On the baize-covered desk in the long room there were glasses and spoons stained white with Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, sheafs and sheafs of paper connected with his duties as Community Welfare Officer, and the long, half-used pad in which he noted his expenses for the Prefect, parked in the grounds of the court house.
The redecoration of the house in Port of Spain proceeded slowly. Frightened by the price, Mrs. Tulsi had not handed over the job to a contractor. Instead, she employed individual workmen, whom she regularly abused and dismissed. She had no experience of city workpeople and could not understand why they were unwilling to work for food and a little pocketmoney. Miss Blackie blamed the Americans and said that rapaciousness was one of her people’s faults. Even after wages had been agreed Mrs. Tulsi was never willing to pay fully. Once, after he had worked for a fortnight, a burly mason, insulted by the two women, left the house in tears, threatening to go to the police. “My people, mum,” Miss Blackie said apologetically.
It was nearly three months before the work was done. The house was painted upstairs and downstairs, inside and out. Striped awnings hung over the windows; and glass louvres, looking fragile and out of place in that clumsy, heavy house, darkened the verandahs.
And Mr. Biswas’s nightmare came to an end. He was invited to return from the tenement. He did not return to his two rooms but, as he had feared, to one, at the back. The rooms he had surrendered were reserved for Owad. Govind and Chinta moved into Basdai’s room, and Basdai, able now only to board, moved under the house with her readers and learners. In his one room Mr. Biswas fitted his two beds, Theophile’s bookcase and Shama’s dressingtable. The destitute’s diningtable remained downstairs. There was no room for Shama’s glass cabinet, but Mrs. Tulsi offered to lodge it in her diningroom. It was safe there and made a pleasing, modern show. Sometimes the children slept in the room; sometimes they slept downstairs. Nothing was fixed. Yet after the tenement the new arrangement seemed ordered and was a relief.
And now Mr. Biswas began to make fresh calculations, working out over and over the number of years that separated each of his children from adulthood. Savi was indeed a grown person. Concentrating on Anand, he had not observed her with attention. And she herself had grown reserved and grave; she no longer quarrelled with her cousins, though she could still be sharp; and she never cried. Anand was more than halfway through college. Soon, Mr. Biswas thought, his responsibilities would be over. The older would look after the younger. Somehow, as Mrs. Tulsi had said in the hall of Hanuman House when Savi was born, they would survive: they couldn’t be killed. Then he thought: “I have missed their childhoods.”
6. The Revolution
A letter from London. A postcard from Vigo. Mrs. Tulsi ceased to be ill and irritable, and spent most of her day in the front verandah, waiting. The house began to fill with sisters, their children and grandchildren, and shook with squeals and thumps. A huge tent was put up in the yard. The bamboo poles were fringed with coconut branches which curved to form arches, and a cluster of fruit hung from every arch. Cooking went on late into the night, and singing; and everyone slept where he could find a place. It was like an old Hanuman House festival. There had been nothing like it since Owad had gone away.
A cable from Barbados threw the house into a frenzy. Mrs. Tulsi became gay. “Your heart, mum,” Miss Blackie said. But Mrs. Tulsi couldn’t sit still. She insisted on being taken downstairs; she inspected, she joked; she went upstairs and came downstairs again; she went a dozen times to the rooms reserved for Owad. And in the confusion a messenger was sent to summon the pundit even after the pundit had come, a self-effacing man who, in trousers and shirt, had passed unnoticed in the growing crowd.
The sisters announced their intention of staying awake all that night. There was so much cooking to do, they said. The children fell asleep. The group of men around the pundit thinned; the pundit fell asleep. The sisters cooked and joyously complained of overwork; they sang sad wedding songs; they made pots of coffee; they played cards. Some sisters disappeared for an hour or so, but none admitted she had gone to sleep, and Chinta boasted that she could stay awake for seventy-two hours, boasting as though Govind was still the devoted son of the family, as though his brutalities had not occurred, as though time had not passed and they were still sisters in the hall of Hanuman House.
They grew lethargic just before dawn, but the morning light kindled them into fresh, over-energetic activity. Children were washed and fed and dressed before the street awoke; the house was swept and cleaned. Mrs. Tulsi was bathed and dressed by Sushila; on her smooth skin there were small beads of perspiration, although the sun had not yet come out and she seldom perspired. Presently the visitors started arriving, many of them only tenuously related to the house, and not a few-the relations, say, of a grandchild’s in-laws-unknown. The street was choked with cars and bright with the dresses of women and girls. Shekhar and Dorothy and their five daughters came. Everyone fussed about something: children, food, wharf-passes, transport. Continually cars drove off with an important noise. Their drivers, returning, showed passes and told of encounters with startled harbour officials.
For Mr. Biswas it had been a difficult night. And the morning began badly. When he asked Anand to bring him the Guardian Anand reported that the paper had been appropriated by the pundit and had disappeared. Then he was turned out of the room while Shama and the girls dressed. Downstairs was chaos. He took one look at the bathroom and decided not to use it that day. When he went back to the room it was filled with the slight but offensive smell of face powder and there were clothes everywhere. Miserably, he dressed. “The wreck of the blasted Hesperus,” he said, using a comb to clean his brush of woman’s hair, sniffing as the dust rose visibly in the sunlight that slanted in below the striped awning. Shama noted his irritability but did not comment upon it; this enraged him further. The house, upstairs and down, resounded with impatient footsteps, shouts and shrieks.
The cavalcade left the house in sections. Mrs. Tulsi travelled in Shekhar’s car. Mr. Biswas went in his Prefect; but his family had split up and gone in other cars, and he was obliged to take some people he didn’t know.
The liner, white and reposed, lay at anchor in the gulf. A chair was found for Mrs. Tulsi and set against the dull magenta wall of the customs shed. She was dressed in white, her veil pulled over her forehead. She pressed her lips together from time to time and crumpled a handkerchief in one hand. She was flanked by Miss Blackie, in her churchgoing clothes and a straw hat with a red ribbon, and by Sushila, who carried a large bag with an assortment of medicines.
A tug hooted. The liner was being towed in. Some of the children, those who had learnt at school that one proof of the roundness of the earth was the way ships disappeared beyond the horizon, exaggerated the distance between ship and wharf. Many said the ship would come alongside in two to three hours. Shivadhar, Chinta’s younger son, said it wouldn’t do so until the evening of the following day.
But the adults were concerned with something else.
“Don’t tell Mai,” the sisters whispered.
Seth was on the wharf. He stood two customs sheds away. He was in a cheap suit of an atrocious brown, and to anyone who remembered him in his khaki uniform and heavy bluchers he looked like a labourer in his Sunday suit.