At The Chase Shama had seldom beat Savi, and then it had been only a matter of a few slaps. But at Hanuman House the sisters still talked with pride of the floggings they had received from Mrs Tulsi. Certain memorable floggings were continually recalled, with commonplace detail made awful and legendary by its association with a stupendous event, like the detail in a murder case. And there was even some rivalry among the sisters as to who had been flogged worst of all.
Mr Biswas had breakfast: biscuits from the big black drum, red butter, and tea, lukewarm, sugary and strong. Shama, though indignant, was dutiful and correct. As she watched him eat, her indignation became more and more defensive. Finally she was only grave.
‘You see Mai yet?’
He understood.
They went to the Rose Room. Sushila admitted them and at once went outside. A shaded oil lamp burned low. The jalousied window in the thick clay-brick wall was closed, keeping out daylight; cloth was wedged around the frame, to keep out draughts. There was a smell of ammonia, bay rum, rum, brandy, disinfectant, and a variety of febrifuges. Below a white canopy with red appliqué apples Mrs Tulsi lay, barely recognizable, a bandage around her forehead, her temples dotted with lumps of soft candle, her nostrils stuffed with some white medicament.
Shama sat on a chair in a shadowed corner, effacing herself.
The marble topped bedside table was a confusion of bottles, jars and glasses. There were little blue jars of medicated rubs, little white jars of medicated rubs; tall green bottles of bay rum and short square bottles of eyedrops and nosedrops; a round bottle of rum, a flat bottle of brandy and an oval royal blue bottle of smelling-salts; a bottle of Sloan’s Liniment and a tiny tin of Tiger Balm; a mixture with a pink sediment and one with a yellow-brown sediment, like muddy water left to stand from the previous night.
Mr Biswas didn’t want to talk to Mrs Tulsi in Hindi, but the Hindi words came out. ‘How are you, Mai? I couldn’t come to see you last night because it was too late and I didn’t want to disturb you.’ He hadn’t intended to give any explanations.
‘How are you?’ Mrs Tulsi said nasally, with unexpected tenderness. ‘I am an old woman and it doesn’t matter how I am.’
She reached out for the bottle of smelling salts and sniffed at it. The bandage around her forehead slipped down to her eyes. Adapting her tone of tenderness to one of distress and authority, she said, ‘Come and squeeze my head, Shama.’
Shama obeyed with alacrity. She sat on the edge of the bed and undid the bandage, undid Mrs Tulsi’s hair, parted it in several places, poured bay rum into her palms and from there into the partings. She worked the bay rum into Mrs Tulsi’s scalp and the soaked hair squelched. Mrs Tulsi looked comforted. She closed her eyes, screwed the white medicament a little further up her nostrils, and patted her lips with a thin shawl.
‘You have seen your daughter?’
Mr Biswas laughed.
‘Two girls,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘Our family is unlucky that way. Think of the worry I had when your father died. Fourteen daughters to marry. And when you marry your girl children you can’t say what sort of life you are letting them in for. They have to live with their Fate. Mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law. Idle husbands. Wife-beaters.’
Mr Biswas looked at Shama. She was concentrating on Mrs Tulsi’s head. At every press of Shama’s long fingers Mrs Tulsi closed her eyes, interrupted what she was saying and groaned, ‘Aah.’
‘That is what a mother has to put up with,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘I don’t mind. I have lived long enough to know that you can’t expect anything from anybody. I give you five hundred dollars. Do you think I want you to bow and scrape and touch my feet whenever you see me? No. I expect you to spit on me. I expect that. When you want five hundred dollars again you come back to me. Do you want me to say, “The last time I gave you five hundred dollars you spat on me. Therefore I can’t give you five hundred dollars this time”? Do you want me to say that? No. I expect the people who spit on me to come to me again. I have a soft heart. And when you have a soft heart, you have a soft heart. Your father used to say to me, “My bride” – that was the way he called me until the day he died – “my bride,” he used to say, “you have the softest heart of any person I know. Be careful of that soft heart. People will take advantage of that soft heart and trample on it.” And I used to say, “When you have a soft heart, you have a soft heart.” ’
She pressed her eyes till tears ran down her cheeks. Her damp grey hair was spread out on the pillow. Now here was a woman with grey hair, and he felt little tenderness towards her.
