“I wasn’t doing nothing, Ma,” the boy wailed in English.
“He wasn’t doing nothing, Ma.” This was from one of the girls. Mr. Biswas knew her: a dumpy little thing, with big contemptuous eyes and full, pendulous lips; she was capable of fantastic physical contortions and often performed for visitors at Hanuman House.
“Blasted liar!” Mr. Biswas said. He ran out of the shop, past a woman who was coming, cooing, to a bawling baby. “Wasn’t doing nothing? And who break up all those soda water bottles?”
In the tent Hari droned imperturbably on. Shama remained bowed in her white cocoon. The brothers-in-law sat on their blankets, reverentially still.
Mr. Biswas was lucid enough to hope that he wasn’t antagonizing a father.
Padma went into the shop in her slow way and came out and said judicially. “Some bottles have been broken.”
“And is eight cents a bottle,” Mr. Biswas said. “Wasn’t doing nothing!”
The mother of the boy, suddenly enraged, flew to a hibiscus bush and began breaking off a switch. It was a tough bush and she had to bend the switch back and forth several times. Torn leaves fell on the ground.
The boy’s bawls were now touched with genuine anguish.
The mother broke two switches on the boy, speaking as she beat. “This will teach you not to meddle with things that don’t belong to you. This will teach you not to provoke people who don’t make any allowances for children.” She caught sight of the marks left on the boy’s collar by Mr. Biswas’s fingers, sticky from the tin-lid. “And this will teach you not to let big people make your clothes dirty. This will teach you that they don’t have to wash them. You are a big man. You know right. You know wrong. You are not a child. That is why I am beating you as though you are a big man and can take a big man’s blows.”
The beating had ceased to be a simple punishment and had become a ritual. Sisters came out to witness, rocking crying babies in their arms, and said without urgency, “You will damage the boy, Sumati.” And: “Stop it now, Sumati. You have beaten him enough.”
Sumati continued to beat, and didn’t stop talking.
In the tent Hari intoned. From the set of Shama’s back Mr. Biswas could divine her displeasure.
“House-blessing party!” Mr. Biswas said.
The beating went on.
“Is just a form of showing-off,” Mr. Biswas said. He had seen enough of these beatings to know that later it would be said admiringly, “Sumati beats her children really well”; and that the sisters would say to their children, “Do you want to be beaten the way Sumati beat her son that day at The Chase?”
The boy, no longer crying, was at last released. He sought comfort from an aunt, who calmed her baby, calmed the boy, said to the baby, “Come, kiss him. His mother has beaten him really badly today”; then to the boy, “Come, look how you are making him cry.” The whimpering boy kissed the crying baby and slowly the noise subsided.
“Good!” Sumati said, tears in her eyes. “Good! Everyone is satisfied now. And I suppose the soda water bottles have been made whole again. Nobody is losing eight cents a bottle now.”
“I didn’t ask anybody to beat their child, you hear,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Nobody asked,” Sumati said, to no one in particular. “I am just saying that everybody is now satisfied.”
She went to the tent and sat down in the section set aside for women and girls. The boy sat among the men.
The road was now lined with villagers and a few outsiders as well. They had not been attracted by the flogging, though that had encouraged the children of the village to gather a little earlier than might have been expected. They came for the food that would be distributed after the ceremony. Among these expectant uninvited guests Mr. Biswas noticed two of the village shopkeepers.
The cooking was being done, under the superintendence of Sushila, over an open fire-hole in the yard. Sisters stirred enormous black cauldrons brought for the occasion from Hanuman House. They sweated and complained but they were happy. Though there was no need for it, some had stayed awake all the previous night, peeling potatoes, cleaning rice, cutting vegetables, singing, drinking coffee. They had prepared bin after bin of rice, bucket upon bucket of lentils and vegetables, vats of tea and coffee, volumes of chapattis.
Mr. Biswas had given up trying to work out the cost. “Just going to leave me a damn pauper,” he said. He walked along the hibiscus hedge, plucked leaves, chewed them and spat them out.
“You have a nice little property here, Mohun.”
It was Mrs. Tulsi, looking tired after her rest on the cast iron fourposter. She had used the English word “property”; it had an acquisitive, self-satisfied flavour; he would have preferred it if she had said “shop” or “place”.
“Nice?” he said, not sure whether she was being satirical or not.
“Very nice little property.”
“Walls falling down in the shop.”
“They wouldn’t fall.”
“Roof leaking in the bedroom.”
“It doesn’t rain all the time.”
“And I don’t sleep all the time either. Want a new kitchen.”
“The kitchen looks all right to me.”
“And who does eat all the time, eh? We could do with a extra room.”
“What’s the matter? You want a Hanuman House right away?”
“I don’t want a Hanuman House at all.”
“Look,” Mrs. Tulsi said. They were in the gallery now. “You don’t want an extra room at all. You could just hang some sugarsacks on these posts during the night, and you have your extra room.”
He looked at her. She was in earnest.
“Take them away in the morning,” she said, “and you have your gallery again.”
“Sugarsack, eh?”
“Just six or seven. You wouldn’t need any more.”
I would like to bury you in one, Mr. Biswas thought. He said, “You going to send me some of these sugarsacks?”
“You’re a shopkeeper,” she said. “You have more than me.”
“Don’t worry. I was just joking. Just send me a coal barrel. You could get a whole family in a coal barrel. You didn’t know that?”
She was too surprised to speak.
“I don’t know why they still building houses,” Mr. Biswas said. “Nobody don’t want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn’t see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.”
Mrs. Tulsi patted her lips with her veil, turned away and stepped into the yard. Faintly she called, “Sushila.”
“And you could get Hari to bless the barrels right in Hanuman House,” Mr. Biswas said. “No need to bring him all the way to The Chase.”
Sushila came and, giving Mr. Biswas a hard stare, offered her arm to Mrs. Tulsi. “What has happened, Mai?”
In the shop a baby woke and screamed and drowned Mrs. Tulsi’s words.
Sushila led Mrs. Tulsi to the tent.
Mr. Biswas went to the bedroom. The window was closed and the room was dark, but enough light came in to make everything distinct: his clothes on the wall, the bed rumpled from Mrs. Tulsi’s rest. Violating his fastidiousness, he lay down on the bed. The musty smell of old thatch was mingled with the smell of Mrs. Tulsi’s medicaments: bay rum, soft candles, Canadian Healing Oil, ammonia. He didn’t feel a small man, but the clothes which hung so despairingly from the nail on the mud wall were definitely the clothes of a small man, comic, make-believe clothes.