Anand and Savi were not easily persuaded to leave Hanuman House. They remained there for some weeks after Shama had left with Myna and Kamla. Then Savi came one Sunday evening with Mrs. Tulsi and the god. She saw the street lamps and the lights of the ships in the harbour. Mrs. Tulsi took her to the Botanical Gardens; she saw the ponds and grassy slopes of the sunken Rock Gardens; she heard the band play; and she stayed. Anand, however, refused to be allured, until the younger god said, “They have a new sweet drink in Port of Spain. Something called Coca Cola. The best thing in the world. Come with me to Port of Spain, and I will get your father to buy you a Coca Cola and some real icecream. In cardboard cups. Real icecream. Not homemade.”
To the children of Hanuman House home-made was not a word of commendation. Home-made icecream was the flavourless (officially coconut) congelation churned out by Chinta after lunch on Christmas Day. She used an old, rusted freezer; she said it “skipped”; and to hasten the freezing she threw lumps of ice into the mixture. The rust from the freezer dripped on the icecream and penetrated it, like a ripple of chocolate.
And it was purely this promise of real icecream and Coca Cola that drew Anand to Port of Spain.
On a Sunday afternoon, when shadows had withdrawn to under the eaves of houses, when the city was hard and bright and empty, with doors closed everywhere, and the glass windows of shops reflected only those opposite, Mr. Biswas took Anand on a tour of Port of Spain. They walked with a sense of adventure in the middle of empty streets; they heard their footsteps; like this, the city could be known; it held no threat. They looked at cafй after cafй, rejecting, at Anand’s insistence, all those which claimed to sell only home-made cakes and icecream. At last they found one which was suitable. On a high red stool, a revelation and luxury in itself, Anand sat at the counter, and the icecream came. In a cardboard tub, frosted, cold to the touch. With a wooden spoon. The cover had to be taken off and licked; the icecream, light pink and spotted with red, steamed: one preparatory delight after another.
“It don’t taste like icecream at all,” Anand said. He cleaned the tub, and it was such a perfectly made thing he would have liked to keep it.
When he sipped the Coca Cola he said, “It is like horse pee.” Which was what some cousin had said of a drink at Hanuman House.
“Anand!” Mr. Biswas said, smiling at the man behind the counter. “You’ve got to stop talking like that. You are in Port of Spain now.”
The house faced east, and the memories that remained of these first four years in Port of Spain were above all memories of morning. The newspaper, delivered free, still warm, the ink still wet, sprawled on the concrete steps, down which the sun was moving. Dew lay on trees and roofs; the empty street, freshly swept and washed, was in cool shadow, and water ran clear in the gutters whose green bases had been scratched and striped by the sweepers’ harsh brooms. Memories of taking the Royal Enfield out from under the house and cycling in a sun still cool along the streets of the awakening city. Stillness at noon: stripping for a short nap: the window of his room open: a square of blue above the unmoving curtain. In the afternoon, the steps in shadow; tea in the back verandah. Then an interview at a hotel, perhaps, and the urgent machinery of the Sentinel. The promise of the evening; the expectation of the morning.
With Mrs. Tulsi and Owad away on week-ends and during the holidays it was possible at times for Mr. Biswas to forget that the house belonged to them. And their presence was hardly a strain. Mrs. Tulsi never fainted in Port of Spain, never stuffed soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub into her nostrils, never wore bay-rum-soaked bandages around her forehead. She was neither distant nor possessive with the children, and her relations with Mr. Biswas became less cautious and formal as his friendship with Owad grew. Owad appreciated Mr. Biswas’s work and Mr. Biswas, flattered to be established as a wit and a madman, developed a respect for the young man who read such big books in foreign languages. They became companions; they went to the cinema and the seaside; and Mr. Biswas showed Owad transcripts, which no paper printed, of court proceedings in cases of rape and brothel-keeping.
Mr. Biswas ceased to ridicule or resent the excessive care Mrs. Tulsi gave to her younger son. Mrs. Tulsi believed that prunes, like fish brains, were especially nourishing for people who exercised their brains, and she fed Owad prunes every day. Milk was obtained for him from the Dairies in Phillip Street; it came in proper milk botdes with silver caps; not like the milk Shama got from a man six lots away who, oblivious of the aspirations of the district, kept cows and delivered milk in rum bottles stopped with brown paper.
Though with Owad and Mrs. Tulsi Mr. Biswas’s attitude towards his children was gently deprecatory, he was watching and learning, with an eye on his own household and especially on Anand. Soon, he hoped, Anand would qualify to eat prunes and drink milk from the Dairies.
His household established, Mr. Biswas set about establishing his tyrannies.
“Savi!”
No answer.
“Savi! Savi! Oh-Savi-yah! Oh, you there. Why you didn’t answer?”
“But I come.”
“Is not enough. You must come and answer.”
“All right.”
“All right what?”
“All right, Pa.”
“Good. On that table in the corner you will find cigarettes, matches and a Sentinel notebook. Hand them to me.”
“O God! That is all you call me for?”
“Yes. That is all. Answer back again, and I make you read out something for me to take down in shorthand.”
Savi ran out of the room.
“Anand! Anand!”
“Yes, Pa.”
“That is better. You are getting a little training now. Sit down there and call out this speech.”
Anand snatched Bell’s Standard Elocutionist and angrily read out some Macaulay.
“You reading too fast.”
“I thought you was writing shorthand.”
“You answering back too! You see what happen to you children, spending all that time at Hanuman House. Just for that, check while I read back.”
“O God!” And Anand stamped, regretting the dying day.
But the checking went on.
Then Mr. Biswas said, “Anand, this is not a punishment. I ask you to do this because I want you to help me.”
He had discovered, with surprise, that this sentence soothed Anand, and he always offered it at the end of these sessions as a consolation.
It was soon established that he did much of his work in bed and was to be expected to call constantly for paper, pencils to be sharpened, matches, cigarettes, ashtrays to be emptied, books to be brought, books to be taken away. It was also established that his sleep was important. He flew into terrible rages when awakened, even at a time he had fixed.
“Savi,” Shama would say, “go and wake your father.”
“Let Anand go.”
“No, the both of you go.”
To Shama, who began to complain of his “strictness”-a word which gave him a curious satisfaction-he said, “It is not strictness. It is training.”
Mrs. Tulsi, approving if a little surprised, told tales of the severe training to which Pundit Tulsi had submitted his children.
And whenever Mrs. Tulsi was away Shama made claims of her own. She was unable to faint like Mrs. Tulsi but she complained of fatigue and liked to be attended by her children. She got Savi and Anand to walk on her and said in Hindi, “God will bless you,” with such feeling that they considered it a sufficient recompense. Soon, and without this recompense, it became the duty of Savi and Anand to walk on Mr. Biswas as well.