A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [70]
‘Nice?’ he said, not sure whether she was being satirical or not.
‘Very nice little property.’
‘Walls falling down in the shop.’
‘They wouldn’t fall.’
‘Roof leaking in the bedroom.’
‘It doesn’t rain all the time.’
‘And I don’t sleep all the time either. Want a new kitchen.’
‘The kitchen looks all right to me.’
‘And who does eat all the time, eh? We could do with a extra room.’
‘What’s the matter? You want a Hanuman House right away?’
‘I don’t want a Hanuman House at all.’
‘Look,’ Mrs Tulsi said. They were in the gallery now. ‘You don’t want an extra room at all. You could just hang some sugarsacks on these posts during the night, and you have your extra room.’
He looked at her. She was in earnest.
‘Take them away in the morning,’ she said, ‘and you have your gallery again.’
‘Sugarsack, eh?’
‘Just six or seven. You wouldn’t need any more.’
I would like to bury you in one, Mr Biswas thought. He said, ‘You going to send me some of these sugarsacks?’
‘You’re a shopkeeper,’ she said. ‘You have more than me.’
‘Don’t worry. I was just joking. Just send me a coal barrel. You could get a whole family in a coal barrel. You didn’t know that?’
She was too surprised to speak.
‘I don’t know why they still building houses,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Nobody don’t want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn’t see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.’
Mrs Tulsi patted her lips with her veil, turned away and stepped into the yard. Faintly she called, ‘Sushila.’
‘And you could get Hari to bless the barrels right in Hanuman House,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘No need to bring him all the way to The Chase.’
Sushila came and, giving Mr Biswas a hard stare, offered her arm to Mrs Tulsi. ‘What has happened, Mai?’
In the shop a baby woke and screamed and drowned Mrs Tulsi’s words.
Sushila led Mrs Tulsi to the tent.
Mr Biswas went to the bedroom. The window was closed and the room was dark, but enough light came in to make everything distinct: his clothes on the wall, the bed rumpled from Mrs Tulsi’s rest. Violating his fastidiousness, he lay down on the bed. The musty smell of old thatch was mingled with the smell of Mrs Tulsi’s medicaments: bay rum, soft candles, Canadian Healing Oil, ammonia. He didn’t feel a small man, but the clothes which hung so despairingly from the nail on the mud wall were definitely the clothes of a small man, comic, make-believe clothes.
He wondered what Samuel Smiles would have thought of him.
But perhaps he could change. Leave. Leave Shama, forget the Tulsis, forget everybody. But go where? And do what? What could he do? Apart from becoming a bus-conductor, working as a labourer on the sugar-estates or on the roads, owning a shop. Would Samuel Smiles have seen more than that?
He was in a state between waking and sleeping when there was a rattling on the door: no ordinary rattling: this was rattling with a purpose: he recognized Shama’s hand. He shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He heard the hook lift and fall. She came into the room and even on the earth floor her footsteps were heavy, meant to be noticed. He felt her standing at the side of the fourposter, looking down at him. He stiffened; his breathing changed.
‘Well, you make me really proud of you today,’ Shama said.
And, really, it wasn’t what he was expecting at all. He had grown so used to her devotion at The Chase that he expected her to take his side, if only in private. All the softness went out of him.
Shama sighed.
He got up. ‘The house done bless?’
She flung back her long hair, still damp and straight, and he could see the sandalwood marks on her forehead: so strange on a woman. They made her look terrifyingly holy and unfamiliar.
‘What you waiting for? Get out and make sure it properly bless.’
She was surprised by his vehemence and, without sighing