A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [194]
That evening Shama discovered the ransacked drawer. ‘
Thief!’ she said. ‘Some thief was in the house.’
Refusing to yield to the gloom of his family and his own feeling that he had been rash, Mr Biswas set about clearing the land. He spared only the poui trees, for their branches and their yellow flowers, which came out bright and pure for one week in the year. The integrity of living bush was replaced by a brown chaos of collapsed and dying trees. Through this Mr Biswas made a winding path from the house down to the road, cutting steps into the earth and shoring them with bamboo. The debris could not be immediately fired, for though the leaves were dead and brittle the wood was green. Waiting, Mr Biswas cut poui sticks and roasted them in bonfires. And he was reminded of a duty.
He sent for his mother. He had for so long been telling her – ever since he was a boy in the back trace – that she was to come to stay with him when he had built his own house, that he now doubted whether she would come. But she came, for a fortnight. Her feelings could not be read. He was at first extravagantly affectionate. But Bipti remained calm, and Mr Biswas followed her example. It was as if the relationship between them had been granted without their asking, and had only to be accepted.
Though the children understood Hindi they could no longer speak it, and this limited communication between them and Bipti. From the start, however, Shama and Bipti got on well. Shama gave not a hint of the sullenness she used with Bipti’s sister Tara; to Mr Biswas’s surprise and pleasure, she treated Bipti with all the respect of a Hindu daughter-in-law. She had touched Bipti’s feet with her fingers when Bipti came, and she never appeared before Bipti with her head uncovered.
Bipti helped with the housework and on the land. When, after Bipti’s death, Mr Biswas wished to be reminded of her, he thought less of his childhood and the back trace than of this fortnight at Shorthills. He thought of one moment in particular. The ground in front of the house had been only partly cleared, and one afternoon, when he had pushed his bicycle up the earth steps to the top of the hill, he saw that part of the ground, which he had left that morning cumbered and unbroken, had been cleared and levelled and forked. The black earth was soft and stoneless; the spade had cut cleanly into it, leaving damp walls as smooth as mason’s work. Here and there the prongs of the fork had left shallow parallel indentations on the upturned earth. In the setting sun, the sad dusk, with Bipti working in a garden that looked, for a moment, like a garden he had known a dark time ages ago, the intervening years fell away. Thereafter the marks of a fork in earth made him think of that moment at the top of the hill, and of Bipti.
The children looked forward to the firing of the land as to a celebration. The Civil Defence authorities had given them a taste for large conflagrations, and now they were to have a hill on fire in their own backyard. It would be almost as good as the mock air-raid on the Port of Spain race course. Of course there would be no dummy houses to burn, no ambulances, no nurses attending to people groaning at mock wounds, no Boy Scouts on motor bicycles dashing about through the thick smoke with dummy dispatches; but at the same time there would be none of those eager firefighters who, in spite of the public outcry, had rescued some of the dummy buildings before they were even scorched.
Mr Biswas, displaying manual skills which his children secretly distrusted, dug trenches and prepared little nests of twigs and leaves at what he called strategic points. On Saturday afternoon he summoned the children, soaked a brand in pitch-oil, set it alight, and ran from nest to nest, poking the brand in and jumping back, as though he had touched off an explosion. A leaf caught here and a twig there, blazed, shrank, smouldered, died. Mr Biswas didn’t wait to see. Ignoring the cries of the children, he ran on, leaving a trail of subsiding wisps of dark smoke.