A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [210]
And, indeed, apart from the unpleasantness caused by the gramophone, there was between Mr Biswas and W. C. Tuttle only that rivalry which had been touched off when Myna broke the torchbearer’s torchbearing arm and Shama bought a glass cabinet. The battle of possessions Mr Biswas lost by default. After the acquisition of the glass cabinet (its broken door unrepaired, its lower shelves filled with schoolbooks and newspapers) and the grateful destitute’s diningtable, Mr Biswas had no more room. W. C. Tuttle had the whole of the front verandah: he bought two moms rockingchairs, a standard lamp, a rolltop desk and a bookcase with sliding glass doors. Mr Biswas had gained a slight advantage by being the first to enrol his children in the Guardian Tinymites League; but he had squandered this by imitating W. C. Tuttle’s khaki shorts. W. C. Tuttle’s shorts were proper shorts, and he had the figure for them. Mr Biswas lacked this figure, and his khaki shorts were only long khaki trousers which Shama, against her judgement, had amputated, and hemmed on her machine with a wavering line of white cotton. Mr Biswas suffered a further setback when the Tuttle children revealed that their father had taken out a life insurance policy. ‘Take out one too?’ Mr Biswas said to Myna and Kamla. ‘If I start paying insurance every month, you think any of you would live to draw it?’
The picture war started when Mr Biswas bought two drawings from an Indian bookshop and framed them in passepartout. He found he liked framing pictures. He liked playing with clean cardboard and sharp knives; he liked experimenting with the colours and shapes of mounts. He saw the glass cut to his measurements, he cycled tremulously home with it, and a whole evening was transformed. Framing a picture was like writing a sign: it required neatness and precision; he could concentrate on what his hands did, forget the house, subdue his irritations. Soon his two rooms were as hung with pictures as the barrackroom in Green Vale had been with religious quotations.
W. C. Tuttle began with a series of photographs, in large wooden frames, of himself. In one photograph W. C. Tuttle, naked except for dhoti, sacred thread and caste-marks, head shown except for the top-knot, sat crosslegged, fingers bunched delicately on his upturned soles, and meditated with closed eyes. Next to this W. C. Tuttle stood in jacket, trousers, collar, tie, hat, one well-shod foot on the running-board of a motorcar, laughing, his gold tooth brilliantly revealed. There were photographs of his father, his mother, their house; his brothers, in a group and singly; his sisters, in a group and singly. There were photographs of W. C. Tuttle in various transitory phases: W. C. Tuttle with beard, whiskers and moustache, W. C. Tuttle with beard alone, moustache alone; W. C. Tuttle as weight-lifter (in bathing trunks, glaring at the camera, holding aloft the weights he had made from the lead of the dismantled electricity plant at Shorthills); W. C. Tuttle in Indian court dress; W. C. Tuttle in full pundit’s regalia, turban, dhoti, white jacket, beads, standing with a brass jar in one hand, laughing again (a number of blurred, awestruck faces in the background). In between there were pictures of the English countryside in spring, a view of the Matterhorn, a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, and a picture entitled ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’ It was W. C. Tuttle’s way of blending East and West.
But Govind, taxi-driving, Ramayana-grunting, remained untouched by this or any other rivalry and continued as menacing and offensive as before. The readers and learners openly wished that he would be maimed or killed in a motor accident. Instead, he won a safety award and had his hand shaken by the