It was W. C. Tuttle’s duty, after taking the children to school, to bring back stale cakes for the cows. To prevent them being stolen, the cakes were heaped in the verandah next to the widows’ dry corn. The widows’ children, foraging among the stale cakes, came upon some that were still edible. The news was reported to Mrs. Tulsi; thereafter stale cakes were shared between the cows and the widows. In this period of experiment many new foods were discovered. The children discovered that brown sugar in a dry pancake made a better lunch than curried bamboo, which could not be exchanged for anything at school. Someone hit upon the idea of dipping sardines in condensed milk, and someone else made the accidental discovery that condensed milk burned in the tin had an original and pleasing flavour.
Economy went further. Directing that no tins were to be thrown away, Mrs. Tulsi summoned a tinker from Arwacas. For a fortnight he shared the household food, slept in the verandah, and made tin cups and tin plates; from a sardine tin he made a whistle. Ink was no longer bought; a violet liquid, faint but unwashable, was extracted from the small berries of the black sage. Mrs. Tulsi, hearing that coconut husks were being thrown away, decided that mattresses and cushions were to be made, and possibly sold. The widows and their children soaked and pounded and stretched and shredded the coconut husks, washed the fibre and dried it. Then Mrs. Tulsi sent for the mattress-maker from Arwacas. He came and made mattresses and cushions for a month.
Sisters with husbands fed their children secretly. And when it was learned that some of the widows’ sons had killed a sheep, roasted it in the woods and eaten it, W. C. Tuttle expressed his outrage at this un-Hindu act, refused to eat any more from the common kitchen and made his wife cook separately. One of his sons reported that W. C. Tuttle’s brahmin mouth had burst into sores the day the sheep was eaten. Mr. Biswas, though unable to produce W. C. Tuttle’s spectacular symptoms, made Shama cook separately as well. Touched by the prevailing obsession with food, Mr. Biswas had been making experiments of his own. He had decided that the gospo, a mixture of the orange and the lemon, and the shadduck, which no one ate, had extraordinary virtues. There was one gospo tree on the estate, and the fruit had been used by the children to play cricket (using bats of bois-canot). Mr. Biswas put an end to that. He drank a glass of the unpleasant gospo juice every morning and made his children do the same, until the gospo tree, which stood at one corner of the cricket field, collapsed into the gully after a flood, still laden with its hybrid fruit.
With the disappearance of the gospo tree the cricket field shrank rapidly. After every shower part of it was carved away, leaving a grass-covered overhang which collapsed in a day or two and was carried off by the next downpour. The drive became tall with weeds, and through the weeds a narrow, curiously wavering path led to the concrete steps, now cracked and sagging and bursting into vegetation at every crack. The evergreen hedge was a tangle of small trees, and whenever it rained the grounds smelled fresh, as of fish, telling that snakes were about.
No one had time to fight the bush. The widows, when not cooking or washing or cleaning or looking after the cows, were making coffee or chocolate or coconut oil or grinding maize. Their clothes became patched, their arms hard. They looked like labourers, and they had to bear with the exulting comments Seth sent through common friends. He had given his life to the family; then he had been rejected and slandered. Their punishment was only beginning. Had he not said that when he left them they would all start catching crabs?
And the widows worked like men. When the gully became a gorge they threw a bridge of coconut trunks across it. The gorge widened; the trunks collapsed. The widows built another bridge; that collapsed too. The widows prevailed on Mrs. Tulsi to buy lengths of rail. The rails were laid across the gorge, coconut trunks laid across the rails, and for a time this structure survived, shaky, slippery, with gaps through which a child might fall to the rocks below.
Mr. Biswas could no longer ignore the dereliction about him; yet when he spoke about moving, Shama, though excluded from the councils of the widows and the confidences of the other sisters, became sullen and sometimes cried.
Then came the scandal of the eighty dollars.
Chinta announced one day that someone had stolen eighty dollars from her room. It was an astonishing announcement, not only because an accusation of theft had never been made in the family before, but also because no one knew that Chinta and Govind had so much money. Chinta told again and again of the last time she had checked the money, and of the accident that had led her to find out that the money was missing. She said she knew who had stolen the money, but was waiting for the thief to trip himself up.
After a few days the thief had not tripped himself up, and Chinta went on searching, drawing crowds wherever she went. Sometimes she spoke Hindi incantations; sometimes she searched with a candle in one hand and a crucifix in the other; sometimes she spat on her left palm, struck the spittle with a finger, and searched in the direction indicated by the flight of the spittle. Finally she decided to hold a trial by Bible and key.
“The old Roman cat and kitten,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “Like mother, like daughter. But look, eh, I don’t want my children meddling in that sort of tomfoolery.”
This was repeated throughout the house.
Chinta said, “I don’t blame him.”
The Bible-and-key trial lasted the whole of one afternoon. Chinta invoked the names of Saints Peter and Paul and spoke the accusations; Miss Blackie, invoking the same names, defended; and the innocence of everyone except Mr. Biswas and his family was established.
Mr. Biswas refused to have his room searched and ignored Shama’s pleas that he should allow the children to be tried. “She is a Roman cat,” he said. “So what? I look like a Hindu mouse?” For some time he and Govind had not spoken; now he and Chinta did not speak. Shama attempted to maintain relations with Chinta, but was rebuffed.
“I am not blaming anybody,” Chinta said. “I am only blaming the man who set the example.”
Then the whisperings began.
“Don’t talk to them. But watch them.”
“Vidiadhar! Quick! I left my purse on the table in the diningroom.”
“Anand likes his nose to run. He swallows the snot. It is like condensed milk to him.”
“Savi does eat the scabs of sores.”
“You ever see Kamla’s head? Crawling with lice. But she is like a monkey. She eats them.”