A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [49]
The younger god frowned even more. ‘Is not because my father dead that people who eating my mother food should feel that they could call she a hen. I want Biswas to apologize to Ma.’
‘Apologize-ologize,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘It wouldn’t make any difference. I don’t see how anyone can be sorry for something he feels.’
There is, in some weak people who feel their own weakness and resent it, a certain mechanism which, operating suddenly and without conscious direction, releases them from final humiliation. Mr Biswas, who had up till then been viewing his blasphemies as acts of the blackest ingratitude, now abruptly lost his temper.
‘The whole pack of you could go to hell!’ he shouted. ‘I not going to apologize to one of the damn lot of you.’
Astonishment and even apprehension appeared on their faces. He noted this for a lucid moment, turned and ran up the stairs to the long room, where he began to pack with unnecessary energy.
‘You don’t care what mess you get other people in, eh?’
It was Shama, standing in the doorway, barefooted, veil low over her forehead, looking as frightened as on that morning in the store.
‘Family! Family!’ Mr Biswas said, stuffing clothes and books – Self Help, Bell’s Standard Elocutionist, the seven volumes of Hawkins’ Electrical Guide – into a cardboard box whose top flaps bore the circular impressions of tins of condensed milk. ‘I not staying here a minute longer. Having that damn little boy talk to me like that! He does talk to all your brother-in-laws like that?’
He packed with such energy that he was soon finished. But his anger had begun to cool and he reflected that by leaving the house again so soon he would be behaving absurdly, like a newly-married girl. He waited for Shama to say something that would rekindle his anger. She remained silent.
‘Before I go,’ he said, unpacking and re-packing the condensed milk case, ‘I want you to tell the Big Boss – because it is clear that he is the big bull in the family – I want you to go and tell him that he ain’t pay me for the signs I do in the store.’
‘Why you don’t go and tell him yourself?’ Shama was now angry and near to tears.
He tried to see himself asking Seth for money. He couldn’t. ‘You and all,’ he said, ‘don’t start provoking me. You think I want to talk to that man? You know him for a long time. He is like a second father to you. You must ask him.’
‘And suppose he ask for what you owe him?’
‘I would give you straight back to him.’
‘You owe him more than he owe you.’
‘He owe me more than I owe him.’
They reduced it to a plain argument, which not only killed what remained of his anger, but even left him exhilarated, though a little puzzled as to what he should do next.
Before he could decide, C and Padma, Seth’s wife, came without knocking into the room. C was crying. Padma begged Mr Biswas, for the sake of family unity and the family name, not to do anything in a temper.
He became very offended, turned his back to Padma and C and walked heavily up and down the small room.
With the arrival of the women Shama’s attitude changed. She ceased to be irritated and suppliant and instead looked martyred. She sat stiffly on a low bench, thumb under her chin, elbow on her knee, and opened her eyes until they were as wide and empty as the younger god’s had been a few minutes before in the hall.
‘Don’t go, brother,’ C sobbed. ‘Your sister is begging you.’ She tried to grab his ankles.
He skipped away and looked puzzled.
C, sobbing, noticed his puzzlement and elucidated: ‘Chinta is begging you.’ She mentioned her own name to indicate the depth of her unhappiness and the sincerity of her plea; and she began to wail.
By coming up to plead with him Chinta had as good as confessed that it was her husband Govind who had reported Mr Biswas’s blasphemies to Seth; she was also claiming that Govind had triumphed.