A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [255]
By the end of the week the house was in a ferment. Everyone was waiting for the revolution. The Soviet Constitution and the Soviet Weekly were read more thoroughly than the Sentinel or the Guardian. Every received idea was shaken. The readers and learners, happy to think themselves in a society that was soon to be utterly destroyed, relaxed their efforts to read and learn and began to despise their teachers, whom they had previously reverenced, as ill-informed stooges.
And Owad was an all-rounder. He not only had views on politics and military strategy; he not only was knowledgeable about cricket and football; he lifted weights, he swam, he rowed; and he had strong opinions about artists and writers.
‘Eliot,’ he told Anand. ‘Used to see him a lot. American, you know. The Waste Land. The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Let us go then, you and I. Eliot is a man I simply loathe.’
And at school Anand said, ‘Eliot is a man I simply loathe’; and added, ‘I know someone who knows him.’
While they waited for the revolution, life had to be lived. The tent was taken down. Sisters and married granddaughters left. Visitors no longer came in great numbers. Owad took up his duties at the Colonial Hospital and for a time the house had to be content with stories of the operations he had carried out. The refugee doctor was dismissed and Owad looked after Mrs Tulsi himself. She improved spectacularly. ‘These doctors stopped learning twenty years ago,’ Owad said. ‘They don’t even bother to keep up with the journals.’ Journals had been coming to him by almost every post from England, and drug samples, which he displayed proudly, though sometimes with scathing comments.
Communal cooking had stopped, but communal life continued. Sisters and granddaughters often came to spend a night or a week-end. They brought all their illnesses to him and he attended to them without charge, giving injections wholesale with new miracle drugs which he said were as yet unknown in the colony. Later the sisters worked out what they would have had to pay another doctor, and there was a gentle rivalry as to who had been favoured with the most expensive treatment.
And Owad’s success grew. For long the emphasis in the house had been on reading and learning, which many of the readers and learners couldn’t do well and approached reluctantly. Now Owad said that this emphasis was wrong. Everyone had something to offer. Physical strength and manual skills were as important as academic success, and he spoke of the equality in Russia of peasants, workers and intellectuals. He organized swimming parties, boating expeditions, ping-pong tournaments; and such was the admiration and respect felt for him that even enemies came together. Anand and Vidiadhar played some ping-pong sets and, though not speaking a word to one another before or after, were scrupulously polite during the game, saying ‘Good shot!’ and ‘Bad luck!’ at the least opportunity. Vidiadhar, who had developed into a games-playing thug, more keen than competent and never picked for any college side, excelled in these family games and was the house champion.
‘I can’t tell you,’ Chinta said to Owad, ‘how Vidiadhar got me worried. That boy does sweat so much. You can’t get him to stick in a corner with some old book. He always exercising or playing some rough game or other. He done break a hand, a foot and some ribs. I does keep on trying to stop him. But he don’t listen. And he does sweat so much.’
‘Nothing to worry about there,’ Owad said, the doctor now. ‘That is quite normal.’
‘You take a weight off my mind,’ Chinta said, disappointed, for she believed that profuse sweating was a sign of exceptional virility and had hoped to be told so. ‘He does sweat so much.’
Regularly Shekhar, Dorothy and their five daughters came