A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [207]
As soon as he got to the house he went to the old bookcase, dug past his newspaper clippings, his correspondence from the Ideal School, a nest of pink blind baby mice, and took out his unfinished Escape stories, the dreams of the barren heroine. He took the stories to the lavatory in the yard and stayed there for some time, creating a din of his own, pulling the chain again and again. When he came out there was a little queue of readers and learners, impatient but interested.
On Sundays the din of the readers and learners was at its peak, and Mr Biswas started once more to take his children on visits to Pagotes. But now he spent little time with them when they got there. Jagdat, like a vicious schoolboy eager to corrupt, was always anxious to get Mr Biswas out of the house, and Mr Biswas was always willing. Between Jagdat and Mr Biswas there had developed an easy, relaxing relationship. They had never quarrelled; they could never be friends; yet each was always pleased to see the other. Neither believed or was interested in what the other said, and did not feel obliged even to listen. Mr Biswas liked, too, to be with Jagdat in Pagotes, for once outside the house Jagdat was a person of importance, Ajodha’s heir, and his manner was that of someone used to obedience and affection. Despite his age, his family, his premature, attractive grey hair, Jagdat was still treated as the young man for whom allowances had to be made. His main pleasure lay in breaking Ajodha’s rules, and for a few hours Mr Biswas had to pretend that these rules applied to him as well. Smoking was forbidden: they began to smoke as soon as they were in the road. Drinking was forbidden, and on Sunday mornings rumshops were closed by law: therefore they drank. Jagdat had an arrangement with a rumshop-keeper who, in return for free petrol from Ajodha’s pumps, offered the use of his drawingroom for this Sunday morning drinking. In this drawingroom, which was strangely respectable, with four highly polished morris chairs around a small table, Mr Biswas and Jagdat drank whisky and soda. In the beginning they were young men, for whom the world was still new, and neither mentioned the affections to which he had that day to return. But there always came a time when, after a silence, with each willing the talk to continue as before, anxieties and affections returned. Jagdat mentioned his family; he spoke their names: they became individuals. Mr Biswas spoke about the Sentinel, about Anand and the exhibition. And always at the end the talk turned to Ajodha. Mr Biswas heard old and new stories of Ajodha’s selfishness and cruelty; again and again he heard how it was Bhandat who had made Ajodha’s early success possible. Distrustful of the family, despite the drink, Mr Biswas listened and made no comments, only squeezing in words about the Tulsis from time to time, half-heartedly trying to suggest that he had suffered as grand a betrayal as Bhandat. One Sunday morning he told Jagdat about his visit to Bhandat.
‘Ah! So you see the old man then, Mohun? How he keeping? Tell me, he say anything about that bloodsucking hog?’
This was clearly Ajodha. Mr Biswas, looking down at his glass as though deeply moved, shook his head.
‘You see the sort of man he is, Mohun. No malice.’
Mr Biswas drank some whisky. ‘He tell me that none of you does go to see him or give him a little help or anything.’
After a pause Jagdat said, ‘Son of a bitch lying like hell. That old bitch he living with smart too, you know. She always putting him up to something or the other.’
Thereafter Jagdat never spoke of Bhandat, and Mr Biswas resolved only to listen.
At these sessions Jagdat gave every indication of growing drunk. Mr Biswas nearly always became drunk, and when they left the rumshop-keeper’s drawingroom they sometimes decided