“I thought he was going to Ace Studios to take out another photo,” Mr. Biswas said.
Overjoyed, he did what he had so far resisted doing: he drove to see the house. To his disappointment he found that it was in a good area, on a whole lot: a sound, oldfashioned timber building that needed only a coat of paint.
Not long after Basdai reported that the tenants were leaving. W. C. Tuttle had persuaded the City Council that the house was dangerous and had to be repaired, if not pulled down altogether.
“Any old trick to throw the poor people out,” Mr. Biswas said. “Though I suppose with ten fat Tuttles jumping about no house could be safe. Repairs, eh? Just drive the old lorry down to Shorthills and cut down a few more trees, I suppose.”
“That is exactly what he is doing,” Shama said, affronted at the piracy.
“You want to know why I can’t get on in this place? That is why.” And even as he spoke he recognized that he was sounding like Bhandat in the concrete room.
The Tuttles left without ceremony. Only Mrs. Tuttle, braving the general antagonism, kissed her sisters and those of the children she found in the way. She was sad but stern, and her manner suggested that though she had nothing to do with it, her husband’s piracy was justified and she was ready for trouble. Cowed, the sisters could only be sad in their turn, and the leave-taking was as tearful as if Mrs. Tuttle had just been married.
Mr. Biswas’s hopes of renting the rooms the Tuttles had vacated were dashed when it was announced that Mrs. Tulsi was coming from Shorthills to take them over. The news cast a gloom over the whole house. Her daughters now accepted that Mrs. Tulsi’s active life was finished, that only death awaited her. But she still controlled them all in varying ways, and her caprices had to be endured. Miserable herself, Basdai made the readers and learners miserable by threats of what Mrs. Tulsi would do to them.
She came with Sushila, the sickroom widow, and Miss Blackie; and at once the house became quieter. The readers and learners were quelled, but Mrs. Tulsi’s presence brought them an unexpected advantage: they knew that if they howled loud enough beforehand they would be spared floggings.
Mrs. Tulsi had no precise illness. She was simply ill. Her eyes ached; her heart was bad; her head always hurt; her stomach was fastidious; her legs were unreliable; and every other day she had a temperature. Her head had continually to be soaked in bay rum; she had to be massaged once a day; she needed poultices of various sorts. Her nostrils were stuffed with soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub; she wore dark glasses; and she was seldom without a bandage around her forehead. Sushila was kept on the go all day. At Hanuman House Sushila had sought to gain power by being Mrs. Tulsi’s nurse; now that the organization of the house had been broken up, the position carried no power, but Sushila was bound to it, and she had no children to rescue her.
Time hung heavily on Mrs. Tulsi’s hands. She did not read. The radio offended her. She was never well enough to go out. She moved from her room to the lavatory to the front verandah to her room. Her only solace was talk. Daughters were always at hand, but talk with them seemed only to enrage her; and as her body decayed so her command of invective and obscenity developed. Her rages fell oftenest on Sushila, whom she ordered out of the house once a week. She cried out that her daughters were all waiting for her to die, that they were sucking her blood; she pronounced curses on them and their children, and threatened to expel them from the family.
“I have no luck with my family,” she told Miss Blackie. “I have no luck with my race.”
And it was Miss Blackie who received her confidences, Miss Blackie who reported and comforted. And there was the Jewish refugee doctor. He came once a week and listened. The house was always specially prepared for him, and Mrs. Tulsi treated him with love. He resurrected all that remained of her softness and humour. When he left, she said to Miss Blackie, “Never trust your race, Black. Never trust them.” And Miss Blackie said, “No”m.” Gifts of fruit were sent regularly to the doctor and sometimes Mrs. Tulsi would suddenly order Basdai and Sushila to prepare an elaborate meal and take it to the doctor’s house, treating the matter as one of urgency, as though she was satisfying some craving of her own.
Still her daughters came to the house. They knew they all had some small hold on her: they knew that she feared loneliness and never wished to push them beyond her reach; they knew they could hurt her by staying away. If Miss Blackie reported that one daughter had been particularly upset, then Mrs. Tulsi made overtures, and made promises. In such moods she might give a piece of jewellery, she might take off a ring or a bracelet and give it. So the daughters came, and none was willing to let Mrs. Tulsi be alone with any other. The visits of Mrs. Tuttle were especially distrusted. She bore abuse with unexampled patience and was able at the end to suggest that Mrs. Tulsi should look at plants, because green nourished the eyes and soothed the nerves.
Though she abused her daughters, she took care not to offend her sons-in-law. She greeted Mr. Biswas briefly but politely. And she never attempted to remonstrate with Govind, who continued to behave as before. He beat Chinta when the mood took him, and, ignoring pleas for silence for Mrs. Tulsi’s headaches, sang from the Ramayana. It was left to the sisters to comment on Govind’s behaviour.
There were times when she wished to have children about her. Then she summoned the readers and learners to scrub the floor of the drawingroom and verandah, or she made them sing Hindi hymns. Her mood changed without warning, and the readers and learners were perpetually apprehensive, never knowing whether they were required to be solemn or amusing. Sometimes she stood them in lines in her room and made them recite arithmetic tables, flogging the inaccurate with as much vigour as her arms would allow, flabby, muscleless arms, broad and loose towards the armpit, and swinging like dead flesh. Miss Blackie burst into squelchy laughter when a child made a stupid mistake or when Mrs. Tulsi made a witticism; and Mrs. Tulsi, her eyes masked by dark glasses, would give a pleased, crooked smile. In sterner moments Miss Blackie grew stern as well and moved her jaws up and down quickly, saying “Mm!” at every blow Mrs. Tulsi gave.
Another trial for the readers and learners was Mrs. Tulsi’s concern for their health. Every five Saturdays or so she called them to her room and dosed them with Epsom salts; and between these gloomy, wasted week-ends she listened for coughs and sneezes. There was no escaping her. She had learned to recognize every voice, every laugh, every footstep, every cough and almost every sneeze. She took a special interest in Anand’s wheeze and doglike cough. She bought him some poisonous herb cigarettes; when these had no effect she prescribed brandy and water and gave him a bottle of brandy. Anand, while hating the brandy and water, drank it for its literary associations: he had read of the mixture in Dickens.
Sometimes she sent for old friends from Arwacas. They came and camped for a week or so, and listened to Mrs. Tulsi. She, refreshed, talked all day and late into the night, while the friends, lying on bedding on the floor, made drowsy mechanical affirmations: “Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother.” Some visits were cut short by illness, some by carefully documented dreams of bad omen; those visitors who stayed to the end went away fatigued, doped, bleary-eyed.
Regularly too, she had pujas, austere rites aimed at God alone, without the feasting and gaiety of the Hanuman House ceremonies. The pundit came and Mrs. Tulsi sat before him; he read from the scriptures, took his money, changed in the bathroom and left. More and more prayer flags went up in the yard, the white and red pennants fluttering until they were ragged, the bamboo poles going yellow, brown, grey. For every puja Mrs. Tulsi tried a different pundit, since no pundit could please her as well as Hari. And, no pundit pleasing her, her faith yielded. She sent Sushila to burn candles in the Roman Catholic church; she put a crucifix in her room; and she had Pundit Tulsi’s grave cleaned for All Saints’ Day.