Mrs. Tulsi proposed that Mr. Biswas should move his family to Port of Spain and live with her son and herself. Unless, of course, Mr. Biswas was thinking of buying a house of his own; she was only a mother and had no control over Shama’s fate. If they came, however, they would have the run of the house, except for those rooms used by Owad and herself. In return they would pay eight dollars a month, Shama would cook, do all the housework and collect the rents from her other two houses: a difficult business: not worth the trouble to get an outsider to do it and she was too old to do it herself.
The offer was stupendous: a house, no less. It was the climax of his current good fortune, which must now, he felt, surely end. To delay acceptance, to cover up his nervousness, he talked about the difficulty of collecting rents. Mrs. Tulsi talked about Pundit Tulsi and he listened with solemn sympathy.
They were in the front verandah. Ferns in baskets hung from the eaves, softening the light, cooling the air. Mr. Biswas reclined on his morris chair. It was an experience, so new he could not yet savour it, to find himself turned all at once from a visitor into a dweller, in a house that was solid and finished and painted and elegant all over, with a level, gapless floor, straight concrete walls, panelled doors with locks, a complete roof, a ceiling varnished in the drawingroom, painted elsewhere. Finishing details, which up to a few minutes before he had taken for granted, he now noted, one by one, as for the first time. Nothing had to be added, nothing was makeshift; there were no surprises of mud walls or tree-branches, no secret ways of doing anything; everything worked as it was meant to.
The house stood on high pillars and was one of the newest and most imposing in the street. The district had been recently redeveloped and was rising fast, though in every street there were still a number of dwellings of the stubborn poor, unfenced wooden huts which spoke of the time when the district was part of a sugar-estate. The streets were straight; every lot measured one hundred feet by fifty; and a sewerage trace, almost a street itself, ran down the middle of each block, separating back fences. So there was space; space below the floor of the house itself, space at the back, space at the sides, space for a garden at the front.
Could this luck have been more complete?
Ramchand and Dehuti were delighted. The camplife which Mr. Biswas’s presence enforced on them in their two rooms, though pleasant at first, had begun to be irksome. They were glad, too, that Mr. Biswas had been settled. They felt responsible for that as well as the reconciliation. One unexpected result of the negotiations was that Dehuti attached herself to Hanuman House, joining the dozens of strange women who, to Mr. Biswas’s surprise, were always willing to turn up days before any large function at Hanuman House, abandoning husbands and children, to cook and clean and generally serve, without payment. Dehuti worked hard and was always invited. She often went with the Tulsi sisters to other functions; and at weddings sang the sad songs which had not been sung for her. In time no one thought of her as Mr. Biswas’s sister, not even Mr. Biswas, to whom she became only one of the women attached to the Tulsis.
Once more, then, the furniture moved. And what had choked the barrackroom made little impression on the house at Port of Spain. The fourposter and Shama’s dressingtable went into a bedroom; the kitchen safe with the coffee-set remained in the back verandah with the green table. The hatrack and the rockingchair alone had places of honour, in the front verandah; they were put out every morning and brought in every night, to prevent them being stolen. For the rest, the house remained furnished in the manner which Mrs. Tulsi had thought appropriate to the city. In the drawing-room four cane-bottomed bentwood chairs stood stiffly around a marble topped three-legged table which carried a potted fern on a crocheted and tasselled white cloth. In the diningroom there was a frigid-looking washstand with a ewer and basin. Mrs. Tulsi had brought none of the statuary from Hanuman House but many of the brass vases, which, filled with potted plants, were disposed about the verandah and brought in every night.
Anand and Savi were not easily persuaded to leave Hanuman House. They remained there for some weeks after Shama had left with Myna and Kamla. Then Savi came one Sunday evening with Mrs. Tulsi and the god. She saw the street lamps and the lights of the ships in the harbour. Mrs. Tulsi took her to the Botanical Gardens; she saw the ponds and grassy slopes of the sunken Rock Gardens; she heard the band play; and she stayed. Anand, however, refused to be allured, until the younger god said, “They have a new sweet drink in Port of Spain. Something called Coca Cola. The best thing in the world. Come with me to Port of Spain, and I will get your father to buy you a Coca Cola and some real icecream. In cardboard cups. Real icecream. Not homemade.”
To the children of Hanuman House home-made was not a word of commendation. Home-made icecream was the flavourless (officially coconut) congelation churned out by Chinta after lunch on Christmas Day. She used an old, rusted freezer; she said it “skipped”; and to hasten the freezing she threw lumps of ice into the mixture. The rust from the freezer dripped on the icecream and penetrated it, like a ripple of chocolate.
And it was purely this promise of real icecream and Coca Cola that drew Anand to Port of Spain.
On a Sunday afternoon, when shadows had withdrawn to under the eaves of houses, when the city was hard and bright and empty, with doors closed everywhere, and the glass windows of shops reflected only those opposite, Mr. Biswas took Anand on a tour of Port of Spain. They walked with a sense of adventure in the middle of empty streets; they heard their footsteps; like this, the city could be known; it held no threat. They looked at cafй after cafй, rejecting, at Anand’s insistence, all those which claimed to sell only home-made cakes and icecream. At last they found one which was suitable. On a high red stool, a revelation and luxury in itself, Anand sat at the counter, and the icecream came. In a cardboard tub, frosted, cold to the touch. With a wooden spoon. The cover had to be taken off and licked; the icecream, light pink and spotted with red, steamed: one preparatory delight after another.
“It don’t taste like icecream at all,” Anand said. He cleaned the tub, and it was such a perfectly made thing he would have liked to keep it.
When he sipped the Coca Cola he said, “It is like horse pee.” Which was what some cousin had said of a drink at Hanuman House.
“Anand!” Mr. Biswas said, smiling at the man behind the counter. “You’ve got to stop talking like that. You are in Port of Spain now.”
The house faced east, and the memories that remained of these first four years in Port of Spain were above all memories of morning. The newspaper, delivered free, still warm, the ink still wet, sprawled on the concrete steps, down which the sun was moving. Dew lay on trees and roofs; the empty street, freshly swept and washed, was in cool shadow, and water ran clear in the gutters whose green bases had been scratched and striped by the sweepers’ harsh brooms. Memories of taking the Royal Enfield out from under the house and cycling in a sun still cool along the streets of the awakening city. Stillness at noon: stripping for a short nap: the window of his room open: a square of blue above the unmoving curtain. In the afternoon, the steps in shadow; tea in the back verandah. Then an interview at a hotel, perhaps, and the urgent machinery of the Sentinel. The promise of the evening; the expectation of the morning.