A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [198]
Bipti helped with the housework and on the land. When, after Bipti’s death, Mr Biswas wished to be reminded of her, he thought less of his childhood and the back trace than of this fortnight at Shorthills. He thought of one moment in particular. The ground in front of the house had been only partly cleared, and one afternoon, when he had pushed his bicycle up the earth steps to the top of the hill, he saw that part of the ground, which he had left that morning cumbered and unbroken, had been cleared and levelled and forked. The black earth was soft and stoneless; the spade had cut cleanly into it, leaving damp walls as smooth as mason’s work. Here and there the prongs of the fork had left shallow parallel indentations on the upturned earth. In the setting sun, the sad dusk, with Bipti working in a garden that looked, for a moment, like a garden he had known a dark time ages ago, the intervening years fell away. Thereafter the marks of a fork in earth made him think of that moment at the top of the hill, and of Bipti.
The children looked forward to the firing of the land as to a celebration. The Civil Defence authorities had given them a taste for large conflagrations, and now they were to have a hill on fire in their own backyard. It would be almost as good as the mock air-raid on the Port of Spain race course. Of course there would be no dummy houses to burn, no ambulances, no nurses attending to people groaning at mock wounds, no Boy Scouts on motor bicycles dashing about through the thick smoke with dummy dispatches; but at the same time there would be none of those eager firefighters who, in spite of the public outcry, had rescued some of the dummy buildings before they were even scorched.
Mr Biswas, displaying manual skills which his children secretly distrusted, dug trenches and prepared little nests of twigs and leaves at what he called strategic points. On Saturday afternoon he summoned the children, soaked a brand in pitch-oil, set it alight, and ran from nest to nest, poking the brand in and jumping back, as though he had touched off an explosion. A leaf caught here and a twig there, blazed, shrank, smouldered, died. Mr Biswas didn’t wait to see. Ignoring the cries of the children, he ran on, leaving a trail of subsiding wisps of dark smoke.
‘Is all right,’ he said, coming down the hillside, the brand dripping fire. ‘Is all right. Fire is a funny thing. You think it out, but it blazing like hell underground.’
One of the smoke wisps shrank like a failing fountain. ‘That one take your advice and gone underground,’ Savi said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, rubbing one itching ankle against the other. ‘Perhaps it is a little too green. Perhaps we should wait until next week.’
There were protests.
Savi put her hand to her face and backed away.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘The heat,’ Savi said.
‘You just carry on. See if you don’t get hot somewhere else. Clowns. That’s what I’m raising. A pack of clowns.’
From the kitchen Shama shouted, ‘Hurry up, all-you. The sun going down.’
They went to examine the nests Mr Biswas had fired. They found them collapsed, reduced: shallow heaps of grey leaves and black twigs. Only one had caught, and from it the fire proceeded unspectacularly, avoiding thick branches and nibbling at lesser ones, making the bark curl, attacking the green wood with a great deal of smoke, staining it, then retreating to run up a twig with a businesslike air, scorching the brown leaves, creating a brief blaze, then halting. On the gound there were a few isolated flames, none higher than an inch.
‘Fireworks,’ Savi said.
‘Well, do it yourself.’
The children ran to the kitchen