A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [151]
Though with Owad and Mrs Tulsi Mr Biswas’s attitude towards his children was gently deprecatory, he was watching and learning, with an eye on his own household and especially on Anand. Soon, he hoped, Anand would qualify to eat prunes and drink milk from the Dairies.
His household established, Mr Biswas set about establishing his tyrannies.
‘Savi!’
No answer.
‘Savi! Savi! Oh-Savi-yah! Oh, you there. Why you didn’t answer?’
‘But I come.’
‘Is not enough. You must come and answer.’
‘All right.’
‘All right what?’
‘All right, Pa.’
‘Good. On that table in the corner you will find cigarettes, matches and a Sentinel notebook. Hand them to me.’
‘O God! That is all you call me for?’
‘Yes. That is all. Answer back again, and I make you read out something for me to take down in shorthand.’
Savi ran out of the room.
‘Anand! Anand!’
‘Yes, Pa.’
‘That is better. You are getting a little training now. Sit down there and call out this speech.’
Anand snatched Bell’s Standard Elocutionist and angrily read out some Macaulay.
‘You reading too fast.’
‘I thought you was writing shorthand.’
‘You answering back too! You see what happen to you children, spending all that time at Hanuman House. Just for that, check while I read back.’
‘O God!’ And Anand stamped, regretting the dying day.
But the checking went on.
Then Mr Biswas said, ‘Anand, this is not a punishment. I ask you to do this because I want you to help me.’
He had discovered, with surprise, that this sentence soothed Anand, and he always offered it at the end of these sessions as a consolation.
It was soon established that he did much of his work in bed and was to be expected to call constantly for paper, pencils to be sharpened, matches, cigarettes, ashtrays to be emptied, books to be brought, books to be taken away. It was also established that his sleep was important. He flew into terrible rages when awakened, even at a time he had fixed.
‘Savi,’ Shama would say, ‘go and wake your father.’
‘Let Anand go.’
‘No, the both of you go.’
To Shama, who began to complain of his ‘strictness’ – a word which gave him a curious satisfaction – he said, ‘It is not strictness. It is training.’
Mrs Tulsi, approving if a little surprised, told tales of the severe training to which Pundit Tulsi had submitted his children.
And whenever Mrs Tulsi was away Shama made claims of her own. She was unable to faint like Mrs Tulsi but she complained of fatigue and liked to be attended by her children. She got Savi and Anand to walk on her and said in Hindi, ‘God will bless you,’ with such feeling that they considered it a sufficient recompense. Soon, and without this recompense, it became the duty of Savi and Anand to walk on Mr Biswas as well.
Shama herself did not escape training. She had to file all the stories Mr Biswas wrote. Mr Biswas said she did this inefficiently. He gave her his pay-packet unopened and when she said that the money was insufficient he accused her of incompetence. And so Shama started on her laborious, futile practice of keeping accounts. Every evening she sat down at the green table in the back verandah and noted every penny she had spent during the day, slowly filling both sides of the pages of a bloated, oilstained Sentinel notebook with her Mission-school script.
‘Your little daily puja, eh?’ Mr Biswas said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I only trying to give you a raise.’
Mr Biswas never asked to see Shama’s accounts, but she did them partly as a reproach to Mr Biswas and partly because she enjoyed it. Whatever his other qualities, Mr Burnett didn’t believe in paying generously and while he edited the Sentinel Mr Biswas’s salary never rose above fifty dollars a month, money which went almost as soon as it came. Shama’s household