day in, day out.’

‘The backache,’ the widow said, arching her back and putting her hand where she ached. ‘You don’t have to tell me. Just planting that one acre, and I feel like going to hospital.’

‘None of that in Russia,’ Owad said. ‘No backache and bending down. In Russia, you know how they plant rice?’

They shook their heads.

‘Shoot it from an aeroplane. Not shooting bullets. Shooting rice.’

‘From an aeroplane?’ the rice-planting widow said.

‘From an aeroplane. You could plant your field in a few seconds.’

‘Take care you don’t miss,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘And you,’ Owad said to Sushila. ‘You should really be a doctor. Your bent is that way.’

‘I’ve been telling her so,’ Mrs Tulsi said.

Sushila, who had had enough of nursing Mrs Tulsi, hated the smell of medicines and asked for nothing more than a quiet dry goods shop to support her old age, nevertheless agreed.

‘In Russia you
would
be a doctor. Free.’

‘Doctor like you?’ Sushila asked.

‘Just like me. No difference between the sexes. None of this nonsense about educating the boys and throwing the girls aside.’

Chinta said, ‘Vidiadhar always keep on telling me that he want to be a aeronautical engineer.’

This was a lie. Vidiadhar didn’t even know the meaning of the words. He just liked their sound.

‘He would be an aeronautical engineer,’ Owad said.

‘To take out the rice grains from the aeroplane gas-tank,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘But what about me?’

‘You, Mohun Biswas. Welfare Officer. After they have broken people’s lives, deprived them of opportunity, sending you around like a scavenger to pick the pieces up. A typical capitalist trick, Ma.’

‘Yes, son.’

‘M-m-m-m.’ It was Miss Blackie, purring. ‘Using you like a tool. You have given us five hundred dollars profit. Here, we give you five dollars charity.’ The sisters nodded.

O God, Mr Biswas thought, another scorpion trying to do me out of a job.

‘But you are not really a capitalist lackey,’ Owad said.

‘Not really,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘You are not really a bureaucrat. You are a journalist, a writer, a man of letters.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Yes, man.’

‘In Russia, they see you are a journalist and a writer, they give you a house, give you food and money and tell you, “Go ahead and write.” ’

‘Really really?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘A house, just like that?’

‘Writers get them all the time. A dacha, a house in the country.’

‘Why,’ asked Mrs Tulsi, ‘don’t we all go to Russia?’

‘Ah,’ Owad said. ‘They fought for it. You should hear what they did to the Czar.’

‘M-m-m-m.’ Miss Blackie said, and the sisters nodded gravely.

‘You,’ Mr Biswas said, now full of respect, ‘are you a member of the Communist Party?’

Owad only smiled.

And his reaction was equally cryptic when Anand asked how, as a communist working for the revolution, he could take a job in the government medical service. ‘The Russians have a proverb,’ Owad said. ‘A tortoise can pull in its head and go through a cesspit and remain clean.’

By the end of the week the house was in a ferment. Everyone was waiting for the revolution. The Soviet Constitution and the
Soviet Weekly
were read more thoroughly than the
Sentinel
or the
Guardian.
Every received idea was shaken. The readers and learners, happy to think themselves in a society that was soon to be utterly destroyed, relaxed their efforts to read and learn and began to despise their teachers, whom they had previously reverenced, as ill-informed stooges.

And Owad was an all-rounder. He not only had views on politics and military strategy; he not only was knowledgeable about cricket and football; he lifted weights, he swam, he rowed; and he had strong opinions about artists and writers.

‘Eliot,’ he told Anand. ‘Used to see him a lot. American, you know.
The Waste Land. The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Let us go then, you and I. Eliot is a man I simply loathe.’

And at school Anand said, ‘Eliot is a man I simply loathe’; and added, ‘I know someone who knows him.’

While they waited for the revolution, life had to be lived. The tent was taken down. Sisters and married granddaughters left. Visitors no longer came in great numbers. Owad took up his duties at the Colonial Hospital and for a time the house had to be content with stories of the operations he had carried out. The refugee doctor was dismissed and Owad looked after Mrs Tulsi himself. She improved spectacularly. ‘These doctors stopped learning twenty years ago,’ Owad said. ‘They don’t even bother to keep up with the journals.’ Journals had been coming to him by almost every post from England, and drug samples, which he displayed proudly, though sometimes with scathing comments.

Communal cooking had stopped, but communal life continued. Sisters and granddaughters often came to spend a night or a week-end. They brought all their illnesses to him and he attended to them without charge, giving injections wholesale with new miracle drugs which he said were as yet unknown in the colony. Later the sisters worked out what they would have had to pay another doctor, and there was a gentle rivalry as to who had been favoured with the most expensive treatment.

