A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [95]
His talk about houses made Shama fearful and impatient and had even caused quarrels. So he did not tell her of this picture or of his plan, and she continued to live for long periods at Hanuman House. She needed to give no explanations to her sisters now. Green Vale, part of the Tulsi lands and just outside Arwacas, was considered almost an extension of Hanuman House.
Rejecting the stone-cold food Shama occasionally sent from Hanuman House, and tired of tins, Mr Biswas learned to cook for himself; and he bought a primus, since he couldn’t manage the coal-pot. Sometimes he went for a walk in the early evening; sometimes he stayed in his room and read. But there were times when, without being fatigued, he could do nothing, when neither food nor tobacco tasted, and he could only lie on the fourposter and read the newspapers on the wall. He soon had many of the stories by heart. And the first line of one story, in breathless capitals, came to possess his mind: AMAZING SCENES WERE WITNESSED YESTERDAY WHEN. Absently he spoke the words aloud, by himself, with the labourers, with Seth. On some evenings, in his room, the words came into his head and repeated themselves until they were meaningless and irritating and he longed to drive them away. He wrote the words on packets of Anchor cigarettes and boxes of Comet matches. And, to fight this exhausting vacancy that left him with the feeling that he had drunk gallons of stale, lukewarm water, he took to lettering religious tags on strips of cardboard, which he hung on the walls against the newspapers. From a Hindi magazine he copied a sentence which, on cardboard, stretched right across one wall, above the papered window: HE WHO BELIE VETH IN ME OF HIM I WILL NEVER LOSE HOLD AND HE SHALL NEVER LOSE HOLD OF ME.
The sugarcane was in arrow. The lanes and roads between the fields were clean green canyons. And at Arwacas the shop-signs celebrated snow and Santa Claus. The Tulsi Store was hung with paper holly and berries, but carried no Christmas signs. Mr Biswas’s old signs still served. They had faded; the distemper on the wall and columns had flaked off in places and Punch had lost a piece of his nose; near the ceiling the letters were dim with dust and soot. Savi knew, and was proud, that the signs had been done by her father. But their gaiety puzzled her; she couldn’t associate them with the morose man she went to see in the dingy barrackroom and who sometimes came to see her. She felt, with a sense of loss that became sharper as Christmas drew nearer, that the signs had been done at some time beyond her memory when her father lived happily at Hanuman House with her mother and everyone else.
Christmas was the only time of the year when the gaiety of the signs had some meaning. Then the Tulsi Store became a place of deep romance and endless delights, transformed from the austere emporium it was on other days, dark and silent, its shelves crammed with bolts of cloth that gave off acrid and sometimes unpleasant smells, its tables jumbled with cheap scissors and knives and spoons, towers of dusty blue-rimmed enamel plates interleaved with ragged grey paper, and boxes of hairpins, needles, pins and thread. Now all day there was noise and bustle. Gramophones played in the Tulsi Store and all the other stores and even from the stalls in the market. Mechanical birds whistled; dolls squeaked; toy trumpets were tried out; tops hummed; cars shot across counters, were seized by hands, and held whining in mid-air. The enamel plates and the hairpins were pushed to the back, and their place was taken by black grapes in white boxes filled with aromatic sawdust; red Canadian apples whose scent overrode every other; by a multitude of toys and dolls and games in boxes, new and sparkling glassware, new china, all smelling of their newness; by Japanese lacquered trays, stacked one on top the other like a pack of cards, so elegant