A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [149]
They were in the front verandah. Ferns in baskets hung from the eaves, softening the light, cooling the air. Mr Biswas reclined on his morris chair. It was an experience, so new he could not yet savour it, to find himself turned all at once from a visitor into a dweller, in a house that was solid and finished and painted and elegant all over, with a level, gapless floor, straight concrete walls, panelled doors with locks, a complete roof, a ceiling varnished in the drawingroom, painted elsewhere. Finishing details, which up to a few minutes before he had taken for granted, he now noted, one by one, as for the first time. Nothing had to be added, nothing was makeshift; there were no surprises of mud walls or tree-branches, no secret ways of doing anything; everything worked as it was meant to.
The house stood on high pillars and was one of the newest and most imposing in the street. The district had been recently redeveloped and was rising fast, though in every street there were still a number of dwellings of the stubborn poor, unfenced wooden huts which spoke of the time when the district was part of a sugar-estate. The streets were straight; every lot measured one hundred feet by fifty; and a sewerage trace, almost a street itself, ran down the middle of each block, separating back fences. So there was space; space below the floor of the house itself, space at the back, space at the sides, space for a garden at the front.
Could this luck have been more complete?
Ramchand and Dehuti were delighted. The camplife which Mr Biswas’s presence enforced on them in their two rooms, though pleasant at first, had begun to be irksome. They were glad, too, that Mr Biswas had been settled. They felt responsible for that as well as the reconciliation. One unexpected result of the negotiations was that Dehuti attached herself to Hanuman House, joining the dozens of strange women who, to Mr Biswas’s surprise, were always willing to turn up days before any large function at Hanuman House, abandoning husbands and children, to cook and clean and generally serve, without payment. Dehuti worked hard and was always invited. She often went with the Tulsi sisters to other functions; and at weddings sang the sad songs which had not been sung for her. In time no one thought of her as Mr Biswas’s sister, not even Mr Biswas, to whom she became only one of the women attached to the Tulsis.
Once more, then, the furniture moved. And what had choked the barrackroom made little impression on the house at Port of Spain. The fourposter and Shama’s dressingtable went into a bedroom; the kitchen safe with the coffee-set remained in the back verandah with the green table. The hatrack and the rockingchair alone had places of honour, in the front verandah; they were put out every morning and brought in every night, to prevent them being stolen. For the rest, the house remained furnished in the manner which Mrs Tulsi had thought appropriate to the city. In the drawingroom four cane-bottomed bentwood chairs stood stiffly around a marble topped three-legged table which carried a potted fern on a crocheted and tasselled white cloth. In the diningroom there was a frigid-looking washstand with a ewer and basin. Mrs Tulsi had brought none of the statuary from Hanuman House but many of the brass vases, which, filled with potted plants, were disposed about the verandah and brought in every night.
Anand and Savi were not easily persuaded to leave Hanuman House. They remained there for some weeks after Shama had left with Myna and Kamla. Then Savi came one Sunday evening with Mrs Tulsi and the god. She saw the street lamps and the lights of the ships in the harbour. Mrs Tulsi took her to the Botanical Gardens; she saw the ponds and grassy slopes of the sunken Rock Gardens; she heard the band play; and she stayed. Anand, however, refused to be allured, until the