A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [213]
The Tuttles never replied. Chinta sang with added zest. Govind sometimes only chuckled between couplets, making it appear to be part of his song: the Ramayana singer is free to add his own rubric in sound between couplets. Sometimes, however, he interrupted his singing to shout insulting things through the partition. Mr Biswas shouted back, and then Shama had to run upstairs to silence Mr Biswas.
Govind had become the terror of the house. It was as if his long spells in his taxi with his back to his passengers had turned him into a complete misanthrope, as if his threepiece suits had buttoned up whatever remained of his eagerness and loyalty and turned it into a brooding which was liable to periodic sour eruptions. He had suffered a corresponding physical change. His weak handsome face had become gross and unreadable, and since he had taken to driving a taxi his body had lost its hardness and broadened into the sort of body that needs a waistcoat to give it dignity, to suggest that the swelling flesh is under control. His behaviour was odd and unpredictable. The Ramayana singing had taken nearly everyone by surprise, and would have been amusing if it hadn’t coincided with several displays of violence. For days he noticed nobody; then, without provocation, he fastened his attention on someone and pursued him with childish taunts and a frightening smile. He insulted Shama and the children; Shama, appreciating the limitations of Mr Biswas’s hammock-like muscles, bore these insults in silence. He made a number of surprise assaults on Basdai’s readers and learners and generally terrorized them. Appeals to Chinta were useless; the fear Govind inspired was to her a source of pride. The story how Govind had once thrashed Mr Biswas she passed on to her children, and they passed it on to the readers and learners, terrifying them utterly.
A quarrel between Govind and Mr Biswas upstairs was invariably accompanied by a quarrel between their children downstairs.
Once Savi said, ‘I wonder why Pa doesn’t buy a house.’
Govind’s eldest daughter replied, ‘If some people could put money where their mouth is they would be living in palaces.’
‘Some people only have mouth and belly.’
‘Some people at least have a belly. Other people have nothing at all.’
Savi took these defeats badly. As soon as the quarrel upstairs subsided she went to the inner room and lay down on the fourposter. Not wishing to hurt herself again or to hurt her father, she could not tell him what had happened; and he was the only person who could have comforted her.
In the circumstances W. C. Tuttle came to be regarded as a useful ally. His physical strength matched Govind’s (though this was denied by Govind’s children), and their dispute about the garage still stood. It helped, too, that W. C. Tuttle and Mr Biswas had something in common: they both felt that by marrying into the Tulsis they had fallen among barbarians. W. C. Tuttle regarded himself as one of the last defenders of brahmin culture in Trinidad; at the same time he considered he had yielded gracefully to the finer products of Western civilization: its literature, its music, its art. He behaved at all times with a suitable dignity. He exchanged angry words with no one, contenting himself with silent contempt, a quivering of his longhaired nostrils.
And, indeed, apart from the unpleasantness caused by the gramophone, there was between Mr Biswas and W. C. Tuttle only that rivalry which had been touched off when Myna broke the torchbearer’s torchbearing arm and Shama bought a glass cabinet. The battle of possessions Mr Biswas lost by default.