A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [176]
When Mr Biswas returned his mood had changed.
‘Shama, how did those marble tops break?’ he asked, mimicking Mrs Tulsi. Then he acted himself. ‘Break, Mai? What break? Oh, marble top. Yes, Mai. It really break. It look as if it break. Now I wonder how that happened.’ He examined the broken hooks of the hatrack. ‘Didn’t know metal was such a funny thing. Come and look, Savi. Is not smooth inside, you know. Is more like packed sand.’ As for the rediffusion set, which he had kicked from room to room and disembowelled, he said, ‘I wanted to do that for a long time. The company always saying that they replace sets free.’
When the engineers saw the battered box and asked what had happened, he said, ‘I feel we listen to it too hard.’ They left a brand-new set in exchange, of the latest design.
Every night Seth’s lorries rested in the shed at the side of the house. Mr Biswas had never thought of Tulsi property as belonging to any particular person. Everything, the land at Green Vale, the shop at The Chase, belonged simply to the House. But the lorries were Seth’s.
3. The Shorthills Adventure
DESPITE THE solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. Only the death of Pundit Tulsi had prevented them from going back to India; and ever since they had talked, though less often than the old men who gathered in the arcade every evening, of moving on, to India, Demerara, Surinam. Mr Biswas didn’t take such talk seriously. The old men would never see India again. And he could not imagine the Tulsis anywhere else except at Arwacas. Separate from their house, and lands, they would be separate from the labourers, tenants and friends who respected them for their piety and the memory of Pundit Tulsi; their Hindu status would be worthless and, as had happened during their descent on the house in Port of Spain, they would be only exotic.
But when Shama went hurrying to Arwacas to give her news of Seth’s blasphemies, she found Hanuman House in commotion. The Tulsis had decided to move on. The clay-brick house was to be abandoned, and everyone was full of talk of the new estate at Shorthills, to the northeast of Port of Spain, among the mountains of the Northern Range.
The High Street was bright and noisy as always at the Christmas season, though because of the war there were few imported goods in the shops. In the Tulsi Store there were no Christmas goods except for the antique black dolls, and no decorations except Mr Biswas’s faded, peeling signs. Many shelves were empty; everything that could be of use at Shorthills had been packed.
And Shama’s news was stale. The disagreement between Seth and the rest of the family had already turned to open war. He and his wife and children had left Hanuman House and were living in a back street not far away; they were taking no part in the move to Shorthills. The cause of the quarrel remained obscure, each side accusing the other of ingratitude and treachery, and Seth abusing Shekhar in particular. Neither Mrs Tulsi nor Shekhar had made any statement. Shekhar, besides, was seldom in Arwacas, and it was the sisters who carried on the quarrel. They had forbidden their children to speak to Seth’s children; Seth had forbidden his children to speak to the Tulsi children. Only Padma, Seth’s wife, was welcome, as Mrs Tulsi’s sister, at Hanuman House; she could not be blamed for her marriage and continued to be respected for her age. Since the breach she had paid one clandestine visit to Hanuman House. The sisters regarded her loyalty as a tribute to the lightness of their cause; that she had had to come secretly was proof of Seth’s brutality.
The crop season was at hand and the sugarcane fields, managerless, were open to the malice of those who bore the Tulsis grudges. Two fires had already been started and there were rumours that Seth was stirring up fresh trouble, claiming Tulsi