A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [185]
The drawingroom furnishings of Hanuman House had been similarly scattered. There could be no division of this house into the used and the unused, and the thronelike chairs, the statuary and the vases were left in the drawingroom, which in appearance and purpose presently became the equivalent of the Hanuman House hall.
A certain unpleasantness was added to Mr Biswas’s situation by the presence directly across the corridor of a brother-in-law he had never seen at Hanuman House, a tall, contemptuous man who had taken an immediate dislike to him and expressed this dislike by a quivering of the nostrils.
Anand said, ‘Prakash say his pappa got more books than you.’
Mr Biswas sent Anand to find out what books Prakash’s father had.
Anand reported, ‘All the books exactly the same size. On the cover they have a green shield marked “Boots”. And they are all by a man called W. C. Turtle.’
‘Trash,’ Mr Biswas said.
‘Trash,’ Anand told Prakash.
‘You call my books trash?’ Prakash’s father asked Mr Biswas some mornings later, when they opened their doors at the same time.
‘I didn’t call your books trash.’
The nostrils quivered. ‘What about your Epictetus and Manxman and Samuel Smiles?’
‘How do you know about my Epictetus?’
‘How do you know about my books?’
Thereafter Mr Biswas locked his room whenever he left it. The news spread and there were comments.
‘So you start up already?’ Shama said.
And having got to Shorthills, everyone waited, for the sheep, the horses, for the swimming pool to be repaired, the drive weeded, the gardens cleaned, the electricity plant fixed, the house repainted.
Waiting, the children stripped the saman tree of its lianas. But there was no use to which they could put these improbable and pleasing growths; they were not good for skipping, as Mrs Tulsi had said: the thin ones frayed easily, the fat ones were unwieldy. Hari cut down the Julie mango tree on the raised bed at the end of the garden and built a small, kennel-like box-board hut; this was the temple. The reader of W. C. Tuttle put up a large framed print of the goddess Lakshmi in the drawingroom and offered up his own prayers before it every evening; Prakash said his father knew more of these matters than Hari. The brick oven in the kitchen was levelled; the roofed way between the house and kitchen was pulled down and the open area roofed with old corrugated iron and tree-branches from the hillside at the back.
Anand’s patience broke. Spreading a rumour among the children that the house was going to be repainted right away but that the old paint had to be scraped off first, he soon had more than a dozen helpers working on the granite blocks. They made many pink and cream scars on the grey verandah walls before they were noticed; and this effort to force improvements ended in a mass flogging.
Mr Biswas, too, was waiting for improvements. But he did not greatly care about them. For him Shorthills was an adventure, an interlude. His job made him independent of the Tulsis; and Shorthills was an insurance against the sack. It also provided an opportunity to save, an opportunity to plunder. And secretly he was plundering: half a dozen oranges at a time, half a dozen avocado pears or grapefruit or lemons, sold to a café keeper in St Vincent Street with some story about the variety of fruit trees he had in his backyard. The money was little but regular, the thrill of plundering delicious. Plunder! The very sound of the word excited Mr Biswas. Cycling to work in the cool of the morning and whistling in his way, he would suddenly jump off his bicycle, look right, look left, pull down oranges or avocado pears, drop them into his saddlebag, hop on to his saddle and cycle me asuredly