A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [106]
‘Stop kneeling,’ Mr Biswas said.
He was surprised at Anand’s outraged and querulous reply. ‘They tell me to kneel down and I going to kneel down.’
It was the first time he had seen Anand in a temper. He looked at the boy’s narrow shoulder blades below the thin cotton shirt; the slender neck, the large head; the thin eczema-stained legs in small, loose trousers; the blackened soles – shoes were to be worn only outside the house – and the big toes.
‘He was frightened,’ Savi said.
‘To do what?’
‘Frightened to ask Teacher permission to leave the room. And when he leave the room he was frightened again. Frightened to use the school wc.’
‘Is a nasty, stinking place,’ Anand burst out, getting off his knees and turning to face them.
‘It really is,’ Savi said. ‘And then – well –’
Anand cried.
‘He went back to the classroom and Teacher ask him to leave.’
Anand looked down at the floor, sniffing and running his fingers along the grooves between the floorboards.
‘Well, just then school was over and everybody walk behind Anand. Everybody was laughing.’
‘And when I come home Ma beat me,’ Anand said. He wasn’t complaining. He was angry. ‘Ma beat me. She beat me.’ Repeated, the words lost their anger and became pleas for sympathy.
Mr Biswas became the buffoon. He told about his own misadventure at Pundit Jairam’s, caricaturing himself, and ridiculing Anand’s shame.
Anand didn’t look up or smile. But he had ceased to cry. He said, ‘I don’t want to go back to that school.’
‘You want to come with me?’
Anand didn’t reply.
They all went down to the hall.
Mr Biswas said, ‘Look, Shama, don’t make this boy kneel down again, you hear.’
Sushila, the widow, said, ‘When we were small Mai used to make us kneel on graters for a thing like that.’
‘Well, I don’t want my children to grow up like you, that is all.’
Sushila, childless, husbandless and now without the protection of Mrs Tulsi, swept upstairs, complaining that advantage was being taken of her situation.
Chinta said, ‘You are taking your son home with you, brother-in-law?’
Shama, noting Mr Biswas’s serene mood, said sternly, ‘Anand not going anywhere. He got to stay here and go to school.’
‘Why?’ Chinta asked. ‘Brother-in-law could teach him. I sure he know the ABC’
‘A for apple, B for bat, C for crab,’ Mr Biswas said.
Anand followed Mr Biswas outside and seemed unwilling to let him leave. He said nothing; he simply hung around the bicycle, occasionally rubbing up against it. Mr Biswas was irritated by his shyness, but he was again touched by the boy’s fragility and the carefully ragged ‘home clothes’ which Anand, like the other children, wore the minute he came from school. Anand’s washed-out khaki shorts were spectacularly patched, had slits but no pockets and a gaping empty fob. His shirt was darned and frayed and the collar was chewed; from the crooked stitches, the irregular cut, the weak and absurd decoration on the pocket Mr Biswas could tell that the shirt had been made by Shama.
He asked, ‘You want to come with me?’
Anand only smiled and looked down and spun the bicycle pedal with his big toe.
It would soon be dark. Mr Biswas had no lamp (every bicycle lamp and every bicycle pump he bought was promptly stolen) and he could never contrive, as some cyclists did, less to light their way than to appease the police, to ride with a lighted candle in an open paper-bag in one hand.
He cycled down the High Street. Just past the shop with the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign, he looked back. Anand was still under the arcade, next to one of the thick white pillars with the lotus-shaped base; standing and staring like that other boy Mr Biswas had seen outside a low hut at dusk.
When he got to Green Vale it was dark. Under the trees it was night. The sounds from the barracks were assertive and isolated one from the other: snatches of talk, the sound of frying, a shout, the cry of a child: sounds thrown up at the starlit sky from a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world. The dead trees