A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [111]
Smiling, Ajodha said, ‘All right, Rabidat. Go back and eat. I was only teasing.’ The demonstration had pleased him; he was as proud of Rabidat’s body as of his own. ‘Good food,’ he told Mr Biswas. ‘And lots of exercise.’ He threw back his shoulders, stuck out his stomach, grabbed Mr Biswas’s soft hand with his firm, long fingers and said, ‘Feel that. Come on, feel it.’ Mr Biswas didn’t respond. Ajodha seized one of Mr Biswas’s fingers and pulled it hard against his stomach. Mr Biswas felt his finger bend backwards; he wrenched it from Ajodha’s grasp. ‘There,’ Ajodha said. ‘Hard as steel. You still sleep with a pillow, I imagine?’
Surreptitiously rubbing his paining finger against its neighbour, Mr Biswas nodded.
‘I never use a pillow. Nature didn’t intend us to use pillows. Train your children from the start, Mohun. Don’t let them use pillows. Ooh! Four children!’ Ajodha gave another little yelp of laughter, jumped out of his chair, walked to the verandah half-wall and shouted irritably to someone outside. He had heard the cowman preparing to leave and was only bidding him good night; that was the voice he always used with his employees. The cowman replied and Ajodha returned to his chair. ‘Married man!’
‘Well, as I was saying,’ Mr Biswas said, ‘this job I have is steady. And I am beginning to build a little house.’
‘O good, Mohun,’ Tara said. ‘Very good.’
‘I don’t know how you managed to live at Hanuman House,’ Ajodha said. ‘How many people live in that place?’
‘About two hundred,’ Mr Biswas said, and they all laughed. ‘Now, this house is going to be a proper house —’
‘You know what you should do, Mohun?’ Ajodha said. ‘You should take Sanatogen. Not one bottle. Take the full course. You don’t get any benefit unless you take the full course.’
Tara nodded.
Rabidat came out of the kitchen again. ‘What is this I hear about a house, Mohun? You build a house? Where you get all this money from?’
‘He has been saving up,’ Ajodha said impatiently. ‘Not like you. You are going to end up living in a hole in the ground, Rabidat. I don’t know what you do with your money.’ It was only indirectly, like this, that Ajodha referred to Rabidat’s outside life.
‘Look. You!’ Rabidat said. ‘I wasn’t born with money, you hear. And I don’t have the scheming mind to make any. My father neither.’ He was being provocative, since any mention of his father, like any mention of Mr Biswas’s sister, was forbidden.
Ajodha frowned and rocked violently.
And Mr Biswas realized that the time to ask had gone for good.
Ajodha’s look wasn’t the one he assumed so easily, of worry and petulance, which meant nothing, though it filled his employees with dread. It was a look of anger.
Ignoring Ajodha and smiling at Mr Biswas, Rabidat asked, ‘A dirt house?’
‘No, man. Concrete pillars. Two bedrooms and a drawingroom. Galvanized roof and everything.’
But Rabidat wasn’t listening.
‘Tara!’ Ajodha said. ‘If I didn’t take him out of the gutter, where would he be today? If I didn’t feed him all that food’ – rising so swiftly that the rockingchair shot backwards, he went up to Rabidat and held his biceps – ‘do you think he would have these?’
‘Don’t touch me!’ Rabidat bawled.
Mr Biswas jumped. Ajodha whipped away his hand.
‘Don’t touch me!’ Tears sprang to Rabidat’s small eyes. He closed them tightly, as if in great pain, lifted one foot high and brought it down with all his strength on the floor. ‘You didn’t make me. If you want to touch children, make them. What you want me to do with the food you feed me? What?’
Tara got up and passed her hand on Rabidat’s back. ‘All right, all right, Rabidat. It is time for you to go to the theatre.’ One of his duties was to go to the cinema twice a day to check the takings.
Breathing hard, almost grunting, and chewing up his words into incomprehensible sounds, he went up the two steps that led from the back verandah to the main section of the house.
Ajodha pulled the rockingchair towards him, sat