A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [27]
He awoke to find Bhandat standing over his mattress on the floor. Above red eyes Bhandat’s lids were swollen, the way they became after he had been drinking. Mr Biswas had not expected anyone to return before evening; he had lost a whole day’s freedom.
‘Come on. Stop pretending. Where have you put it?’ The bumps on Bhandat’s top lip were quivering with anger.
‘Put what?’
‘Oh yes. Smart man. So you don’t know?’ And Bhandat pulled Mr Biswas off the mattress, grabbed him by the back of his trousers and lifted him to his toes. With this hold, widely known in Lal’s school as the policeman’s hold, Bhandat led Mr Biswas to the next room. No one else was there; Bhandat’s wife and children had not come back from the funeral. A shirt hung on the back of a chair over a pair of neatly folded trousers. On the seat of the chair there were coins, keys and a number of crumpled dollar-notes.
‘Last night I had twenty-six dollars in notes. This morning I have twenty-five. Eh?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t even know when you came in. I was sleeping all the time.’
‘Sleeping. Yes, sleeping like the snake. With both eyes open. Big eyes and long tongue. Tongue wagging all the time to Tara and Ajodha. Do you think that has done you any good? You expect them to give you a pound and a crown for that?’ He was shouting now, and pulling out his leather belt through the loops of his trousers. ‘Eh? You will tell them you stole my dollar?’ He raised his arm and brought the belt down on Mr Biswas’s head. Whenever the buckle struck a bone it made a sharp sound.
Suddenly Mr Biswas howled. ‘O God! O God! My eye! My eye!’
Bhandat stopped.
Mr Biswas had been cut on the cheek-bone and the blood had run below his eye.
‘Get out, you nasty tale-carrying lout. Get out of here at once before I peel the skin off your back.’ The bumps on Bhandat’s lip were trembling again and his arm, when he raised it, was quivering.
The sun had not risen and the back trace was still and empty when Mr Biswas roused Bipti.
‘Mohun! What has happened?’
‘I fell down. Don’t ask me.’
‘Come, tell me. What’s the matter?’
‘Why do you keep on sending me to stay with other people?’
‘Who beat you?’ She pressed a finger under the cut on the cheek-bone and he winced. ‘Bhandat beat you?’ She undid his shirt and saw the weals on his back. ‘He beat you? He beat you?’
She made him lie face down on the bed in her room, and, for the first time since he was a baby, rubbed his body down with oil. She gave him a cup of hot milk sweetened with brown sugar.
‘I am never going back there,’ Mr Biswas said.
Instead of giving the consolation he expected, Bipti said, as though arguing with him, ‘Where will you go then?’
He became impatient. ‘You have never done a thing for me. You are a pauper.’
He had meant to hurt her, but she was not hurt. ‘It is my fate. I have had no luck with my children. And with you, Mohun, I have the least luck of all. Everything Sitaram said about you was true.’
‘I have heard you and everybody else talking a lot about this Sitaram. What exactly did he say?’
‘That you were going to be a spendthrift and a liar and that you were going to be lecherous.’
‘Oh yes. Spendthrift with two dollars a month. Two whole dollars. Two hundred cents. Very heavy if you put that in a bag. And lecherous?’
‘Leading a bad life. With women. But you are too small.’
‘Bhandat’s children are more lecherous than me. And with their mother too.’
‘Mohun!’ Then Bipti said, ‘I don’t know what Tara is going to say.’
‘Again! Why do you keep on caring what Tara says? I don’t want you to go and see Tara. I don’t want anything from her. And Ajodha can keep that body of his.