From somewhere in the house Mr. Biswas’s voice came, raised, indistinct, heated.
Seth moved to the lorry.
“Eh, Ewart?” he said gently to one of the loaders. “They was nice roses, eh?”
Ewart smiled, his tongue over his top lip, and made sounds which committed him in no way.
Seth jerked his chin toward the house, still the source of angry, indistinct words. He smiled. Then he stopped smiling and said, “We mustn’t pay any mind to these damn jackasses.”
The children moved to the foot of the back steps, where they were hidden from Seth and the loaders.
Mr. Biswas’s mutterings died away.
Suddenly an obscenity cracked out from the house. The children were quite still. There was silence, even from the lorry. Anand could have wept. Then the corrugated iron sheets jangled again.
A series of resonant crashes came from the kitchen.
“Cut down the rose trees,” Mr. Biswas was shouting. “Cut them down. Break up everything else.”
The children, now below the house, heard his footsteps on the floor above as he went from room to room, pulling things down.
Anand walked under the house to the front, past Mr. Biswas’s abandoned bicycle. The fence cast a shadow over the pavement and part of the road. Anand leaned against the fence and envied the calm of the other houses in the street, the group of boys and young men, the cricket players, the night chatterers, around the lamp-post.
Fresh noises came from the yard. It was not Mr. Biswas pulling things down, but Seth and Ewart and Ewart’s colleague putting up a shed for Seth’s lorries at the side of the house, over Mr. Biswas’s garden.
On the road the shadows of houses and trees quickly lengthened, were distorted, became unrecognizable and finally dissolved into darkness.
Mr. Biswas came down the front steps.
“Come with me for a walk.”
Anand would have liked to go, if only because he didn’t want to hurt by refusing. But he wanted more to inspect the damage and comfort Shama.
The damage was slight. Mr. Biswas had ordered his destruction with economy. The mirror of Shama’s dressingtable had been unhinged and thrown on the bed, where it lay intact, reflecting the ceiling. The books had been knocked about a good deal; Selections from Sankamcharya had suffered especially. Mrs. Tulsi’s marble topped tables had all been overturned; the marble tops, crashing, must have been responsible for some of the more frightening noises. Many of the brass vases had been dented, and two potted palms had lost their pots without in any way losing their shape. The hatrack was in a semi-recumbent position against the half-wall of the front verandah, but it had been thrown there gently: a few hooks had snapped, but the glass was whole. In the kitchen no glass or china had been thrown, only noisy things like pots and pans and enamel plates.
When Mr. Biswas returned his mood had changed.
“Shama, how did those marble tops break?” he asked, mimicking Mrs. Tulsi. Then he acted himself. “Break, Mai? What break? Oh, marble top. Yes, Mai. It really break. It look as if it break. Now I wonder how that happened.” He examined the broken hooks of the hatrack. “Didn’t know metal was such a funny thing. Come and look, Savi. Is not smooth inside, you know. Is more like packed sand.” As for the re-diffusion set, which he had kicked from room to room and disembowelled, he said, “I wanted to do that for a long time. The company always saying that they replace sets free.”
When the engineers saw the battered box and asked what had happened, he said, “I feel we listen to it too hard.” They left a brand-new set in exchange, of the latest design.
Every night Seth’s lorries rested in the shed at the side of the house. Mr. Biswas had never thought of Tulsi property as belonging to any particular person. Everything, the land at Green Vale, the shop at The Chase, belonged simply to the House. But the lorries were Seth’s.
3. The Shortfalls Adventure
Despite the solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. Only the death of Pundit Tulsi had prevented them from going back to India; and ever since they had talked, though less often than the old men who gathered in the arcade every evening, of moving on, to India, Demerara, Surinam. Mr. Biswas didn’t take such talk seriously. The old men would never see India again. And he could not imagine the Tulsis anywhere else except at Arwacas. Separate from their house, and lands, they would be separate from the labourers, tenants and friends who respected them for their piety and the memory of Pundit Tulsi; their Hindu status would be worthless and, as had happened during their descent on the house in Port of Spain, they would be only exotic.
But when Shama went hurrying to Arwacas to give her news of Seth’s blasphemies, she found Hanuman House in commotion. The Tulsis had decided to move on. The clay-brick house was to be abandoned, and everyone was full of talk of the new estate at Shorthills, to the northeast of Port of Spain, among the mountains of the Northern Range.
The High Street was bright and noisy as always at the Christmas season, though because of the war there were few imported goods in the shops. In the Tulsi Store there were no Christmas goods except for the antique black dolls, and no decorations except Mr. Biswas’s faded, peeling signs. Many shelves were empty; everything that could be of use at Shorthills had been packed.
And Shama’s news was stale. The disagreement between Seth and the rest of the family had already turned to open war. He and his wife and children had left Hanuman House and were living in a back street not far away; they were taking no part in the move to Shortfalls. The cause of the quarrel remained obscure, each side accusing the other of ingratitude and treachery, and Seth abusing Shekhar in particular. Neither Mrs. Tulsi nor Shekhar had made any statement. Shekhar, besides, was seldom in Arwacas, and it was the sisters who carried on the quarrel. They had forbidden their children to speak to Seth’s children; Seth had forbidden his children to speak to the Tulsi children. Only Padma, Seth’s wife, was welcome, as Mrs. Tulsi’s sister, at Hanuman House; she could not be blamed for her marriage and continued to be respected for her age. Since the breach she had paid one clandestine visit to Hanuman House. The sisters regarded her loyalty as a tribute to the rightness of their cause; that she had had to come secretly was proof of Seth’s brutality.
The crop season was at hand and the sugarcane fields, managerless, were open to the malice of those who bore the Tulsis grudges. Two fires had already been started and there were rumours that Seth was stirring up fresh trouble, claiming Tulsi property as his own. The husbands of some sisters said they had been threatened.
Yet the talk was less of Seth than of the new estate. Shama heard its glories listed again and again. In the grounds of the estate house there was a cricket field and a swimming pool; the drive was lined with orange trees and gri-gri palms with slender white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves. The land itself was a wonder. The saman trees had lianas so strong and supple that one could swing on them. All day the immortelle trees dropped their red and yellow bird-shaped flowers through which one could whistle like a bird. Cocoa trees grew in the shade of the immortelles, coffee in the shade of the cocoa, and the hills were covered with tonka bean. Fruit trees, mango, orange, avocado pear, were so plentiful as to seem wild. And there were nutmeg trees, as well as cedar, poui, and the bois-canot which was light yet so springy and strong it made you a better cricket bat than the willow. The sisters spoke of the hills, the sweet springs and hidden waterfalls with all the excitement of people who had known only the hot, open plain, the flat acres of sugarcane and the muddy ricelands. Even if one didn’t have a way with land, as they had, if one did nothing, life could be rich at Shorthills. There was talk of dairy fanning; there was talk of growing grapefruit. More particularly, there was talk of rearing sheep, and of an idyllic project of giving one sheep to every child as his very own, the foundation, it was made to appear, of fabulous wealth. And there were horses on the estate: the children would learn to ride.