A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  The barrackyard, with its mud, animal droppings and the quick slime on stale puddles, gave him nausea, especially when he was eating fish or Shama’s pancakes. He took to eating at the green table in the room, hidden from the front door, his back to the side window, and determined not to look up at the black, furry underside of the galvanized iron roof. As he ate he read the newspapers on the wall. The smell of damp and soot, old paper and stale tobacco reminded him of the smell of his father’s box, under the bed which rested on tree-branches buried in the earth floor.

  He bathed incessantly. The barracks had no bathroom but at the back there were waterbarrels under the spouts which drained off the water from the roof. However quickly the water was used, there were always larvae of some sort on its surface, jumpy jellylike whiskery things, perfection in their way. Mr. Biswas stood in pants and sabots on a length of board next to a barrel and threw water over himself with a calabash dipper. He sang Hindi songs and In the snowy and the blowy while he did so. Afterwards he wrapped a towel around his waist, took off his pants and then, in towel and sabots, made a dash for his room. Since there was no side door to his room, he had to run around to the front, come into full view of all twelve kitchens and all twelve rooms, then bound into his own.

  One day the towel dropped off.

  “Is you,” he told Shama, after a terrible day in the fields. “Is you and your family who get me in this.”

  Shama, who had herself spent a day of humiliation at the barracks, cooked one of her especially bad meals, dressed Anand, a boy now big enough to talk, and took him to Hanuman House.

  On Saturday, after he had paid the labourers, Seth smiled and said, “Your wife say to look in the top righthand drawer of her bureau and get her pink bodice, and look in the bottom of the lefthand corner of the middle drawer for the pantaloons for the boy.”

  “Ask my wife, which boy?”

  But Mr. Biswas explored the alien drawers.

  “I nearly forget,” Seth said, just before he left. “That shop at The Chase. Well, it insuranburn now.”

  Seth took out a roll of dollar notes from his trouser pocket and displayed it like a magician. Note by note, he counted the roll into Mr. Biswas’s hand. It came to seventy-five dollars, the sum he had mentioned in the Rose Room at Hanuman House.

  Mr. Biswas was impressed and grateful. He determined to put his money aside, and add to it, until he had enough to build his house.

  He had thought deeply about this house, and knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted, in the first place, a real house, made with real materials. He didn’t want mud for walls, earth for floor, tree branches for rafters and grass for roof. He wanted wooden walls, all tongue-and-groove. He wanted a galvanized iron roof and a wooden ceiling. He would walk up concrete steps into a small verandah; through doors with coloured panes into a small drawingroom; from there into a small bedroom, then another small bedroom, then back into the small verandah. The house would stand on tall concrete pillars so that he would get two floors instead of one, and the way would be left open for future development. The kitchen would be a shed in the yard; a neat shed, connected to the house by a covered way. And his house would be painted. The roof would be red, the outside walls ochre with chocolate facings, and the windows white.

  His talk about houses made Shama fearful and impatient and had even caused quarrels. So he did not tell her of this picture or of his plan, and she continued to live for long periods at Hanuman House. She needed to give no explanations to her sisters now. Green Vale, part of the Tulsi lands and just outside Arwacas, was considered almost an extension of Hanuman House.

  Rejecting the stone-cold food Shama occasionally sent from Hanuman House, and tired of tins, Mr. Biswas learned to cook for himself; and he bought a primus, since he couldn’t manage the coal-pot. Sometimes he went for a walk in the early evening; sometimes he stayed in his room and read. But there were times when, without being fatigued, he could do nothing, when neither food nor tobacco tasted, and he could only lie on the fourposter and read the newspapers on the wall. He soon had many of the stories by heart. And the first line of one story, in breathless capitals, came to possess his mind: AMAZING SCENES WERE WITNESSED YESTERDAY WHEN. Absently he spoke the words aloud, by himself, with the labourers, with Seth. On some evenings, in his room, the words came into his head and repeated themselves until they were meaningless and irritating and he longed to drive them away. He wrote the words on packets of Anchor cigarettes and boxes of Comet matches. And, to fight this exhausting vacancy that left him with the feeling that he had drunk gallons of stale, lukewarm water, he took to lettering religious tags on strips of cardboard, which he hung on the walls against the newspapers. From a Hindi magazine he copied a sentence which, on cardboard, stretched right across one wall, above the papered window: HE WHO BELIEVETH IN ME OF HIM I WILL NEVER LOSE HOLD AND HE SHALL NEVER LOSE HOLD OF ME.

