A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [181]
The solitude and silence of Shorthills was violated. The villagers bore the invasion without protest and almost with indifference. They were an attractive mixture of French and Spanish and Negro and, though they lived so near to Port of Spain, formed a closed, distinctive community. They had a rural slowness and civility, and spoke English with an accent derived from the French patois they spoke among themselves. They appeared to exercise some rights on the grounds of the house. They played cricket on the cricket field most afternoons and there was a match every Sunday, when the grounds were virtually taken over by the villagers. For some time after the coming of the Tulsis courting couples strolled about the orange walks and the drive in the afternoon, disappearing from time to time into the cocoa woods. But this custom soon ceased. The couples, finding themselves surprised at every turn by a Tulsi, moved further up the gully.
Mr Biswas’s first impression on moving to Shorthills was that the Tulsi family had increased. Seth and his family were absent; but those sisters who for one reason and another had lived away from Hanuman House had brought their families; and there were many married grandchildren as well, and their families.
Mr Biswas was given a room on the upper floor, one of six rooms of equal size about a central corridor. It was a hotel-like arrangement, with a couple in each room, and widows and children moving about the common area downstairs. Mr Biswas’s room became the headquarters of his family; it was there that Anand did his homework, there that the children came to complain, there that Mr Biswas gave them delicacies to eat in private. The fourposter, Shama’s dressingtable, the bookcase and desk and the table were in this room; the rest of his furniture, rockingchair, hatrack, kitchen safe, was disposed, like his children at night, about the house.
The drawingroom furnishings of Hanuman House had been similarly scattered. There could be no division of this house into the used and the unused, and the thronelike chairs, the statuary and the vases were left in the drawingroom, which in appearance and purpose presently became the equivalent of the Hanuman House hall.
A certain unpleasantness was added to Mr Biswas’s situation by the presence directly across the corridor of a brother-in-law he had never seen at Hanuman House, a tall, contemptuous man who had taken an immediate dislike to him and expressed this dislike by a quivering of the nostrils.
Anand said, ‘Prakash say his pappa got more books than you.’
Mr Biswas sent Anand to find out what books Prakash’s father had.
Anand reported, ‘All the books exactly the same size. On the cover they have a green shield marked “Boots”. And they are all by a man called W. C. Turtle.’
‘Trash,’ Mr Biswas said.
‘Trash,’ Anand told Prakash.
‘You call my books trash?’ Prakash’s father asked Mr Biswas some mornings later, when they opened their doors at the same time.
‘I didn’t call your books trash.’
The nostrils quivered. ‘What about your Epictetus and Manxman and Samuel Smiles?’
‘How do you know about my Epictetus?’
‘How do you know about my books?’
Thereafter Mr Biswas locked his room whenever he left it. The news spread and there were comments.
‘So you start up already?’ Shama said.
And having got to Shorthills, everyone waited, for the sheep, the horses, for the swimming pool to be repaired, the drive weeded, the gardens cleaned, the electricity plant fixed, the house repainted.
Waiting, the children stripped the saman tree of its lianas. But there was no use to which they could put these improbable and pleasing growths; they were not good for skipping, as Mrs Tulsi had said: the thin ones frayed easily, the fat ones were unwieldy. Hari cut down the Julie mango tree on the raised bed at the end of the garden and built a small, kennel-like box-board