‘I am not blaming anybody,’ Chinta said. ‘I am only blaming the man who set the example.’
Then the whisperings began.
‘Don’t talk to them. But watch them.’
‘Vidiadhar! Quick! I left my purse on the table in the diningroom.’
‘Anand likes his nose to run. He swallows the snot. It is like condensed milk to him.’
‘Savi does eat the scabs of sores.’
‘You ever see Kamla’s head? Crawling with lice. But she is like a monkey. She eats them.’
And the girls begged Mr Biswas to move.
He had found a site such as he always wanted, isolated, unused and full of possibilities. It was some way from the estäte house, on a low hill buried in bush and well back from the road. The house was begun and, unblessed, completed in less than a month. Its pattern was precisely that of the house he had attempted in Green Vale, precisely that of thousands of houses in rural Trinidad. It had a verandah, two bedrooms and a drawingroom, and stood on tall pillars. Estate trees provided the timber; he had to pay only for the sawing. He bought corrugated iron for the roof, plain glass and frosted glass for the windows, coloured glass for the drawingroom door, and cement for the pillars.
The speed with which the house went up took him by surprise. The builders had given him no opportunity to withdraw, and at the end he found that his savings were nearly all gone. He felt uneasy. His circumstances had changed; but his ambition had remained steady, and now seemed only idyllic and absurd. He had built his own house, in a place as wild and out-of-the-way as he could have wished. But Shama had to walk a mile to the village to do her shopping, water had to be brought up the hill from a spring in the cocoa woods. And there was the problem of transport. He had to cycle long distances every day, and though he had cut himself off from the family, his children had to go to school in the family car.
After he had bought a Slumberking bed (delivered by two Port of Spain vanmen who swore as they made their various trips up and down the improperly cleared and precipitous path) his money was exhausted. The house was not painted. It stood red-raw in its unregulated green setting, not seeming to invite habitation so much as decay.
Shama, though pained by the quarrel with Chinta, did not approve of the move. She regarded it as provocative, and like the children, she had watched the house rise and wished it not to be completed. The children wanted to go back to Port of Spain, to the life they had had before Shorthills. They knew about the housing shortage but blamed Mr Biswas for not trying hard enough. The new house imprisoned them in silence and bush. They had no pleasures, no cinema shows, no walks, no games even, for the land around the house still smelled of snakes. The nights seemed longer and blacker. The girls stayed close to Shama, as though frightened to be by themselves; and in her shanty kitchen Shama sang sad Hindi songs.
Late one afternoon, not long after they had moved, Anand found himself alone in the house. Mr Biswas was out, the girls were in the kitchen with Shama. The house felt bare, unused and still exposed; corners held no secrets; none of the furniture seemed to have found its place. Moved by boredom more than curiosity, Anand opened the bottom drawer of Shama’s dressingtable. In an envelope he found his parents’ marriage certificate and the birth certificates of his sisters and himself. On a birth certificate, which he did not at first recognize as Savi’s, he saw a name, Basso, which he had never heard used. He saw Mr Biswas’s harsh scrawl: Real calling name: Lakshmi. In the column headed ‘Father’s Occupation’ labourer had been energetically scratched out and proprietor written in. No other birth certificate had been so scribbled over. Some photographs were wrapped in crinkled brown paper. One was of the Tulsi sisters standing in a straight line and scowling; the others were of the entire Tulsi family, of Hanuman House, of Pundit Tulsi, of Pundit Tulsi in Hanuman House.
In the kitchen Shama was singing her doleful song and slapping dough between her palms.
Anand came upon a bundle of letters. They were all still in their envelopes. The stamps were English and bore the head of George V. From one envelope fell small brown photographs of an English girl, a dog, a house with a faded X on a window; in another envelope there was a newspaper clipping with one name underlined in ink in a long paragraph of names. The letters were neatly written and said little at great length. They spoke about letters received, about school, about holidays; they thanked for photographs. Abruptly they were touched with feeling; they expressed surprise that arrangements for marriage had been made so soon; they attempted to soften surprise with congratulation. Then there were no more letters.
