A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [58]
‘Man!’ Shama said. ‘What you go and do now?’
Mr Biswas drained his cup, used his spoon to scrape up the mess of biscuit at the bottom, ate that and, getting up, said, ‘What I do? I ain’t do nothing. I just don’t believe in this idol worship, that is all.’
‘M-m-m-m. Mm!’ Miss Blackie made a loud purring noise. She was offended. She was a Roman Catholic and went to mass every morning, but she had seen the Hindu rites performed every day for many years and regarded them as inviolate as her own.
‘Idols are stepping-stones to the worship of the real thing,’ Mr Biswas said, quoting Pankaj Rai to the hall. ‘They are necessary only in a spiritually backward society. Look at that little boy down there. You think he know what he was doing this morning?’
The god stamped and said shrilly, ‘I know a lot more about it than you, you – you Christian!’
Miss Blackie purred again, now deeply offended.
Sushila said to the god, ‘You must never lose your temper when you are doing puja, Owad. It isn’t nice.’
‘It nice for him to insult me and Ma and everybody else the way he doing?’
‘Just give him enough rope. He will hang himself.’
In the long room Mr Biswas gathered his painting equipment and sang over and over:
In the snowy and the blowy,
In the blowy and the snowy.
Words and tune were based, remotely, on Roaming in the Gloaming, which the choir at Lal’s school had once sung to entertain important visitors from the Canadian Mission.
Yet almost as soon as he had left Hanuman House through the side gate, Mr Biswas’s high spirits vanished, and a depression fell upon him and lasted all day. He worked badly. He had to paint a large sign on a corrugated iron paling. Doing letters on a corrugated surface was bad enough; to paint a cow and a gate, as he had to, was maddening. His cow looked stiff, deformed and sorrowful, and undid the gaiety of the rest of the advertisement.
He was strained and irritable when he went back to Hanuman House. The aggrieved and aggressive stares he received in the hall reminded him of his morning triumph. All his joy at that had turned into disgust at his condition. The campaign against the Tulsis, which he had been conducting with such pleasure, now seemed pointless and degrading. Suppose, Mr Biswas thought in the long room, suppose that at one word I could just disappear from this room, what would remain to speak of me? A few clothes, a few books. The shouts and thumps in the hall would continue; the puja would be done; in the morning the Tulsi Store would open its doors.
He had lived in many houses. And how easy it was to think of those houses without him! At this moment Pundit Jairam would be at a meeting or he would be eating at home, looking forward to an evening with his books. Soanie stood in the doorway, darkening the room, waiting for the least gesture of command. In Tara’s back verandah Ajodha sat relaxed in his rockingchair, his eyes closed, listening perhaps to That Body of Yours being read by Rabidat, who sat at an awkward angle, trying to hide the smell of drink and tobacco on his breath. Tara was about, harrying the cowman (it was milking-time) or harrying the yard boy or the servant girl, harrying somebody. In none of these places he was being missed because in none of these places had he ever been more than a visitor, an upsetter of routine. Was Bipti thinking of him in the back trace? But she herself was a derelict. And, even more remote, that house of mud and grass in the swamplands: probably pulled down now and ploughed up. Beyond that, a void. There was nothing to speak of him.
He heard footsteps and Shama came into the room with a brass plate loaded with rice, curried potatoes, lentils and coconut chutney.
‘How often you want me to tell you that I hate those blasted brass plates?’
She put the plate on the floor.
He walked round it. ‘Nobody ever teach you hygiene at school? Rice, potatoes. All that damn starch.’ He tapped his belly. ‘You want to blow me up?’ At the sight of Shama his depression had turned to anger, but he spoke jocularly.