Then he noted, what he had missed in the darkness, that Shama’s cheeks were also wet. She must have been crying silently all along.
‘I don’t mind,’ Mrs Tulsi said. She blew her nose and called for bay rum. Shama filled her palm with bay rum, drenched Mrs Tulsi’s face and pressed her palm over Mrs Tulsi’s nose. Mrs Tulsi’s face shone; she screwed up her eyes to prevent the bay rum going into them and breathed loudly through her mouth. Shama removed her hand and Mrs Tulsi said, ‘But I don’t know what Seth will say.’
As at a cue Seth came in. He ignored Mr Biswas and Shama and asked Mrs Tulsi how she was, expressing in those words his concern for Mrs Tulsi and his impatience with the people who were disturbing her. He sat on the other side of the bed. The bed creaked; he sighed; he shifted his feet and his bluchers drummed on the floor in annoyance.
‘We’ve been talking,’ Mrs Tulsi said gently.
Shama gave a little sob.
Seth sucked his teeth. He sounded extremely irritable; it was as if he too were unwell, with a cold or a headache. ‘Paddling-addling,’ he said. His voice was gruff and indistinct.
‘You mustn’t mind,’ Mrs Tulsi said.
Seth held his thigh and looked at the floor.
And Mr Biswas was convinced of what he had already guessed from Mrs Tulsi’s speech and Shama’s tears: that the scene had been arranged, that there had been not only discussions, but decisions. And Shama, who had arranged the scene, was crying to lessen his humiliation, to shift some of it to herself. Her tears were ritual in another way: they were tears for the hardships that had come to her with a husband she had been given by Fate.
‘So what we going to do about the shop?’ Seth asked in English. He was still irritable and his voice, though businesslike, was weary.
Mr Biswas couldn’t think. ‘Is a bad site for a shop,’ he said.
‘A bad site today could be a good site tomorrow,’ Seth said. ‘Suppose I drop a few cents here and there and get the Public Works to run the trunk road through there after all? Eh?’
Shama’s sobs mingled with the squelch of bay rum in Mrs Tulsi’s hair.
‘You got any debts?’
‘Well, a lot of people owing me but they won’t pay.’
‘Not after what happen with Mungroo. I suppose you was the only man in Trinidad who didn’t know about Seebaran and Mahmoud.’
Shama was crying openly.
Abruptly Seth lost interest in Mr Biswas. He said, ‘Tcha!’ and looked at his bluchers.
‘You mustn’t mind,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘I know you haven’t got a soft heart. But you mustn’t mind.’
Seth sighed. ‘So what we going to do with the shop?’
Mr Biswas shrugged.
‘Insure-and-burn?’ Seth said, making it one word: insuranburn.
Mr Biswas felt that talk like this belonged to the realms of high finance.
Seth crossed his big arms high over his chest. ‘Is the only thing for you to do now.’
‘Insuranburn,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘How much I going to make out of that?’
‘More than you would make if you don’t insuranburn. The shop is Mai own. The goods is yours. For the goods you ought to get about seventy-five, a hundred dollars.’
It was a large sum. Mr Biswas smiled.
But Seth only said, ‘And after that, what?’
Mr Biswas tried to look thoughtful.
‘You still too proud to get you
r hands dirty in the fields?’ And Seth displayed his own hands.
‘Soft heart,’ Mrs Tulsi muttered.
‘I want a driver at Green Vale,’ Seth said.
Shama gave a loud sob and, suddenly leaving Mrs Tulsi’s head, rushed to Mr Biswas and said, ‘Take it, man. Take it, I beg you.’ She was making it easy for him to accept. ‘He will take it,’ she cried to Seth. ‘He will take it.’
Seth looked irritable and turned away.
Mrs Tulsi groaned.
Shama, still crying, went back to the bed and pressed her fingers into Mrs Tulsi’s hair. Mrs Tulsi said, ‘Aah.’
‘I don’t know anything about estate work,’ Mr Biswas said, trying to salvage some of his dignity.
‘Nobody begging you,’ Seth said.
