The paper would sprawl on the sunny steps in the morning; there would be stillness at noon and shadow in the afternoon. But it would be a different day.
2. The New Regime
Having no further business in Port of Spain, Mrs. Tulsi returned to Arwacas. The tent was taken down and after a few days the house was cleared of stragglers. Mr. Biswas set about restoring his rose-beds and the lily-pond, whose edges had collapsed, turning the water into bubbling mud. He worked without heart, feeling the emptiness of the house and not knowing how much longer he would be allowed to stay there. None of Mrs. Tulsi’s furniture had been removed: the house there seemed to be awaiting change. Some of the savour went out of his job at the Sentinel. He needed to address his work mentally to someone. At first this had been Mr. Burnett; then it had been Owad. Now there was only Shama. She seldom read his articles; when he read them aloud to her she showed neither interest nor amusement and made no comments. Once he gave her the typescript of an article and she infuriated him by turning over the last page and looking for more. “No more, no more,” he said. “I don’t want to strain you.”
And from Hanuman House came more reports of disturbance. Govind, the eager, the loyal, was discontented; Shama reported his seditious sayings. Nothing had outwardly changed, but Mrs. Tulsi no longer directed and her influence was beginning to be felt more and more as only that of a cantankerous invalid. With her two sons settled, she appeared to have lost interest in the family. She spent much of her time in the Rose Room, acquiring illnesses, grieving for Owad. As for Seth, he still controlled; but his control was superficial. Though nothing had been said openly, Shekhar’s reported displeasure, uncontradicted, lay against him and made him suspect to the sisters. When all was said and done Seth was not of the family and he alone could not maintain its harmony, as had been shown by his helplessness when squabbles had arisen between sisters during Mrs. Tulsi’s absences in Port of Spain. Seth ruled effectively only in association with Mrs. Tulsi and through her affection and trust. That trust, not officially withdrawn, was no longer so fully displayed; and Seth was even beginning to be resented as an outsider.
Then came rumours that Seth had been inspecting properties.
“Buying it for Mai, you think?” Mr. Biswas asked.
Shama said, “I glad it make somebody happy.”
And Mr. Biswas was soon to regret his jubilation. The Christmas school holidays came and Shama took the children to Hanuman House. By now they were complete strangers there. The old crepe paper decorations and the goods in the dark, choked Tulsi Store were petty country things after the displays in the Port of Spain shops, and Savi felt pity for the people of Arwacas, who had to take them seriously. At last on Christmas Eve the store was closed and the uncles went away. Savi, Anand, Myna and Kamla hunted for stockings and hung them up. And got nothing. There was no one to complain to. Some of the sisters had secretly provided gifts for their children; and on Christmas morning in the hall, where Mrs. Tulsi was not waiting to be kissed, the gifts were displayed and compared. With Owad in England, Mrs. Tulsi in her room, all the uncles away, and Shekhar spending the day with his wife’s family, there was no one to organize games, to give a lead to the gaiety. And Christmas was reduced to lunch and Chinta’s icecream, as tasteless and rust-rippled as ever. The sisters were sullen; the children quarrelled, and some were even flogged.
Shekhar came on the morning of Boxing Day with a large bag of imported sweets. He went up to Mrs. Tulsi’s room, had lunch in the hall, and then went away again. When Mr. Biswas arrived later that afternoon he found that the talk among the sisters was not of Seth, but of Shekhar and his wife. The sisters felt that Shekhar had abandoned them. Yet no one blamed him. He was under the influence of his wife, and the fault was wholly hers.
Relations between the sisters and Shekhar’s wife had never been easy. Despite the untraditional organization of Hanuman House, where married daughters lived with their mother, the sisters were alert to certain of the conventions of Hindu family relationships: mothers-in-law, for example, were expected to be hard on daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law were to be despised. But Shekhar’s wife had from the first met Tulsi patronage with arrogant Presbyterian modernity. She flaunted her education. She called herself Dorothy, without shame or apology. She wore short frocks and didn’t care that they made her look lewd and absurd: she was a big woman who had grown fat after the birth of her first child, and her dresses hung from her high, shelflike hips as from a hoop. Her voice was deep, her manner hearty; once, when she had damaged her ankle, she used a stick, and Chinta remarked that it suited her. Added to all this she sometimes sold the tickets at her cinema; which was disgraceful, besides being immoral. So far, however, from making any impression on Dorothy, the sisters continually found themselves defeated. They had said she wouldn’t be able to keep a house: she turned out to be maddeningly house-proud. They had said she was barren: she was bearing a child every two years. Her children were all girls, but this was scarcely a triumph for the sisters. Dorothy’s daughters were of exceptional beauty and the sisters could complain only that the Hindi names Dorothy had chosen-Mira, Leela, Lena-were meant to pass as Western ones.
And now old charges were made again and for the benefit of Shama and other attentive visiting sisters fresh details added. As the talk scratched back and forth over the same topic these details became increasingly gross: Dorothy, like all Christians, used her right hand for unclean purposes, her sexual appetite was insatiable, her daughters already had the eyes of whores. Over and over the sisters concluded that Shekhar was to be pitied, because he had not gone to Cambridge and had instead been married against his will to a wife who was shameless. Padma, Seth’s wife, was present, and Seth’s behaviour could not be discussed. Whenever Cambridge was mentioned looks and intonation made it clear to Padma that she was excluded from this implied criticism of her husband, that she, like Shekhar, was to be pitied for having such a spouse. And Mr. Biswas marvelled again at the depth of Tulsi family feeling.
Mr. Biswas had always got on well with Dorothy; he was attracted by her loudness and gaiety and regarded her as an ally against the sisters. But on that hot still afternoon, when a holiday stateness lay over Arwacas, the hall, with its confused furniture, its dark loft and sooty green walls, with flies buzzing in and out of the white sunny spots on the long table, seemed abandoned, deprived of animation; and Mr. Biswas, feeling Shekhar’s absence as a betrayal, could sympathize with the sisters.
Savi said, “This is the last Christmas I spend at Hanuman House.”
Change followed change. At Pagotes Tara and Ajodha were decorating their new house. In Port of Spain new lampposts, painted silver, went up in the main streets and there was talk of replacing the diesel buses by trolley-buses. Owad’s old room was let to a middle-aged childless coloured couple. And at the Sentinel there were rumours.
Under Mr. Burnett’s direction the Sentinel had overtaken the Gazette and, though some distance behind the Guardian, it had become successful enough for its frivolity to be an embarrassment to the owners. Mr. Burnett had been under pressure for some time. That Mr. Biswas knew, but he had no head for intrigue and did not know the source of this pressure. Some of the staff became openly contemptuous and spoke of Mr. Burnett as uneducated; a joke went around the office that he had applied from the Argentine for a job as a sub-editor and his letter had been misunderstood. As if in reply to all this Mr. Burnett became increasingly perverse. “Let’s face it,” he said. “Editorials from Port of Spain didn’t have much effect in Spain. They are not going to stop Hitler either.” The Guardian responded to the war by starting a fighter fund: in a box on the front page twelve aeroplanes were outlined, and as the fund rose the outlines were filled in. Right up to the end the Sentinel had been headlining the West Indian cricket tour of England, and when the tour was abandoned it printed a drawing of Hitler which, when cut out and folded along certain dotted lines, became a drawing of a pig.