A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [202]
The glass cabinet came.
Chinta shouted to her children in English. ‘Vidiadhar and Shivadhar! Stay away from the front gate. I don’t want you to go breaking other people things and have other people saying that is because I jealous.’
As the elegant cabinet was being taken up the front steps one of the glass doors swung open, struck the steps and broke. This was observed by the Tuttles, imperfectly concealed behind the jalousies on either side of the drawingroom door.
‘Oh! Oh!’ Mr Biswas said that evening. ‘Glass cabinet come, Shama. Glass cabinet come, girl. The only thing you have to do now is to get something to put inside it.’
She spread out the Japanese coffee-set on one shelf. The other shelves remained empty, and the glass cabinet, for which she had committed herself to many months of debt, became another of her possessions which were regarded as jokes, like her sewingmachine, her cow, the coffee-set. It was placed in the front room, which was already choked with the Slumberking, Théophile’s bookcase, the hatrack, the kitchen table and the rockingchair. Mr Biswas said, ‘You know, Shama girl, what we want to put these rooms really straight is another bed.’
In the house the crowding became worse. Basdai, the widow, who had occupied the servantroom as a base for a financial assault on the city, gave up that plan and decided instead to take in boarders and lodgers from Shorthills. The widows were now almost frantic to have their children educated. There was no longer a Hanuman House to protect them; everyone had to fight for himself in a new world, the world Owad and Shekhar had entered, where education was the only protection. As fast as the children graduated from the infant school at Shorthills they were sent to Port of Spain. Basdai boarded them.
Between her small servantroom and the back fence Basdai built an additional room of galvanized iron. Here she cooked. The boarders ate on the steps of the servantroom, in the yard, and below the main house. The girls slept in the servantroom with Basdai; the boys slept below the house, with Govind’s children.
Sometimes, driven out by the crowd and the noise, Mr Biswas took Anand for long night walks in the quieter districts of Port of Spain. ‘Even the streets here are cleaner than that house,’ he said. ‘Let the sanitary inspector pay just one visit there, and everybody going to land up in jail. Boarders, lodgers and all. I mad to lay a report myself.’
The house, pouring out a stream of scholars every morning and receiving a returning stream in the afternoon, soon attracted the attention of the street. And whether it was this, or whether a sanitary inspector had indeed made a threat, news came from Shorthills that Mrs Tulsi had decided to do something. There was talk of flooring and walling the space below the house, talk of partitions and rooms, of lattice work above brick walls. The outer pillars were linked by a half-wall of hollow clay bricks, partly plastered, never painted; there was no sign of lattice work. Instead, to screen the house, the wire fence was pulled down and replaced by a tall brick wall; and this was plastered, this was painted; and the people in the street could only make surmises about the arrangements for the feeding and lodging of the childish multitude who, in the afternoons and evenings and early mornings, buzzed like a school.
The children were divided into residents and boarders, and subdivided into family groups. Clashes were frequent. The boarders also brought quarrels from Shorthills and settled them in Port of Spain. And all evening, above the buzzing, there were sounds of flogging (Basdai had flogging powers over her boarders as well), and Basdai cried, ‘Read! Learn! Learn! Read!’
And every morning,