The duty of the puja was shared by many of the men and boys. Sometimes even Anand had to do it. Untutored in the prayers, he could only go through the motions of the ritual. He washed the images, placed fresh flowers on the shrine, diverted himself by trying to stick the stem of a flower in the crook of a god’s arm or between the god’s chin and chest. He put fresh sandalwood paste on the foreheads of the gods, on the smooth black and rose and yellow pebbles, and on his own forehead; lit the camphor, circled the flame about the shrine with his right hand while with his left he tried to ring the bell; blew at the conch shell, emitting a sound like that of a heavy wardrobe scraping on a wooden floor; then, his cheeks aching from the effort of blowing the conch shell, he hurried out to eat, first making the round of the house to offer the milk and tulsi leaves which, unbelievably, he had consecrated. When he dressed for school he brushed the caked sandalwood marks from his forehead.
About a fortnight after Hari died news came from Arwacas of another death. Anand was working at the table in the room on the upper floor one evening, and Mr. Biswas was reading in bed, when the door was thrown open and Savi ran in and said, “Great Aunt Padma is dead!”
Mr. Biswas closed his eyes and put his hand on his heart.
Anand screamed, “Savi!”
She stood still, her eyes shining.
From downstairs a deep-drawn lamentation burst out and spread through the house, rising, falling, relayed from one sister to the other and back again, like the barking of dogs at night.
Sharma’s death had done little more than upset routine. Hari’s had saddened. Padma’s terrified. She was Mrs. Tulsi’s sister: death had come closer to them all. She had known them all their lives; she had died away from them. The sisters said these things over and over as they embraced each other and embraced their children. The house shook with footsteps, shrieks, wails and the crying of frightened children. Mrs. Tulsi was reported to be out of her mind; there were rumours that she too was dying. The children stuck pins into lamp wicks and murmured incantations to keep off fresh disaster. They heard Mrs. Tulsi clamouring to be taken to the body of her sister. The cry was taken up by some of the sisters, and despite the hour and despite the quarrel with Seth, preparations were made and the lorry and sports car set off for Arwacas, and only men and children were left in the house.
The women returned the following afternoon, with more than their grief. For most of them it had been their first visit to Arwacas since the move, their first glimpse of Seth. They had not spoken to him, but the truce had enabled them to inspect the property which Seth, still vigorously pursuing the quarrel, had bought on the High Street not far from Hanuman House, a first step, they had been told, to his buying over of Hanuman House itself. It was a grocery and it was large enough and new enough and well enough stocked to alarm the sisters. But there could be no talk of Seth just then.
Padma appeared in many dreams that night. In the morning every dream was recounted and it was agreed that Padma’s spirit had come to the house in Shorthills, which she had never visited while she lived. This was confirmed by the experience of one sister. In the middle of the night she had heard footsteps in the road. She recognized them as Padma’s. There was silence as Padma had crossed the gully, footsteps again as Padma came up the sandy drive and up the concrete steps. Padma had then made a tour of the house, sat down on the back steps and wept. Many people saw Padma after that. Much attention was given to the story of one of the Tuttle children. In broad daylight he had seen a woman in white walking from the graveyard towards the house. He caught up with her and said, “Aunt.” She turned. It wasn’t an aunt. It was Padma; she was crying. Before he could speak she pulled her veil over her face, and he had run. When he looked back he saw no one.
Yet it was some time before the sisters realized that Padma appeared so often because she had a message. They then decided that anyone who saw her should ask what her message was. The messages varied. At first Padma merely asked after certain people and said she wished she were alive and with them; sometimes she also said she had died of a broken heart. But Padma’s later messages, when whispered from sister to sister, from child to child, caused consternation. She said Seth had driven her to take poison; she said Seth had poisoned her; she said Seth had beaten her to death and bribed the doctor not to have a post mortem.
“Don’t tell Mai,” the sisters said.
Anger overrode their grief. Every sister cursed Seth and vowed never to speak to him again.
