A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [24]
‘And it was Tara who wanted you to be a pundit,’ Bipti said. ‘I don’t know what we are going to tell her.’
‘Tell me about Dehuti,’ he said.
Bipti had little to say. No one had been to see Dehuti; Tara had vowed never to mention her name again. Bipti spoke as if she herself deserved every reproach for Dehuti’s behaviour; and though she declared she could have nothing more to do with Dehuti, her manner suggested that she had to defend Dehuti not only against Tara’s anger, but also Mr Biswas’s.
But he felt no anger or shame. When he asked about Dehuti he was only remembering the girl who pressed his dirty clothes to her face and wept when she thought her brother was dead.
Bipti sighed. ‘I don’t know what Tara is going to say now. You had better go and see her yourself.’
And Tara was not angry. True to her vow, she did not mention Dehuti. Ajodha, to whom Jairam had given only a hint of Mr Biswas’s misdemeanour, laughed in his high-pitched, breathless way and tried to get Mr Biswas to tell exactly what had happened. Mr Biswas’s embarrassment delighted Ajodha and Tara, until he was laughing too; and then, in the cosy back verandah of Tara’s house – though it had mud walls it stood on proper pillars, had a neat thatched roof and wooden ledges on the half-walls, and was bright with pictures of Hindu gods – he told about the bananas, blusteringly at first, but when he noticed that Tara was giving him sympathy he saw his own injury very clearly, broke down and wept, and Tara held him to her bosom and dried his tears. So that the scene he had pictured as taking place with his mother took place with Tara.
Ajodha had bought a motorbus and opened a garage, and it was in the garage that Alec worked, no longer wearing red bodices or peeing blue, but doing mysterious greasy things. Grease blackened his hairy legs; grease had turned his white canvas shoes black; grease blackened his hands even beyond the wrist; grease made his short working trousers black and stiff. Yet he had the gift, which Mr Biswas admired, of being able to hold a cigarette between greasy fingers and greasy lips without staining it. His lips still twisted easily and his small humorous eyes still squinted; but the cheeks had already sunk on his small square face and he now had a perpetual air of abstraction and debauch.
Mr Biswas did not join Alec in the garage. Tara sent him to the rumshop. This had been Ajodha’s first business venture and had provided the money for some of his subsequent exploits. But, with Ajodha’s growing success, the importance of the rumshop had declined and it was now run by his brother Bhandat, about whom there were unpleasant rumours: Bhandat apparently drank, beat his wife and kept a mistress of another race.
Bipti, who had not been consulted, was very grateful to Tara. And Mr Biswas was thrilled at the thought of earning money. He was not going to earn much. He was to live at the shop and be fed by Bhandat’s wife; he was to be given suits of clothes every now and then; and he was to get two dollars a month.
The rumshop was a long high building of simple design, flat to the ground, with a pitched roof of corrugated iron rising from concrete walls. Swing doors exposed only the wet floor of the shop and the feet of drinkers, and, in a land where all doors are wide open, gave a touch of vice to the building. The doors were needed, for many of the people who came past them meant to drink themselves into insensibility. At any time of the day there were people who had collapsed on the wet floor, men who looked older than they were, women too; useless people crying in corners, their anguish lost in the din and press of the standing drinkers who swallowed their rum at a gulp, made a face, hastily swallowed water, and bought more rum. There was swearing, boasting, threatening; fights, broken