A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [109]
He decided to borrow the money from Ajodha. He didn’t want to ask Seth or Mrs Tulsi. And he couldn’t ask Misir: their relationship had cooled since he had borrowed from him to pay Mungroo and Seebaran and Mahmoud. And yet he was unwilling to go to Ajodha. He walked out of the barrackyard but before he reached the main road decided to let the matter rest until the following Sunday. He walked back to his room and put on his bicycle clips, thinking he would spend the afternoon at Hanuman House instead. But he knew so clearly what he would find there that he took off his bicycle clips. Eventually it was the room that drove him out. He caught two buses and was at Pagotes in the late afternoon.
He entered Tara’s yard through the wide side gate of unpainted corrugated iron and went down the gravelled way to the garage and the cowpen. Nothing in this part of the yard seemed to have changed since he had first seen it. The plum tree was as desolate as ever; it bore fruit regularly but its grey branches were almost bare and looked dry and stiff and brittle. He no longer wondered what would be done with the heap of scrap metal, and he had given up the hope, which he had had as a boy, of seeing the rusting body of a motorcar reanimated and driven away. The mound of manured grass changed in size but remained where it always had been. For despite the cost and the trouble, and the multiplication of his business interests, Ajodha still kept two or three cows in his yard. They were his pets; he spent most of his free time in the cowpen, which he could never finish improving.
From the cowpen came the hiss of milk in a bucket and the mumble of conversation. It was Sunday; Ajodha would certainly be in the cowpen. Mr Biswas didn’t look. He hurried to the back verandah, hoping to see Tara first and to catch her alone.
She was alone, except for the servant girl. She greeted him so warmly that he at once felt ashamed of his mission. His resolve to speak directly came to nothing, for when he asked how she was she replied at length and, instead of asking for money, he had to give sympathy. Indeed, she didn’t look well. Her breathing had grown worse and she couldn’t move about easily; her body had broadened and become slack; her hair had thinned; her eyes had lost their brightness.
The servant girl brought him a cup of tea and Tara followed the girl back to the kitchen.
The top shelves of the bookcase were still packed with the disintegrating volumes of The Book of Comprehensive Knowledge, for which Ajodha had not paid. The lower shelves contained magazines, motor manufacturers’ catalogues and illustrated trilingual souvenir booklets of Indian films. The religious pictures on the walls were crowded out by calendars from the distributors of American and English motor vehicles, and an enormous framed photograph of an Indian actress.
Tara came back to the verandah and said that she hoped Mr Biswas would stay to dinner. He had intended to; apart from everything else, he liked their food. She sat down in Ajodha’s rockingchair and asked after the children. He told her about the one that was coming. She asked about the Tulsis and he replied as briefly as he could. He knew that, though the two houses had little to do with one another, an antagonism existed between them. The Tulsis, who did puja every day and celebrated every Hindu festival, regarded Ajodha as a man who pursued wealth and comfort and modernity and had alienated himself from the faith. Ajodha and Tara simply thought the Tulsis squalid, and had always made it clear that they considered Mr Biswas’s marriage into that house a calamity. It was doubly embarrassing to Mr Biswas to discuss the Tulsis with Tara, since despite his concern for his children he found it hard not to agree with her view, particularly when he was in her clean, uncrowded, comfortable house, waiting for a meal he knew would be good.
The cowman came from the pen, called to the girl in the kitchen and passed her the bucket of milk through the window. Then, at the standpipe in the yard