Mr. Biswas went in by the tall side gate. The hall was lit by one oil lamp. Despite the late hour children were still eating. Some were at the long table, some on benches and chairs about the hall, two in the hammock, some on the steps, some on the landing, and two on the disused piano. Two of the lesser Tulsi sisters and Miss Blackie were supervising.
No one seemed surprised to see him. He was grateful for that. He looked for Savi and had trouble in locating her. She saw him first, smiled, but didn’t leave the table. He went up to her.
“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” she said, and he couldn’t tell whether she was disappointed or not.
“Missing your six cents, eh?” He studied the food on Savi’s enamel plate: curried beans, fried tomatoes and a dry pancake. “Where’s your mother?”
“She had another baby. Did you know?”
He noticed the fatherless children. They had given up their offending mourning suits; even so, their clothes were different. He didn’t know these children very well and they regarded him, a visiting father, with curiosity.
“Ma said you beat her,” Savi said.
The fatherless children looked at Mr. Biswas with dread and disapproval. They all had large eyes: another distinguishing feature.
Mr. Biswas laughed. “She was only joking,” he said in English.
“She upstairs, rubbing down Myna,” Savi said, in English as well.
“Myna, eh? Another girl.” He spoke light-heartedly, trying to get the attention of the two Tulsi sisters. “This family just full of girl children.”
The sisters tittered. He turned to them and smiled.
Shama was not in the Rose Room, but in the wooden bridge between the two houses. A basin with soapy, baby-smelling water was on the floor and, as Savi had said, Shama was rubbing down Myna, the way she had rubbed down Savi herself and Anand (asleep on the bed: no more rubbing for him, for the rest of his life).
Shama saw him, but concentrated on the baby, folding limbs this way and that, saying the rhyme that was to end in a laugh, a bunching of the limbs over the belly, a clap, and a release of the limbs.
Mr. Biswas watched.
While she was dressing Myna, Shama said, “Have you eaten?”
He shook his head. They might have parted only the hour before. And not only that. She had spoken about eating, and there was nothing in her voice to hint at the innumerable quarrels they had had about food. He had often opened tins of salmon and sardines from the shop after refusing to eat her food and sometimes throwing it away, food as unimaginative as that he had just seen on Savi’s plate. It wasn’t that the Tulsis couldn’t cook. They thought appetizing food should be reserved for religious festivals; at other times it was a carnal indulgence. Mr. Biswas’s digestion had been repeatedly shocked to move from plain food before a ceremony to excessively rich food on the day of the ceremony and promptly back to plain food the day after.
Myna fell asleep at Shama’s breast and was laid on the bed next to Anand. A pillow was placed at her side to keep her from rolling off, and the oil lamp in the bracket on the un-painted wall was turned down.
When Mr. Biswas and Shama passed through the verandah it was thronged with children sitting on mats, reading or playing cards or draughts. These games had been recently introduced and were taken with the utmost seriousness; they were regarded as intellectual disciplines particularly suitable for children. Savi, too small for books, was playing Go-to-Pack with one of the large-eyed children. Everyone talked in whispers. Shama walked on tiptoe.
“Mai sick,” she said.
Which accounted for the children’s late dinner and the absence of so many of the sisters.
Shama laid out food for Mr. Biswas in the hall. The food might be bad at Hanuman House, but there was always some for unexpected visitors. Everything was cold. The pancakes were sweating, hard on the outside and little better than dough inside. He did not complain.
“You going back tonight?” she asked in English.
He knew then that he hadn’t intended to go back, ever. He said nothing.
“You better sleep here then.”
As long as there was floor space, there was bed space.
Some sisters came into the hall. Packs of cards were brought out; the sisters split into groups and gravely settled down to play. Chinta played with style. She fussed with her cards, rearranged them often, stared blankly and disconcertingly at the other players, hummed and never spoke; before she played a telling card she frowned at it, pulled it up a little, tapped it down and kept on tapping it; then, suddenly, she threw it on the table with a crack and, still frowning, collected her trick. She was a magnanimous winner and a bad loser.
Mr. Biswas watched.
Shama made a bed for him in the verandah upstairs, among the children.
He woke to a babel the next morning and when he went down to the hall found the sisters getting their children ready for school. It was the only time of day when it was reasonably easy to tell which child belonged to which mother. He was surprised to see Shama filling a satchel with a slate, a slate pencil, a lead pencil, an eraser, an exercise book with the Union Jack on the cover, and Nelson’s West Indian Reader, First Stage, by Captain J. O. Cutteridge, Director of Education, Trinidad and Tobago. Lastly Shama wrapped an orange in tissue paper and put it in the satchel. “For teacher,” she said to Savi.
Mr. Biswas didn’t know that Savi had begun to go to school.
Shama sat on a bench, held Savi between her legs, combed her hair, plaited it, straightened the pleats on her navy-blue uniform, and adjusted her Panama hat.
Mother and daughter had been doing this for many weeks. And he had known nothing.
Shama said, “If your shoelaces come loose again today, you think you would be able to tie them back?” She bent down and undid Savi’s shoelaces. “Let me see you tie them.”
“You know I can’t tie them.”
“Do it quick sharp, or I give you a dose of licks.”
“I can’t tie them.”
“Come,” Mr. Biswas said, shamelessly paternal in the bustling hall. “I will tie them for you.”
“No,” Shama said. “She must learn to tie her laces. Otherwise I will keep her at home and beat her until she can tie them.”
It was standard talk at Hanuman House. At The Chase Shama had never spoken like that.
As yet no one was paying attention. But when Shama started to hunt for one of the many hibiscus switches which always lay about the hall, sisters and children became less noisy and good-humouredly waited to see what would happen. It was not going to be a serious flogging since ineptitude rather than criminality was being punished; and Shama moved about with a comic jerkiness, as though she knew she was only an actor in a farce and not, like Sumati at the house-blessing in The Chase, a figure of high tragedy.
Mr. Biswas, his eyes fixed on Savi, found himself tittering nervously. Still wearing her Panama hat, Savi squatted on the floor, tangling laces and watching them fall apart, or knotting them double, tight and high, and having to undo them with her nails and teeth. She, too, was partly acting for the audience. Her failures were greeted with approving laughter. Even Shama, standing by with whip in hand, allowed amusement to invade her playacting annoyance.
“All right,” Shama said. “Let me show you for the last time. Watch me. Now try.”
Savi fumbled ineffectually again. This time there was less laughter.
“You just want to shame me,” Shama said. “A big girl like you, five going on six, can’t tie her own laces. Jai, come here.”
Jai was the son of an unimportant sister. He was pushed to the front by his mother, who was dandling another baby on her hip.
“Look at Jai,” Shama said. “His mother don’t have to tie his shoelaces. And he is a whole year younger than you.”