A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [183]
Then suddenly some sheep appeared. Haifa dozen scraggy, bare, bewildered sheep. The children had been promised sheep, but they had expected fleecy things, and there was no rush to claim these. The sheep remained nibbling in the cricket field, offending the children and the cricketers.
Nothing was done to the cocoa trees or the orange trees. Week by week the bush advanced and the estate, from looking neglected, began to look abandoned. There was still no one to plan or direct. As suddenly as she had emerged from her sickroom to supervise the move, so Mrs Tulsi had now withdrawn. She had a small room on the lower floor, overlooking the ruined garden and Hari’s box-board temple. But her window was closed, the room was sealed against light and air, and there, in an ammoniac darkness, she spent much of the day, looked after by Sushila and Miss Blackie. It was as though her energy had been stimulated only by the quarrel with Seth and, ebbing, had depressed her further into exhaustion and grief.
Govind tore down the cricket pavilion one day. A rough cowshed went up in its place, and Mr Biswas heard, with astonishment, that his cow was to be stabled there.
‘Cow? My cow?’
It turned out that the cow, whose name was Mutri, was one of Shama’s secret possessions, like her sewingmachine.
Mutri had been kept on the estate at Arwacas with all the other Tulsi cows. She was an old black cow, tired, with short bruised horns.
‘What about the milk?’ Mr Biswas asked. ‘The calves?’
‘What about the grass?’ Shama replied. ‘The water? The feed?’
Govind looked after the cows and for that reason alone Mr Biswas made no further inquiries. Govind was becoming increasingly surly. He scarcely spoke to anyone, and worked off his rages on the cows. He beat them with thick lengths of wood and at milking time the slightest misdemeanour threw him into a rage. The animals didn’t moan or wince or show anger; they only tried to move away. No one protested; there was no one to complain to.
Mr Biswas said, ‘Poor Mutri.’
Before cows and sheep the cricketers retreated. The cricket field turned to mud and manure, and someone planted a pumpkin vine at the edge of it.
Then the tree-cutting began. In less than a morning the reader of W. C. Tuttle cut down the gri-gri palms along the drive. He came back sweating to the house and, since none of the watertaps worked, had a bath at a waterbarrel. Mrs Tulsi ate the hearts of the trees, which had been recommended to her by one of her Arwacas friends, and the children consoled themselves with the red berries. Govind, asserting himself, then cut down the orange trees: they were blighted, encouraged snakes, and could conceal thieves.
‘Damn stupid thieves if they think they could find anything in this place,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘They cut down the trees only to make it easier to pick the oranges, that is all.’
The oranges were collected by Govind and Chinta and their children, put into sacks and sent to Port of Spain by bus. Everyone wondered who took the money. The trees were chopped into logs and burned in the kitchen, the moss-covered barks making excellent kindling.
The children lost heart. They now had to be compelled to gather tonka beans, to pick oranges and avocado pears to be sent to Port of Spain. On some Saturdays they pulled up weeds from the drive, urged on by the adults to hollow competitions to see who could amass the highest pile of weeds.
The plumbing remained unrepaired. Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside. The house toilet, unused, became a sewingroom.
In place of the orange trees and the palm trees seedlings were planted along the drive and hedged around with bamboo stakes. The cows broke down the cricket field fence. The sheep, escaping, broke down the bamboo stakes and stripped the seedlings clean. The silt rose