And yet there were moments when he could persuade himself that he lived in a land where romance was possible. When, for instance, he had to do a rush job and worked late into the night by the light of a gas lamp, excitement and the light transforming the hut; able then to forget that ordinary morning would come and the sign would hang over a cluttered little shop with its doors open on to a hot dusty road.
There were the days when he became a conductor on one of Ajodha’s buses which ran in competition with other buses on a route without fixed stops. He enjoyed the urgent motion and noisy rivalry, and endangered himself needlessly by hanging far out from the running-board to sing to people on the road, “Tunapuna, Naparima, Sangre Grande, Guayaguayare, Chacachacare, Mahatma Gandhi and back,” the glorious Amerindian names forming an imaginary route that took in the four corners of the island and one place, Chacachacare, across the sea.
And there were times when elusive Alec, with a face that hinted of debauch, came to Pagotes, spoke of pleasures and took Mr. Biswas to certain houses which terrified, then attracted, and finally only amused him. With Bhandat’s boys he also went; but they seemed to get most of their pleasure from the thought that they were being vicious.
And now too there were other occasions of excitement, unrelated to the excitements of books and magazines, unrelated to the visits to those houses: the glimpse of a face, a smile, a laugh. But his experiences had taken him beyond the stage when a girl was something of painful loveliness, and it was a marvel that any creature so soft and lovely could welcome the attentions of hard, ugly men; and few persons now held him. Some features always finally repelled, a tone of voice, a quality of skin, an over-sensuous hang of lip; one such lip had grown gross and obscene in a dream which left him feeling unclean. Love was something he was embarrassed to think about; the very word he mentioned seldom, and then as mockingly as Alec and Bhandat’s boys. But secretly he believed.
Alec, misunderstanding, said, “You worry too much. These things come when you least expect them.”
But he never ceased to worry. He no longer simply lived. He had begun to wait, not only for love, but for the world to yield its sweetness and romance. He deferred all his pleasure in life until that day. And it was in this mood of expectation that he went to Hanuman House at Arwacas, and saw Shama.
3. The Tulsis
Among the tumbledown timber- and-corrugated-iron buildings in the High Street at Arwacas, Hanuman House stood like an alien white fortress. The concrete walls looked as thick as they were, and when the narrow doors of the Tulsi Store on the ground floor were closed the House became bulky, impregnable and blank. The side walls were windowless, and on the upper two floors the windows were mere slits in the faзade. The balustrade which hedged the flat roof was crowned with a concrete statue of the benevolent monkey-god Hanuman. From the ground his whitewashed features could scarcely be distinguished and were, if anything, slightly sinister, for dust had settled on projections and the effect was that of a face lit up from below.
The Tulsis had some reputation among Hindus as a pious, conservative, landowning family. Other communities, who knew nothing of the Tulsis, had heard about Pundit Tulsi, the founder of the family. He had been one of the first to be killed in a motorcar accident and was the subject of an irreverent and extremely popular song. To many outsiders he was therefore only a creature of fiction. Among Hindus there were other rumours about Pundit Tulsi, some romantic, some scurrilous. The fortune he had made in Trinidad had not come from labouring and it remained a mystery why he had emigrated as a labourer. One or two emigrants, from criminal clans, had come to escape the law. One or two had come to escape the consequences of their families’ participation in the Mutiny. Pundit Tulsi belonged to neither class. His family still flourished in India-letters arrived regularly-and it was known that he had been of higher standing than most of the Indians who had come to Trinidad, nearly all of whom, like Raghu, like Ajodha, had lost touch with their families and wouldn’t have known in what province to find them. The deference paid Pundit Tulsi in his native district had followed him to Trinidad and now that he was dead attached to his family. Little was really known about this family; outsiders were admitted to Hanuman House only for certain religious celebrations.
Mr. Biswas went to Hanuman House to paint signs for the Tulsi Store, after a protracted interview with a large, moustached, overpowering man called Seth, Mrs. Tulsi’s brother-in-law. Seth had beaten down Mr. Biswas’s price and said that Mr. Biswas was getting the job only because he was an Indian; he had beaten it down a little further and said that Mr. Biswas could count himself lucky to be a Hindu; he had beaten it down yet further and said that signs were not really needed but were being commissioned from Mr. Biswas only because he was a Brahmin.
The Tulsi Store was disappointing. The faзade that promised such an amplitude of space concealed a building which was trapezoid in plan and not deep. There were no windows and light came only from the two narrow doors at the front and the single door at the back, which opened on to a covered courtyard. The walls, of uneven thickness, curved here and jutted there, and the shop abounded in awkward, empty, cobwebbed corners. Awkward, too, were the thick ugly columns, whose number dismayed Mr. Biswas because he had undertaken, among other things, to paint signs on all of them.
He began by decorating the top of the back wall with an enormous sign. This he illustrated meaninglessly with a drawing of Punch, who appeared incongruously gay and roguish in the austere shop where goods were stored rather than displayed and the assistants were grave and unenthusiastic.
These assistants, he had learned with surprise, were all members of the House. He could not therefore let his eyes rove as freely as usual among the unmarried girls. So, as circumspectly as he could, he studied them while he worked, and decided that the most attractive was a girl of about sixteen, whom the others called Shama. She was of medium height, slender but firm, with fine features, and though he disliked her voice, he was enchanted by her smile. So enchanted, that after a few days he would very much have liked to do the low and possibly dangerous thing of talking to her. The presence of her sisters and brothers-in-law deterred him, as well as the unpredictable and forbidding appearances of Seth, dressed more like a plantation overseer than a store manager. Still, he stared at her with growing frankness. When she found him out he looked away, became very busy with his brushes and shaped his lips as though he were whistling softly. In fact he couldn’t whistle; all he did was to expel air almost soundlessly through the lecherous gap in his top teeth.
When she had responded to his stares a few times he felt that a certain communion had been established between them; and, meeting Alec in Pagotes, where Alec was working in Ajodha’s garage once again, as a mechanic and a painter of buses and signs, Mr. Biswas said, “I got a girl in Arwacas.”