A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [250]
A cable from Barbados threw the house into a frenzy. Mrs Tulsi became gay. ‘Your heart, mum,’ Miss Blackie said. But Mrs Tulsi couldn’t sit still. She insisted on being taken downstairs; she inspected, she joked; she went upstairs and came downstairs again; she went a dozen times to the rooms reserved for Owad. And in the confusion a messenger was sent to summon the pundit even after the pundit had come, a self-effacing man who, in trousers and shirt, had passed unnoticed in the growing crowd.
The sisters announced their intention of staying awake all that night. There was so much cooking to do, they said. The children fell asleep. The group of men around the pundit thinned; the pundit fell asleep. The sisters cooked and joyously complained of overwork; they sang sad wedding songs; they made pots of coffee; they played cards. Some sisters disappeared for an hour or so, but none admitted she had gone to sleep, and Chinta boasted that she could stay awake for seventy-two hours, boasting as though Govind was still the devoted son of the family, as though his brutalities had not occurred, as though time had not passed and they were still sisters in the hall of Hanuman House.
They grew lethargic just before dawn, but the morning light kindled them into fresh, over-energetic activity. Children were washed and fed and dressed before the street awoke; the house was swept and cleaned. Mrs Tulsi was bathed and dressed by Sushila; on her smooth skin there were small beads of perspiration, although the sun had not yet come out and she seldom perspired. Presently the visitors started arriving, many of them only tenuously related to the house, and not a few – the relations, say, of a grandchild’s in-laws – unknown. The street was choked with cars and bright with the dresses of women and girls. Shekhar and Dorothy and their five daughters came. Everyone fussed about something: children, food, wharf-passes, transport. Continually cars drove off with an important noise. Their drivers, returning, showed passes and told of encounters with startled harbour officials.
For Mr Biswas it had been a difficult night. And the morning began badly. When he asked Anand to bring him the Guardian Anand reported that the paper had been appropriated by the pundit and had disappeared. Then he was turned out of the room while Shama and the girls dressed. Downstairs was chaos. He took one look at the bathroom and decided not to use it that day. When he went back to the room it was filled with the slight but offensive smell of face powder and there were clothes everywhere. Miserably, he dressed. ‘The wreck of the blasted Hesperus,’ he said, using a comb to clean his brush of woman’s hair, sniffing as the dust rose visibly in the sunlight that slanted in below the striped awning. Shama noted his irritability but did not comment upon it; this enraged him further. The house, upstairs and down, resounded with impatient footsteps, shouts and shrieks.
The cavalcade left the house in sections. Mrs Tulsi travelled in Shekhar’s car. Mr Biswas went in his Prefect; but his family had split up and gone in other cars, and he was obliged to take some people he didn’t know.
The liner, white and reposed, lay at anchor in the gulf. A chair was found for Mrs Tulsi and set against the dull magenta wall of the customs shed. She was dressed in white, her veil pulled over her forehead. She pressed her lips together from time to time and crumpled a handkerchief in one hand. She was flanked by Miss Blackie, in her churchgoing clothes and a straw hat with a red ribbon, and by Sushila, who carried a large bag with an assortment of medicines.
A tug hooted. The liner was being towed in. Some of the children, those who had learnt at school that one proof of the roundness of the earth was the way ships disappeared beyond the horizon, exaggerated the distance between ship and wharf. Many said the ship would come alongside in two to three hours. Shivadhar, Chinta’s younger son,