A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [182]
Anand’s patience broke. Spreading a rumour among the children that the house was going to be repainted right away but that the old paint had to be scraped off first, he soon had more than a dozen helpers working on the granite blocks. They made many pink and cream scars on the grey verandah walls before they were noticed; and this effort to force improvements ended in a mass flogging.
Mr Biswas, too, was waiting for improvements. But he did not greatly care about them. For him Shorthills was an adventure, an interlude. His job made him independent of the Tulsis; and Shorthills was an insurance against the sack. It also provided an opportunity to save, an opportunity to plunder. And secretly he was plundering: half a dozen oranges at a time, half a dozen avocado pears or grapefruit or lemons, sold to a café keeper in St Vincent Street with some story about the variety of fruit trees he had in his backyard. The money was little but regular, the thrill of plundering delicious. Plunder! The very sound of the word excited Mr Biswas. Cycling to work in the cool of the morning and whistling in his way, he would suddenly jump off his bicycle, look right, look left, pull down oranges or avocado pears, drop them into his saddlebag, hop on to his saddle and cycle me asuredly away, whistling.
He came back one afternoon to find the cherry tree cut down, the artificial mound partly dug up, the swimming pool partly filled in. By the end of the week the mound was a flat black patch and the swimming pool did not exist. A tent was put up over the area occupied by the pool and sisters and husbands remarked again and again that it was wonderful not only to have so much bamboo so near but not to have to pay for it either, as they had had to at Arwacas.
The tent was for wedding guests. It appeared that a whole wave of Shama’s nieces was to be married off. One marriage had been arranged before the move, and during the idle weeks at Shorthills the idea had grown. Action was swift and sudden. Details – the bridegrooms and dowries – had been easily settled, and now the puzzling estate was forgotten and all energy went to preparing for the weddings. Days before the ceremony guests and retainers and dancers, singers and musicians came from Arwacas. They slept in the tent, the verandah, the garage, the covered space between the kitchen and house, and by day wandered through the grounds and woods, plundering.
Much bamboo was used in the decorations. The drive and walks were lined with bamboo poles placed horizontally on vertical bamboo poles; every horizontal section was filled with oil and fitted with a wick. On the night of the weddings many small flickering flames seemed to be suspended in the darkness; trees, outlined, not illuminated, looked solid; and the grounds felt protected, a warm cave in the night. The seven bridegrooms came in seven cavalcades with seven teams of drummers, followed by the stupefied villagers. At the foot of the concrete steps there were seven ceremonies of welcome, and in the wedding-tent, built over one of the gardens flattened for the purpose, the seven wedding ceremonies went on all night, while in the tent over the swimming pool there was singing, dancing and feasting.
When the weddings were over, the population of the house temporarily reduced by seven, the guests gone away, and the tents over the ruined garden and swimming pool taken down, everyone began waiting again, for the small cricket pavilion to be restored, the drive cleaned, its culverts mended, the canal cleared of silt, for the evergreen hedges at the bottom of the hill to be trimmed, for the unruined garden to