A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [254]
He did the complicated sums for the travelling expenses. Presently he heard the dry, crisp sounds of the ping-pong ball, the exclamations of Owad and Vidiadhar and Shekhar and the others.
He did not go down to have the lunch to which he had looked forward; and when Shama brought it up he could not eat or drink. Mr Biswas, his clowning mood persisting, squatted on the chair and pretended to spit on his food, to save it from Anand’s gluttony. He knew this trick infuriated Anand. But Anand did not respond.
Downstairs the men were getting ready to go to the sea. Sons asked their mothers for towels, mothers urged their sons to be careful.
‘Not going with them?’
Anand didn’t reply.
Mr Biswas had withdrawn from these excursions. They were far too energetic, and the example of Owad led to dangerous competitive feats. Instead, after lunch he went for a walk by himself, looking at houses, occasionally making inquiries, but mostly simply looking.
The brightness of their aunts and cousins, their new and excluding chumminess, drove Savi and Kamla and Myna to join Anand in their room, where they lay on the bed, for want of places to sit, and made disjointed, selfconscious conversation.
Anand sipped his orange juice. The ice had melted, the juice gone flat and warm. The girls went for a walk to the Botanical Gardens. Shama had her bath: Anand heard her singing in the open-air bathroom and washing clothes. When she came up her hair was wet and straight, her fingers pinched, but for all her songs her anxiety had not gone.
She said in Hindi, ‘Go and apologize to your uncle.’
‘No!’ It was the first word he had spoken for a long time.
She petted him. ‘For my sake.’
‘The revolution,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t lose anything. He is older than you. And your uncle.’
‘Not my uncle. Shooting rice from aeroplanes!’
Shama began to sing softly. She flung her hair down over her face and beat it with a stretched towel. The noises were like muffled sneezes.
The girls came back from their walk. They were brighter and talked more easily.
Then they were silent.
The men had returned. They heard their loud talk, their footsteps; Owad’s voice raised in friendliness, breaking into laughter; the light inquiries from aunts; Shekhar’s goodbyes, his car driving off.
Savi asked Shama in a whisper, ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing has happened,’ Shama said coaxingly, not replying to Savi, but repeating her plea to Anand. ‘He will just go and apologize to your uncle, and that is all. Nothing at all.’
The girls did not want to desert Anand, and they feared going downstairs.
‘Remember,’ Shama said. ‘Not a word to your father. You know what he is like.’
She left the room. They heard her talking normally, even jestingly, with one of the aunts, and they admired her for her courage. Then the girls also went down, to face the righteousness of the unpersecuted.
The shower upstairs was going. Owad was in the bathroom, singing a song from an old Indian film. This was part of his virtue: it showed how untainted he had been by England and flattered everyone. For the virtue with which everyone had endowed him in his absence was now found in the smallest things: Anand remembered one sister saying that Owad had brought back from England the shoes and shirts and underclothes he had taken from Trinidad.
‘Same shoes after eight years,’ Anand muttered. ‘Blasted liar.’
The bathroom went silent.
Shama came to the room. ‘Quick. Before they go to the theatre.’
Anand knew the Sunday routine: the bridge, the ping-pong, lunch, the sea, the shower, dinner, then the evening show.
The cousins could be heard assembling in the diningroom. Owad’s voice, smothered by a towel, came from his bedroom.
Anand walked down the back stairs and up the stairs to the back verandah, the same verandah to which he had returned after he had nearly been drowned at Docksite. From the verandah he had a glimpse of the diningroom, where he had pulled the chair from under his father in the presence of Owad.
The cousins saw him. Some aunts saw him. The talk stopped.