“Really really?” Mr. Biswas said. “A house, just like that?”
“Writers get them all the time. A dacha, a house in the country.”
“Why,” asked Mrs. Tulsi, “don’t we all go to Russia?”
“Ah,” Owad said. “They fought for it. You should hear what they did to the Czar.”
“M-m-m-m.” Miss Blackie said, and the sisters nodded gravely.
“You,” Mr. Biswas said, now full of respect, “are you a member of the Communist Party?”
Owad only smiled.
And his reaction was equally cryptic when Anand asked how, as a communist working for the revolution, he could take a job in the government medical service. “The Russians have a proverb,” Owad said. “A tortoise can pull in its head and go through a cesspit and remain clean.”
By the end of the week the house was in a ferment. Everyone was waiting for the revolution. The Soviet Constitution and the Soviet Weekly were read more thoroughly than the Sentinel or the Guardian. Every received idea was shaken. The readers and learners, happy to think themselves in a society that was soon to be utterly destroyed, relaxed their efforts to read and learn and began to despise their teachers, whom they had previously reverenced, as ill-informed stooges.
And Owad was an all-rounder. He not only had views on politics and military strategy; he not only was knowledgeable about cricket and football; he lifted weights, he swam, he rowed; and he had strong opinions about artists and writers.
“Eliot,” he told Anand. “Used to see him a lot. American, you know. The Waste Land. The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Let us go then, you and I. Eliot is a man I simply loathe.”
And at school Anand said, “Eliot is a man I simply loathe”; and added, “I know someone who knows him.”
While they waited for the revolution, life had to be lived. The tent was taken down. Sisters and married granddaughters left. Visitors no longer came in great numbers. Owad took up his duties at the Colonial Hospital and for a time the house had to be content with stories of the operations he had carried out. The refugee doctor was dismissed and Owad looked after Mrs. Tulsi himself. She improved spectacularly. “These doctors stopped learning twenty years ago,” Owad said. “They don’t even bother to keep up with the journals.” Journals had been coming to him by almost every post from England, and drug samples, which he displayed proudly, though sometimes with scathing comments.
Communal cooking had stopped, but communal life continued. Sisters and granddaughters often came to spend a night or a week-end. They brought all their illnesses to him and he attended to them without charge, giving injections wholesale with new miracle drugs which he said were as yet unknown in the colony. Later the sisters worked out what they would have had to pay another doctor, and there was a gentle rivalry as to who had been favoured with the most expensive treatment.
And Owad’s success grew. For long the emphasis in the house had been on reading and learning, which many of the readers and learners couldn’t do well and approached reluctantly. Now Owad said that this emphasis was wrong. Everyone had something to offer. Physical strength and manual skills were as important as academic success, and he spoke of the equality in Russia of peasants, workers and intellectuals. He organized swimming parties, boating expeditions, ping-pong tournaments; and such was the admiration and respect felt for him that even enemies came together. Anand and Vidiadhar played some ping-pong sets and, though not speaking a word to one another before or after, were scrupulously polite during the game, saying “Good shot!” and “Bad luck!” at the least opportunity. Vidiadhar, who had developed into a games-playing thug, more keen than competent and never picked for any college side, excelled in these family games and was the house champion.
“I can’t tell you,” Chinta said to Owad, “how Vidiadhar got me worried. That boy does sweat so much. You can’t get him to stick in a corner with some old book. He always exercising or playing some rough game or other. He done break a hand, a foot and some ribs. I does keep on trying to stop him. But he don’t listen. And he does sweat so much.”
“Nothing to worry about there,” Owad said, the doctor now. “That is quite normal.”
“You take a weight off my mind,” Chinta said, disappointed, for she believed that profuse sweating was a sign of exceptional virility and had hoped to be told so. “He does sweat so much.”
Regularly Shekhar, Dorothy and their five daughters came to the house, and these visits gave the sisters a sweet revenge. They treated Shekhar with the respect due to him, but they made their contempt for Dorothy plain. “I am sorry,” Chinta said to her one Sunday. “I cannot understand you. I only speak Spanish.” Dorothy had not spoken Spanish since Owad’s arrival and the sisters felt that they were at last making her boil down. But their behaviour had an unexpected result. For Owad, taking his cue from the sisters, spoke rallyingly to Dorothy; she responded with rough good humour and soon a familiarity grew up between them; and one Sunday, to the dismay of the sisters, Dorothy came with her cousin, a handsome young woman who had graduated from McGill University and had all the elegance of the Indian girl from South Trinidad. When they had gone Owad calmed the sisters’ fears by deriding the girl’s Canadian degree, her slight Canadian accent and her musical skills. “She went all the way to Canada to learn to play the violin,” he said. “I hope she doesn’t want to play to me. I’ll break the bow on her parents’ heads. People starving, not getting enough to eat in Trinidad, and she playing the violin in Canada!”
And though he spent more and more time with his friends and colleagues and often went south to Shekhar’s, and though when his friends called the house had to be silent and the sisters and the readers and learners hidden, the sisters continued to feel safe. For after every journey, every meeting, Owad related his adventures to them. His appetite for talk was insatiable, his dramatic gifts never failed, and the comments he made on the people he had met were invariably scathing.
The sisters now sought audience with him singly or in small groups. They came to the house, waited up for him, and when he returned they fell to talking, under the house, so as not to disturb Mrs. Tulsi’s sleep. In time each sister felt she had a special hold on him; and having received his confidences, offered hers. At first the sisters spoke of their financial difficulties. But Owad was unwilling to anticipate the revolution. Then the sisters complained. They complained about the teachers who were keeping their children back at school; they complained about Dorothy, about Shekhar, about their husbands; they complained about absent sisters. Every scandal was gone over, every petty dispute, every resentment. And Owad listened. The children listened as well, kept awake by the sisters’ bumbling and their frequent hawking and spitting (a sign of intimacy: the warmer the feeling, the noisier the hawk, the longer the period of speaking through the spittle). In the morning the sisters who had talked late into the night were brisk and exceptionally friendly towards the people they had criticized, exceptionally proprietary towards Owad.
The house was always full of sisters on Sunday, when there was communal cooking. Sometimes Shekhar came by himself and then before lunch there were discussions between the brothers and Mrs. Tulsi. The sisters did not feel threatened by these discussions as they had done when Shekhar and Dorothy and Mrs. Tulsi talked. They did not feel excluded. For, with Owad there, these discussions were like the old Hanuman House family councils. So the sisters cooked below the house and sang and were gay. They were even anxious to exaggerate the difference between their brothers and themselves. It was as if by doing so they paid their brothers a correct reverence, a reverence which comforted and protected the sisters by assigning them a place again. They spoke no Hindi, used the grossest English dialect and the coarsest expressions and vied with one another in doing menial jobs and getting themselves dirty. In this way they sealed the family bond for the day.