A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [148]
He went up the stairs, past the landing with the broken piano. In the verandah he saw Hari, the holy man, and Hari’s wife. They barely greeted him. They both seemed untouched by his new fame or his new suit. Hari, in his pundit’s clothes, looked jaundiced and unwell as always; his wife’s solemnity was tinged with worry and fatigue. Mr Biswas had often surprised them in similar quiet domestic scenes, withdrawn from the life about them.
He felt he was intruding, and hurried past the door with the coloured glass panes into the Book Room, which smelled mustily of old paper and worm-eaten wood. His books were there with traces of their soaking: bleached covers, stained and crinkled pages. Anand came into the room. His hair was long on his big head; he was in his ‘home-clothes’. Mr Biswas held Anand to his leg and Anand rubbed against it. He asked Anand about school and got shy, unintelligible replies. They had little to talk about.
‘Exactly when they did start seeing my name in the papers?’ Mr Biswas asked.
Anand smiled, raised one foot off the floor, and mumbled.
‘Who see it first?’
Anand shook his head.
‘And what they say, eh? Not the children, but the big people.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? But what about the photo? Coming out every day. What they say when they see that?’
‘Nothing.’ ‘Nothing at all?’
‘Only Auntie Chinta say you look like a crook.’
‘Who is the pretty baby? Tell me, who is the pretty baby?’
It was Shama, coming into the room and wandering about it with a baby in her arms.
Mr Biswas had not seen his fourth child. And now he was embarrassed to look.
Shama came closer but did not raise her eyes. ‘Who is that man?’ she said to the baby. ‘Do you know that man?’
Mr Biswas did not respond. He felt suffocated, sickened by the picture of mother and child as by the whole furtive domestic scene in this room above the hall: father, mother, children.
‘And who is this?’ Shama had taken the baby to Anand. ‘This is brother.’ Anand tickled her chin and the baby gurgled.
‘Yes, this is brother. Oh, isn’t she a pretty baby?’
He noticed that Shama had grown a little plumper.
He relented. He took a step towards Shama and immediately she held up the baby to him.
‘Her name is Kamla,’ Shama said in Hindi, her eyes still on the baby.
‘Nice name,’ he said in English. ‘Who give it?’
‘The pundit.’
‘This one register too, I suppose?’
‘But you were here when she was born –’ And Shama stopped, as though she had ventured on to dangerous ground.
Mr Biswas took the baby.
‘Give her back to me,’ Shama said after a short time. ‘She might get your clothes dirty.’
The reconciliation was soon complete, and on terms that made Mr Biswas feel he had won a victory. It was arranged for him to meet Mrs Tulsi in Port of Spain. She pretended not to know that he had ever left Shama and Hanuman House; he had come to Port of Spain to see the doctor, hadn’t he? Mr Biswas said he had. She was glad he was better; Pundit Tulsi always used to say that good health was worth any fortune. She never asked about his job, though she said that she expected much from Mr Biswas and always had; which was why she had been so ready to agree when he came that afternoon to ask for Shama’s hand.
Mrs Tulsi proposed that Mr Biswas should move his family to Port of Spain and live with her son and herself. Unless, of course, Mr Biswas was thinking of buying a house of his own; she was only a mother and had no control over Shama’s fate. If they came, however, they would have the run of the house, except for those rooms used by Owad and herself. In return they would pay eight dollars a month, Shama would cook, do all the housework and collect the rents from her other two houses: a difficult business: not worth the trouble to get an outsider to do it and she was too old to do it herself.
The offer was stupendous: a house, no less. It was the climax of his current good fortune, which