A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [70]
He lifted a boy by the collar. The boy bawled, the girls with him bawled, the babies in the shop bawled.
From outside a woman asked, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’
Mr Biswas dropped the boy he had seized, and the boy ran outside, screaming louder than the babies.
‘Uncle Mohun beat me. Ma, Uncle Mohun beat me.’
Another woman, doubtless the mother, said, ‘But he wouldn’t touch you for nothing.’ Her tone indicated that Mr Biswas wouldn’t dare. ‘You must have been doing something.’
‘I wasn’t doing nothing, Ma,’ the boy wailed in English.
‘He wasn’t doing nothing, Ma.’ This was from one of the girls. Mr Biswas knew her: a dumpy little thing, with big contemptuous eyes and full, pendulous lips; she was capable of fantastic physical contortions and often performed for visitors at Hanuman House.
‘Blasted liar!’ Mr Biswas said. He ran out of the shop, past a woman who was coming, cooing, to a bawling baby. ‘Wasn’t doing nothing? And who break up all those soda water bottles?’
In the tent Hari droned imperturbably on. Shama remained bowed in her white cocoon. The brothers-in-law sat on their blankets, reverentially still.
Mr Biswas was lucid enough to hope that he wasn’t antagonizing a father.
Padma went into the shop in her slow way and came out and said judicially. ‘Some bottles have been broken.’
‘And is eight cents a bottle,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Wasn’t doing nothing!’
The mother of the boy, suddenly enraged, flew to a hibiscus bush and began breaking off a switch. It was a tough bush and she had to bend the switch back and forth several times. Torn leaves fell on the ground.
The boy’s bawls were now touched with genuine anguish.
The mother broke two switches on the boy, speaking as she beat. ‘This will teach you not to meddle with things that don’t belong to you. This will teach you not to provoke people who don’t make any allowances for children.’ She caught sight of the marks left on the boy’s collar by Mr Biswas’s fingers, sticky from the tin-lid. ‘And this will teach you not to let big people make your clothes dirty. This will teach you that they don’t have to wash them. You are a big man. You know right. You know wrong. You are not a child. That is why I am beating you as though you are a big man and can take a big man’s blows.’
The beating had ceased to be a simple punishment and had become a ritual. Sisters came out to witness, rocking crying babies in their arms, and said without urgency, ‘You will damage the boy, Sumati.’ And: ‘Stop it now, Sumati. You have beaten him enough.’
Sumati continued to beat, and didn’t stop talking.
In the tent Hari intoned. From the set of Shama’s back Mr Biswas could divine her displeasure.
‘House-blessing party!’ Mr Biswas said.
The beating went on.
‘Is just a form of showing-off,’ Mr Biswas said. He had seen enough of these beatings to know that later it would be said admiringly, ‘Sumati beats her children really well’ and that the sisters would say to their children, ‘Do you want to be beaten the way Sumati beat her son that day at The Chase?’
The boy, no longer crying, was at last released. He sought comfort from an aunt, who calmed her baby, calmed the boy, said to the baby, ‘Come, kiss him. His mother has beaten him really badly today’; then to the boy, ‘Come, look how you are making him cry.’ The whimpering boy kissed the crying baby and slowly the noise subsided.
‘Good!’ Sumati said, tears in her eyes. ‘Good! Everyone is satisfied now. And I suppose the soda water bottles have been made whole again. Nobody is losing eight cents a bottle now.’
‘I didn’t ask anybody to beat their child, you hear,’ Mr Biswas said.
‘Nobody asked,’ Sumati said, to no one in particular. ‘I am just saying that everybody is now satisfied.’
She went to the tent and sat down in the section set aside for women