A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [219]
Mr Biswas took the letter absently, told Shama to send up his food, and went to the front room. He was alone, too, when he awoke in the night to the snoring house, Anand asleep beside him, and looked through the window at the clear, dead sky.
He saw the judge the next day, and went to the meeting of the literary group on Friday evening. He was especially glad to be out of the house then, for on Friday evenings the widows came up from Shorthills and spent the night below the house. Encouraged by the success of Indian shirtmakers, the widows had decided to go into the clothesmaking business. Since none of the five could sew at all well, they had decided to learn, and every Friday they went to the sewing classes at the Royal Victoria Institute, each widow specializing in a different aspect of the craft. They came in the late afternoon, they were rapturously welcomed by the readers and learners, and Basdai fed them. The readers and learners, not subject to Basdai’s floggings while their mothers were present, were unusually vociferous; there was an air of festival.
Mr Biswas found himself a little out of his depth in the literary group. Apart from the poems in the Royal Reader and Bell’s Standard Elocutionist, the only poems he knew were those of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Edward Carpenter; and at the judge’s the emphasis was on poetry. But there was much to drink, and it was late when Mr Biswas came back and wheeled his bicycle below the house, his head ringing with the names of Lorca and Eliot and Auden. The readers and learners were asleep on benches and tables. The widows, dressed in white and singing softly, sat below a weak bulb, playing cards, drinking coffee, and handling pieces of sewing which had grown grubby over the weeks of tuition. He went up the dark front stairs and turned the light on in his room. Anand sprawled on the bed behind the bank of pillows. He undressed and squeezed himself between the diningtable and the bed. Shama came from the inner room, in answer to the light, and noted those symptoms, of slowness, precision and silence, which she associated with his Sunday excursions to Pagotes.
As a condition of his acceptance by the group he had to read something of his own. He didn’t know what to offer them. He couldn’t write poetry, and he had thrown away the ‘Escape’ stories. He knew that story well, however; it could be written again. He still could think of no satisfactory end, but he had read enough of modern prose to know that a neat end might offend the group. He couldn’t make his hero the faceless ‘John Lubbard’, who was ‘tall, broad-shouldered, handsome’; he would be laughed down. He had to be ruthless. His hero would be Gopi, a country shopkeeper, ‘small, spare and shrunken’. He took a Sentinel pad, got into bed and, neatly, began to write the familiar words: At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children …
Those words were never read to the group. This story, like the others, was never finished. For, even before Gopi could meet his barren heroine, news came that Bipti, Mr Biswas’s mother, had died.
He called the children away from school and they went with Shama to Pratap’s. From the road the open verandah and steps, thick with mourners, appeared to be draped with white. He had not expected such a crowd. Tara was there, and Ajodha, looking annoyed. But most of the mourners he didn’t know: the families of his sister-in-law, his brother’s friends, Bipti’s friends. He might have been attending the funeral of a stranger. The body laid out in a coffin on the verandah belonged more to them. He longed to feel grief. He was surprised only by jealousy.
Shama did her duty and wept. Dehuti, who had been ostracized since her marriage, sat halfway up the steps, shrieking at new mourners and grabbing at their feet, as if anxious to trip them up, to prevent them going any further. The mourners, finding their trousers or skirts clutched to