And Owad’s success grew. For long the emphasis in the house had been on reading and learning, which many of the readers and learners couldn’t do well and approached reluctantly. Now Owad said that this emphasis was wrong. Everyone had something to offer. Physical strength and manual skills were as important as academic success, and he spoke of the equality in Russia of peasants, workers and intellectuals. He organized swimming parties, boating expeditions, ping-pong tournaments; and such was the admiration and respect felt for him that even enemies came together. Anand and Vidiadhar played some ping-pong sets and, though not speaking a word to one another before or after, were scrupulously polite during the game, saying ‘Good shot!’ and ‘Bad luck!’ at the least opportunity. Vidiadhar, who had developed into a games-playing thug, more keen than competent and
never picked for any college side, excelled in these family games and was the house champion.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Chinta said to Owad, ‘how Vidiadhar got me worried. That boy does sweat so much. You can’t get him to stick in a corner with some old book. He always exercising or playing some rough game or other. He done break a hand, a foot and some ribs. I does keep on trying to stop him. But he don’t listen. And he does sweat so much.’

‘Nothing to worry about there,’ Owad said, the doctor now. ‘That is quite normal.’

‘You take a weight off my mind,’ Chinta said, disappointed, for she believed that profuse sweating was a sign of exceptional virility and had hoped to be told so. ‘He
does
sweat so much.’

Regularly Shekhar, Dorothy and their five daughters came to the house, and these visits gave the sisters a sweet revenge. They treated Shekhar with the respect due to him, but they made their contempt for Dorothy plain. ‘I am sorry,’ Chinta said to her one Sunday. ‘I cannot understand you. I only speak Spanish.’ Dorothy had not spoken Spanish since Owad’s arrival and the sisters felt that they were at last making her boil down. But their behaviour had an unexpected result. For Owad, taking his cue from the sisters, spoke rallyingly to Dorothy; she responded with rough good humour and soon a familiarity grew up between them; and one Sunday, to the dismay of the sisters, Dorothy came with her cousin, a handsome young woman who had graduated from McGill University and had all the elegance of the Indian girl from South Trinidad. When they had gone Owad calmed the sisters’ fears by deriding the girl’s Canadian degree, her slight Canadian accent and her musical skills. ‘She went all the way to Canada to learn to play the violin,’ he said. ‘I hope she doesn’t want to play to me. I’ll break the bow on her parents’ heads. People starving, not getting enough to eat in Trinidad, and she playing the violin in Canada!’

And though he spent more and more time with his friends and colleagues and often went south to Shekhar’s, and though when his friends called the house had to be silent and the sisters and the readers and learners hidden, the sisters
continued to feel safe. For after every journey, every meeting, Owad related his adventures to them. His appetite for talk was insatiable, his dramatic gifts never failed, and the comments he made on the people he had met were invariably scathing.

The sisters now sought audience with him singly or in small groups. They came to the house, waited up for him, and when he returned they fell to talking, under the house, so as not to disturb Mrs Tulsi’s sleep. In time each sister felt she had a special hold on him; and having received his confidences, offered hers. At first the sisters spoke of their financial difficulties. But Owad was unwilling to anticipate the revolution. Then the sisters complained. They complained about the teachers who were keeping their children back at school; they complained about Dorothy, about Shekhar, about their husbands; they complained about absent sisters. Every scandal was gone over, every petty dispute, every resentment. And Owad listened. The children listened as well, kept awake by the sisters’ bumbling and their frequent hawking and spitting (a sign of intimacy: the warmer the feeling, the noisier the hawk, the longer the period of speaking through the spittle). In the morning the sisters who had talked late into the night were brisk and exceptionally friendly towards the people they had criticized, exceptionally proprietary towards Owad.

The house was always full of sisters on Sunday, when there was communal cooking. Sometimes Shekhar came by himself and then before lunch there were discussions between the brothers and Mrs Tulsi. The sisters did not feel threatened by these discussions as they had done when Shekhar and Dorothy and Mrs Tulsi talked. They did not feel excluded. For, with Owad there, these discussions were like the old Hanuman House family councils. So the sisters cooked below the house and sang and were gay. They were even anxious to exaggerate the difference between their brothers and themselves. It was as if by doing so they paid their brothers a correct reverence, a reverence which comforted and protected the sisters by assigning them a place again. They spoke no Hindi, used the grossest English dialect and the coarsest
expressions and vied with one another in doing menial jobs and getting themselves dirty. In this way they sealed the family bond for the day.

It was the custom on these Sunday mornings, after the discussions and before lunch, which came before the trip to the sea, for the men to play bridge.

And on this morning Shekhar, despite Anand’s pleas for sophistication, showed his disrelish of Owad’s talk about the extermination of capitalists and what the Russians had done to the Czar, and tried to turn the conversation. It turned, oddly, to modern art.

‘I can’t make head or tail of this Picasso,’ Shekhar said.

‘Picasso is a man I loathe,’ Owad said.

‘But isn’t he a comrade?’ Anand said.

Owad frowned. ‘And as for Chagall and Rouault and Braque —’

‘What do you think of Matisse?’ Shekhar asked, using a name he had got from
Life
and putting a stop to the flow of names he didn’t know.

‘He’s
all right,’ Owad said. ‘Delicious colour.’

This was unfamiliar language to Shekhar. He said, ‘That was a nice picture they made. Didn’t do too well, though.
The Moon and Sixpence.
With George Sanders.’

Owad, concentrating on his cards, didn’t reply.

‘These artists are funny fellers,’ Shekhar said.

They were playing for matches. Anand scattered his heap and said, ‘Portrait by Picasso.’