A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [211]
But the police were never called. For, quite suddenly, Govind ceased to be a problem.
An abrupt, stunning silence fell on the house one evening. The learners and readers stopped buzzing. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone went dead. The Ramayana singing broke off in mid-couplet. And from Govind’s room came a series of grunts, thumps, cracks and crashes.
Anand came running on tiptoe into Mr Biswas’s room and whispered joyfully, ‘Daddy is beating Mummy.’
Mr Biswas sat up and listened. It sounded true. Vidiadhar’s Daddy was beating Vidiadhar’s Mummy.
The whole house listened. And when the noises from Govind’s room died down, and Govind resumed whining out the Ramayana, the buzzing downstairs built up again, a new, satisfied sound, and W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone played, music of celebration.
So it was whenever Chinta was beaten by Govind. Which was often. The readers and learners recovered from their terror, for having found this outlet, Govind sought no other. Her beatings gave Chinta a matriarchal dignity and, curiously, gained her a respect she had never had before. They had the subsidiary effects of quelling her children, killing her song, and rousing her to cultural rivalry.
Vidiadhar was also in the exhibition class. He was not in the star section, like Anand; but Chinta put this down only to bribery and corruption. And one afternoon, while Anand was sitting on the end stool at the bar in the Dairies, an Indian boy came in. It was Vidiadhar. Anand was surprised. Vidiadhar looked surprised as well. And in their surprise, neither boy spoke to the other. Vidiadhar walked past Anand to the stool at the other end of the bar and asked for a half-pint of milk. Anand was pleased to see him making this mistake: money was first paid at the desk, and the receipt presented to the barman. So Vidiadhar had to walk past the whole row of high stools again, get his receipt from the cashier, and walk past the stools once more to the end he had chosen. Without looking at one another, they drank their milk, slowly, each unwilling to be the first to leave. Neither had intended to cut the other; the cutting had simply happened. But each boy considered he had been cut; and never again, until they were men, did they speak. In the shifting, tangled, multifarious relationships in that crowded house, this silence remained constant. It became historic. Then Vidiadhar said that he had done the cutting that afternoon, and Anand said that he had done it. And every afternoon, at five minutes past three, the people in the Dairies saw two Indian boys sitting at opposite ends of the milk bar, drinking half-pints of milk through straws, not looking at one another, never speaking.
Myna and Kamla, resenting the challenge of Vidiadhar, who was now openly eating prunes, began to claim astounding scholastic achievements for Anand.
‘My brother read more books than all of all-you put together.’
‘Hear you. But all right. If Anand read so much, let him tell me who is the author of Singing Guns.’ This from a young Tuttle.
‘Tell him, Anand. Tell him who is the author of Singing Guns.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Ah-ah-ah!’
‘But how you could expect him to know that?’ Myna said. ‘He does only read books of common sense.’
‘Okay. Anand does read a lot of books. But my brother write a book. A whole book. And he writing another right now.’
The writer had indeed done that. He was the eldest Tuttle boy. He had impressed his parents by a constant demand for exercise books and by a continuous show of writing. He said he was making notes. In fact, he had copied out every word of Nelson’s West Indian Geography, by Captain Cutteridge, Director of Education, author of Nelson’s West Indian Readers and Nelson’s West Indian Arithmetics. He had completed the Geography in more than a dozen exercise books, and was at the moment engaged on the first volume of Nelson’s West Indian History, by Captain Daniel, Assistant Director of Education.
With the exhibition