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By Root 7652 0

accounts were complicated by the rents she collected. She spent the rent money on the household and then had to make it up with the household money. The figures nearly always came out wrong. And every other week-end Shama’s accounting reached a pitch of frenzy, and she was to be seen in the back verandah puzzling over the Sentinel notebook, the rent book, the receipt book, doing innumerable little addition and subtraction sums on scraps of paper and occasionally making memoranda. Shama wrote curious memoranda. She wrote as she spoke and once Mr Biswas came on a note that said, ‘Old creole woman from 42 owe six dollars.’

‘I always did say that you Tulsis were a pack of financial geniuses,’ he said.

She said, ‘I would like you to know that I used to come first in arithmetic’

And when Savi and Anand came to her for help with their arithmetic homework she said, ‘Go to your father. He was the genius in arithmetic’

‘Know more than you anyway,’ he said. ‘Savi, ought twos are how much?’

‘Two.’

‘You are your mother’s daughter all right. Anand?’

‘One.’

‘But what happening these days? They are not teaching as they used to when I was a boy.’

He found fault with all the textbooks.

‘Readers by Captain Cutteridge! Listen to this. Page sixty-five, lesson nineteen. Some of Our Animal Friends.’ He read in a mincing voice: ‘ “What should we do without our animal friends? The cow and the goat give us milk and we eat their flesh when they are killed.” You hear the savage? And listen. “Many boys and girls have to tie up their goats before going to school in the morning, and help to milk them in the afternoon.” Anand, you tie up your goat this morning? Well, you better hurry up. Is nearly milking time. That is the sort of stuff they fulling up the children head with these days. When I was a boy it used to be the Royal Reader and Blackie’s Tropical Reader. Nesfield’s Grammar!’ he exclaimed. ‘I used to use Macdougall’s.’ And he sent Anand hunting for the Macdougall’s, a typographical antique, its battered boards hinged with strips of blue tape.

From time to time he called for their exercise books, said he was horrified, and set himself up as their teacher for a few days. He cured Anand of a leaning towards fancy lettering and got him to abridge the convolutions of his C and J and S. With Savi he could do nothing. As a teacher he was exacting and short-tempered, and when Shama went to Hanuman House she was able to tell her sisters with pride, ‘The children are afraid of him.’

And, partly to have peace on Sundays, and partly because the combination of the word ‘Sunday’ with the word ‘school’ suggested denial and a spoiling of pleasure, he sent Anand and Savi to Sunday school. They loved it. They were given cakes and soft drinks and taught hymns with catchy tunes.

At home one day Anand began singing, ‘Jesus loves me, yes I know.’

Mrs Tulsi was offended. ‘How do you know that Jesus loves you?’

‘ ’Cause the Bible tells me so,’ Anand said, quoting the next line of the hymn.

Mrs Tulsi took this to mean that, without provocation, Mr Biswas was resuming his religious war.

‘Roman cat, your mother,’ he told Shama. ‘I thought a good Christian hymn would remind her of happy childhood days as a baby Roman kitten.’

But the Sunday school stopped. In its place, and also to counter the influence of Captain Cutteridge, Mr Biswas began reading novels to his children. Anand responded but Savi was again a disappointment.

‘I can’t see Savi ever eating prunes and drinking milk from the Dairies,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Let her go on. All I see her doing is fighting to make up accounts like her mother.’

Unmoved by Mr Biswas’s insults, Shama continued to write up her accounts, continued to wrestle once a fortnight with the rent money, and continued to serve eviction notices. Unknown to her family and almost unknown to herself, Shama had become a creature of terror to Mrs Tulsi’s tenants. To get the rents she often had to serve eviction notices, particularly on ‘old creole woman from 42’. It amused Mr Biswas to read the stern, grammatical injunctions in Shama