Bhandat’s boy stopped reading when he saw Mr. Biswas. His eyes became bright with amusement and his prognathous smile was a sneer.
Ajodha opened his eyes and gave a shriek of malicious delight. “Married man!” he cried in English. “Married man!”
Mr. Biswas smiled and looked sheepish.
“Tara, Tara,” Ajodha called. “Come and look at your married nephew.”
She came out gravely from the kitchen, embraced Mr. Biswas and wept for so long that he began to feel, with sadness and a deep sense of loss, that he really was married, that in some irrevocable way he had changed. She undid the knot at the end of her veil and took out a twenty-dollar note. He objected for a little, then took it.
“Married man!” Ajodha cried again.
Tara took Mr. Biswas to the kitchen and gave him a meal. And while, in the verandah, Bhandat’s boy continued to read That Body of Yours, with the moths striking continually against the glass chimney of the oil lamp, she and Mr. Biswas talked. She could not keep the unhappiness and disappointment out of her face and voice, and this encouraged him to be bitter about the Tulsis.
“And what sort of dowry did they give you?” she asked.
“Dowry? They are not so oldfashioned. They didn’t give me a penny.”
“Registry?”
He bit at a slice of pickled mango and nodded.
“It is a modern custom,” Tara said. “And like most modern customs, very economical.”
“They didn’t even pay me for the signs.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Yes,” he lied. “But you don’t know those people.” He would have been ashamed to explain the organization of the Tulsi house, and to say that his signs were probably considered contributions to the family endeavour.
“You just leave this to me,” Tara said.
His heart sank. He had wanted her to declare that he was free, that he needn’t go back, that he could forget the Tulsis and Shama.
And he was no happier when she went to Hanuman House and came back with what she said was good news. He was not to live at Hanuman House forever; the Tulsis had decided to set him up as soon as possible in a shop in a village called The Chase.
He was married. Nothing now, except death, could change that.
“They told me that they only wanted to help you out,” Tara said. “They said you didn’t want any dowry or big wedding and they didn’t offer because it was a love match.” Reproach was in her voice.
“Love match!” Ajodha cried. “Rabidat, listen to that.” He punched Bhandat’s younger boy in the belly. “Love match!”
Rabidat gave his contemptuous smile.
Mr. Biswas looked angrily and accusingly at Rabidat. He held Rabidat, more than anyone else, responsible for his marriage and wanted to say it was Rabidat’s taunt which had made him write that note to Shama. Instead, ignoring Ajodha’s chuckles and shrieks, he said, “Love match? What love match? They are lying.”
In a disappointed, tired way Tara said, “They showed me a love letter.” She used the English word; it sounded vicious.
Ajodha shrieked again. “Love letter! Mohun!”
Bhandat’s boy continued to smile.
Their mood seemed to infect Tara. “Mrs. Tulsi told me that she believed you wanted to go on with your sign-writing and that Hanuman House was the best place to work from.” She had begun to smile. “Everything’s all right now, boy. You can go back to your wife.”
The stress she gave to the word “wife” wounded Mr. Biswas.
“You have got yourself into a real gum-pot,” she added, more sympathetically. “And I had such nice plans for you.”
“I wish you had told me,” he said, without irony.
“Go back and get your wife!” Ajodha said.
He paid no attention to Ajodha and asked Tara in English, “You like she?” Hindi was too intimate and tender.
Tara shrugged, to say that it was none of her business; and this hurt Mr. Biswas, for it emphasized his loneliness: Tara’s interest in Shama might have made everything more bearable. He thought he would show an equal unconcern. Lightly, smiling back at Ajodha, he asked Tara, “I suppose they vex with me now over there, eh?”
His tone angered her. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of them already, like every other man in that place?”
“Afraid? No. You don’t know me.”
But it was some days before he could make up his mind to go back. He didn’t know what his rights were, didn’t believe in the shop at The Chase, and his plans were vague. Only, he doubted that he would return to the back trace, and when he packed, he packed everything, Bipti crying happily all the while. As he cycled past the unfinished, open houses on the County Road, he wondered how many nights he would spend behind the closed facade of Hanuman House.
“What?” Shama said in English. “You come back already? You tired catching crab in Pagotes?”
Despite the adventurousness and danger of his calling, the crab-catcher was considered the lowest of the low.
“I thought I would come and help all-you catch some here,” Mr. Biswas replied, and killed the giggles in the hall.
No other comment was made. He had expected to be met by silence, stares, hostility and perhaps a little fear. He got the stares; the noise continued; the fear was, of course, only a wild hope; and he couldn’t be sure of the hostility. The interest in his return was momentary and superficial. No one referred to his absence or return, not Seth, not Mrs. Tulsi, both of whom continued, as they had done even before he left, hardly to notice him. He heard nothing about the visits of Bipti and Tara. The house was too full, too busy; such events were insignificant because he mattered little to the house. His status there was now fixed. He was troublesome and disloyal, and could not be trusted. He was weak and therefore contemptible.
He had not expected to hear any more about the shop in The Chase. And he didn’t. He began to doubt that it existed. He went on with his sign-writing and spent as much time as he could out of the house. But he was unknown in Arwacas and jobs were scarce. Time hung heavily on his hands until he met an equally underemployed man called Misir, the Arwacas correspondent of the Trinidad Sentinel. They discussed jobs, Hinduism, India and their respective families.
Every afternoon Mr. Biswas had to prepare afresh for his return to Hanuman House, though once he had pushed open the tall gate at the side it was a short journey, across the courtyard, through the hall, up the steps, along the verandah, through the Book Room, to his share of the long room. There he stripped to pants and vest, lay down on his bedding and read, leaning on one elbow. His pants, made by Bipti from floursacks, were unfortunate. Despite many washings they were still bright with letters and even whole words; they went down to his knees and made him look smaller than he was. It was not long before the children got to know about these pants, but Mr. Biswas, refusing to yield to laughter, comments from the hall and Shama’s pleas, continued to parade them.
It was impossible to keep anything secret from the children. As soon as darkness fell beds were made for them in the Book Room and all along the verandah upstairs. As the evening wore on, more and more beds were unrolled and the old upstairs became choked with sleepers; sleepers filled the wooden bridge that connected the old upstairs with the concrete house. Beyond the bridge, called “the new room”, lay the seclusion and space of the drawingroom that had impressed Bipti. But even if that part of the house was not reserved for Seth, Mrs. Tulsi and her two sons, Mr. Biswas would not have cared to go there. It was a forbidding room, with its large brass pots and marble topped tables. There was nothing to sit on apart from the two chairs which Bipti had described as thronelike. And the room was made oppressive by the many statues of Hindu gods, heavy and ugly, which Pundit Tulsi had brought back from his Indian visits. “He must have bought them wholesale from some godshop,” Mr. Biswas told Shama later. Above that was the greater seclusion of the prayer-room, reached from the drawingroom by a staircase as steep as a ship’s companionway (a means of testing the faithful, or it might simply have been that Pundit Tulsi, like most builders in the island, got ideas as he went along). But in the prayer-room there was no furniture at all, the ground was of course sacred, and he found the smell of incense and sandalwood insupportable.