  The sugarcane was in arrow. The lanes and roads between the fields were clean green canyons. And at Arwacas the shop-signs celebrated snow and Santa Claus. The Tulsi Store was hung with paper holly and berries, but carried no Christmas signs. Mr. Biswas’s old signs still served. They had faded; the distemper on the wall and columns had flaked off in places and Punch had lost a piece of his nose; near the ceiling the letters were dim with dust and soot. Savi knew, and was proud, that the signs had been done by her father. But their gaiety puzzled her; she couldn’t associate them with the morose man she went to see in the dingy barrackroom and who sometimes came to see her. She felt, with a sense of loss that became sharper as Christmas drew nearer, that the signs had been done at some time beyond her memory when her father lived happily at Hanuman House with her mother and everyone else.

  Christmas was the only time of the year when the gaiety of the signs had some meaning. Then the Tulsi Store became a place of deep romance and endless delights, transformed from the austere emporium it was on other days, dark and silent, its shelves crammed with bolts of cloth that gave off acrid and sometimes unpleasant smells, its tables jumbled with cheap scissors and knives and spoons, towers of dusty blue-rimmed enamel plates interleaved with ragged grey paper, and boxes of hairpins, needles, pins and thread. Now all day there was noise and bustle. Gramophones played in the Tulsi Store and all the other stores and even from the stalls in the market. Mechanical birds whistled; dolls squeaked; toy trumpets were tried out; tops hummed; cars shot across counters, were seized by hands, and held whining in mid-air. The enamel plates and the hairpins were pushed to the back, and their place was taken by black grapes in white boxes filled with aromatic sawdust; red Canadian apples whose scent overrode every other; by a multitude of toys and dolls and games in boxes, new and sparkling glassware, new china, all smelling of their newness; by Japanese lacquered trays, stacked one on top the other like a pack of cards, so elegant as they stood that it was sad to think of them being sold one by one, leaving the store in brown paper and string, and ending drab, broken and disregarded in ugly kitchens and tumbledown houses. There were stacks, too, of the Bookers Drug Stores Almanac, with art paper tickling smooth to the touch and a smell of corresponding richness, with jokes, stories, photographs, quizzes, puzzles, and prizes for competitions which the Tulsi children were all going to enter but never would, though they had already inked in their names and addresses on dotted lines. And the decorations: the paper holly and berries, the spiralling streamers of crepe paper, the cotton wool and the Jack Frost that stuck to fingers and clothes, the balloons, the lanterns.

  The sisters masked their excitement by frowns and complaints of fatigue that fooled no one. Mrs. Tulsi herself came to the store from time to time, spoke to people she knew, and on occasion even sold something. The two gods strode sternly about, superintending, signing bills, checking money. The elder god was especially stern this Christmas and the children were afraid of him. His behaviour had grown a little strange. He had not yet left the Roman Catholic college, but efforts were being made to find him a wife from among the handful of eligible fami
lies. He expressed his disapproval by random angry outbursts, tears and threats of suicide. This was construed as a conventional shyness and, as such, was a source of amusement to sisters and brothers-in-law. But the children were frightened when he talked of leaving the house and buying rope and soft candle; they were not sure what he wanted the soft candle for; and they stayed out of his way.