Anand closed the drawer and went to the drawingroom. He rested his elbows on the window-sill and looked out. The sun had just set and the bush was turning black against a sky that was still clear. Smoke came through the kitchen door and window and Anand listened to Shama singing. Darkness filled the valley.
That evening Shama discovered the ransacked drawer. ‘
Thief!’ she said. ‘Some thief was in the house.’
Refusing to yield to the gloom of his family and his own feeling that he had been rash, Mr Biswas set about clearing the land. He spared only the poui trees, for their branches and their yellow flowers, which came out bright and pure for one week in the year. The integrity of living bush was replaced by a brown chaos of collapsed and dying trees. Through this Mr Biswas made a winding path from the house down to the road, cutting steps into the earth and shoring them with bamboo. The debris could not be immediately fired, for though the leaves were dead and brittle the wood was green. Waiting, Mr Biswas cut poui sticks and roasted them in bonfires. And he was reminded of a duty.
He sent for his mother. He had for so long been telling her – ever since he was a boy in the back trace – that she was to come to stay with him when he had built his own house, that he now doubted whether she would come. But she came, for a fortnight. Her feelings could not be read. He was at first extravagantly affectionate. But Bipti remained calm, and Mr Biswas followed her example. It was as if the relationship between them had been granted without their asking, and had only to be accepted.
Though the children understood Hindi they could no longer speak it, and this limited communication between them and Bipti. From the start, however, Shama and Bipti got on well. Shama gave not a hint of the sullenness she used with Bipti’s sister Tara; to Mr Biswas’s surprise and pleasure, she treated Bipti with all the respect of a Hindu daughter-in-law. She had touched Bipti’s feet with her fingers when Bipti came, and she never appeared before Bipti with her head uncovered.
Bipti helped with the housework and on the land. When, after Bipti’s death, Mr Biswas wished to be reminded of her, he thought less of his childhood and the back trace than of this fortnight at Shorthills. He thought of one moment in particular. The ground in front of the house had been only partly cleared, and one afternoon, when he had pushed his bicycle up the earth steps to the top of the hill, he saw that part of the ground, which he had left that morning cumbered and unbroken, had been cleared and levelled and forked. The black earth was soft and stoneless; the spade had cut cleanly into it, leaving damp walls as smooth as mason’s work. Here and there the prongs of the fork had left shallow parallel indentations on the upturned earth. In the setting sun, the sad dusk, with Bipti working in a garden that looked, for a moment, like a garden he had known a dark time ages ago, the intervening years fell away. Thereafter the marks of a fork in earth made him think of that moment at the top of the hill, and of Bipti.
The children looked forward to the firing of the land as to a celebration. The Civil Defence authorities had given them a taste for large conflagrations, and now they were to have a hill on fire in their own backyard. It would be almost as good as the mock air-raid on the Port of Spain race course. Of course there would be no dummy houses to burn, no ambulances, no nurses attending to people groaning at mock wounds, no Boy Scouts on motor bicycles dashing about through the thick smoke with dummy dispatches; but at the same time there would be none of tho
se eager firefighters who, in spite of the public outcry, had rescued some of the dummy buildings before they were even scorched.
Mr Biswas, displaying manual skills which his children secretly distrusted, dug trenches and prepared little nests of twigs and leaves at what he called strategic points. On Saturday afternoon he summoned the children, soaked a brand in pitch-oil, set it alight, and ran from nest to nest, poking the brand in and jumping back, as though he had touched off an explosion. A leaf caught here and a twig there, blazed, shrank, smouldered, died. Mr Biswas didn’t wait to see. Ignoring the cries of the children, he ran on, leaving a trail of subsiding wisps of dark smoke.
‘Is all right,’ he said, coming down the hillside, the brand dripping fire. ‘Is all right. Fire is a funny thing. You think it out, but it blazing like hell underground.’
