A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [207]
Now he twisted his head and saw that Shama was smiling. Her excitement contained much self-satisfaction.
‘Who?’ he asked, jumping out of bed, striking the top of his hip-bone against the diningtable. Standing between the table and the bed, it was impossible for him to bend down to get his shoes. He sat down carefully on the bed again and fished out a shoe.
Shama said it was the widows from Shorthills.
He relaxed. ‘I can’t see them outside?’
‘Is private.’
‘But how the hell I can see them inside here?’ It was a problem. The widows would have to stand just inside the door, in the narrow area between the bed and the partition; and he would have to stand between the bed and the table. However, it was evening. He took the cotton sheet from below the pillow and threw it over himself.
Shama went out to summon the widows, and the five widows entered almost at once, in their best white clothes and veils, their faces roughened by sun and rain, their demeanour grave and conspiratorial as it always was whenever they were hatching one of their disastrous schemes: poultry farming, dairy farming, sheep raising, vegetable growing.
Mr Biswas, the sheet pulled halfway up his chest, scratched his bare, slack arms. ‘Can’t ask you to sit down,’ he said. ‘Nowhere to sit down. Except the table.’
The widows didn’t smile. Their solemnity affected Mr Biswas. He stopped scratching his arms and pulled the sheet up to his armpits. Only Shama, already conspicuous in her patched and dirty home-clothes, continued to smile.
Sushila, the senior widow, came to the foot of the bed and spoke.
Could they be considered Deserving Destitutes?
She spoke in a steady, considered way.
Mr Biswas was too embarrassed to reply.
Of course, Sushila said, they couldn’t all be Deserving Destitutes. But couldn’t one?
It was impossible. However destitute they might be, they were relations. But they had put on their best clothes and jewellery and come all the way from Shorthills, and he could not reject them at once. ‘What about the name?’ he asked.
That had occurred to them. The Tulsi name need not be mentioned. Their husbands’ names could be used.
Mr Biswas thought rapidly. ‘But what about the children at school?’
They had thought of that too. Sushila had no children. And as for the photograph: with veil, glasses and a few pieces of facial jewellery she could be effectively disguised.
Mr Biswas could think of no other delaying objection. He scratched his arms slowly.
The widows gazed solemnly, then accusingly at him. As his silence lengthened, Shama’s smile turned to a look of annoyance; in the end she, too, was accusing.
Mr Biswas slapped his left arm. ‘I would lose my job.’
‘But that time,’ Sushila said, ‘when you were the Scarlet Pimpernel, you went around dropping tokens-okens to your mother, your brothers and all the children.’
‘That was different,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I am sorry. Really.’
The five widows were silent. For some time they remained immobile, staring at Mr Biswas until their eyes went blank. He avoided their eyes, felt for cigarettes, and patted the bed until the matchbox rattled.
Sushila started on a deep sigh, and one by one the widows, staring at Mr Biswas’s forehead, sighed and shook their heads. Shama gave Mr Biswas a look of perfect fury. Then she and the widows trooped out of the door.
A child was being flogged downstairs. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone was playing ‘One Night When the Moon Was so Mellow’.
‘I am sorry,’ Mr Biswas said, to the back of the last widow. ‘But I would lose my job. Sorry.’
And really he was sorry. But even if they were not relations, he could not have made their case convincing. How could one speak of a woman as destitute when she lived on her mother’s estate, in one of her mother’s three houses; when her brother was studying medicine in the United Kingdom;