  On the morning of Christmas Eve excitement was at its height, but before the afternoon was out had subsided so far that the displays had ceased to be magical, their gaiety became disorder, and the disorder could be seen to be superficial. So that before Christmas came, in the shop it was felt to be over. And throughout the afternoon attention turned more and more to the hall and kitchen where Sumati, the flogger, was in charge of the baking, and Shama, who had no recognized talents, was one of her many helpers. The smells from the kitchen had an added savour because, as always at Hanuman House, the food continued to be ordinary and bad up to the very day of a festival.

  The Tulsi Store was closed, the toys left in darkness which would transform them into stock and the brothers-in-law prepared to leave Hanuman House for their families. As Mr. Biswas cycled through the night to Green Vale, he remembered he had not got presents for Savi and Anand. But they expected none from him; they knew they would find their presents in their stockings on Christmas morning.

  Because the sisters were busy the children were given a skimpier dinner than usual. Then hunts were started for stockings. There were none to be had. The providential, mostly the girls, had acquired theirs days before, and the boys had to be content with pillowcases. There was talk of staying awake, but one by one the children dropped out of card games and fell asleep to the songs that came from their mothers in the kitchen.

  Anand had a moment of alarm when he got up. His pillowcase, lying at the foot of his bedding on the floor, looked empty. But when he shook the pillowcase out he found he had got what the other boys had: a balloon, one of those he had seen for weeks past in the store, a red apple in a dark blue wrapper, one of those he had seen in the boxes in the store, and a tin whistle. In her stocking Savi found a balloon, an apple and a tiny rubber doll. Presents were compared, and when it was established that there was no cause for jealousy, the children ate their apples, blew up balloons, and raised a feeble chirruping with tin whistles. Many whistles were soon silenced by spittle or some fundamental mechanical defect, and most of the boys burst their balloons before going downstairs to kiss Mrs. Tulsi. Those boys who were to grow up into detestable men gave a single toot on their whistles, nibbled at their apples and blew up their balloons hardly at all, in this resembling the girls, who already showed their pleasure in possession and anticipation rather than fulfilment. Then the children, in varying degrees of contentment, went downstairs and found Mrs. Tulsi waiting at the long pitchpine table. Their mothers were waiting as well, happy Santa Clauses. When a discontented child forgot to kiss Mrs. Tulsi and impatiently hurried off to see about food, his mother called him back.

  After breakfast-tea and biscuits from the drum-the children waited for lunch. More whistles were silenced; more balloons burst. The girls seized the scraps of the boys’ burst balloons and blew them up into many-coloured bunches of grapes which they rubbed against their cheeks to make a noise like heavy furniture dragging on an unpolished floor. Lunch was good. And after lunch they waited for tea: Sumati’s cakes, a local and fraudulent cherry brandy doled out by Chinta, and icecream, made by Chinta again, who, against annual evidence, was supposed to have an especial gift for making icecream. And that was that. Dinner was as bad as usual. Christmas was over. And, like all other Christmases at Hanuman House, it had turned out to be only a series of anticipations.

  At the barracks there were no apples, no stockings, no baking of cakes, no churning of icecream, no refinements to be waited for. It was from the start a day of abandoned eating and drinking and was to end, not with the beating of children, but with the beating of wives. Mr. Biswas went to see his mother and had dinner at Tara’s. On Boxing-day he visited his brothers; they had married nondescript women from nondescript families and spent Christmas with their wives.

  The following day Mr. Biswas cycled from Green Vale to Arwacas. When he turned into the High Street the sight of the stores, open again and carelessly displaying Christmas goods at bargain prices, reminded him of the presents he had forgotten. He got off his bicycle and leaned it against the kerb. Before he had taken off his bicycle clips he was accosted by a heavy-lidded shopman who repeatedly sucked his teeth. The shopman offered Mr. Biswas a cigarette and lit it for him. Words were exchanged. Then, with the shopman’s arm around his shoulders, Mr. Biswas disappeared into the shop. Not many minutes later Mr. Biswas and the shopman reappeared. They were both smoking and excited. A boy came out of the shop partly hidden by the large doll’s house he was carrying. The doll’s house was placed on the handlebar of Mr. Biswas’s cycle and, with Mr. Biswas on one side and the boy on the other, wheeled down the High Street.

