Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“You have seen your daughter?”

Mr. Biswas laughed.

“Two girls,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Our family is unlucky that way. Think of the worry I had when your father died. Fourteen daughters to marry. And when you marry your girl children you can’t say what sort of life you are letting them in for. They have to live with their Fate. Mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law. Idle husbands. Wife-beaters.”

Mr. Biswas looked at Shama. She was concentrating on Mrs. Tulsi’s head. At every press of Shama’s long fingers Mrs. Tulsi closed her eyes, interrupted what she was saying and groaned, “Aah.”

“That is what a mother has to put up with,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “I don’t mind. I have lived long enough to know that you can’t expect anything from anybody. I give you five hundred dollars. Do you think I want you to bow and scrape and touch my feet whenever you see me? No. I expect you to spit on me. I expect that. When you want five hundred dollars again you come back to me. Do you want me to say, ‘The last time I gave you five hundred dollars you spat on me. Therefore I can’t give you five hundred dollars this time’? Do you want me to say that? No. I expect the people who spit on me to come to me again. I have a soft heart. And when you have a soft heart, you have a soft heart. Your father used to say to me, ‘My bride’-that was the way he called me until the day he died-‘my bride,’ he used to say, ‘you have the softest heart of any person I know. Be careful of that soft heart. People will take advantage of that soft heart and trample on it.’ And I used to say, ‘When you have a soft heart, you have a soft heart.’ “

She pressed her eyes till tears ran down her cheeks. Her damp grey hair was spread out on the pillow. Now here was a woman with grey hair, and he felt little tenderness towards her.

Then he noted, what he had missed in the darkness, that Shama’s cheeks were also wet. She must have been crying silently all along.

“I don’t mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said. She blew her nose and called for bay rum. Shama filled her palm with bay rum, drenched Mrs. Tulsi’s face and pressed her palm over Mrs. Tulsi’s nose. Mrs. Tulsi’s face shone; she screwed up her eyes to prevent the bay rum going into them and breathed loudly through her mouth. Shama removed her hand and Mrs. Tulsi said, “But I don’t know what Seth will say.”

As at a cue Seth came in. He ignored Mr. Biswas and Shama and asked Mrs. Tulsi how she was, expressing in those words his concern for Mrs. Tulsi and his impatience with the people who were disturbing her. He sat on the other side of the bed. The bed creaked; he sighed; he shifted his feet and his bluchers drummed on the floor in annoyance.

“We’ve been talking,” Mrs. Tulsi said gently.

Shama gave a little sob.

Seth sucked his teeth. He sounded extremely irritable; it was as if he too were unwell, with a cold or a headache. “Paddling-addling,” he said. His voice was gruff and indistinct.

“You mustn’t mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

Seth held his thigh and looked at the floor.

And Mr. Biswas was convinced of what he had already guessed from Mrs. Tulsi’s speech and Shama’s tears: that the scene had been arranged, that there had been not only discussions, but decisions. And Shama, who had arranged the scene, was crying to lessen his humiliation, to shift some of it to herself. Her tears were ritual in another way: they were tears for the hardships that had come to her with a husband she had been given by Fate.

“So what we going to do about the shop?” Seth asked in English. He was still irritable and his voice, though businesslike, was weary.

Mr. Biswas couldn’t think. “Is a bad site for a shop,” he said.

“A bad site today could be a good site tomorrow,” Seth said. “Suppose I drop a few cents here and there and get the Public Works to run the trunk road through there after all? Eh?”

Shama’s sobs mingled with the squelch of bay rum in Mrs. Tulsi’s hair.

“You got any debts?”

“Well, a lot of people owing me but they won’t pay.”

“Not after what happen with Mungroo. I suppose you was the only man in Trinidad who didn’t know about Seebaran and Mahmoud.”

Shama was crying openly.

Abruptly Seth lost interest in Mr. Biswas. He said, “Tcha!” and looked at his bluchers.

“You mustn’t mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “I know you haven’t got a soft heart. But you mustn’t mind.”

Seth sighed. “So what we going to do with the shop?”

Mr. Biswas shrugged.

“Insure-and-burn?” Seth said, making it one word: insuranburn .

Mr. Biswas felt that talk like this belonged to the realms of high finance.

Seth crossed his big arms high over his chest. “Is the only thing for you to do now.”

“Insuranburn,” Mr. Biswas said. “How much I going to make out of that?”

“More than you would make if you don’t insuranburn. The shop is Mai own. The goods is yours. For the goods you ought to get about seventy-five, a hundred dollars.”

It was a large sum. Mr. Biswas smiled.

But Seth only said, “And after that, what?”

Mr. Biswas tried to look thoughtful.

“You still too proud to get your hands dirty in the fields?” And Seth displayed his own hands.

“Soft heart,” Mrs. Tulsi muttered.

“I want a driver at Green Vale,” Seth said.

Shama gave a loud sob and, suddenly leaving Mrs. Tulsi’s head, rushed to Mr. Biswas and said, “Take it, man. Take it, I beg you.” She was making it easy for him to accept. “He will take it,” she cried to Seth. “He will take it.”

Seth looked irritable and turned away.

Mrs. Tulsi groaned.

Shama, still crying, went back to the bed and pressed her fingers into Mrs. Tulsi’s hair.

Mrs. Tulsi said, “Aah.”

“I don’t know anything about estate work,” Mr. Biswas said, trying to salvage some of his dignity.

“Nobody begging you,” Seth said.

“You mustn’t mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “You know what Owad always tells me. He always blames me for the way I married off my daughters. And I suppose he is right. But then Owad is going to college, reading and learning all the time. And I am very oldfashioned.” She spoke with pride in Owad and pride in her oldfashionedness.

Seth stood up. His bluchers scraped on the floor, the bed made noises, and Mrs. Tulsi was slightly disturbed. But Seth’s irritability had disappeared. He took out the ivory cigarette holder which had been pushing up through the buttoned flap of the pocket on his khaki shirt, put it in his mouth and blew whistlingly through it. “Owad. You remember him, Mohun?” He laughed, opening his mouth on either side of the holder. “The old hen son.”

“What is past is past,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “When people are boys they behave like boys. When they are men they behave like men.”

Shama squeezed vigorously at Mrs. Tulsi’s head and succeeded in reducing Mrs. Tulsi’s speech to a series of “Aah. Aah.” She washed bay rum into Mrs. Tulsi’s hair and face and held her palm over Mrs. Tulsi’s nose and mouth.

“This insuranburning,” Mr. Biswas said, and his tone was light, “who going to see about it? Me?” He was putting himself back into the role of the licensed buffoon.

Shama was the first to laugh. Seth followed. A croak came from Mrs. Tulsi and Shama took away her hand from Mrs. Tulsi’s mouth to allow her to laugh.

Mrs. Tulsi began to splutter. “He want,” she said in English, choking with laughter, “to jump-from-the fryingpan-into-into-”

They all roared.

“-into-the fire!”

The witty mood spread.

“No more paddling,” Seth said.

“We insuranburning right away?” Mr. Biswas asked, pitching his voice high and speaking quickly.