One of the smoke wisps shrank like a failing fountain. ‘That one take your advice and gone underground,’ Savi said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, rubbing one itching ankle against the other. ‘Perhaps it is a little too green. Perhaps we should wait until next week.’
There were protests.
Savi put her hand to her face and backed away.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘The heat,’ Savi said.
‘You just carry on. See if you don’t get hot somewhere else. Clowns. That’s what I’m raising. A pack of clowns.’
From the kitchen Shama shouted, ‘Hurry up, all-you. The sun going down.’
They went to examine the nests Mr Biswas had fired. They found them collapsed, reduced: shallow heaps of grey leaves and black twigs. Only one had caught, and from it the fire proceeded unspectacularly, avoiding thick branches and nibbling at lesser ones, making the bark curl, attacking the green wood with a great deal of smoke, staining it, then retreating to run up a twig with a businesslike air, scorching the brown leaves, creating a brief blaze, then halting. On the gound there were a few isolated flames, none higher than an inch.
‘Fireworks,’ Savi said.
‘Well, do it yourself.’
The children ran to the kitchen and seized the pitch-oil Shama had bought for the lamps. They poured the pitch-oil haphazardly on the bush and set it alight. In minutes the bush blazed and became a restless sea of yellow, red, blue and green. They exchanged theories about the various colours; they listened with pleasure to the chatter and crackle of the quick fire. Too soon the tall flames contracted. The sun set. Charred leaves rose in the air. After dinner they had the sad task of beating down the fire at the edge of the trench. The brown sea had turned black, with red glitters and twinkles.
‘All right,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Puja over. Books now.’
They retired to the bare drawingroom. From time to time they went to the window. The hill was black against a lighter sky. Here and there it showed red and occasionally burst into yellow flame, which seemed unsupported, dancing in the air.
Anand was in a bus, one of those dilapidated, crowded buses that ran between Shorthills and Port of Spain. Something was wrong. He was lying on the floor of the bus and people were looking down at him and chattering. The bus must have been running over a newly-repaired road: the wheels were kicking up pebbles against the wings.
Myna and Kamla stood over him, and he was being shaken by Savi. He lay on his bedding in the drawingroom.
‘Fire!’ Savi said.
‘What o’clock it is?’
‘Two or three. Get up. Quick.’
The chattering, the pebbles against the wings, was the noise of the fire. Through the window he saw that the hill had turned red, and the land was red in places where no fire had been intended.
‘Pa? Ma?’ he asked.
‘Outside. We have to go to the big house to tell them.’
The house appeared to be encircled by the red, unblazing bush. The heat made breathing painful. Anand looked for the two poui trees at the top of the hill. They were black and leafless against the sky.
Hurriedly he dressed.
‘Don’t leave us,’ Myna said.
He heard Mr Biswas shouting outside, ‘Just beat it back. Just beat it back from the kitchen. House safe. No bush around it. Just keep it back from the kitchen.’
‘Savi!’ Shama called. ‘Anand wake?’
‘Don’t leave us,’ Kamla cried.
All four children left the house and walked past the newly-forked land in front to the path that led to the road. Just below the brow of the hill they were surprised by an absolute darkness. Between the path and the road there was no fire.
Myna and Kamla began to cry, afraid of the darkness before them, the fire behind them.
‘Leave them,’ Shama called. ‘And hurry up.’
Savi and Anand picked their way down the earth steps they couldn’t see.
‘You can hold my hand,’ Anand said.
They held hands and worked their way down the hill, into the gully, up the gully and into the road. Trees vaulted the blackness. The blackness was like a weight; it was as if they wore hats that came down to their eyebrows. They didn’t look up, not willing to be reminded that darkness lay above them and behind them as well as in front of them. They fixed their eyes on the road and kicked the loose gravel for the noise. It was chilly.
‘Say Rama Rama,’ Savi said. ‘It will keep away anything.’
They said Rama Rama.
‘Is Pa to blame for this,’ Savi said suddenly.
