A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [179]
A series of resonant crashes came from the kitchen.
‘Cut down the rose trees,’ Mr Biswas was shouting. ‘Cut them down. Break up everything else.’
The children, now below the house, heard his footsteps on the floor above as he went from room to room, pulling things down.
Anand walked under the house to the front, past Mr Biswas’s abandoned bicycle. The fence cast a shadow over the pavement and part of the road. Anand leaned against the fence and envied the calm of the other houses in the street, the group of boys and young men, the cricket players, the night chatterers, around the lamp-post.
Fresh noises came from the yard. It was not Mr Biswas pulling things down, but Seth and Ewart and Ewart’s colleague putting up a shed for Seth’s lorries at the side of the house, over Mr Biswas’s garden.
On the road the shadows of houses and trees quickly lengthened, were distorted, became unrecognizable and finally dissolved into darkness.
Mr Biswas came down the front steps.
‘Come with me for a walk.’
Anand would have liked to go, if only because he didn’t want to hurt by refusing. But he wanted more to inspect the damage and comfort Shama.
The damage was slight. Mr Biswas had ordered his destruction with economy. The mirror of Shama’s dressingtable had been unhinged and thrown on the bed, where it lay intact, reflecting the ceiling. The books had been knocked about a good deal; Selections from Sankaracharya had suffered especially. Mrs Tulsi’s marble topped tables had all been overturned; the marble tops, crashing, must have been responsible for some of the more frightening noises. Many of the brass vases had been dented, and two potted palms had lost their pots without in any way losing their shape. The hatrack was in a semi-recumbent position against the half-wall of the front verandah, but it had been thrown there gently: a few hooks had snapped, but the glass was whole. In the kitchen no glass or china had been thrown, only noisy things like pots and pans and enamel plates.
When Mr Biswas returned his mood had changed.
‘Shama, how did those marble tops break?’ he asked, mimicking Mrs Tulsi. Then he acted himself. ‘Break, Mai? What break? Oh, marble top. Yes, Mai. It really break. It look as if it break. Now I wonder how that happened.’ He examined the broken hooks of the hatrack. ‘Didn’t know metal was such a funny thing. Come and look, Savi. Is not smooth inside, you know. Is more like packed sand.’ As for the rediffusion set, which he had kicked from room to room and disembowelled, he said, ‘I wanted to do that for a long time. The company always saying that they replace sets free.’
When the engineers saw the battered box and asked what had happened, he said, ‘I feel we listen to it too hard.’ They left a brand-new set in exchange, of the latest design.
Every night Seth’s lorries rested in the shed at the side of the house. Mr Biswas had never thought of Tulsi property as belonging to any particular person. Everything, the land at Green Vale, the shop at The Chase, belonged simply to the House. But the lorries were Seth’s.
3. The Shorthills Adventure
DESPITE THE solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. Only the death of Pundit Tulsi had prevented them from going back to India; and ever since they had talked, though less often than the old men who gathered in the arcade every evening, of moving on, to India, Demerara, Surinam. Mr Biswas didn’t take such talk seriously. The old men would never see India again. And he could not imagine the Tulsis anywhere else except at Arwacas. Separate from their house, and lands, they would be separate from the labourers, tenants and friends who respected them for their piety and the memory of Pundit Tulsi; their Hindu status would be worthless and, as had happened during their descent on the house in Port of Spain, they would be only exotic.
But