A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [203]
He was lying in vest and pants on the Slumberking one evening, reading, trying to ignore the buzzing and shrieks of the readers and learners, and W. C. Tuttle’s new gramophone record of a boy American called Bobby Breen singing ‘When There’s a Rainbow on the River’. Someone came into the room and Mr Biswas, his back to the door, added to the pandemonium by wondering aloud who the hell was standing in his light.
It was Shama. ‘Hurry up and get some clothes on,’ she said excitedly. ‘Some people have come to see you.’
He had a moment of panic. He had kept his address secret, yet since he had become investigator of destitutes he had been repeatedly traced. Once, indeed, he had been accosted by a destitute just as he was wheeling his bicycle between the high walls. He had pretended that he was investigating a deserving case, and as this had looked likely, he had managed to get rid of the man by taking down his particulars there and then, standing on the pavement, and promising to investigate him as soon as possible.
Now he twisted his head and saw that Shama was smiling. Her excitement contained much self-satisfaction.
‘Who?’ he asked, jumping out of bed, striking the top of his hip-bone against the diningtable. Standing between the table and the bed, it was impossible for him to bend down to get his shoes. He sat down carefully on the bed again and fished out a shoe.
Shama said it was the widows from Shorthills.
He relaxed. ‘I can’t see them outside?’
‘Is private.’
‘But how the hell I can see them inside here?’ It was a problem. The widows would have to stand just inside the door, in the narrow area between the bed and the partition; and he would have to stand between the bed and the table. However, it was evening. He took the cotton sheet from below the pillow and threw it over himself.
Shama went out to summon the widows, and the five widows entered almost at once, in their best white clothes and veils, their faces roughened by sun and rain, their demeanour grave and conspiratorial as it always was whenever they were hatching one of their disastrous schemes: poultry farming, dairy farming, sheep raising, vegetable growing.
Mr Biswas, the sheet pulled halfway up his chest, scratched his bare, slack arms. ‘Can’t ask you to sit down,’ he said. ‘Nowhere to sit down. Except the table.’
The widows didn’t smile. Their solemnity affected Mr Biswas. He stopped scratching his arms and pulled the sheet up to his armpits. Only Shama, already conspicuous in her patched and dirty home-clothes, continued to smile.
Sushila, the senior widow, came to the foot of the bed and spoke.
Could they be considered Deserving Destitutes?
She spoke in a steady, considered way.
Mr Biswas was too embarrassed to reply.
Of course, Sushila said, they couldn’t all be Deserving Destitutes. But couldn’t one?
It was impossible. However destitute they might be, they were relations. But they had put on their best clothes and jewellery and come all the way from Shorthills, and he could not reject them at once. ‘What about the name?’ he asked.
That had occurred to them. The Tulsi name need not be mentioned. Their husbands’ names could be used.
Mr Biswas thought rapidly. ‘But what about the children at school?’
They had thought of that too. Sushila had no children. And as for the photograph: with veil, glasses and a few pieces of facial jewellery she could be effectively disguised.
Mr Biswas could think of no other delaying objection. He scratched his arms slowly.
The widows gazed solemnly, then accusingly at him. As his silence lengthened, Shama’s smile turned to a look of annoyance; in the end she, too, was accusing.
Mr Biswas slapped his left arm. ‘I would lose my job.’
‘But that time,’ Sushila said, ‘when you were the Scarlet Pimpernel, you went around dropping tokens-okens to your mother, your brothers and all the children.’
‘That was different,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I am sorry. Really.’
The five widows