A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [192]
No one had time to fight the bush. The widows, when not cooking or washing or cleaning or looking after the cows, were making coffee or chocolate or coconut oil or grinding maize. Their clothes became patched, their arms hard. They looked like labourers, and they had to bear with the exulting comments Seth sent through common friends. He had given his life to the family; then he had been rejected and slandered. Their punishment was only beginning. Had he not said that when he left them they would all start catching crabs?
And the widows worked like men. When the gully became a gorge they threw a bridge of coconut trunks across it. The gorge widened; the trunks collapsed. The widows built another bridge; that collapsed too. The widows prevailed on Mrs Tulsi to buy lengths of rail. The rails were laid across the gorge, coconut trunks laid across the rails, and for a time this structure survived, shaky, slippery, with gaps through which a child might fall to the rocks below.
Mr Biswas could no longer ignore the dereliction about him; yet when he spoke about moving, Shama, though excluded from the councils of the widows and the confidences of the other sisters, became sullen and sometimes cried.
Then came the scandal of the eighty dollars.
Chinta announced one day that someone had stolen eighty dollars from her room. It was an astonishing announcement, not only because an accusation of theft had never been made in the family before, but also because no one knew that Chinta and Govind had so much money. Chinta told again and again of the last time she had checked the money, and of the accident that had led her to find out that the money was missing. She said she knew who had stolen the money, but was waiting for the thief to trip himself up.
After a few days the thief had not tripped himself up, and Chinta went on searching, drawing crowds wherever she went. Sometimes she spoke Hindi incantations; sometimes she searched with a candle in one hand and a crucifix in the other; sometimes she spat on her left palm, struck the spittle with a finger, and searched in the direction indicated by the flight of the spittle. Finally she decided to hold a trial by Bible and key.
‘The old Roman cat and kitten,’ Mr Biswas said to Shama. ‘Like mother, like daughter. But look, eh, I don’t want my children meddling in that sort of tomfoolery.’
This was repeated throughout the house.
Chinta said, ‘I don’t blame him.’
The Bible-and-key trial lasted the whole of one afternoon. Chinta invoked the names of Saints Peter and Paul and spoke the accusations; Miss Blackie, invoking the same names, defended; and the innocence of everyone except Mr Biswas and his family was established.
Mr Biswas refused to have his room searched and ignored Shama’s pleas that he should allow the children to be tried. ‘She is a Roman cat,’ he said. ‘So what? I look like a Hindu mouse?’ For some time he and Govind had not spoken; now he and Chinta did not speak. Shama attempted to maintain relations with Chinta, but was rebuffed.
‘I am not blaming anybody,’ Chinta said. ‘I am only blaming the man who set the example.’
Then the whisperings began.
‘Don’t talk to them. But watch them.’
‘Vidiadhar! Quick! I left my purse on the table in the diningroom.’
‘Anand likes his nose to run. He swallows the snot. It is like condensed milk to him.’
‘Savi does eat the scabs of sores.’
‘You ever see Kamla’s head? Crawling with lice. But she is like a monkey. She eats them.’
And the girls begged Mr Biswas to move.
He had found a site such as he always wanted, isolated, unused and full of possibilities. It was some way from the estäte house, on a low hill buried in bush and well back from the road. The house was begun and, unblessed, completed in less than a month. Its pattern was precisely that of the house he had attempted in Green Vale, precisely that of thousands of houses in rural Trinidad. It had a verandah, two bedrooms and a drawingroom, and stood on tall pillars. Estate trees provided the timber; he had to pay only for the sawing.