A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [88]
Myna fell asleep at Shama’s breast and was laid on the bed next to Anand. A pillow was placed at her side to keep her from rolling off, and the oil lamp in the bracket on the unpainted wall was turned down.
When Mr Biswas and Shama passed through the verandah it was thronged with children sitting on mats, reading or playing cards or draughts. These games had been recently introduced and were taken with the utmost seriousness; they were regarded as intellectual disciplines particularly suitable for children. Savi, too small for books, was playing Go-to-Pack with one of the large-eyed children. Everyone talked in whispers. Shama walked on tiptoe.
‘Mai sick,’ she said.
Which accounted for the children’s late dinner and the absence of so many of the sisters.
Shama laid out food for Mr Biswas in the hall. The food might be bad at Hanuman House, but there was always some for unexpected visitors. Everything was cold. The pancakes were sweating, hard on the outside and little better than dough inside. He did not complain.
‘You going back tonight?’ she asked in English.
He knew then that he hadn’t intended to go back, ever. He said nothing.
‘You better sleep here then.’
As long as there was floor space, there was bed space.
Some sisters came into the hall. Packs of cards were brought out; the sisters split into groups and gravely settled down to play. Chinta played with style. She fussed with her cards, rearranged them often, stared blankly and disconcertingly at the other players, hummed and never spoke; before she played a telling card she frowned at it, pulled it up a little, tapped it down and kept on tapping it; then, suddenly, she threw it on the table with a crack and, still frowning, collected her trick. She was a magnanimous winner and a bad loser.
Mr Biswas watched.
Shama made a bed for him in the verandah upstairs, among the children.
He woke to a babel the next morning and when he went down to the hall found the sisters getting their children ready for school. It was the only time of day when it was reasonably easy to tell which child belonged to which mother. He was surprised to see Shama filling a satchel with a slate, a slate pencil, a lead pencil, an eraser, an exercise book with the Union Jack on the cover, and Nelson’s West Indian Reader, First Stage, by Captain J. O. Cutteridge, Director of Education, Trinidad and Tobago. Lastly Shama wrapped an orange in tissue paper and put it in the satchel. ‘For teacher,’ she said to Savi.
Mr Biswas didn’t know that Savi had begun to go to school.
Shama sat on a bench, held Savi between her legs, combed her hair, plaited it, straightened the pleats on her navy-blue uniform, and adjusted her Panama hat.
Mother and daughter had been doing this for many weeks. And he had known nothing.
Shama said, ‘If your shoelaces come loose again today, you think you would be able to tie them back?’ She bent down and undid Savi’s shoelaces. ‘Let me see you tie them.’
‘You know I can’t tie them.’
‘Do it quick sharp, or I give you a dose of licks.’
‘I can’t tie them.’
‘Come,’ Mr Biswas said, shamelessly paternal in the bustling hall. ‘I will tie them for you.’
‘No,’ Shama said. ‘She must learn to tie her laces. Otherwise I will keep her at home and beat her until she can tie them.’
It was standard talk at Hanuman House. At The Chase Shama had never spoken like that.
As yet no one was paying attention. But when Shama started to hunt for one of the many hibiscus switches which always lay about the hall, sisters and children became less noisy and good-humouredly waited to see what would happen. It was not going to be a serious flogging since ineptitude rather than criminality was being punished; and Shama moved about with a comic jerkiness, as though she knew she was only an actor in a farce and not, like Sumati at the house-blessing in The Chase, a figure of high tragedy.
Mr Biswas,