With Mrs. Tulsi and Owad away on week-ends and during the holidays it was possible at times for Mr. Biswas to forget that the house belonged to them. And their presence was hardly a strain. Mrs. Tulsi never fainted in Port of Spain, never stuffed soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub into her nostrils, never wore bay-rum-soaked bandages around her forehead. She was neither distant nor possessive with the children, and her relations with Mr. Biswas became less cautious and formal as his friendship with Owad grew. Owad appreciated Mr. Biswas’s work and Mr. Biswas, flattered to be established as a wit and a madman, developed a respect for the young man who read such big books in foreign languages. They became companions; they went to the cinema and the seaside; and Mr. Biswas showed Owad transcripts, which no paper printed, of court proceedings in cases of rape and brothel-keeping.
Mr. Biswas ceased to ridicule or resent the excessive care Mrs. Tulsi gave to her younger son. Mrs. Tulsi believed that prunes, like fish brains, were especially nourishing for people who exercised their brains, and she fed Owad prunes every day. Milk was obtained for him from the Dairies in Phillip Street; it came in proper milk botdes with silver caps; not like the milk Shama got from a man six lots away who, oblivious of the aspirations of the district, kept cows and delivered milk in rum bottles stopped with brown paper.
Though with Owad and Mrs. Tulsi Mr. Biswas’s attitude towards his children was gently deprecatory, he was watching and learning, with an eye on his own household and especially on Anand. Soon, he hoped, Anand would qualify to eat prunes and drink milk from the Dairies.
His household established, Mr. Biswas set about establishing his tyrannies.
“Savi!”
No answer.
“Savi! Savi! Oh-Savi-yah! Oh, you there. Why you didn’t answer?”
“But I come.”
“Is not enough. You must come and answer.”
“All right.”
“All right what?”
“All right, Pa.”
“Good. On that table in the corner you will find cigarettes, matches and a Sentinel notebook. Hand them to me.”
“O God! That is all you call me for?”
“Yes. That is all. Answer back again, and I make you read out something for me to take down in shorthand.”
Savi ran out of the room.
“Anand! Anand!”
“Yes, Pa.”
“That is better. You are getting a little training now. Sit down there and call out this speech.”
Anand snatched Bell’s Standard Elocutionist and angrily read out some Macaulay.
“You reading too fast.”
“I thought you was writing shorthand.”
“You answering back too! You see what happen to you children, spending all that time at Hanuman House. Just for that, check while I read back.”
“O God!” And Anand stamped, regretting the dying day.
But the checking went on.
Then Mr. Biswas said, “Anand, this is not a punishment. I ask you to do this because I want you to help me.”
He had discovered, with surprise, that this sentence soothed Anand, and he always offered it at the end of these sessions as a consolation.
It was soon established that he did much of his work in bed and was to be expected to call constantly for paper, pencils to be sharpened, matches, cigarettes, ashtrays to be emptied, books to be brought, books to be taken away. It was also established that his sleep was important. He flew into terrible rages when awakened, even at a time he had fixed.
“Savi,” Shama would say, “go and wake your father.”
“Let Anand go.”
“No, the both of you go.”
To Shama, who began to complain of his “strictness”-a word which gave him a curious satisfaction-he said, “It is not strictness. It is training.”
Mrs. Tulsi, approving if a little surprised, told tales of the severe training to which Pundit Tulsi had submitted his children.
And whenever Mrs. Tulsi was away Shama made claims of her own. She was unable to faint like Mrs. Tulsi but she complained of fatigue and liked to be attended by her children. She got Savi and Anand to walk on her and said in Hindi, “God will bless you,” with such feeling that they considered it a sufficient recompense. Soon, and without this recompense, it became the duty of Savi and Anand to walk on Mr. Biswas as well.
Shama herself did not escape training. She had to file all the stories Mr. Biswas wrote. Mr. Biswas said she did this inefficiently. He gave her his pay-packet unopened and when she said that the money was insufficient he accused her of incompetence. And so Shama started on her laborious, futile practice of keeping accounts. Every evening she sat down at the green table in the back verandah and noted every penny she had spent during the day, slowly filling both sides of the pages of a bloated, oilstained Sentinel notebook with her Mission-school script.
“Your little daily puja, eh?” Mr. Biswas said.
“No,” she said. “I only trying to give you a raise.”
Mr. Biswas never asked to see Shama’s accounts, but she did them partly as a reproach to Mr. Biswas and partly because she enjoyed it. Whatever his other qualities, Mr. Burnett didn’t believe in paying generously and while he edited the Sentinel Mr. Biswas’s salary never rose above fifty dollars a month, money which went almost as soon as it came. Shama’s household accounts were complicated by the rents she collected. She spent the rent money on the household and then had to make it up with the household money. The figures nearly always came out wrong. And every other week-end Shama’s accounting reached a pitch of frenzy, and she was to be seen in the back verandah puzzling over the Sentinel notebook, the rent book, the receipt book, doing innumerable little addition and subtraction sums on scraps of paper and occasionally making memoranda. Shama wrote curious memoranda. She wrote as she spoke and once Mr. Biswas came on a note that said, “Old Creole woman from 42 owe six dollars.”
“I always did say that you Tulsis were a pack of financial geniuses,” he said.
She said, “I would like you to know that I used to come first in arithmetic.”
And when Savi and Anand came to her for help with their arithmetic homework she said, “Go to your father. He was the genius in arithmetic.”
“Know more than you anyway,” he said. “Savi, ought twos are how much?”
“Two.”
“You are your mother’s daughter all right. Anand?”
“One.”
“But what happening these days? They are not teaching as they used to when I was a boy.”
He found fault with all the textbooks.
“Readers by Captain Cutteridge! Listen to this. Page sixty-five, lesson nineteen. Some of Our Animal Friends.” He read in a mincing voice:” ‘What should we do without our animal friends? The cow and the goat give us milk and we eat their flesh when they are killed.’ You hear the savage? And listen. ‘Many boys and girls have to tie up their goats before going to school in the morning, and help to milk them in the afternoon.’ Anand, you tie up your goat this morning? Well, you better hurry up. Is nearly milking time. That is the sort of stuff they fulling up the children head with these days. When I was a boy it used to be the Royal Reader and Blackie’s Tropical Reader. Nesfield’s Grammar!” he exclaimed. “I used to use Macdougall’s.” And he sent Anand hunting for the Macdougall’s, a typographical antique, its battered boards hinged with strips of blue tape.