Mrs. Tulsi kept to the room with the closed windows. Sushila and Miss Blackie made brandy poultices for her eyelids, as before, and massaged her head with bay rum. But in the box-board temple at the end of the ruined, overgrown garden there was no Hari to say prayers for her and the house. Bells were rung and gongs were struck, but the luck, the virtue had gone out of the family.
And two of the sheep died. The canal at the side of the drive was at last completely silted over and the rain, which ran down the hillside in torrents after the briefest shower, flooded the flat land. The gully, no longer supported by the roots, began to be eaten away. The old man’s beard was deprived of a footing; its thin tangled roots hung over the banks like a threadbare carpet. The gully bed, washed clean of black soil and the plants that grew on it, showed sandy, then pebbly, then rocky. It could no longer be forded by the car, and the car stayed on the road. The sisters were puzzled by the erosion, which seemed to them sudden; but they accepted it as part of their new fate.
Govind stopped looking after the cows. He bought a secondhand motorcar and operated it as a taxi in Port of Spain. W. C. Tuttle opened a quarry on the estate. His enterprise aroused envy. He had been the first to sell estate trees; now that there were few trees to sell he was selling the very earth. Mr. Biswas continued to transport his plunder of oranges and avocado pears in the saddlebag of his bicycle.
For nearly all the sisters still with husbands Shorthills had become only an interlude. For the widows there was only Shorthills, and land they did not understand. It was not rice-land or caneland. But the widows united, and after much whispered discussion and ostentatious silence when other sisters, husbands or their children were near, the widows announced that they were going to start a chicken farm. To feed the chickens they needed maize. They cut down a hillside, burned it, and planted maize. Then they bought some chickens and set them loose. At first the chickens stayed close to the house and sometimes inside it, leaving their droppings everywhere. Presently snakes and mongooses attacked the chickens. Those that survived took to the bush, learned to fly high, and laid their eggs where the widows couldn’t get them. In the meantime the maize was reaped and husked. The widows and their children ate much corn, boiled and roasted. The remainder was heaped in the verandah; there were no chickens to give it to. The corn turned from pale yellow to hard bright orange. Intermittently the widows and their children shelled the cobs on graters. There was talk of selling maize flour; with the continuing shortage of wheat flour the prospects were considered bright. The widows invested in a milclass="underline" two circular slabs of toothed stone resting one on the other. After some time and much labour a little flour was ground, but there was not the demand for it that the widows had expected. The maize remained in the verandah; weevils and other insects burrowed neatly through the golden cobs.
Mrs. Tulsi remained in her dark room, devising economies and issuing directives about food. She had heard that the Chinese, an ancient race, ate bamboo shoots. The estate abounded in bamboo; Mrs. Tulsi ordered that bamboo shoots were to be eaten. But what were bamboo shoots? Were they the neat little green buds at the joints of the bamboo trunks? Were they the very young bamboo stalks? Were they the very young bamboo leaves? No one knew. Buds, stalks and leaves were collected, washed, chopped, boiled, and curried with tomatoes. No one could eat it. The leaves of the shining bush, a prolific shrub that grew even in sand, had been used in the house to make a mildly purgative brew that was not unpleasant and was reputedly good for colds, coughs and fevers. Mrs. Tulsi directed that tea should no longer be bought: the shining bush was to be used instead. Already the widows and their children were making coffee and chocolate from the beans on the estate. Now maize flour was to be used instead of wheat flour, and coconut oil was to be made, not bought. No one had thought of growing vegetables and, since they too could not be bought, efforts were made to find vegetable substitutes: hard coconut, green papaw, green mango, green pomme cithиre, and almost any green fruit. But when Mrs. Tulsi ordered the widows to experiment with birds’ nests, which the Chinese ate, and the widows looked at the long stockinglike corn-bird nests of dry twigs hanging from the saman tree, there was such an outcry that the idea was dropped.