Mr. Biswas held the brass jar of milk toward him. “Baba.”
Jairam sat up, rearranged a pillow, held a cupped palm, touching the elbow of the outstretched arm with the fingers of his free hand. Mr. Biswas poured. Jairam brought the inside of his wrist against his forehead, blessed Mr. Biswas, threw the milk into his mouth, passed his wet palm through his thin grey hair, readjusted his spectacles and looked down again at his book.
Mr. Biswas went to his room, put on his workaday clothes and came out to breakfast. They ate in silence. Suddenly Jairam pushed his brass plate towards Mr. Biswas.
“Eat this.”
Mr. Biswas’s fingers, ploughing through some cabbage, stood still.
“Of course you won’t eat it. And I will tell you why. Because I have been eating from this plate.”
Mr. Biswas’s fingers, feeling dry and dirty, bent and straightened.
“Soanie!”
Jairam’s wife thumped out from the kitchen and stood between them, with her back to Mr. Biswas. He looked at the creases on the edge of her soles and saw that the soles were hard and dirty. This surprised him, because Soanie was always washing the floor and bathing herself.
“Go and bring the bananas.”
She pulled the veil over her forehead. “Don’t you think you had better forget it? It is such a small thing.”
“Small thing! A whole hand of bananas!”
She went to the kitchen and came back, cradling the bananas.
“Put them here, Soanie. Mohun, nobody else can touch these bananas now but yourself. When people, out of the goodness of their hearts, give me gifts, they are for you. Eh?” Then the edge went out of his voice and he became like the benign, expounding pundit he was in company. “We mustn’t waste, Mohun. I have told you that again and again. We mustn’t let these bananas get rotten. You must finish what you have begun. Start now.”
Mr. Biswas had been lulled by Jairam’s calm, even manner, and the abruptness of the command took him by surprise. He looked down at his plate and flexed his fingers, the tips of which were stuck with drying shreds of cabbage.
“Start now.”
Soanie stood in the doorway, blocking the light. Though it was bright day, the room, with bedrooms on one side and the low roof of the verandah on the other, was gloomy.
“Look. I have peeled one for you.”
The banana hovered in Jairam’s clean hand before Mr. Biswas’s face. He took it with his dirty fingers, bit and chewed. Surprisingly, it tasted. But the taste was so localized it gave no pleasure. He then discovered that chewing killed the taste, and chewed deliberately, not tasting, only listening to the loud squelchy sound that filled his head. He had never heard bananas eaten with so much noise.
Presently the banana was finished, except for the hard little cone buried at the heart of the banana skin, open like a huge and ugly forest flower.
“Look, Mohun. I have peeled you another.”
And while he ate that, Jairam slowly peeled another. And another, and another.
When he had eaten seven bananas, Mr. Biswas was sick, whereupon Soanie, silently crying, carried him to the back verandah. He didn’t cry, not from bravery: he was only bored and uncomfortable. Jairam rose at once and walked heavily to his room, suddenly in a great temper.
Mr. Biswas never ate another banana. That morning also marked the beginning of his stomach trouble; ever afterwards, whenever he was excited or depressed or angry his stomach swelled until it was taut with pain.
A more immediate result was that he became constipated. He could no longer relieve himself in the mornings and he was aware of the dishonour he did the gods by doing the puja unrelieved. The call came upon him at unpredictable times, and it was this which led to his departure from Jairam’s, and took him back to that other world he had entered at Pagotes, the world signified by Lai’s school and the effete rubber-stamps and dusty books of F. Z. Ghany.
One night he got up in a panic. The latrine was far from the house and to go there through the dark frightened him. He was frightened, too, to walk through the creaking wooden house, open locks, undo bolts and possibly waken Jairam who was fussy about his sleep and often flew into a rage even when awakened at a time he had fixed. Mr. Biswas decided to relieve himself in his room on one of his handkerchiefs. He had scores of these, made from the cotton given him at the ceremonies he attended with Jairam. When the time came to dispose of the handkerchief, he left his room and tiptoed, the floor creaking, through the open doorway to the enclosed verandah at the back. He carefully unbolted the Demerara window, which hung on hinges at the top, and, keeping the window open with his left hand, flung the handkerchief as far as he could with his right. But his hands were short, the window was heavy, there was too little space for him to manoeuvre, and he heard the handkerchief fall not far off.
Not staying to bolt the window, he hurried back to his bed where for a long time he stayed awake, repeatedly imagining that a fresh call was upon him. He had just fallen asleep, it seemed, when someone was shaking him. It was Soanie.
Jairam stood scowling in the doorway. “You are no Brahmin,” he said. “I take you into my house and show you every consideration. I do not ask for gratitude. But you are trying to destroy me. Go and look at your work.”
The handkerchief had fallen on Jairam’s cherished oleander tree. Never again could its flowers be used at the puja.
“You will never make a pundit,” Jairam said. “I was talking the other day to Sitaram, who read your horoscope. You killed your father. I am not going to let you destroy me. Sitaram particularly warned me to keep you away from trees. Go on, pack your bundle.”
The neighbours had heard and came out to watch Mr. Biswas as, in his dhoti, with his bundle slung on his shoulder, he walked through the village.
Bipti was not in a welcoming mood when Mr. Biswas, after walking and getting rides on carts, came back to Pagotes. He was tired, hungry and itching. He had expected her to welcome him with joy, to curse Jairam and promise that she would never allow him to be sent away again to strangers. But as soon as he entered the yard of the hut in the back trace he knew that he was wrong. She looked so depressed and indifferent, sitting in the sooty open kitchen with another of Ajodha’s poor relations, grinding maize; and it did not then surprise him that, instead of being pleased to see him, she was alarmed.
They kissed perfunctorily, and she began to ask questions. He thought her manner was harsh and saw her questions as attacks. His replies were sullen, defensive, angry. Her fury rose and she shouted at him. She said that he was ungrateful, that all her children were ungrateful and didn’t appreciate the trouble the rest of the world went to on their behalf. Then her rage spent itself and she became as understanding and protective as he hoped she would have been right at the beginning. But it was not sweet now. She poured water for him to wash his hands, sat him down on a low bench and gave him food-not hers to give, for this was the communal food of the house, to which she had contributed nothing but her labour in the cooking-and looked after him in the proper way. But she could not coax him out of his sullenness.
He did not see at the time how absurd and touching her behaviour was: welcoming him back to a hut that didn’t belong to her, giving him food that wasn’t hers. But the memory remained, and nearly thirty years later, when he was a member of a small literary group in Port of Spain, he wrote and read out a simple poem in blank verse about this meeting. The disappointment, his surliness, all the unpleasantness was ignored, and the circumstances improved to allegory: the journey, the welcome, the food, the shelter.
After the meal he learned that there was another reason for Bipti’s annoyance. Dehuti had run away with Tara’s yard boy, not only showing ingratitude to Tara and bringing disgrace to her, for the yard boy is the lowest of the low, but also depriving her at one blow of two trained servants.