‘You mustn’t mind,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘You know what Owad always tells me. He always blames me for the way I married off my daughters. And I suppose he is right. But then Owad is going to college, reading and learning all the time. And I am very oldfashioned.’ She spoke with pride in Owad and pride in her oldfashionedness.
Seth stood up. His bluchers scraped on the floor, the bed made noises, and Mrs Tulsi was slightly disturbed. But Seth’s irritability had disappeared. He took out the ivory cigarette holder which had been pushing up through the buttoned flap of the pocket on his khaki shirt, put it in his mouth and blew whistlingly through it. ‘Owad. You remember him, Mohun?’ He laughed, opening his mouth on either side of the holder. ‘The old hen son.’
‘What is past is past,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘When people are boys they behave like boys. When they are men they behave like men.’
Shama squeezed vigorously at Mrs Tulsi’s head and succeeded in reducing Mrs Tulsi’s speech to a series of ‘Aah. Aah.’ She washed bay rum into Mrs Tulsi’s hair and face and held her palm over Mrs Tulsi’s nose and mouth.
‘This insuranburning,’ Mr Biswas said, and his tone was light, ‘who going to see about it? Me?’ He was putting himself back into the role of the licensed buffoon.
Shama was the first to laugh. Seth followed. A croak came from Mrs Tulsi and Shama took away her hand from Mrs Tulsi’s mouth to allow her to laugh.
Mrs Tulsi began to splutter. ‘He want,’ she said in English, choking with laughter, ‘to jump – from – the fryingpan – into – into –’
They all roared.
‘– into – the fire!’
The witty mood spread.
‘No more paddling,’ Seth said.
‘We insuranburning right away?’ Mr Biswas asked, pitching his voice high and speaking quickly.
‘You got to get your furniture out first,’ Seth said.
‘My bureau!’ Shama exclaimed, and put her hand to her own mouth, as though astonished that, when she had left Mr Biswas, she had forgotten to take that piece of furniture with her.
‘You know,’ Seth said, ‘the best thing would be for you to do the insuranburning.’
‘No, Uncle,’ Shama said. ‘Don’t start putting ideas in his head.’
‘Don’t worry with the child,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘You just tell me.’
Seth sat on the bed again. ‘Well, look,’ he said, and his voice was amused and avuncular. ‘You had this trouble with Mungroo. You go to the police station and lay your life on Mungroo head.’
‘Lay my what on Mungroo head?’
‘Tell them about the row. Tell them that Mungroo threatening to kill you. And the moment anything happen to you, the first person they would pick up would be Mungroo.’
‘You mean the first person they would pick up would be me. But let me get this straight. When I dead, like a cockroach, lying on my back with my four foot throw up straight and stiff and high in the air, you want me to walk to the police station and say, “I did tell all-you so.” ’
Mrs Tulsi, still chuckling over her own joke, the first she had managed in English, made Mr Biswas’s an excuse to burst out laughing again.
‘Well, you lay your life on Mungroo head,’ Seth said. ‘You go back to The Chase and stay quiet. You let one week pass, two weeks, even three. Then you make your little preparations. You let Shama collect her bureau. On Thursday, half-day, you drop pitch-oil all over the shop – not where you sleeping – and in the night-time you set a match to it. You give it a little time – not too much – and then you run outside and start bawling for Mungroo.’
‘You mean,’ Mr Biswas said, ‘that this is why all those motorcars burning up every day in this place? And all those houses?’
5. Green Vale
WHENEVER AFTERWARDS Mr Biswas thought of Green Vale he thought of the trees. They were tall and straight, and so hung with long, drooping leaves that their trunks were hidden and appeared to be branchless. Half the leaves were dead; the others, at the top, were a dead green. It was as if all the trees had, at the same moment, been blighted in luxuriance, and death was spreading at the same pace from all the roots. But death was forever held in check. The tonguelike leaves of dead green turned slowly to the brightest yellow, became brown and thin as if scorched, curled downwards over the other dead leaves and did not fall. And new leaves came, as sharp as daggers; but there was no freshness to them; they came into the world old, without a shine, and only grew longer before they too died.
It was hard to imagine that beyond the trees on every side lay the clear plain. Green Vale was damp and shadowed and close. The trees darkened the road and their rotting leaves choked the grass gutters. The trees surrounded the barracks.
