A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [174]
But none of the clothes Shama made then were worn at Hanuman House.
One afternoon Mr Biswas came back from the Sentinel and as soon as he pushed his cycle through the front gate he saw that the rose garden at the side of the house had been destroyed and the ground levelled, red earth mingling with the black. The plants were in a bundle against the corrugated iron fence. The stems, hard and stained and blighted on the outside, yet showed white and wet and full of promise where they had been cleanly gashed; their ill formed leaves had not begun to quail; they still looked alive.
He threw his bicycle against the concrete steps.
‘Shama!’
He walked briskly, his footsteps resounding, through the drawingroom to the back verandah. The floor was littered with scraps of cloth and tangles of thread.
‘Shama!’
She came out of the kitchen, her face taut. Her eyes sought to still his voice.
He took in the table and the sewingmachine, the scraps of cloth, the thread, the pins, the kitchen safe, the rails, the banister. Below, in the yard, standing in a group against the fence, he saw the children. They were looking up at him. Then he saw the back of a lorry, a pile of old corrugated iron sheets, a heap of new scantlings, two Negro labourers with dusty heads, faces and backs. And Seth. Rough and managerial in his khaki uniform and heavy bruised bluchers, the ivory cigarette holder held down in one shirt pocket by the buttoned flap.
He saw it clearly. For what seemed a long time he contemplated it. Then he was running down the back steps; Seth looked up, surprised; the labourers, stooping on the lorry, looked up; and he was fumbling among the scantlings. He tried to take one up, had misjudged its size, abandoned it, Shama saying from the verandah, ‘No, no,’ picked up a large stained wet stone from the bleaching-bed and ‘Who tell you you could come and cut down my rose trees? Who?’ Scraping the words out of his throat so that they didn’t seem to come from where he stood, but from someone just behind him. A labourer jumped down from the lorry, there was surprise and even dread in Seth’s eyes. ‘Pa!’ one girl cried, and he hoisted his arm, Shama saying ‘Man, man.’ His wrist was seized, roughly, by large hot gritty fingers. The stone fell to the ground.
Disarmed, he was without words. Beside the three men he felt his frailty, his baggy linen suit beside Seth’s tight khaki clothes and the labourers’ working rags. The cuffs of his jacket bore the imprints of dirty fingers; his wrist burned where it had been held.
Seth said, ‘You see. You make your children frighten like hell’ And to the loaders, ‘All right, all right.’
The unloading continued.
‘Rose trees?’ Seth said. ‘They did just look like black sage bush to me.’
‘Yes,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Yes! I know they just look like bush to you. Tough!’ he added. ‘Tough!’ As he turned he stumbled against the bed of bleaching stones.
‘Oops!’ Seth said.
‘Tough!’ Mr Biswas repeated, walking away.
Shama followed him.
Heads were withdrawn from the fence on either side. Curtains dropped back into place.
‘Thug!’ Mr Biswas said, going up the steps.
‘Eh, eh,’ Seth said, smiling at the children. ‘Helluva temper, man. But my lorries can’t sleep in the road.’
From the verandah Mr Biswas, unseen, said, ‘This is not the end of this. The old lady will have something to say about this, I guarantee you. And Shekhar.’
Seth