A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [246]
He could not avoid Mrs Tulsi when he returned to the house. She sat in the verandah, feeding her eyes on the green, patting her lips with her veil.
And though he had nerved himself for the blow, he grew frantic when it came.
It was Shama who brought the message.
‘The old bitch can’t throw me out like that,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I still have some rights. She has got to provide me with alternative accommodation.’ And: ‘Die, you bitch!’ he hissed towards the verandah. ‘Die!’
‘Man!’
‘Die! Sending poor little Myna to pick her lice. That did you any good? Eh? Think she would throw out the little god like that? O no. The god must have a room to himself. You and me and my children can sleep in sugarsacks. The Tulsi sleeping-bag. Patents applied for. Die, you old bitch!’
They heard Mrs Tulsi mumbling placidly to Sushila.
‘I have my rights,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘This is not like the old days. You can’t just stick a piece of paper on my door and throw me out. Alternative accommodation, if you please.’
But Mrs Tulsi had provided alternative accommodation: a room in one of the tenements whose rents Shama had collected years before. The wooden walls were unpainted, grey-black, rotting; at every step on the patched, shaky floor wood dust excavated by woodlice showered down; there was no ceiling and the naked galvanized roof was fluffy with soot; there was no electricity. Where would the furniture go? Where would they sleep, cook, wash? Where would the children study?
He vowed never to talk to Mrs Tulsi again; and she, as though sensing his resolve, did not speak to him. Morning after morning he went from house to house, looking for rooms to rent, until he was exhausted, and exhaustion burned out his anger. Then in the afternoons he drove to his area, where he stayed until evening.
Returning late one night to the house, which seemed to him more and more ordered and sheltering, he saw Mrs Tulsi sitting in the verandah in the dark. She was humming a hymn, softly, as though she were alone, removed from the world. He did not greet her, and was passing into his room when she spoke.
‘Mohun?’ Her voice was groping, amiable.
He stopped.
‘Mohun?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘How is Anand? I haven’t heard his cough these last few days.’
‘He’s all right.’
‘Children, children. Trouble, trouble. But do you remember how Owad used to work? Eating and reading. Helping in the store and reading. Checking money and reading. Helping head and head with everybody else, and still reading. You remember Hanuman House, Mohun?’
He recognized her mood, and did not wish to be seduced by it. ‘It was a big house. Bigger than the place we are going to.’
She was unruffled. ‘Did they show you Owad’s letter?’
Those of Owad’s letters which went the rounds were mainly about English flowers and the English weather. They were semi-literary, and were in a large handwriting with big spaces between the words and big gaps between the lines. ‘The February fogs have at last gone,’ Owad used to write, ‘depositing a thick coating of black on every window-sill. The snowdrops