The repetition of Rama Rama comforted them. They became used to the darkness. They could distinguish trees a few yards ahead. The squat concrete box, where behind a steel door estate explosives were kept, was a reassuring white blur on the roadside.
At last they came to the bridge of coconut trunks. The white fretwork along the eaves of the house were visible. In Mrs Tulsi’s room, as always at night, a light burned. They made their way across the dangerous bridge and emerged into the open, grateful at that moment for the tree-cutting of Govind and W. C. Tuttle. The tall wet weeds on the drive stroked their bare legs. They sniffed, alert for the smell of snakes.
They heard a heavy breathing. They could not tell from which direction it came. They stopped muttering Rama Rama, came close together and began to run towards the concrete steps, a distant grey glow. The breathing followed, and a dull, unhurried tramp.
Glancing to his left, Anand saw the mule in the cricket field. It was following them, moving along the snarled fence-wires. They reached the end of the drive. The mule reached the corner of the field and stopped.
They ran up the concrete steps, avoiding the overhanging nutmeg tree. They fumbled with the bolt on the verandah gate and the noise frightened them. They scratched at doors and windows, tapped the wall of Mrs Tulsi’s room, rattled the tall drawingroom doors. They called. There was no reply. Every noise they made seemed to them an explosion. But in the silence and blackness they were only whispering. Their footsteps, their knockings, Anand’s stumbling among the stale cakes and the widow’s corn, sounded only like the scuttling of rats.
Then they heard voices: low and alarmed: one aunt whispering to another, Mrs Tulsi calling for Sushila
Anand shouted: ‘Aunt!’
The voices were silenced. Then they were raised again, this time defiantly. Anand knocked hard on a window. A woman’s voice said, ‘Two of the little people!’ There was an exclamation.
They were thought to be the spirits of Hari and Padma.
Mrs Tulsi groaned and spoke a Hindi exorcism. Inside, doors were opened, the floor pounded. There was loud aggressive talk about sticks, cutlasses and God, while Sushila, the sickroom widow, an expert on the supernatural, asked in a sweet conciliatory voice, ‘Poor little people, what can we do for you?’
‘Fire!’ Anand cried.
‘Fire,’ Savi said.
‘Our house on fire!’
And Sushila, though she had taken part in the whisperings against Savi and Mr Biswas, found herself obliged to continue talking sweetly to Savi and Anand.
The apprehension of the h
ouse turned to joyous energy at the news of the fire.
‘But really,’ Chinta said, as she happily got ready, ‘what fool doesn’t know that to set fire to land in the night is to ask for trouble?’
Lights went on everywhere. Babies squealed, were hushed. Mrs Tuttle was heard to say, ‘Put something on your head, man. This dew isn’t good for anyone.’ ‘A cutlass, a cutlass,’ Sharma’s widow called. And the children excitedly relayed the news: ‘Uncle Mohun’s house is burning down!’ Some thrilled alarmists feared that the fire might spread through the woods to the big house itself; and there was speculation about the effects of the fire on the explosives.
The journey to the fire was like an excursion. Once there, the Tulsi party fell to work with a will, cutting, clearing, beating. It became a celebration. Shama, host for the second time to her family, prepared coffee in the kitchen, which was untouched. And Mr Biswas, forgetful of animosities, shouted to everyone, ‘Is all right. Is all right. Everything under control.’
Some eggs were discovered, burnt black, and dry inside. Whether they were snakes’ eggs or the eggs of the widows’ errant hens no one knew. A snake was found burnt to death less than twenty yards from the kitchen. ‘The hand of God,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Burning the bitch up before it bite me.’
Morning revealed the house, still red and raw, in a charred and smoking desolation. Villagers came running to see, and were confirmed in their belief that their village had been taken over by vandals.
‘Charcoal, charcoal,’ Mr Biswas called to them. ‘Anybody want charcoal?’
For days afterwards the valley darkened with ash whenever the wind blew. Ash dusted the plot Bipti had forked.
‘Best thing for the land,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Best sort of fertilizer.’
4. Among the Readers and Learners