A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [253]
The pundit, in dhoti, vest, sacred thread, caste-marks and wrist-watch, reclined on a blanket spread on the swept and flattened earth. He was reading a paper Mr Biswas had never seen before. And Mr Biswas saw then that the many other newspapers in the tent were similar to the pundit’s. It was the Soviet Weekly.
It was past midnight before Mr Biswas, moving from group to group, decided he had heard enough; and when Anand tried to tell of Owad’s meeting with Molotov, of the achievements of the Red Army and the glories of Russia, Mr Biswas said it was time for them to go to sleep. He went up to his room, leaving Anand and Savi in the festival atmosphere downstairs. His head rang with the great names the children and the sisters had spoken so casually. To think that the man who had met those people was sleeping under the same roof! There, where Owad had been, was surely where life was to be found.
For a full week the festival continued. Visitors left; fresh ones arrived. Perfect strangers – the ice-man, the salted-peanuts-man, the postman, the beggars, the street-sweepers, many stray children – were called in and fed. The food was supplied by Mrs Tulsi and there was communal cooking, as in the old days, which seemed to have returned with Owad. The fruit hanging from the coconut-frond arches in the tent disappeared; the fronds became yellow. But Owad was still followed by admiring eyes, it was still an honour to be spoken to by him, and everything he had said was to be repeated. At any time and to anyone Owad might start on a new tale; then a crowd instantly collected. Regularly in the evening there were gatherings in the drawingroom or, when Owad was tired, in his bedroom. Mr Biswas attended as often as he could. Mrs Tulsi, forgetting her own illnesses and anxious instead to nurse, held Owad’s hand or head while he spoke.
He had canvassed for the Labour Party in 1945 and was considered by Kingsley Martin to be one of the architects of the Labour victory. In fact Kingsley Martin had pressed him to join the New Statesman and Nation; but he, laughing as at a private joke, said he had told Kingsley no. He had earned the bitter hatred of the Conservative Party by his scathing denunciations of Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech. Scathing was one of his favourite words, and the person he had handled most scathingly was Krishna Menon. He didn’t say, but it appeared from his talk that he had been gratuitously insulted by Menon at a public meeting. He had collected funds for Maurice Thorez and had discussed Party strategy in France with him. He spoke familiarly of Russian generals and their battles. He pronounced Russian names impressively.
‘Those Russian names are ugly like hell,’ Mr Biswas ventured one evening.
The sisters looked at Mr Biswas, then looked at Owad.
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ Owad said. ‘Biswas is a funny name, if you say it in a certain way.’
The sisters looked at Mr Biswas.
‘Rokossovsky and Coca-cola-kowsky,’ Mr Biswas said, a little annoyed. ‘Ugly like hell.’
‘Ugly? Vyacheslav Molotov. Does that sound ugly to you, Ma?’
‘No, son.’
‘Joseph Dugashvili,’ Owad said.
‘That’s the one I had in mind,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Don’t say you think that pretty.’
Owad replied scathingly, ‘I think so.’
The sisters smiled.
‘Gawgle,’ Owad said, raising his chin (he was lying in bed) and making a strangulated noise.
Mrs Tulsi passed her hand from his chin to his Adam’s apple.
‘What was that?’ Mr Biswas asked.
‘Gogol,’ Owad said. ‘The world’s greatest comic writer.’
‘It sounded like a gargle.’ Mr Biswas waited for the applause, but Shama only looked warningly at him.
‘You couldn’t say that in Russia,’ Chinta said.
This led Owad from the beauty of Russian names to Russia itself. ‘There is work for everyone and everyone must work. It is distinctly