A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [161]
Now that there were only a few days left to Owad in Trinidad, and very few before the family came to Port of Spain for the farewell, Mr Biswas and Anand ate as many meals as possible with him. They ate formally, in the diningroom. And that evening, just before Mr Biswas sat at the table, Anand pulled the chair from under him, and Mr Biswas fell noisily to the floor.
‘Shompo! Lompo! Gomp!’ Owad said, roaring with laughter.
Savi said, ‘Well, some people are satisfied.’
Mr Biswas didn’t talk during the meal. Afterwards he went for a walk. When he came back he went directly to his room and never once called to anyone to get his cigarettes or matches or books.
It was his habit to walk through the house at six in the morning, rustling the newspaper and getting everyone up. Then he himself went back to bed: he had the gift of enjoying sleep in snatches. He woke no one the next morning and didn’t show himself while the children were getting ready for school.
But before Anand left, Shama gave him a six-cents piece.
‘From your Father. For milk from the Dairies.’
At three that afternoon, when school was over, Anand walked down Victoria Avenue, past the racketing wheels and straps of the Government Printery, crossed Tragarete Road for the shade of the ivory-covered walls of Lapeyrouse Cemetery, and turned into Phillip Street where, in the cigarette factory, was the source of the sweet smell of tobacco which hung over the district. The Dairies looked expensive and forbidding in white and pale green. Anand tiptoed to the caged desk, said to the woman, ‘A small bottle of milk, please,’ paid, got his voucher, and sat on a tall pale green stool at the milky-smelling bar. The white-capped barman tried to stab off the silver top a little too nonchalantly and, failing twice, pressed it out with a large thumb. Anand didn’t care for the ice-cold milk and the cloying sweetness it left at the back of his throat; it also seemed to have the tobacco smell, which he associated with the cemetery.
When he got home Shama gave him a small brown paper parcel. It contained prunes. They were his, to eat as and when he pleased.
Both he and Savi were told to keep the milk and the prunes secret, lest Owad should hear of it and laugh at them for their presumptuousness.
And almost immediately Anand began to pay the price of the milk and prunes. Mr Biswas went to the school and saw the headmaster and the teacher whose vocabulary he knew so well. They agreed that Anand could win an exhibition if he worked, and Mr Biswas made arrangements for Anand to be given private lessons after school, after milk. To balance this, Mr Biswas also arranged for Anand to have unlimited credit at the school shop; thus deranging Shama’s accounts further.
Savi’s heart went out to Anand.
‘I am too glad,’ she said, ‘that God didn’t give me a brain.’
In the week before Owad’s departure the house filled up with sisters, husbands, children and those of Mrs Tulsi’s retainers who remained faithful. The women came in their brightest clothes and best jewellery and, though only twenty miles from their villages, looked exotic. Heedless of stares, they stared; and made comments in Hindi, unusually loud, unusually ribald, because in the city Hindi was a secret language, and they were in holiday mood. A tent covered the back of the yard where Anand and Owad had sometimes played cricket. Fire-holes had been dug on the pitch itself, and over these food was always being cooked in large black cauldrons specially brought from Hanuman House. The visitors had come with musical instruments. They played and sang late into the night, and neighbours, too fascinated to object, peeped through holes in the corrugated iron fences.
Few of the visitors knew Mr Biswas or knew the position he held in the house. And all at once this position became uncertain. He found himself squeezed into one room, and for periods lost track of Shama and his children. ‘Eight dollars,’ he whispered to Shama. ‘That is the rent I pay every month. I have my rights.’
The rose-bushes and the