A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [220]
Mr Biswas went past Dehuti to look at the body. Then he did not wish to see it again. But always, as he wandered about the yard among the mourners, he was aware of the body. He was oppressed by a sense of loss: not of present loss, but of something missed in the past. He would have liked to be alone, to commune with this feeling. But time was short, and always there was the sight of Shama and the children, alien growths, alien affections, which fed on him and called him away from that part of him which yet remained purely himself, that part which had for long been submerged and was now to disappear.
The children did not go to the burial ground. They strayed about Pratap’s large yard, eyed other groups of children, town children versus country children. Anand, in his exhibition clothes, led his sisters through the vegetable garden to the cowpen. They examined a broken cartwheel. Behind the pen they surprised a hen and its brood scratching a dung heap. Girls and chickens fled in opposite directions, and the country children tittered.
Back in Port of Spain, they noticed Mr Biswas’s stillness, his silence, his withdrawal. He did not complain about the noise; he discouraged, but gently, all efforts to engage him in conversation; he went alone for long night walks. He summoned no one to get his matches or cigarettes or books. And he wrote. He told no one what he was writing. He wrote with energy but without enthusiasm, doggedly, destroying sheet after sheet. He ate little, but his indigestion had gone. Shama bought him tinned salmon, his favourite food; she had the girls clean his bicycle and made Anand pump the tyres every morning. But he did not appear to notice these attentions.
She went to the front room one evening and stood at the head of the bed. He was writing; his back was to her. She was in his light, but he did not shout.
‘What’s the matter, man?’
He said in an expressionless voice, ‘You are blocking the light.’ He laid down paper and pencil.
She worked her way between the table and bed and sat on the edge of the bed, near his head. Her weight created a minor disturbance. The pillow tilted and his head slipped off it, falling almost into her lap. He tried to move his head, but when she held it he remained still.
‘You don’t look well,’ she said.
He accepted her caresses. She stroked his hair, remarked on its fine quality, said it was going thin, but not, thank God, going grey like hers. She pulled out a hair from her head and laid it across his chest. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘completely grey,’ laughing.
‘Grey all right.’
She looked over his chest to the sheets he had put down. She saw My Dear Doctor, with the My crossed out and written in again.
‘Who you writing to?’
She couldn’t read more, for beyond the first line the handwriting had deteriorated into a racing scrawl.
He didn’t reply.
For some time, until the position became uncomfortable for Shama, they remained like that, silent. She stroked his head, looked from him to the open window, heard the buzz and shrieks upstairs and downstairs. He closed his eyes and opened them under her stroking.
‘Which doctor?’ Though there had been a long silence, there seemed to be no break between her questions.
He was silent.
Then he said, ‘Doctor Rameshwar.’
‘The one who …’
‘Yes. The one who signed my mother’s death certificate.’
She went on stroking his head, and, slowly, he began to speak.
There had been some trouble about the certificate. No, it wasn’t really trouble. Pratap had first dispatched messages; Prasad had come and they had both gone, with urgent grief, to the doctor’s. It was midday,