As soon as he saw the barracks Mr Biswas decided that the time had come for him to build his own house, by whatever means. The barracks gave one room to one family, and sheltered twelve families in one long room divided into twelve. This long room was built of wood and stood on low concrete pillars. The whitewash on the walls had turned to dust, leaving stains like those left on stones by bleaching clothes; and these stains were mildewed and sweated and freckled with grey and green and black. The corrugated iron roof projected on one side to make a long gallery, divided by rough partitions into twelve kitchen spaces, so open that when it rained hard twelve cooks had to take twelve coal-pots to twelve rooms. The ten middle rooms each had a front door and a back window. The rooms at the end had a front door, a back window, and a side window. Mr Biswas, as a driver, was given an end room. The back window had been nailed shut by the previous tenant and plastered over with newspaper. Its position could only be guessed at, since newspaper covered the walls from top to bottom. This had obviously been the work of a literate. No sheet was placed upside down, and Mr Biswas found himself continuously exposed to the journalism of his time, its bounce and excitement bottled and made quaint in these old newspapers.
Into this room they moved all their furniture: the kitchen safe, the green kitchen table, the hatrack, the iron fourposter, a rockingchair Mr Biswas had bought in the last days at The Chase, and the dressingtable which, during Shama’s long absences at Hanuman House, had come to stand for Shama.
Only one small drawer of the dressingtable was Mr Biswas’s. The others were alien and if by some chance he opened one he felt he was intruding. It was during the move to Green Vale that he discovered that, in addition to the finer clothes of Shama and the children, those drawers contained Shama’s marriage certificate and the birth certificates of her children; a Bible and Bible pictures she had got from her mission school and kept, not for their religious content, but as reminders of past excellence; and a packet of letters from a pen-pal in Northumberland, the result of one of the headmaster’s schemes. Mr Biswas yearned after the outside world; he read novels that took him there; he never suspected that Shama, of all persons, had been in contact with this world.
‘You didn’t by any chance keep the letters you did write back?’
‘Headteacher used to read them and post them.’
‘I woulda like to read your letters.’
So Mr Biswas became a driver, or sub-overseer, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month, which was twice as much as the labourers go
t. As he had told Seth, he knew nothing about estate work. He had been surrounded by sugarcane all his life; he knew that the tall fields shot up grey-blue, arrowlike flowers just when shop signs were bursting into green and red gaiety, with holly and berries and Santa Claus and snow-capped letters; he knew the ‘crop-over’ harvest festival; but he didn’t know about burning or weeding or hoeing or trenching; he didn’t know when new cuttings had to be put in or mounds of trash built around new plants. He got instructions from Seth, who came to Green Vale every Saturday to inspect, and pay the labourers, which he did from the kitchen space outside Mr Biswas’s room, using the green kitchen table, and having Mr Biswas sit beside him to read out the number of tasks each labourer had worked.
Mr Biswas didn’t know the admiration and respect his father Raghu had had for drivers. But he could feel the awe the labourers had for the blue and green moneybags with serrated edges and small circular holes for the money to breathe, and he took some pleasure in handling these bags casually, as though they were a bother. It sometimes occurred to him that, perhaps at that very moment, his brothers were standing in similar slow submissive queues on other estates.
On Saturdays, then, he enjoyed power. But on the other days it was different. True, he went out early every morning with his long bamboo rod and measured out the labourers’ tasks. But the labourers knew he was unused to the job and was there simply as a watchman and Seth’s representative. They could fool him and they did, fearing more a single rebuke of Seth’s on Saturday than a week of shy remonstrance from Mr Biswas. Mr Biswas was ashamed to complain to Seth. He bought a topee; it was too big for his head, which was rather small, and he adjusted the topee so badly that it fell down to his ears. For some time after that, whenever the labourers saw Mr Biswas they pulled their hats over their eyes, tilted their heads backwards and looked in his direction. Two or three of the young and impudent even talked to him in this way. He thought he ought to ride a horse, as Seth did; and he was beginning to feel sympathy for those overseers of legend who rode on horseback and lashed labourers on either side. Then, being the buffoon with Seth one Saturday, he mounted Seth’s horse, was thrown after a few yards, and said, ‘I didn’t want to go where he was going.’
A House for Mr. Biswas Page 21