A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [22]
Jairam, bathed and dressed and fresh, was sitting against some pillows in one corner of the verandah, spectacles low down on his nose, a brown Hindi book on his lap. When the verandah shook below Mr Biswas’s bare feet Jairam looked up and then down through his spectacles, and turned a page of his dingy book. Spectacles made him look older, abstracted and benign.
Mr Biswas held the brass jar of milk toward him. ‘Baba.’
Jairam sat up, rearranged a pillow, held a cupped palm, touching the elbow of the outstretched arm with the fingers of his free hand. Mr Biswas poured. Jairam brought the inside of his wrist against his forehead, blessed Mr Biswas, threw the milk into his mouth, passed his wet palm through his thin grey hair, readjusted his spectacles and looked down again at his book.
Mr Biswas went to his room, put on his workaday clothes and came out to breakfast. They ate in silence. Suddenly Jairam pushed his brass plate towards Mr Biswas.
‘Eat this.’
Mr Biswas’s fingers, ploughing through some cabbage, stood still.
‘Of course you won’t eat it. And I will tell you why. Because I have been eating from this plate.’
Mr Biswas’s fingers, feeling dry and dirty, bent and straightened.
‘Soanie!’
Jairam’s wife thumped out from the kitchen and stood between them, with her back to Mr Biswas. He looked at the creases on the edge of her soles and saw that the soles were hard and dirty. This surprised him, because Soanie was always washing the floor and bathing herself.
‘Go and bring the bananas.’
She pulled the veil over her forehead. ‘Don’t you think you had better forget it? It is such a small thing.’
‘Small thing! A whole hand of bananas!’
She went to the kitchen and came back, cradling the bananas.
‘Put them here, Soanie. Mohun, nobody else can touch these bananas now but yourself. When people, out of the goodness of their hearts, give me gifts, they are for you. Eh?’ Then the edge went out of his voice and he became like the benign, expounding pundit he was in company. ‘We mustn’t waste, Mohun. I have told you that again and again. We mustn’t let these bananas get rotten. You must finish what you have begun. Start now.’
Mr Biswas had been lulled by Jairam’s calm, even manner, and the abruptness of the command took him by surprise. He looked down at his plate and flexed his fingers, the tips of which were stuck with drying shreds of cabbage.
‘Start now.’
Soanie stood in the doorway, blocking the light. Though it was bright day, the room, with bedrooms on one side and the low roof of the verandah on the other, was gloomy.
‘Look. I have peeled one for you.’
The banana hovered in Jairam’s clean hand before Mr Biswas’s face. He took it with his dirty fingers, bit and chewed. Surprisingly, it tasted. But the taste was so localized it gave no pleasure. He then discovered that chewing killed the taste, and chewed deliberately, not tasting, only listening to the loud squelchy sound that filled his head. He had never heard bananas eaten with so much noise.
Presently the banana was finished, except for the hard little cone buried at the heart of the banana skin, open like a huge and ugly forest flower.
‘Look, Mohun. I have peeled you another.’
And while he ate that, Jairam slowly peeled another. And another, and another.
When he had eaten seven bananas, Mr Biswas was sick, whereupon Soanie, silently crying, carried him to the back verandah. He didn’t cry, not from bravery: he was only bored and uncomfortable. Jairam rose at once and walked heavily to his room, suddenly in a great temper.
Mr Biswas never ate another banana. That morning also marked the beginning of his stomach trouble; ever afterwards, whenever he was excited or depressed or angry his stomach swelled until it was taut with pain.
A more immediate result was that he became constipated. He could no longer relieve himself in the mornings and he was aware of the dishonour he did the gods by doing the puja unrelieved. The call came upon him at unpredictable times, and it was this which led to his departure from Jairam’s, and took him back to that other