A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [83]
The numbers of the Tulsis swelled continually. Fresh children were born to the resident daughters. A son-in-law who lived away died, and his brood came to Hanuman House, where they were distinguished and made glamorous by their mourning clothes of black, white and mauve. This Christian custom did not please everyone. And almost at once Shama had tales to take back to The Chase about the low manners and language of the new arrivals. There were even whispers of theft and obscene practises, and Shama reported the general approval when the widow, anxious to appease, took to inflicting spectacular punishments on her bereaved children.
All this made Mr Biswas uneasy, and he was mortified to find that Savi now talked of nothing but the mourners, their misdeeds and their punishments.
‘Sometimes,’ Savi said, ‘their mother simply hands over to Granny.’
‘Look, Savi. If Granny or anybody else touches you, you just let me know. Don’t let them frighten you. I will take you home right away. You just let me know.’
‘And Granny tied Vimla to the bed in the Rose Room and blindfolded her and pinched her all over.’
‘God!’
‘It serves Vimla right. The language that girl has picked up.’
Mr Biswas wanted to know whether Savi had been blindfolded and pinched herself; but he was afraid to ask.
‘Oh, I like Granny,’ Savi said. ‘I think she is very funny. And she likes me.’
‘Yes?’
‘She calls me the little paddler.’
He made no comment.
Another day Savi said, ‘Granny is making me eat fish. I hate it.’
‘Well, you just don’t eat it. Throw it away. Don’t let them feed you any of their bad food.’
‘But I can’t refuse. Granny takes out all the bones and feeds me herself.’
When he got back to The Chase he told Shama, ‘Look, I want you to get your mother to stop trying to feed my daughter all sort of bad food, you hear.’
She knew about it. ‘Fish? But the brains good for the brain, you know.’
‘It look to me that your family just eat too much damn fish brains, you hear. And I want them to stop calling the girl the little paddler. I don’t want anybody to give names to my child.’
‘And what about the names you give?’
‘I just want them to stop it, that is all.’
Never ceasing to believe that their stay at The Chase was only temporary, he had made no improvements. The kitchen remained askew and rickety; he did not wall off part of the gallery to make a new room; and he had not thought it worth while to plant trees that would bear flowers or fruit in two or three years.
It was strange, then, for him to find one day that house and shop bore so many marks of his habitation. No one might have lived there before him, and it was hard to imagine anyone after him moving about these rooms and getting to know them as he had done. The hammock rope had worn polished indentations in the rafters from which it hung. The rope itself had grown darker; where his hands and Shama’s had held it there were glints like those on the bumps on the lower half of the mud walls. The thatch was sootier and more bearded; the back rooms smelled of his cigarettes and his paint; window-sills and the gallery uprights had been made clean by constant leaning. The shop was gloomier, dingier, smellier, but entirely supportable. The table that had come with the shop had been so transformed that he felt it had always been his. He had tried to varnish it, but the wood, a local cedar, was absorbent and never sated, drinking in coat after coat of stain and varnish until, in exasperation, he painted it one of his forest greens, and had to be dissuaded by Shama from doing a landscape on it.
And it was strange, too, to find that these disregarded years had been years of acquisition. They could not move from The Chase on a donkey-cart. They had acquired a kitchen safe of white wood and netting. This too had been awkward to varnish and had been painted. One leg was shorter than the others and had to be propped up; now they knew without