A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [72]
He wondered what Samuel Smiles would have thought of him.
But perhaps he could change. Leave. Leave Shama, forget the Tulsis, forget everybody. But go where? And do what? What could he do? Apart from becoming a bus-conductor, working as a labourer on the sugar-estates or on the roads, owning a shop. Would Samuel Smiles have seen more than that?
He was in a state between waking and sleeping when there was a rattling on the door: no ordinary rattling: this was rattling with a purpose: he recognized Shama’s hand. He shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He heard the hook lift and fall. She came into the room and even on the earth floor her footsteps were heavy, meant to be noticed. He felt her standing at the side of the fourposter, looking down at him. He stiffened; his breathing changed.
‘Well, you make me really proud of you today,’ Shama said.
And, really, it wasn’t what he was expecting at all. He had grown so used to her devotion at The Chase that he expected her to take his side, if only in private. All the softness went out of him.
Shama sighed.
He got up. ‘The house done bless?’
She flung back her long hair, still damp and straight, and he could see the sandalwood marks on her forehead: so strange on a woman. They made her look terrifyingly holy and unfamiliar.
‘What you waiting for? Get out and make sure it properly bless.’
She was surprised by his vehemence and, without sighing or speaking, left the room.
He heard her making excuses for him.
‘He has a headache.’
He recognized the tone as the one used by friendly sisters to discuss the infirmities of their husbands. It was Shama’s plea to a sister to exchange intimacies, to show support.
He hated Shama for it, yet found himself anxiously waiting for someone to reply, to discuss his illness sympathetically, headache though it was.
But no one even said, ‘Give him an aspirin.’
Still, he was pleased that Shama had tried.
The house-blessing seriously depleted Mr Biswas’s resources; and after the ceremony, affairs in the shop began to go less well. One of the shopkeepers Mr Biswas had fed sold his establishment. Another man moved in; his business prospered. It was the pattern of trade in The Chase.
‘Well, one thing sure,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘The house bless. You think everybody was just waiting for all that free food to stop coming here?’
‘You give too much credit,’ Shama said. ‘You must get those people to pay you.’
‘You want me to go and beat them?’
And when she took out the Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook, he said, ‘What you want to bust your brains adding up accounts for? I could tell you straight off. Ought oughts are ought.’
She worked out the expenses of the house-blessing and added up the outstanding credit.
‘I don’t want to know,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I just don’t want to know. How about getting the house un-bless? You think Hari could manage that?’
She had a theory. ‘The people feeling shame. They owe too much. It used to happen in the store at home.’
‘You know what I think it is? Is my face. I don’t think I have the face of a shopkeeper. I have the sort of face of a man who does give credit but can’t get it.’ He got a mirror and studied his face. ‘That nose, with that ugly lump on top of it. Those Chinese eyes. Look, girl, suppose – I mean, just supposing you see me for the first time. Look at me and try to imagine that.’
She looked.
‘All right. Close your eyes. Now open them. First time you see me. You just see me. What you would say I was?’
She couldn’t say.
‘That is the whole blasted trouble,’ he said. ‘I don’t look like anything at all. Shopkeeper, lawyer, doctor, labourer, overseer – I don’t look like any of them.’
The Samuel Smiles depression fell on him.
Shama was a puzzle. Within the girl who had served in the Tulsi Store and romped up and down the staircase of Hanuman House, the wit, the prankster, there were other Shamas, fully grown, it seemed, just waiting to be released: the wife, the