A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [28]
The sun had not risen and the back trace was still and empty when Mr Biswas roused Bipti.
‘Mohun! What has happened?’
‘I fell down. Don’t ask me.’
‘Come, tell me. What’s the matter?’
‘Why do you keep on sending me to stay with other people?’
‘Who beat you?’ She pressed a finger under the cut on the cheek-bone and he winced. ‘Bhandat beat you?’ She undid his shirt and saw the weals on his back. ‘He beat you? He beat you?’
She made him lie face down on the bed in her room, and, for the first time since he was a baby, rubbed his body down with oil. She gave him a cup of hot milk sweetened with brown sugar.
‘I am never going back there,’ Mr Biswas said.
Instead of giving the consolation he expected, Bipti said, as though arguing with him, ‘Where will you go then?’
He became impatient. ‘You have never done a thing for me. You are a pauper.’
He had meant to hurt her, but she was not hurt. ‘It is my fate. I have had no luck with my children. And with you, Mohun, I have the least luck of all. Everything Sitaram said about you was true.’
‘I have heard you and everybody else talking a lot about this Sitaram. What exactly did he say?’
‘That you were going to be a spendthrift and a liar and that you were going to be lecherous.’
‘Oh yes. Spendthrift with two dollars a month. Two whole dollars. Two hundred cents. Very heavy if you put that in a bag. And lecherous?’
‘Leading a bad life. With women. But you are too small.’
‘Bhandat’s children are more lecherous than me. And with their mother too.’
‘Mohun!’ Then Bipti said, ‘I don’t know what Tara is going to say.’
‘Again! Why do you keep on caring what Tara says? I don’t want you to go and see Tara. I don’t want anything from her. And Ajodha can keep that body of his. Let Bhandat’s boys read to him. I am finished with that.’
But Bipti went to see Tara, and that afternoon Tara, still in her mourning clothes and her jewellery, fresh from her funeral duties and her struggles with the funeral photographer, came to the back trace.
‘Poor Mohun,’ Tara said. ‘He’s shameless, that Bhandat.’
‘I am sure he stole the money himself,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘He’s got a lot of practice. He steals all the time. And I can always tell when he is stealing. He spins the coin.’
‘Mohun!’ Bipti said.
‘He’s the lecher, spendthrift and liar. Not me.’
‘Mohun!’
‘And I know all about that other woman. His sons know about her too. They boast about it. He quarrels with his wife and beats her. I am not going back to that shop if he comes and asks me on bended knee.’
‘I can’t see Bhandat doing that,’ Tara said. ‘But he is sorry. The dollar wasn’t missing. It was at the bottom of his trouser pocket and he didn’t notice it.’
‘He was too drunk, if you ask me.’ Then the humiliation hurt afresh and he began to cry. ‘You see, Ma. I have no father to look after me and people can treat me how they want.’
Tara became coaxing.
Mr Biswas, enjoying the coaxing and his misery, still spoke angrily. ‘Dehuti was quite right to run away from you. I am sure you treated her badly.’
By mentioning Dehuti’s name he had gone too far. Tara at once stiffened and, without saying more, left, her long skirt billowing about her, the silver bracelets on her arm clanking.
Bipti ran out after her to the yard. ‘You mustn’t mind the boy, Tara. He is young.’
‘I don’t mind, Bipti.’
‘Oh Mohun,’ Bipti said, when she came back to the room, ‘you will reduce us all to pauperdom. You will see me spending the rest of my days in the Poor House.’
‘I am going to get a job on my own. And I am going to get my own house too. I am finished with this.’ He waved his aching arm about the mud walls and the low, sooty thatch.
On Monday morning he set about looking for a job. How did one look for a job?