A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [203]
Now when he said to Shama: ‘Hole! That’s what your family has got me in. This hole!’ his words had an unpleasant relevance. For whereas before he had spoken of his house in the country and his mother-in-law’s estate, now he kept his address as secret as an animal keeps its hole. And his hole was not a haven. His indigestion returned, virulently; and he saw his children increasingly riddled with nervous afflictions. Savi suffered from a skin rash, and Anand suddenly developed asthma, which laid him in bed for three days at a time, choking, having his chest scorched and peeled by the futile applications of a medicated wadding.
Still the boarders came. The education frenzy had spread to Mrs Tulsi’s friends and retainers at Arwacas. They all wanted their children to go to Port of Spain schools, and Mrs Tulsi, fulfilling a duty that had been imposed in a different age, had to take them in. And Basdai boarded them. The floggings and the rows increased. The cries of ‘Read! Learn!’ increased; and every morning, not long after the babbling children had streamed through the narrow gateway between the high walls, Mr Biswas emerged, neatly dressed, and cycled to the Sentinel.
Despite his duties and despite the fear of the sack, which he had never quite lost, even during the adventure at Shorthills, the office now became the haven to which he escaped every morning; and like Mr Burnett’s news editor, he dreaded leaving it. It was only at midday, when the readers and learners were at school and W. C. Tuttle and Govind were at work, that he found the house bearable. He gave himself a longer midday break and stayed later in the office in the afternoons.
Then once more Shama started to bring out her account books, and once more she showed how impossible it was for them to live on what he earned. Self-disgust led to anger, shouts, tears, something to add to the concentrated hubbub of the evening, the nerve-torn helplessness. In daylight, in a Sentinel motorcar and with a Sentinel photographer, he drove through the open plain to call on Indian farmers to get material for his feature on Prospects for This Year’s Rice Crop. They, illiterate, not knowing to what he would return that evening, treated him as an incredibly superior being. And these same men who, like his brothers, had started on the estates and saved and bought land of their own, were building mansions; they were sending their sons to America and Canada to become doctors and dentists. There was money in the island. It showed in the suits of Govind, who drove the Americans in his taxi; in the possessions of W. C. Tuttle, who hired out his lorry to them; in the new cars; the new buildings. And from this money, despite Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, despite Samuel Smiles, Mr Biswas found himself barred.
It was now that he began to speak to his children of his childhood. He told them of the hut, the men digging in the garden at night; he told them of the oil that was later found on the land. What fortune might have been theirs, if only his father had not died, if only he had stuck to the land like his brothers, if he had not gone to Pagotes, not become a sign-writer, not gone to Hanuman House, not married! If only so many things had not happened!
He blamed his father; he blamed his mother; he blamed the Tulsis; he blamed Shama. Blame succeeded blame confusedly in his mind; but more and more he blamed the Sentinel, and hinted savagely to Shama, almost as if she were on the board of the paper, that he was going to keep his eye open for another job, and that if the worst came to the worst he would get a job as a labourer with the Americans.
‘Labourer!’ Shama said. ‘With those hammocks you have for muscles, I would like to see how long you would last.’
Which either made him angry, or reduced him to an absurd puckishness. Then, lying on the Slumberking in vest and pants, as was his wont