A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [89]
Mr Biswas went in by the tall side gate. The hall was lit by one oil lamp. Despite the late hour children were still eating. Some were at the long table, some on benches and chairs about the hall, two in the hammock, some on the steps, some on the landing, and two on the disused piano. Two of the lesser Tulsi sisters and Miss Blackie were supervising.
No one seemed surprised to see him. He was grateful for that. He looked for Savi and had trouble in locating her. She saw him first, smiled, but didn’t leave the table. He went up to her.
‘I haven’t seen you for a long time,’ she said, and he couldn’t tell whether she was disappointed or not.
‘Missing your six cents, eh?’ He studied the food on Savi’s enamel plate: curried beans, fried tomatoes and a dry pancake. ‘Where’s your mother?’
‘She had another baby. Did you know?’
He noticed the fatherless children. They had given up their offending mourning suits; even so, their clothes were different. He didn’t know these children very well and they regarded him, a visiting father, with curiosity.
‘Ma said you beat her,’ Savi said.
The fatherless children looked at Mr Biswas with dread and disapproval. They all had large eyes: another distinguishing feature.
Mr Biswas laughed. ‘She was only joking,’ he said in English.
‘She upstairs, rubbing down Myna,’ Savi said, in English as well.
‘Myna, eh? Another girl.’ He spoke light-heartedly, trying to get the attention of the two Tulsi sisters. ‘This family just full of girl children.’
The sisters tittered. He turned to them and smiled.
Shama was not in the Rose Room, but in the wooden bridge between the two houses. A basin with soapy, baby-smelling water was on the floor and, as Savi had said, Shama was rubbing down Myna, the way she had rubbed down Savi herself and Anand (asleep on the bed: no more rubbing for him, for the rest of his life).
Shama saw him, but concentrated on the baby, folding limbs this way and that, saying the rhyme that was to end in a laugh, a bunching of the limbs over the belly, a clap, and a release of the limbs.
Mr Biswas watched.
While she was dressing Myna, Shama said, ‘Have you eaten?’
He shook his head. They might have parted only the hour before. And not only that. She had spoken about eating, and there was nothing in her voice to hint at the innumerable quarrels they had had about food. He had often opened tins of salmon and sardines from the shop after refusing to eat her food and sometimes throwing it away, food as unimaginative as that he had just seen on Savi’s plate. It wasn’t that the Tulsis couldn’t cook. They thought appetizing food should be reserved for religious festivals; at other times it was a carnal indulgence. Mr Biswas’s digestion had been repeatedly shocked to move from plain food before a ceremony to excessively rich food on the day of the ceremony and promptly back to plain food the day after.
Myna fell asleep at Shama’s breast and was laid on the bed next to Anand. A pillow was placed at her side to keep her from rolling off, and the oil lamp in the bracket on the unpainted wall was turned down.
When Mr Biswas and Shama passed through the verandah it was thronged with children sitting on mats, reading or playing cards or draughts. These games had been recently introduced and were taken with the utmost seriousness; they were regarded as intellectual disciplines particularly suitable for children. Savi, too small for books, was playing Go-to-Pack with one of the large-eyed children. Everyone talked in whispers. Shama walked on tiptoe.
‘Mai sick,’ she said.
Which accounted for the children’s late dinner and the absence of