A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [256]
‘Go to hell?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Go to hell? To prepare the way for you? Praying to God, eh? Cleaning up the old man’s grave.’
‘For God’s sake, Biswas,’ Owad called, ‘hold your damned tongue.’
‘You don’t talk to me about God. Red and blue cotton! Shooting rice from aeroplanes!’ The girls came into the room.
Savi said, ‘Pa, stop being stupid. For God’s sake, stop it.’ Anand was standing between the two beds. The room was like a cage.
‘Let him go to hell,’ Mrs Tulsi sobbed. ‘Let him get out.’
‘Neighbour! Neighbour!’ a woman cried shrilly from next door. ‘Anything wrong, neighbour?’
‘I can’t stand this,’ Owad shouted. ‘I can’t stand it. I don’t know what I’ve come back to.’ His footsteps were heard pounding across the drawingroom. He mumbled loudly, angrily, indistinctly.
‘Son, son,’ Mrs Tulsi said.
They heard him going down the steps, heard the gate click and shiver.
Mrs Tulsi began to wail.
‘Neighbour! Neighbour!’
A wonderful sentence formed in Mr Biswas’s mind, and he said, ‘Communism, like charity, should begin at home.’
Mr Biswas’s door was pushed open, fresh light and shadows confused the patterns on the walls, and Govind came into the room, his trousers unbelted, his shirt unbuttoned.
‘Mohun!’
His voice was kind. Mr Biswas was overwhelmed to tears. ‘Communism, like charity,’ he said to Govind, ‘should begin at home.’
‘We know, we know,’ Govind said.
Sushila was comforting Mrs Tulsi. Her wail broke up into sobs.
‘I am giving you notice,’ Mr Biswas shouted. ‘I curse the day I step into your house.’ ‘Man, man.’
‘You curse the day,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘Coming to us with no more clothes than you could hang on a nail.’
This wounded Mr Biswas. He could not reply at once. ‘I am giving you notice,’ he repeated at last.
‘I am giving you notice,’ Mrs Tulsi said.
‘I gave it to you first.’
There was an abrupt silence. Then in the drawingroom there was an outburst of low, amused chatter, and downstairs the readers and learners, who had kept silent all along, were whispering.
‘Cha!’ the woman next door said. ‘Bother with people business.’
Govind patted Mr Biswas on the shoulder, gave a little laugh and left the room.
The whispers downstairs subsided. The light which came through the jalousies from the yard and striped the room was extinguished. The laughter in the drawingroom died away. Throats were cleared with faint satiric intonations, and there were muted apprehensive chuckles. There were shuffles on the floor, and whispers. Then the light went out and the room was in darkness and the house was absolutely silent.
They remained appalled in the room, not daring to move, to break the silence, unable in the dark and the stillness to believe fully in what had just happened.
Presently, exhausted by their inactivity, the children went downstairs.
Morning would show the full horror of the past few minutes.
They awoke with a sense of unease. Almost at once they remembered. They avoided one another. They listened, above the hawking and spitting, the running taps, the continuous scuffling, the fanning of coal-pots, the metallic hiss of the lavatory flush, for the footsteps and voices of Mrs Tulsi and Owad. But the house was quiet upstairs. Then they learned that Owad had left early that morning for a week’s tour of Tobago. The instinct of Mr Biswas’s children was to get away at once, to escape from the house to the separate reality of the streets and school.
Mr Biswas’s anger had gone stale; it burdened him. Now there was also shame at his behaviour, shame at the whole gross scene. But the uncertainty that had been with him ever since he heard that Owad was returning from England had disappeared. He found it easy to ignore his fears; and after he had had his bath he felt energetic and even light-headed. He too was anxious to get out of the house. And as he left it his sympathy went out to Shama, who had to remain.
The sisters looked chastened. Unpersecuted, they believed in their righteousness; and though Owad’s departure, in anger, as was reported, involved them all in disgrace and threatened