A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [150]
To the children of Hanuman House home-made was not a word of commendation. Home-made icecream was the flavourless (officially coconut) congelation churned out by Chinta after lunch on Christmas Day. She used an old, rusted freezer; she said it ‘skipped’; and to hasten the freezing she threw lumps of ice into the mixture. The rust from the freezer dripped on the icecream and penetrated it, like a ripple of chocolate.
And it was purely this promise of real icecream and Coca Cola that drew Anand to Port of Spain.
On a Sunday afternoon, when shadows had withdrawn to under the eaves of houses, when the city was hard and bright and empty, with doors closed everywhere, and the glass windows of shops reflected only those opposite, Mr Biswas took Anand on a tour of Port of Spain. They walked with a sense of adventure in the middle of empty streets; they heard their footsteps; like this, the city could be known; it held no threat. They looked at café after café, rejecting, at Anand’s insistence, all those which claimed to sell only home-made cakes and icecream. At last they found one which was suitable. On a high red stool, a revelation and luxury in itself, Anand sat at the counter, and the icecream came. In a cardboard tub, frosted, cold to the touch. With a wooden spoon. The cover had to be taken off and licked; the icecream, light pink and spotted with red, steamed: one preparatory delight after another.
‘It don’t taste like icecream at all,’ Anand said. He cleaned the tub, and it was such a perfectly made thing he would have liked to keep it.
When he sipped the Coca Cola he said, ‘It is like horse pee.’ Which was what some cousin had said of a drink at Hanuman House.
‘Anand!’ Mr Biswas said, smiling at the man behind the counter. ‘You’ve got to stop talking like that. You are in Port of Spain now.’
The house faced east, and the memories that remained of these first four years in Port of Spain were above all memories of morning. The newspaper, delivered free, still warm, the ink still wet, sprawled on the concrete steps, down which the sun was moving. Dew lay on trees and roofs; the empty street, freshly swept and washed, was in cool shadow, and water ran clear in the gutters whose green bases had been scratched and striped by the sweepers’ harsh brooms. Memories of taking the Royal Enfield out from under the house and cycling in a sun still cool along the streets of the awakening city. Stillness at noon: stripping for a short nap: the window of his room open: a square of blue above the unmoving curtain. In the afternoon, the steps in shadow; tea in the back verandah. Then an interview at a hotel, perhaps, and the urgent machinery of the Sentinel. The promise of the evening; the expectation of the morning.
With Mrs Tulsi and Owad away on week-ends and during the holidays it was possible at times for Mr Biswas to forget that the house belonged to them. And their presence was hardly a strain. Mrs Tulsi never fainted in Port of Spain, never stuffed soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub into her nostrils, never wore bay-rum-soaked bandages around her forehead. She was neither distant nor possessive with the children, and her relations with Mr Biswas became less cautious and formal as his friendship with Owad grew. Owad appreciated Mr Biswas’s work and Mr Biswas, flattered to be established as a wit and a madman, developed a respect for the young man who read such big books in foreign languages. They became companions; they went to the cinema and the seaside; and Mr Biswas showed Owad transcripts, which no paper printed, of court proceedings in cases of rape and brothel-keeping.
Mr Biswas ceased to ridicule or resent the excessive care Mrs Tulsi gave to her younger son. Mrs Tulsi believed that prunes, like fish brains, were especially nourishing for people who