And just before the school holidays all quarrels were forgotten. The house was scrubbed and cleaned, the brass polished and the yard tidied, as though to receive passing royalty; and the brothers-in-law vied with one another in laying aside offerings for the god: a Julie mango, a bunch of bananas, an especially large purple-skinned avocado pear.
Mr. Biswas brought nothing. Shama complained.
“And what about my son, eh?” Mr. Biswas said. “He lost in the crowd? Who looking after him? He not studying too?”
For, halfway through the term, Anand had begun to go to the mission school. He hated it. He soaked his shoes in water; he was flogged and sent to school in wet shoes. He threw away Captain Cutteridge’s First Primer and said it had been stolen; he was flogged and given another copy.
“Anand is a coward,” Savi told Mr. Biswas. “He still frightened of school. And you know what Aunt Chinta say to him yesterday? ‘If you don’t look out you will come a grass-cutter just like your father.’ “
“Grass-cutter! Look, look, Savi. The next time your aunt Chinta open that big mouth”-he broke off, remembering grammar-“the next time she opens her big mouth-”
Savi smiled.
“-you just ask her whether she has ever read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.”
These were household names to Savi.
“Munnih-munnih-munnih,” Mr. Biswas muttered.
“Munnih-munnih?”
“Money. Checking munnih-munnih-munnih. That is the only way your mother’s family like to get their fat little hands dirty. Look, the next time Chinta or anybody else says I am a grass-cutter, you just tell them that it is better to be a grass-cutter than a crab-catcher. You got that? Better to be a grass-cutter than a crab-catcher.”
And he opened the campaign himself. He had seen some large blue-backed crabs scrambling awkwardly about the black tank in the yard. “Whoo!” he said in the hall. “Those are big crabs in the tank. Where did they come from?”
“Govind bought them for Mai and Owad,” Chinta said proudly.
“Bought them?” Mr. Biswas said. “Anybody would say that he caught them.”
When he next went to Hanuman House he found that Savi had delivered all his messages.
Chinta came straight up to him and said, with the mannishness she put on when Mrs. Tulsi was away, “Brother-in-law, I want you to know that until you came to this house there were no crab-catchers here.”
“Eh? No what?”
“Crab-catchers.”
“Crab-catchers? What about crab-catchers? You don’t have enough here?”
“Marcus Aurelius-Aurelius,” Chinta said, retreating to the kitchen. “Shama sister, I don’t want to meddle in the way you are bringing up your children, but you are turning them into men and women before their time.”
Mr. Biswas winked at Savi.
Presently Chinta came out to the hall again. She had obviously thought of something to say. Sternly and needlessly she rearranged chairs and benches and straightened the photographs of Pundit Tulsi and a huge Chinese calendar which showed a woman of sly beauty against a background of tamed trees and waterfalls. “Savi,” Chinta said at last, and her voice was gentle, “you reach first standard at school and you must know the poetry Captain Cutteridge have in that book. I don’t think your father know it because I don’t think your father reach first standard.”
Mr. Biswas had not been brought up on Captain Cutteridge but on the Royal Reader. Nevertheless he said, “First standard? I skipped that one. I went straight from Introductory to second standard.”
“I thought so, brother-in-law. But you, Savi, you know the poetry I mean. The one about felo-de-se. The little pigs. You know it?”
“I know it! I know it!” a boy exclaimed. This was Jai, the expert lace-knotter, fourteen months younger than Savi. He had developed into something of an exhibitionist. He ran to the centre of the hall, held his hands behind his back and said, “The Three Little Piggies. By Sir Alfred Scott-Gatty.”
A jolly old sow once lived in a sty.
And three little piggies had she,
And she waddled about, saying, “Umph! Umph! Utnph!”
While the little ones said, “Wee! Wee!”
”My dear little brothers,” said one of the brats,
”My dear little piggies,” said he,
”Let us all for the future say, ‘Umph! Umph! Umph!’
”Tis so childish to say, ‘Wee! Wee!’”
While Jai recited Chinta moved her head up and down in time to the rhythm and stared smilingly at Savi.
“So after a time,” Jai went on,
So after a time these little pigs died,
They all died of “felo-de-se”,
From trying too hard to say, “Umph! Umph! Umph!”
When they could only say, “Wee! Wee!”
“A moral there is to this little song,” Chinta said, continuing the poem with Jai and wagging her finger at Savi. “A moral that’s easy to see.”
“Felo-de-se?” Mr. Biswas said. “Sounds like the name of a crab-catcher to me.”
Chinta stamped, irritated as when she lost at cards, and, looking as though she was about to cry, went back to the kitchen.
“Shama sister,” Mr. Biswas heard her say in a breaking voice, “I want you to ask your husband to stop provoking me. Otherwise I will just have to tell him ”-her husband, Govind-“and you know what happened when he had a little falling-out with your husband.”
“All right, Chinta sister, I will tell him.”
Shama came out and said, with annoyance, “Man, stop provoking C. You know she can’t take jokes.”
“Jokes? What jokes? Crab-catching is no joke, you hear.”
Chinta had her revenge a few days later.
Mr. Biswas arrived at Hanuman House when the evening meal was over and the children were sitting about the hall in groups of three or four, reading primers or pretending to read. One of the economies of the house was that as many children as possible shared a book; and the children were talking among themselves and trying to hide the fact by holding their hands over their mouths and turning pages regularly. When Mr. Biswas came they looked at him with amusement and expectancy.
Chinta smiled. “You have come to see your son, brother-in-law?”
A rustle of turning pages coincided with many muffled titters.
Savi left a group around a book and came to Mr. Biswas. She looked unhappy. “Anand upstairs.” When they were halfway up she whispered, “He kneeling down.”
In the hall Chinta was singing.
“Kneeling down? What for?”
“He mess up himself at school today and had to leave.”
They went through the Book Room to the long room, which he and Shama had occupied after their marriage. The lotus decorations on the wall were as faded as before; the Demerara window through which he had gargled was propped open with a section of a broomstick.
Anand was kneeling in a corner with his face to the wall.
“He kneeling down since this afternoon,” Savi said.
Mr. Biswas didn’t feel this was true. Anand had been left to himself, and was now kneeling upright, without a sign of fatigue, as though he had just begun.
“Stop kneeling,” Mr. Biswas said.
He was surprised at Anand’s outraged and querulous reply. “They tell me to kneel down and I going to kneel down.”
It was the first time he had seen Anand in a temper. He looked at the boy’s narrow shoulder blades below the thin cotton shirt; the slender neck, the large head; the thin eczema-stained legs in small, loose trousers; the blackened soles-shoes were to be worn only outside the house-and the big toes.