A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [71]
He heard her making excuses for him.
‘He has a headache.’
He recognized the tone as the one used by friendly sisters to discuss the infirmities of their husbands. It was Shama’s plea to a sister to exchange intimacies, to show support.
He hated Shama for it, yet found himself anxiously waiting for someone to reply, to discuss his illness sympathetically, headache though it was.
But no one even said, ‘Give him an aspirin.’
Still, he was pleased that Shama had tried.
The house-blessing seriously depleted Mr Biswas’s resources; and after the ceremony, affairs in the shop began to go less well. One of the shopkeepers Mr Biswas had fed sold his establishment. Another man moved in; his business prospered. It was the pattern of trade in The Chase.
‘Well, one thing sure,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘The house bless. You think everybody was just waiting for all that free food to stop coming here?’
‘You give too much credit,’ Shama said. ‘You must get those people to pay you.’
‘You want me to go and beat them?’
And when she took out the Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook, he said, ‘What you want to bust your brains adding up accounts for? I could tell you straight off. Ought oughts are ought.’
She worked out the expenses of the house-blessing and added up the outstanding credit.
‘I don’t want to know,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I just don’t want to know. How about getting the house un-bless? You think Hari could manage that?’
She had a theory. ‘The people feeling shame. They owe too much. It used to happen in the store at home.’
‘You know what I think it is? Is my face. I don’t think I have the face of a shopkeeper. I have the sort of face of a man who does give credit but can’t get it.’ He got a mirror and studied his face. ‘That nose, with that ugly lump on top of it. Those Chinese eyes. Look, girl, suppose – I mean, just supposing you see me for the first time. Look at me and try to imagine that.’
She looked.
‘All right. Close your eyes. Now open them. First time you see me. You just see me. What you would say I was?’
She couldn’t say.
‘That is the whole blasted trouble,’ he said. ‘I don’t look like anything at all. Shopkeeper, lawyer, doctor, labourer, overseer – I don’t look like any of them.’
The Samuel Smiles depression fell on him.
Shama was a puzzle. Within the girl who had served in the Tulsi Store and romped up and down the staircase of Hanuman House, the wit, the prankster, there were other Shamas, fully grown, it seemed, just waiting to be released: the wife, the housekeeper, and now the mother. With Mr Biswas she continued to be brisk, uncomplaining and almost unaware of her pregnancy. But when she was visited by her sisters, who made it plain that the pregnancy was their business, Tulsi business, and had little to do with Mr Biswas, a change came over her. She did not cease to be uncomplaining; but she also became someone who not so much suffered as endured. She fanned herself and spat often, which she never did when she was alone; but pregnant women were supposed to behave in this way. It was not that she was trying to impress the sisters and get their sympathy; she was anxious not to disappoint them or let herself down. And when her feet began to swell, Mr Biswas wanted to say, ‘Well, you are complete and normal now. Everything is going as it should. You are just like your sisters.’ For there was no doubt that this was what Shama expected from life: to be taken through every stage, to fulfil every function, to have her share of the established emotions: joy at a birth or marriage, distress during illness and hardship, grief at a death. Life, to be full, had to be this established pattern of sensation. Grief and joy, both equally awaited, were one. For Shama and her sisters and women like them, ambition, if the word could be used, was a series of negatives: not to be unmarried, not to be childless, not to be an undutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow.
Secretly, with the help of her sisters, the baby clothes were made. A number of Mr Biswas’s floursacks disappeared; later they turned