Though it was never clear afterwards why this large decision had been taken so suddenly, and puzzling that the last corporate effort of the Tulsis should have been directed towards this uprooting, Shama left for Port of Spain full of enthusiasm. She wanted to be part of her family again, to share the adventure.
“Horses?” Mr. Biswas said. “I bet you when you go there all you find is one old monkey swinging from the liana on the saman tree. I can’t understand this craziness that possess your family.”
Shama spoke about the sheep.
“Sheep?” Mr. Biswas said. “To ride?”
She said that Seth was no longer part of the family and that two husbands who had left Hanuman House after disagreements with Seth had rejoined the family for the move to Shortfalls.
Mr. Biswas didn’t listen. “About those sheep. Savi get one, Anand get one, Myna get one, Kamla get one. Make four in all. What are we going to do with four sheep. Breed more? To sell and kill? Hindus, eh? Feeding and fattening just in order to kill. Or you see the six of us sitting down and making wool from four sheep? You know how to make wool? Any of your family know how to make wool?”
The children did not want to move to a place they didn’t know, and they were a little frightened of living with the Tulsis again. Above all, they did not want to be referred to as “country pupils” at school; the advantages-being released fifteen minutes earlier in the afternoon-could not make up for the shame. And Mr. Biswas turned Shama’s propaganda into a joke. He read out “The Emperor’s New Clothes” from Bell’s Standard Elocutionist; he drove imaginary flocks of sheep through the drawingroom, making bleating noises. As always during the holidays, he announced his arrival by ringing his bicycle bell from the road; then the children walked out in single file to meet him, staggering under imaginary loads. “Watch it, Savi!” he would call. “Those tonka beans are heavy like hell, you know.” Later he would ask, “Make a lot of wool today?” And once, when Anand came into the drawingroom just as the lavatory chain was pulled, Mr. Biswas said, “Walking back? What’s the matter? Forgot your horse at the waterfall?”
Shama sulked.
“Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! Anand, Savi, Myna! Come and sing a Christmas carol for your mother.”
They sang “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night”.
Shama’s gloom, persisting, defeated them all. And that Christmas, the first they spent by themselves, was made more memorable by Shama’s gloom. She could not make icecream because she didn’t have a freezer, but she did what she could to turn the day into a miniature Hanuman House Christmas. She got up early and waited to be kissed, like Mrs. Tulsi. She spread a white cloth on the table and put out nuts and dates and red apples; she cooked an extravagant meal. She did everything punctiliously, but as one martyred. “Anybody would think you were making another baby,” Mr. Biswas said. And in his diary, a Sentinel reporter’s notebook which he had begun to fill at Mr. Biswas’s suggestion, as an additional exercise in English Composition and as practice in natural writing, Anand wrote, “This is the worst Christmas Day I have ever spent;” and, not forgetting the literary purpose of the diary, added, “I feel like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.”
But Shama never relented.
Soon she received impressive assistance. The house became full of sisters and husbands on their way to and from Shorthills. The fine dresses, veils and jewellery of the sisters contrasted with their mood, which they seemed to get from Shama. They fixed Mr. Biswas with injured, helpless, accusing woman’s looks which he found difficult to ignore. The jokes about sheep and waterfalls and tonka beans stopped; he locked himself in his room. Sometimes Shama, after much coaxing from her sisters, dressed and went to Shorthills with them. She came back gloomier than ever, and when Mr. Biswas said, “Well, tell me, girl, tell me,” she did not reply and only cried silently. When Mrs. Tulsi came Shama cried all the time.
Since the quarrel with Seth Mrs. Tulsi had ceased to be an invalid. She had left the Rose Room to direct the move from Arwacas and was, indeed, the source of the new enthusiasm. She tried to persuade Mr. Biswas to join the move, and Mr. Biswas, flattered at this attention, listened sympathetically. There would be no Seth, Mrs. Tulsi said; one could live for nothing at Shorthills; Mr. Biswas would be able to save his salary; there were many good sites for houses, and with timber from the estate Mr. Biswas might even build himself a little house.
“Leave him, leave him,” Shama said. “All this talk about house was only to spite me.”
“But if I keep my job in Port of Spain I don’t see how I would be able to do anything on the estate,” Mr. Biswas said.
“Never mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said.
He wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to move for Shama’s sake; or whether, without Seth, she needed as many men as possible around her; or whether she wanted no one, by his coolness, to make her question her own enthusiasm. And he agreed to go to Shorthills with her one morning, to have a look at the estate.
He made Anand telephone the Sentinel and went with Mrs. Tulsi to the bus stop. There he suffered some moments of anxiety, for with her long white skirt, her veil, her arms braceleted from wrist to elbow and a thick gold yoke around her neck, Mrs. Tulsi was noticeable in any Port of Spain street, and Mr. Biswas feared he would be spotted by someone from the office. He leaned against the lamp-post, hiding his face.
“Regular bus service,” he said after a time.
“From Shorthills, the buses always leave on the dot.”
“Instead of giving every child a sheep, better to give them a horse. Ride to school. Ride back.”
At last the bus came, empty except for the driver and the conductor. The body had been made locally, a crude jangling box of wood and tin and felt and large naked bolts. Mr. Biswas bumped exaggeratedly up and down on the rough wooden seat. “Just practising,” he said.
The city ended abruptly at the Maraval terminus. The road climbed anl dipped; hills intermittently shut out the view. After half an hour Mr. Biswas pointed to the bush on a roundabout. “Estate?” They went past a puzzling huddle of three crumbling shacks. Two black water barrels stood in the hard yellow yard. “Cricket field?” Mr. Biswas said. “Swimming pool?”
After many curves and climbs the road straightened out and ran steadily down into a widening valley. The hills looked wild, the tops of trees rising one behind the other: a coagulation of greenery. But here and there the faded thatch of a lean-to, warm against the still, dark green, showed that the wilderness had been charted. Houses and huts appeared on either side of the road, widely separated and so hidden by green that, from the bus, Shorthills was only flitting patches of colour: the rust of a roof, the pink or ochre of a wall.
“Next bus to Port of Spain in ten minutes,” the conductor said conversationally. Mr. Biswas got up. Mrs. Tulsi pulled him down. “They like to reverse first.” The bus reversed in a dirt lane and came to rest on the verge, under an avocado pear tree.