A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [250]
They shook their heads.
‘Shoot it from an aeroplane. Not shooting bullets. Shooting rice.’
‘From an aeroplane?’ the rice-planting widow said.
‘From an aeroplane. You could plant your field in a few seconds.’
‘Take care you don’t miss,’ Mr Biswas said.
‘And you,’ Owad said to Sushila. ‘You should really be a doctor. Your bent is that way.’
‘I’ve been telling her so,’ Mrs Tulsi said.
Sushila, who had had enough of nursing Mrs Tulsi, hated the smell of medicines and asked for nothing more than a quiet dry goods shop to support her old age, nevertheless agreed.
‘In Russia you would be a doctor. Free.’
‘Doctor like you?’ Sushila asked.
‘Just like me. No difference between the sexes. None of this nonsense about educating the boys and throwing the girls aside.’
Chinta said, ‘Vidiadhar always keep on telling me that he want to be a aeronautical engineer.’
This was a lie. Vidiadhar didn’t even know the meaning of the words. He just liked their sound.
‘He would be an aeronautical engineer,’ Owad said.
‘To take out the rice grains from the aeroplane gas-tank,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘But what about me?’
‘You, Mohun Biswas. Welfare Officer. After they have broken people’s lives, deprived them of opportunity, sending you around like a scavenger to pick the pieces up. A typical capitalist trick, Ma.’
‘Yes, son.’
‘M-m-m-m.’ It was Miss Blackie, purring. ‘Using you like a tool. You have given us five hundred dollars profit. Here, we give you five dollars charity.’ The sisters nodded.
O God, Mr Biswas thought, another scorpion trying to do me out of a job.
‘But you are not really a capitalist lackey,’ Owad said.
‘Not really,’ Mr Biswas said.
‘You are not really a bureaucrat. You are a journalist, a writer, a man of letters.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. Yes, man.’
‘In Russia, they see you are a journalist and a writer, they give you a house, give you food and money and tell you, “Go ahead and write.” ’
‘Really really?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘A house, just like that?’
‘Writers get them all the time. A dacha, a house in the country.’
‘Why,’ asked Mrs Tulsi, ‘don’t we all go to Russia?’
‘Ah,’ Owad said. ‘They fought for it. You should hear what they did to the Czar.’
‘M-m-m-m.’ Miss Blackie said, and the sisters nodded gravely.
‘You,’ Mr Biswas said, now full of respect, ‘are you a member of the Communist Party?’
Owad only smiled.
And his reaction was equally cryptic when Anand asked how, as a communist working for the revolution, he could take a job in the government medical service. ‘The Russians have a proverb,’ Owad said. ‘A tortoise can pull in its head and go through a cesspit and remain clean.’
By the end of the week the house was in a ferment. Everyone was waiting for the revolution. The Soviet Constitution and the Soviet Weekly were read more thoroughly than the Sentinel or the Guardian. Every received idea was shaken. The readers and learners, happy to think themselves in a society that was soon to be utterly destroyed, relaxed their efforts to read and learn and began to despise their teachers, whom they had previously reverenced, as ill-informed stooges.
And Owad was an all-rounder. He not only had views on politics and military strategy; he not only was knowledgeable about cricket and football; he lifted weights, he swam, he rowed; and he had strong opinions about artists and writers.
‘Eliot,’ he told Anand. ‘Used to see him a lot. American, you know. The Waste Land. The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Let us go then, you and I. Eliot is a man I simply loathe.’
And at school Anand said, ‘Eliot is a man I simply loathe’; and added, ‘I know someone who knows him.’
While they waited for the revolution, life had to be lived. The tent was taken down. Sisters and married granddaughters left. Visitors no longer came in great numbers. Owad took up his duties at the Colonial Hospital and for a time the house had to be content with stories of the operations he had carried out. The refugee doctor was dismissed and Owad looked after Mrs Tulsi himself. She improved spectacularly. ‘These doctors stopped