A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [251]
Communal cooking had stopped, but communal life continued. Sisters and granddaughters often came to spend a night or a week-end. They brought all their illnesses to him and he attended to them without charge, giving injections wholesale with new miracle drugs which he said were as yet unknown in the colony. Later the sisters worked out what they would have had to pay another doctor, and there was a gentle rivalry as to who had been favoured with the most expensive treatment.
And Owad’s success grew. For long the emphasis in the house had been on reading and learning, which many of the readers and learners couldn’t do well and approached reluctantly. Now Owad said that this emphasis was wrong. Everyone had something to offer. Physical strength and manual skills were as important as academic success, and he spoke of the equality in Russia of peasants, workers and intellectuals. He organized swimming parties, boating expeditions, ping-pong tournaments; and such was the admiration and respect felt for him that even enemies came together. Anand and Vidiadhar played some ping-pong sets and, though not speaking a word to one another before or after, were scrupulously polite during the game, saying ‘Good shot!’ and ‘Bad luck!’ at the least opportunity. Vidiadhar, who had developed into a games-playing thug, more keen than competent and never picked for any college side, excelled in these family games and was the house champion.
‘I can’t tell you,’ Chinta said to Owad, ‘how Vidiadhar got me worried. That boy does sweat so much. You can’t get him to stick in a corner with some old book. He always exercising or playing some rough game or other. He done break a hand, a foot and some ribs. I does keep on trying to stop him. But he don’t listen. And he does sweat so much.’
‘Nothing to worry about there,’ Owad said, the doctor now. ‘That is quite normal.’
‘You take a weight off my mind,’ Chinta said, disappointed, for she believed that profuse sweating was a sign of exceptional virility and had hoped to be told so. ‘He does sweat so much.’
Regularly Shekhar, Dorothy and their five daughters came to the house, and these visits gave the sisters a sweet revenge. They treated Shekhar with the respect due to him, but they made their contempt for Dorothy plain. ‘I am sorry,’ Chinta said to her one Sunday. ‘I cannot understand you. I only speak Spanish.’ Dorothy had not spoken Spanish since Owad’s arrival and the sisters felt that they were at last making her boil down. But their behaviour had an unexpected result. For Owad, taking his cue from the sisters, spoke rallyingly to Dorothy; she responded with rough good humour and soon a familiarity grew up between them; and one Sunday, to the dismay of the sisters, Dorothy came with her cousin, a handsome young woman who had graduated from McGill University and had all the elegance of the Indian girl from South Trinidad. When they had gone Owad calmed the sisters’ fears by deriding the girl’s Canadian degree, her slight Canadian accent and her musical skills. ‘She went all the way to Canada to learn to play the violin,’ he said. ‘I hope she doesn’t want to play to me. I’ll break the bow on her parents’ heads. People starving, not getting enough to eat in Trinidad, and she playing the violin in Canada!’
And though he spent more and more time with his friends and colleagues and often went south to Shekhar’s, and though when his friends called the house had to be silent and the sisters and the readers and learners hidden, the sisters continued to feel safe. For after every journey, every meeting, Owad related his adventures to them. His appetite for talk was insatiable, his dramatic gifts never failed, and the comments he made on the people he had met were invariably scathing.
The sisters now sought audience with him singly or in small groups. They