A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [180]
‘This used to be the old road,’ Mrs Tulsi said.
And Mr Biswas found it easy to imagine the other race of Indians moving about this road before the world grew dark for them.
Nothing in Shama’s accounts had prepared him for the view of the house from the gully, at the end of the tree-lined drive. It was a two-storeyed house with a long verandah on the lower floor; it stood far from the road on an escarpment on the hill, above a broad flight of concrete steps, white against the surrounding green.
And everything was as Shama had said. On one side of the drive there was a cricket field; the pitch was red and broken: obviously the village team did not use matting. On the other side, beyond the saman tree, the lianas, the wild tannia, there was a swimming pool, empty, cracked, sandy, plants pushing up through the concrete, but it was easy to see it mended and filled with clear water; and beyond that, on an artificial mound, a cherry tree, its thick branches trimmed level at the bottom above a wrought-iron seat. And in the drive the gri-gri palms, with their white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves; though they were perhaps too old: they had grown so tall they could not be seen whole, and could even be missed.
Then at the far end of the cricket ground Mr Biswas saw a mule. It looked old and dispirited. Untethered, it remained still, against a camouflage of cocoa-trees.
‘Ah!’ Mr Biswas said, breaking the silence. ‘Horses.’
‘That’s not a horse,’ Mrs Tulsi said.
They left the drive and stood among the wild tannia under the saman tree. Mrs Tulsi held a liana and offered it to Mr Biswas. While he felt it, she held a thinner liana and pulled it down. ‘As strong as rope,’ she said. ‘The children could skip with this.’
They walked along the weed-ridden drive. The narrow canal at one side was silted with fine, rippled sand. ‘You could just sell the sand from this place,’ Mrs Tulsi said. They came to the broad flight of shallow concrete steps. Mr Biswas went up slowly: impossible not to feel regal ascending steps like these.
On either side of the house there was an abandoned garden, flowerless except for some stray marigolds; but through the bush it was possible to see the pattern of the beds, edged with concrete and the stunted shrubs called ‘green tea’ and ‘red tea’. At the end of one garden a Julie mango tree stood on a concrete-walled circular bed more than three feet high.
‘Just the spot for a temple,’ Mrs Tulsi whispered.
The house was of timber, but the timber had been painted to look like blocks of granite: grey, flecked with black, red, white and blue, and marked with thin white lines. A folding screen separated the regal drawingroom from the regal diningroom; and there was a multiplicity of rooms whose purposes were uncertain. The house had its own electricity plant; not working at the moment, Mrs Tulsi said, but it could be fixed. There was a garage, servants’ quarters, an outdoor bathroom with a deep concrete tub. The kitchen, linked to the house by a roofed way, was vast, with a brick oven. The hill rose directly behind the kitchen; the view through the back window was of the green hillside just a few feet away. And tonka beans grew on the hill.
‘Who owned the house before?’ Mr Biswas asked.
‘Some French people.’
This, allied to a brief acquaintance during his Aryan days with the writings of Romain Rolland, gave Mr Biswas a respect for the French.
They walked and looked. The silence, the solitude, the fruitful bush in a broken landscape: it was an enchantment.
They heard the bus in the distance.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is time to go home now.’
‘Home?’ said Mrs Tulsi. ‘Isn’t this your home now?’
So the Tulsis left Arwacas. The lands were rented out and it fell to the tenants to contend with Seth’s claims. The Tulsi Store was leased to a firm of Port of Spain merchants. At Port of Spain one of the tenements was sold and Shama relieved of her rent-collecting duties. It was only then that Shama, still sulking after her victory, disclosed that Mrs Tulsi had decided to raise the rent of