A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [247]
‘He never took much interest in flowers when he was a boy,’ Mrs Tulsi said.
‘I suppose he was too busy reading.’
‘He always liked you, Mohun. I suppose that was because you were a big reader yourself. I don’t know. Perhaps I should have married all my daughters to big readers. Owad always said that. But Seth, you know –’ She stopped; it was the first time he had heard her speak the name for years. ‘The old ways have become oldfashioned so quickly, Mohun. I hear that you are looking for a house.’
‘I have my eye on something.’
‘I am sorry about the inconvenience. But we have to get the house ready for Owad. It isn’t his father’s house, Mohun. Wouldn’t it be nice if he could come back to his father’s house?’
‘Very nice.’
‘You wouldn’t like the smell of paint. And it’s dangerous too. We are putting up some awnings and louvres here and there. Modern things.’
‘It sounds very nice.’
‘Really for Owad. Though I suppose it would be nice for you to come back to.’
‘Come back to?’
‘Aren’t you coming back?’
‘But yes,’ he said, and couldn’t keep the eagerness out of his voice. ‘Yes, of course. Louvres would be very nice.’
Shama was elated at the news.
‘I never did believe,’ she said, ‘that Ma did want us to stay away for good.’ She spoke of Mrs Tulsi’s regard for Myna, her gift of brandy to Anand.
‘God!’ Mr Biswas said, suddenly offended. ‘So you’ve got the reward for lice-picking? You’re sending back Myna to pick some more, eh? God! God! Cat and mouse! Cat and mouse!’
It sickened him that he had fallen into Mrs Tulsi’s trap and shown himself grateful to her. She was keeping him, like her daughters, within her reach. And he was in her power, as he had been ever since he had gone to the Tulsi Store and seen Shama behind the counter.
‘Cat and mouse!’
At any moment she might change her mind. Even if she didn’t, to what would they be allowed to come back? Two rooms, one room, or only a camping place below the house? She had shown how she could use her power; and now she had to be courted and pacified. When she was nostalgic he had to share her nostalgia; when she was abusive he had to forget.
To escape, he had only six hundred dollars. He belonged to the Community Welfare Department: he was an unestablished civil servant. Should the department be destroyed, so would he.
‘Trap!’ he accused Shama. ‘Trap!’
He sought quarrels with her and the children.
‘Sell the damn car!’ he shouted. And knowing how this humiliated Shama, he said it downstairs, where it was heard by sisters and the readers and learners.
He became surly, constantly in pain. He threw things in his room. He pulled down the pictures he had framed and broke them. He threw a glass of milk at Anand and cut him above the eye. He slapped Shama downstairs. So that to the house he became, like Govind, an object of contempt and ridicule. Beside him, the Community Welfare Officer, the absent Owad shone with virtue, success and the regard of everyone.
They moved the glass cabinet, Shama’s dressingtable, Théophile’s bookcase, the hatrack and the Slumberking to the tenement. The iron fourposter was dismantled and taken downstairs with the destitute’s diningtable and the rockingchair, whose rockers splintered on the rough, uneven concrete. Life became nightmarish, divided between the tenement room and the area below the house. Shama continued to cook below the house. Sometimes the children slept there with the readers and learners; sometimes they slept with Mr Biswas in the tenement.
And every afternoon Mr Biswas drove to his area to spread knowledge of the finer things in life. He distributed booklets; he lectured; he formed organizations and became involved in the complicated politics of small villages;