A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [204]
Sushila started on a deep sigh, and one by one the widows, staring at Mr Biswas’s forehead, sighed and shook their heads. Shama gave Mr Biswas a look of perfect fury. Then she and the widows trooped out of the door.
A child was being flogged downstairs. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone was playing ‘One Night When the Moon Was so Mellow’.
‘I am sorry,’ Mr Biswas said, to the back of the last widow. ‘But I would lose my job. Sorry.’
And really he was sorry. But even if they were not relations, he could not have made their case convincing. How could one speak of a woman as destitute when she lived on her mother’s estate, in one of her mother’s three houses; when her brother was studying medicine in the United Kingdom; and when another brother was a figure of growing importance in the South, his name all over the paper, in the gossip columns, in the news columns for his business deals and political statements, in his own stylish advertisements (‘Tulsi Theatres Trinidad proudly present …’)?
It was not long after this that Mr Biswas had another request which disturbed him. It came from Bhandat, Ajodha’s ostracized brother. Mr Biswas had never seen Bhandat since Bhandat had left the rumshop in Pagotes for his Chinese mistress in Port of Spain; he had only heard from Jagdat, Bhandat’s son, that Bhandat was living in a poverty which he bore with fortitude. Mr Biswas could do nothing for Bhandat. They were related, and again it would have been impossible to make a case for a man whose brother was known to be one of the wealthiest men in the colony.
Bhandat had given an address in the city centre which might have led someone without a knowledge of the city’s slums to believe that Bhandat was a dealer in cocoa or sugar, an import-and-export king. In fact he lived in a tenement that lay between an importer of eastern goods and an exporter of sugar and copra. It was an old, Spanish style building. The flat façade, diversified by irregular areas of missing plaster, small windows with broken shutters, and two rusty iron balconies, rose directly from the pavement.
From the exporter came the rancid smell of copra and the heavy smell of sacked sugar, a smell quite different from the fetid, sweet smell of the sugar factories and buffalo ponds Mr Biswas remembered from his boyhood. From the importer came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the smell of dust, straw, the urine and droppings of horses, donkeys and mules. At every impediment the gutters had developed a wrinkled film of scum, as white as the skin on boiled milk, with a piercing, acrid smell, which, blended and heated by the afternoon sun, rose suffocatingly from the road and pursued Mr Biswas as he turned off into the sudden black shadow of an archway between the tenement and the exporter’s. He leaned his bicycle against the cool wall, fought off the bees from the exporter’s sugar, and made his way down a cobbled lane along which ran a shallow green and black gutter, glittering in the gloom. The lane opened out into a paved yard which was only slightly wider. On one side was the high blank wall of the exporter’s; on the other was the wall of the tenement, with windows that gaped black above dingy curtains. A leaning standpipe dripped on a mossy base and fed the gutter; at the end of the yard, their doors open, were a newspaper-littered lavatory and a roofless bathroom. Above was the sky, bright blue. Sunlight struck diagonally across the top of the exporter’s wall.
Beyond the standpipe Mr Biswas turned into a passage. He was passing a curtained doorway when a shrill voice cried out, almost gaily, ‘Mohun!’
He felt he had become a boy again. All the sense of weakness and shame returned.
It was a low, windowless room, lit only by the light from the passage. A folding screen barred off one corner. In another corner there was a bed, and from it came gurgling happy sounds.