A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [90]
She reached out for the bottle of smelling salts and sniffed at it. The bandage around her forehead slipped down to her eyes. Adapting her tone of tenderness to one of distress and authority, she said, ‘Come and squeeze my head, Shama.’
Shama obeyed with alacrity. She sat on the edge of the bed and undid the bandage, undid Mrs Tulsi’s hair, parted it in several places, poured bay rum into her palms and from there into the partings. She worked the bay rum into Mrs Tulsi’s scalp and the soaked hair squelched. Mrs Tulsi looked comforted. She closed her eyes, screwed the white medicament a little further up her nostrils, and patted her lips with a thin shawl.
‘You have seen your daughter?’
Mr Biswas laughed.
‘Two girls,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘Our family is unlucky that way. Think of the worry I had when your father died. Fourteen daughters to marry. And when you marry your girl children you can’t say what sort of life you are letting them in for. They have to live with their Fate. Mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law. Idle husbands. Wife-beaters.’
Mr Biswas looked at Shama. She was concentrating on Mrs Tulsi’s head. At every press of Shama’s long fingers Mrs Tulsi closed her eyes, interrupted what she was saying and groaned, ‘Aah.’
‘That is what a mother has to put up with,’ Mrs Tulsi said. ‘I don’t mind. I have lived long enough to know that you can’t expect anything from anybody. I give you five hundred dollars. Do you think I want you to bow and scrape and touch my feet whenever you see me? No. I expect you to spit on me. I expect that. When you want five hundred dollars again you come back to me. Do you want me to say, “The last time I gave you five hundred dollars you spat on me. Therefore I can’t give you five hundred dollars this time”? Do you want me to say that? No. I expect the people who spit on me to come to me again. I have a soft heart. And when you have a soft heart, you have a soft heart. Your father used to say to me, “My bride” – that was the way he called me until the day he died – “my bride,” he used to say, “you have the softest heart of any person I know. Be careful of that soft heart. People will take advantage of that soft heart and trample on it.” And I used to say, “When you have a soft heart, you have a soft heart.” ’
She pressed her eyes till tears ran down her cheeks. Her damp grey hair was spread out on the pillow. Now here was a woman with grey hair, and he felt little tenderness towards her.
Then he noted, what he had missed in the darkness, that Shama’s cheeks were also wet. She must have been crying silently all along.
‘I don’t mind,’ Mrs Tulsi said. She blew her nose and called for bay rum. Shama filled her palm with bay rum, drenched Mrs Tulsi’s face and pressed her palm over Mrs Tulsi’s nose. Mrs Tulsi’s face shone; she screwed up her eyes to prevent the bay rum going into them and breathed loudly through her mouth. Shama removed her hand and Mrs Tulsi said, ‘But I don’t know what Seth will say.’
As at a cue Seth came in. He ignored Mr Biswas and Shama and asked Mrs Tulsi how she was, expressing in those words his concern for Mrs Tulsi and his impatience with the people who were disturbing her. He sat on the other side of the bed. The bed creaked; he sighed; he shifted his feet and his bluchers drummed on the floor in annoyance.
‘We’ve been talking,’ Mrs Tulsi said gently.
Shama gave a little sob.
Seth sucked his teeth. He sounded extremely irritable; it was as if he too were unwell, with a cold or a headache. ‘Paddling-addling,’ he said. His voice was gruff and indistinct.
‘You mustn’t mind,’ Mrs Tulsi said.
Seth held his thigh and looked at the floor.
And Mr Biswas was convinced of what he had already guessed from Mrs Tulsi’s speech and Shama’s tears: that the scene had been arranged, that there had been not only discussions, but decisions. And Shama, who had arranged the scene, was crying to lessen his humiliation, to shift some of it to herself. Her tears were ritual