A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [248]
Many emotions came to him and, saying good-bye to no one, he left the crowd and got into the Prefect, oven-hot with the windows closed, and drove to his area.
‘Tulips and daffodils!’ he muttered, remembering Owad’s horticultural letters as he drove along the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, past the swamplands, the crumbling huts, the rice fields.
It was just after ten when he got back to Port of Spain. The house was silent and upstairs was in darkness: Owad had gone to bed. But downstairs and in the tent lights blazed. Only the younger children were asleep; for everyone else, including those of the morning’s visitors who had decided to stay the night, the excitement of the day still lingered. Some were eating, some were playing cards; many were talking in whispers; and a surprising number were reading newspapers. Anand and Savi and Myna ran to Mr Biswas as soon as they saw him and breathlessly began telling of Owad’s adventures in England: his firefighting during the war, the rescues he had conducted, his narrow escapes; the operations he had been called in to perform at the last minute on famous men, the jobs that had been offered to him as a result, the seat in parliament; the distinguished men he had known and sometimes defeated in public debate: Russell, Joad, Radhakrishnan, Laski, Menon: these had already become household names. The whole house had fallen under Owad’s spell, and everywhere in the tent little groups were going over Owad’s tales. Chinta had already worked up a great antipathy for Krishna Menon, whom Owad particularly disliked. And in one afternoon the family reverence for India had been shattered: Owad disliked all Indians from India. They were a disgrace to Trinidad Indians; they were arrogant, sly and lecherous; they pronounced English in a peculiar way; they were slow and unintelligent and were given degrees only out of charity; they were unreliable with money; in England they went around with nurses and other women of the lower classes and were frequently involved in scandals; they cooked Indian food badly (the only true Indian meals Owad had in England were the meals he had cooked himself); their Hindi was strange (Owad had repeatedly caught them out in solecisms); their ritual was debased; the moment they got to England they ate meat and drank to prove their modernity (a brahmin boy had offered Owad curried corn beef for lunch); and, incomprehensibly, they looked down on colonial Indians. The sisters said they had never really been fooled by Indians from India; they spoke of the behaviour of the missionaries, merchants, doctors and politicians they had known; and they grew grave as they realized their responsibilities as the last representatives of Hindu culture.
The pundit, in dhoti, vest, sacred thread, caste-marks and wrist-watch, reclined on a blanket spread on the swept and flattened earth. He was reading a paper Mr Biswas had never seen before. And Mr Biswas saw then that the many other newspapers in the tent were similar to the pundit’s. It was the Soviet Weekly.
It was past midnight before Mr Biswas, moving from group to group, decided he had heard enough; and when Anand tried to tell of Owad’s meeting with Molotov, of the achievements of the Red Army and the glories of Russia, Mr Biswas said it was time for them to go to sleep. He went up to his room, leaving Anand and Savi in the festival atmosphere downstairs. His head rang with the great names the children and the sisters had spoken so casually. To think that the man who had met those people was sleeping under the same roof! There, where Owad had been, was surely where life was to be found.
For a full week the festival continued. Visitors left; fresh ones arrived. Perfect strangers – the ice-man, the salted-peanuts-man, the postman, the beggars, the street-sweepers, many stray children – were called in and fed. The food was supplied by Mrs