“Just where you would place your brothers.”
“Road-sweeper? Little washerboys? Barber? Yes, little barbers. Pankaj would just look at them and feel that he want a trim. And what about your mother?” He paused. “Shama! It just hit me. Pankaj would say that your mother ain’t a Hindu at all! I mean, look at the facts. Marrying off her favourite daughter in a registry office. Sending the two little barbers to a Roman Catholic college. As soon as Pankaj see your mother he would start making the sign of the cross. Roman Catholic, that’s what she is!”
“Why don’t you shut your mouth?” Shama tried to sound amused, but he could tell that she was getting angry.
“Ro-man Cat-o-lic! Roman cat, the bitch. You think she could fool Pankaj? And here you have Pankaj bringing the woman a message of hope, saying that Hindus should take in converts and treat them like their own, saying that it is not necessary to be born a high-caste to be a high-caste. A message of hope, man. And what? Your mother running the man down, when she should be grateful like hell, kissing the man foot. Gratitude, eh?”
“I just hope this Pankaj Rai come to lift you out of this gum-pot you surely going to land yourself in. Go ahead.”
“Shama.”
“Why you don’t wrap your little tail up and go to sleep?”
“Shama, we have another problem, girl. You think any good Hindu would get married to a Roman Catholic girl, if he was really a good Hindu? Shama, you know what? It look to me that your whole family is just one big low-caste bunch.”
“You should know. You married into it.”
“Married into it. Ha! You think that make me happy. I look as if I happy?”
“Why you should look as if you happy? It should make you miserable. Is the first time in your life you eating three square meals a day. It giving your stomach too much exercise, I should say.”
“Licking up my stomach, you mean. My biggest item of food and drink in this house is soda powder and water.”
He pressed his foot against the wall and with his big toe drew circles around one of the faded lotus decorations.
He intended to discuss the Aryans less flippantly with Hari. He imagined that Hari, like Pundit Jairam and many other pundits, would welcome disputation. But at the long table Hari remained cold, his wife looked aghast, and Mr. Biswas left him to his food.
When Hari had changed and was sitting in the verandah upstairs, humming from some holy book in his cheerless way, Mr. Biswas, piqued and anxious to provoke some reaction, brought out his copy of Reform the Only Way and showed it, drawing Hari’s attention to the inscriptions. Hari looked briefly at the book and said, “Mm.”
Having failed with Hari, Mr. Biswas decided that it would be prudent to withhold the message of hope from the other brothers-in-law, who were less intelligent and more temperamental.
About a week later Seth met Mr. Biswas in the hall and said, laughing, “How is your dear friend Pankaj Rai?”
“What you asking me for?” Mr. Biswas nearly always spoke English at Hanuman House, even when the other person spoke Hindi; it had become one of his principles. “Why you don’t ask Hari, the stargazer?”
“You know Rai nearly went to jail?”
“Some people would say anything.” But Mr. Biswas was disturbed by this news about the purist.
“These Aryans say all sorts of things about women,” Seth said. “And you know why? They want to lift them up to get on top of them. You know Rai was interfering with Nath’s daughter-in-law? So they asked him to leave. But a lot of other things left the house when he left.”
“But the man is a BA.”
“And LLB. I know. I wouldn’t trust an Aryan with my great-grandmother.”
“Is a trick. The man is a dear friend. A purist. Pankaj wouldn’t do a thing like that. You never hear him talk, that’s why.”
“Nath’s daughter-in-law heard, though. She didn’t like what she heard.”
“Scandal, scandal. Is just a piece of scandal you stick-in-the-mud Sanatanists dig up.”
“If I had my way,” Seth said, “I would cut the balls off all these Aryans. Have they converted you yet?”
“That is my own business.”
“I hear they have made some Creole converts. Brothers for you, Mohun!”
In the verandah Mr. Biswas saw Hari in dhoti, vest and beads, reading.
“Hello, pundit!” Mr. Biswas said.
Hari stared blankly at Mr. Biswas and returned to his book.
Mr. Biswas went past a door with glass panes of many colours into the Book Room. Here, along the length of one wall, was a bookcase choked with the religious literature Hari was working through. Few of the books were bound. Many were simply stacks of large loose brown-edged sheets which looked stained rather than printed. Each sheet carried partial impressions of the sheet above and the sheet below; the ink had turned russet; and each letter lay in a patch of oil.
Mr. Biswas turned and walked back to the verandah. He put his head around a brilliant blue pane and whispered loudly down the verandah to Hari, “Hello, Mr. God.”
Hari, humming, didn’t hear.
“I got a name for another one of your brother-in-laws,” he told Shama that evening, lying on his blanket, his right foot on his left knee, peeling off a broken nail from his big toe. “The constipated holy man.”
“Hari?” she said, and pulled herself up, realizing that she had begun to take part in the game.
He slapped his yellow, flabby calf and pushed his finger into the flesh. The calf yielded like sponge.
She pulled his hand away. “Don’t do that. I can’t bear to see you do that. You should be ashamed, a young man like you, being so soft.”
“That is all the bad food I eating in this place.” He was still holding her hand. “Well, as a matter of fact, I have quite a few names for him. The holy ghost. You like that?”
“Man!”
“And what about the two gods? It ever strike you that they look like two monkeys? So, you have one concrete monkey-god outside the house and two living ones inside. They could just call this place the monkey house and finish. Eh, monkey, bull, cow, hen. The place is like a blasted zoo, man.”
“And what about you? The barking puppy dog?”
“Man’s best friend.” He flung up his legs and his thin slack calves shook. With a push of his finger he kept the calves swinging.
“Stop doing that!”
By now Shama’s head was on his soft arm, and they were lying side by side.
Abandoning the brothers-in-law altogether, Mr. Biswas contented himself with the company of the Aryans at the Naths”. Pankaj Rai was no longer with them and no one was willing to talk about him. His place had been taken by a man who introduced himself as Shivlochan, BA (Professor). He was no purist. He spoke pompous Hindi and little English, and continually allowed himself to be bullied by Misir. Misir was keen on discussions and resolutions, and under his guidance they passed resolutions that education was important, that child marriage should be abolished, that young people should choose their own spouses.
Misir, who had suffered from his parents’ choice, said, “The present system is nothing more than cat-in-bag.”
(Mr. Biswas loved Misir’s phrases. “That is all your family do for you,” he said to Shama that evening. “Marry off the whole pack of you cat-in-bag.”