A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [175]
On Saturday he took the children on a surprise visit to Ajodha’s. Tara and Ajodha were as delighted as the children, and the visit lasted till Sunday. There was much to look at in the new house. It was a grand two-storeyed concrete house built and decorated and furnished in the modern manner. The concrete blocks looked like rough-hewn stone; there was no dust-collecting fretwork hanging from the eaves; doors and windows were varnished, not painted, and closed and opened in interesting ways; chairs were upholstered and vast, not small and cane-bottomed; floors were stained and polished; the lavatory flushes were chainless. In the drawingroom they studied Tara’s photographs of the dead; they saw Raghu in his flower-strewn coffin surrounded by his thin, big-eyed children. The kitchen was enormous and abounded in modern contrivances; Tara, old, slow and oldfashioned, seemed out of place in it. When they were tired of the house they wandered about the yard, which had not changed. They talked to the cowman and the gardener, examined the various people who called, and played among the abandoned frames of motor vehicles. After lunch on Saturday they went to the cinema, and on Sunday Ajodha arranged an excursion.
The following week-end they went again, and the week-end after that; and soon this week-end visit was established. They travelled up on Saturday morning, since that was the only time it was reasonably easy to get a bus out of Port of Spain. As soon as they got on the bus in the George Street station Mr Biswas changed, dropping his week-day moroseness and becoming gay and even impish. The mood lasted until Sunday evening; then they were all silent as they got nearer the city, the house, Shama, Monday morning. For a day or two afterwards the house in Port of Spain seemed dark and clumsy.
Shama went on only one of these visits, and that she almost ruined. The old, unspoken antagonism between the families still existed and she was not eager to go. There had been a minor quarrel just before they went through the gate, and Shama was sullen when she stepped into Tara’s house. Then, either from pride, or because she was made uneasy by the grandeur of the house, or because she was unable to make the effort, she remained sullen throughout the week-end. She said afterwards that she had known all along that Ajodha and Tara did not care for her; and she never went again.
She was often alone in Port of Spain. The children were not anxious to go with her to Hanuman House, and as dissension there increased she went less often herself, regretting the old warmth, fearing to be involved in new quarrels. She had hardly moved outside her own family and did not know how to get on with strangers. She was shy of people of another race, religion or way of life. Her shyness had got her a reputation for hardness among the tenants, and she had done little to get to know the woman who lived in Owad’s old room. But now, alone at the week-ends, she felt the need of company and sought out the woman, who not only responded, but showed herself exceedingly curious. And Shama took down her account books and explained.
So the house became Shama’s, the place where she stayed, the place to which Mr Biswas and the children returned with sadness after the week-end.
And during the week Anand’s life was a misery. While Mr Biswas struggled with features on the splendid work of the Chacachacare Leper Settlement (with a photograph of lepers at prayer) and the Young Offenders’ Detention Institution (with a photograph of young offenders at prayer), Anand wrote down and learned by heart copious notes on geography and English. Textbooks were discarded; only the notes of the teacher mattered; any deviation was instantly and severely punished; and there was not a day when