A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [20]
So, whenever Mr Biswas was in Tara’s house, it was as a Brahmin or a reader, with a status distinct from Dehuti’s, and he had little opportunity of speaking to her.
Bipti had a specific worry about her children: neither Pratap nor Prasad nor Dehuti was married. She had no plans for Mr Biswas, since he was still young and she assumed that the education he was receiving was provision and protection enough. But Tara thought otherwise. And just when Mr Biswas was beginning to do stocks and shares, transactions as unreal to Lal as they were to him, and was learning ‘Bingen on the Rhine’ from Bell’s Standard Elocutionist for the visit of the school inspector, he was taken out of school by Tara and told that he was going to be made a pundit.
It was only when his possessions were being bundled that he discovered he still had the school’s copy of the Standard Elocutionist. It was too late to return it, and he never did. Wherever he went the book went with him, and ended in the blacksmith-built bookcase in the house at Sikkim Street.
For eight months, in a bare, spacious, unpainted wooden house smelling of blue soap and incense, its floors white and smooth from constant scrubbing, its cleanliness and sanctity maintained by regulations awkward to everyone except himself, Pundit Jairam taught Mr Biswas Hindi, introduced him to the more important scriptures and instructed him in various ceremonies. Morning and evening, under the pundit’s eye, Mr Biswas did the puja for the pundit’s household.
Jairam’s children had all been married and he lived alone with his wife, a crushed, hard-working woman whose only duty now was to look after Jairam and his house. She didn’t complain. Among Hindus Jairam was respected for his knowledge. He also held scandalous views which, while being dismissed as contentious, had nevertheless brought him much popularity. He believed in God, fervently, but claimed it was not necessary for a Hindu to do so. He attacked the custom some families had of putting up a flag after a religious ceremony; but his own front garden was a veritable grove of bamboo poles with red and white pennants in varying stages of decay. He ate no meat but spoke against vegetarianism: when Lord Rama went hunting, did they think it was just for the sport?
He was also working on a Hindi commentary on the Ramayana, and parts of this commentary were dictated to Mr Biswas to extend his own knowledge of the language. So that Mr Biswas could see and learn, Jairam took him on his rounds; and wherever he went with the pundit Mr Biswas, invested with the sacred thread and all the other badges of caste, found himself, as in Tara’s house, the object of regard. It was his duty on these occasions to do the mechanical side of Jairam’s offices. He took around the brass plate with the lighted camphor; the devout dropped a coin on the plate, brushed the flame with their fingers and took their fingers to their forehead. He took around the consecrated sweetened milk with strips of the tulsi leaf floating on its surface, and doled it out a teaspoonful at a time. When the ceremonies were over and the feeding of Brahmins began, he was seated next to Pundit Jairam; and when Jairam had eaten and belched and asked for more and eaten again it was Mr Biswas who mixed the bicarbonate of soda for him. Afterwards Mr Biswas went to the