A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [175]
Mr Biswas appeared at the banister of the verandah.
Anand looked away.
‘You will be hearing from my solicitor,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘And those two rakshas you have with you. They too.’ He disappeared again.
The labourers, unaware of their identification with Hindu mythological forces of evil, unloaded.
Seth winked at the children. ‘Your father is a damn funny sort of man. Behaving as though he own the place. Let me tell you that when you children born your father couldn’t feed you. Ask him. And see the gratitude I get? Everybody defying me these days. Or you don’t know?’
‘Savi! Myna! Kamla! Anand!’ Shama called.
‘You know what your father was doing when I pick him up and marry him to your mother? You know? He tell you? He wasn’t even catching crab. He was just catching flies.’
‘Savi! Anand!’
They hesitated, afraid of Seth, afraid of the house and Mr Biswas.
‘Today, look! White suit, collar and tie. And me. Still in the same dirty clothes you see me with since you born. Gratitude, eh? But I will tell you children that if I leave them today, all of them – your father, mother and all – all of them start catching crab tomorrow, I guarantee you.’
From somewhere in the house Mr Biswas’s voice came, raised, indistinct, heated.
Seth moved to the lorry.
‘Eh, Ewart?’ he said gently to one of the loaders. ‘They was nice roses, eh?’
Ewart smiled, his tongue over his top lip, and made sounds which committed him in no way.
Seth jerked his chin toward the house, still the source of angry, indistinct words. He smiled. Then he stopped smiling and said, ‘We mustn’t pay any mind to these damn jackasses.’
The children moved to the foot of the back steps, where they were hidden from Seth and the loaders.
Mr Biswas’s mutterings died away.
Suddenly an obscenity cracked out from the house. The children were quite still. There was silence, even from the lorry. Anand could have wept. Then the corrugated iron sheets jangled again.
A series of resonant crashes came from the kitchen.
‘Cut down the rose trees,’ Mr Biswas was shouting. ‘Cut them down. Break up everything else.’
The children, now below the house, heard his footsteps on the floor above as he went from room to room, pulling things down.
Anand walked under the house to the front, past Mr Biswas’s abandoned bicycle. The fence cast a shadow over the pavement and part of the road. Anand leaned against the fence and envied the calm of the other houses in the street, the group of boys and young men, the cricket players, the night chatterers, around the lamp-post.
Fresh noises came from the yard. It was not Mr Biswas pulling things down, but Seth and Ewart and Ewart’s colleague putting up a shed for Seth’s lorries at the side of the house, over Mr Biswas’s garden.
On the road the shadows of houses and trees quickly lengthened, were distorted, became unrecognizable and finally dissolved into darkness.
Mr Biswas came down the front steps.
‘Come with me for a walk.’
Anand would have liked to go, if only because he didn’t want to hurt by refusing. But he wanted more to inspect the damage and comfort Shama.
The damage was slight. Mr Biswas had ordered his destruction with economy. The mirror of Shama’s dressingtable had been unhinged and thrown on the bed, where it lay intact, reflecting the ceiling. The books had been knocked about a good deal; Selections from Sankaracharya had suffered especially. Mrs Tulsi’s marble topped tables had all been overturned; the marble tops, crashing, must have been responsible for some of the more frightening noises. Many of the brass vases had been dented, and two potted palms had lost their pots without in any way losing their shape. The hatrack was in a semi-recumbent position against the half-wall of the front verandah, but it had been thrown there gently: a few hooks had snapped, but the glass was whole. In the kitchen no glass or china had