A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [196]
After a few days the thief had not tripped himself up, and Chinta went on searching, drawing crowds wherever she went. Sometimes she spoke Hindi incantations; sometimes she searched with a candle in one hand and a crucifix in the other; sometimes she spat on her left palm, struck the spittle with a finger, and searched in the direction indicated by the flight of the spittle. Finally she decided to hold a trial by Bible and key.
‘The old Roman cat and kitten,’ Mr Biswas said to Shama. ‘Like mother, like daughter. But look, eh, I don’t want my children meddling in that sort of tomfoolery.’
This was repeated throughout the house.
Chinta said, ‘I don’t blame him.’
The Bible-and-key trial lasted the whole of one afternoon. Chinta invoked the names of Saints Peter and Paul and spoke the accusations; Miss Blackie, invoking the same names, defended; and the innocence of everyone except Mr Biswas and his family was established.
Mr Biswas refused to have his room searched and ignored Shama’s pleas that he should allow the children to be tried. ‘She is a Roman cat,’ he said. ‘So what? I look like a Hindu mouse?’ For some time he and Govind had not spoken; now he and Chinta did not speak. Shama attempted to maintain relations with Chinta, but was rebuffed.
‘I am not blaming anybody,’ Chinta said. ‘I am only blaming the man who set the example.’
Then the whisperings began.
‘Don’t talk to them. But watch them.’
‘Vidiadhar! Quick! I left my purse on the table in the diningroom.’
‘Anand likes his nose to run. He swallows the snot. It is like condensed milk to him.’
‘Savi does eat the scabs of sores.’
‘You ever see Kamla’s head? Crawling with lice. But she is like a monkey. She eats them.’
And the girls begged Mr Biswas to move.
He had found a site such as he always wanted, isolated, unused and full of possibilities. It was some way from the estäte house, on a low hill buried in bush and well back from the road. The house was begun and, unblessed, completed in less than a month. Its pattern was precisely that of the house he had attempted in Green Vale, precisely that of thousands of houses in rural Trinidad. It had a verandah, two bedrooms and a drawingroom, and stood on tall pillars. Estate trees provided the timber; he had to pay only for the sawing. He bought corrugated iron for the roof, plain glass and frosted glass for the windows, coloured glass for the drawingroom door, and cement for the pillars.
The speed with which the house went up took him by surprise. The builders had given him no opportunity to withdraw, and at the end he found that his savings were nearly all gone. He felt uneasy. His circumstances had changed; but his ambition had remained steady, and now seemed only idyllic and absurd. He had built his own house, in a place as wild and out-of-the-way as he could have wished. But Shama had to walk a mile to the village to do her shopping, water had to be brought up the hill from a spring in the cocoa woods. And there was the problem of transport. He had to cycle long distances every day, and though he had cut himself off from the family, his children had to go to school in the family car.
After he had bought a Slumberking bed (delivered by two Port of Spain vanmen who swore as they made their various trips up and down the improperly cleared and precipitous path) his money was exhausted. The house was not painted. It stood red-raw in its unregulated green setting, not seeming to invite habitation so much as decay.
Shama, though pained by the quarrel with Chinta, did not approve of the move. She regarded it as provocative, and like the children, she had watched the house rise and wished it not to be completed. The children wanted to go back to Port of Spain,