A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [51]
Between his estate duties, his reading in the verandah and his visits to the latrine, Hari had little free time, and was open to approach only at the long table. But then conversation was not easy. Hari believed in chewing every mouthful forty times, and was a noisy and preoccupied eater.
Sitting next to Hari one evening, receiving a brief ruminant glance from him and a concerned stare from his wife, Mr Biswas waited until Hari had champed and ground and squelched through a mouthful. Then he hurriedly asked, ‘What do you feel about the Aryans?’
He was speaking of the protestant Hindu missionaries who had come from India and were preaching that caste was unimportant, that Hinduism should accept converts, that idols should be abolished, that women should be educated, preaching against all the doctrines the orthodox Tulsis held dear.
‘What do you feel about the Aryans?’ Mr Biswas asked.
‘The Aryans?’ Hari said, and started on another mouthful. His tone declared that it was a frivolous question raised by a mischievous person.
A look of anguish came over the face of Hari’s wife.
‘Yes,’ Mr Biswas said, despairingly filling in the pause. ‘The Aryans.’
‘I don’t think much about them.’ Hari bit at a pepper, baring sharp little white teeth, like a rat’s, and surprising in such a tall and sluggish man. ‘I hear,’ he went on, the merest hint of amusement and reproof in his voice, ‘that you have been doing a lot of thinking about them.’
Mr Biswas was almost an Aryan convert.
It was Misir, the idle journalist, who had encouraged him to go to hear Pankaj Rai. ‘He is not one of those illiterate Trinidad pundits, you know,’ Misir said. ‘Pankaj is a BA and a LLB into the bargain. The man is a real orator. A purist, man.’ Mr Biswas had not asked what a purist was, but the word, pronounced with reverence by Misir, appealed strongly to him, suggesting not only purity and fastidiousness, but also elegance and breeding.
He had an additional inducement: the meeting was to be held at the home of the Naths. The Naths owned land and a soap factory, and were the Tulsis’ most important rivals in Arwacas. Between Naths and Tulsis of all ages there was an enmity as established and unexamined as the enmity between Hindu and Muslim. The enmity had grown more acrimonious since the Naths had built a new house in the modern Port of Spain style.
Purist, Mr Biswas thought, when he saw Pankaj Rai. The man is a purist. He was elegant in a long, black, close-fitting Indian coat; and when he shook Mr Biswas by the hand Mr Biswas surrendered to his graciousness, at the same time noting with satisfaction that Pankaj Rai was as short as himself and had an equally ugly nose. He also had unusually heavy, drooping eyelids which could make him look comic or sinister, benevolent or supercilious. They dropped a fraction of an inch and converted a smile into a faint but devastating sneer. This was particularly effective when he began to ridicule the practices of orthodox Hinduism. He spoke without flourish, and slowly, as if tasting the phrases beforehand, like a good purist; and it was a revelation to Mr Biswas that words and phrases which by themselves were commonplace could be welded into sentences of such balance and beauty. He found he agreed with everything Pankaj Rai said: after thousands of years of religion idols were an insult to the human intelligence and to God; birth was unimportant; a man’s caste should be determined only by his actions.
After he had spoken Pankaj Rai distributed copies of his book, Reform the Only Way, and Mr Biswas asked for his to be autographed. Pankaj Rai did more. He wrote Mr Biswas’s name as well, describing him as a ‘dear friend’. Below this inscription Mr Biswas wrote: ‘Presented to Mohun Biswas by his dear friend Pankaj Rai, BA LLB.’
He showed book and inscriptions to Shama when he got back to Hanuman House.
‘Go ahead,’ Shama said.
‘Let me hear what you have against him. You people say you are high-caste. But you think Pankaj would call you that? Let me