  Every room of the doll’s house was daintily furnished. The kitchen had a stove such as Mr. Biswas had never seen in real life, a safe and a sink. As they progressed towards Hanuman House Mr. Biswas’s excitement cooled; his extravagance astonished, then frightened him. He had spent more than a month’s wages. He couldn’t take back the doll’s house now; he was attracting continuous attention. And he had bought nothing for Anand. It was always like this. When he thought of his children he thought mainly of Savi. She was part of those early months at The Chase and he knew her. Anand belonged completely to the Tulsis.

  At Hanuman House they knew about the doll’s house before it arrived. The hall was packed with sisters and their children. Mrs. Tulsi sat at the pitchpine table patting her lips with her veil.

  The children exclaimed when the doll’s house was set down, and in the hush that followed Savi came forward and stood near it proprietorially.

  “Well, what you think?” Mr. Biswas asked the hall, using his quick, high-pitched voice.

  The sisters were silent.

  Then Padma, Seth’s wife, usually taciturn and oppressed and unwell, began on a long and involved story, which Mr. Biswas refused to believe, about an incredible doll’s house one of Seth’s brothers had made for somebody’s daughter, a girl of exceptional beauty who had died shortly afterwards.

  As Padma spoke, the children, boys and girls, gathered round the house. Mr. Biswas was not altogether happy about this, but was pleased when the children acknowledged Savi’s ownership by asking her permission to open doors and touch beds. Even as she explored, Savi tried to give the impression that she was familiar with everything.

  “What have you brought for the others?”

  It was Mrs. Tulsi.

  “Didn’t have room,” Mr. Biswas said gaily.

  “When I give, I give to all,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “I am poor, but I give to all. It is clear, however, that I cannot compete with Santa Claus.”

  Her voice was even and he would have smiled, as at a witticism, but when he looked at her he saw that her face was tight with anger.

  “Vidiadhar and Shivadhar!” Chinta shouted. “Come here at once. Stop interfering with what doesn’t belong to you.”

  As at a signal the sisters pounced on their children, threatening horrible punishments on those who interfered with what didn’t belong to them.

  “I will peel your backside.”

  “I will break every bone in your body.”

  And Sumati the flogger said, “I will make you heavy with welts.”

  “Savi, go and put it away,” Shama whispered. “Take it upstairs.”

  Mrs. Tulsi, rising, patting her lips, said, “Shama, I hope you will have the grace to give me notice before you move to your mansion.” She laboured up the stairs, and Sushila, the widow who ruled the sickroom, followed solicitously.

  The affronted sisters drew closer together, and Shama stood alone. Her eyes were wide with dread. She stared accusingly at Mr. Biswas.

  “Well,” he sa
id briskly. “I better go back home-to the barracks.”

  He urged Savi and Anand to come with him out to the arcade. Savi came willingly. Anand was, as usual, embarrassed. Mr. Biswas couldn’t help feeling that, compared with Savi, the boy was a disappointment. He was small for his age, thin and sickly, with a big head; he looked as though he needed protection, but was shy and tongue-tied with Mr. Biswas and always seemed anxious to be free of him. Now, when Mr. Biswas put his arms around him, Anand sniffed, rubbed a dirty face against Mr. Biswas’s trousers, and tried to pull away.

  “You must let Anand play with it,” Mr. Biswas said to Savi.

  “He is a boy.”

  “Don’t worry.” Mr. Biswas rubbed Anand’s bony back. “You are going to get something next time.”

  “I want a car,” Anand said to Mr. Biswas’s trousers. “A big one.”

  Mr. Biswas knew the sort he meant. “All right,” he said. “Going to get you a car.”

  Immediately Anand broke away and ran back through the gate to the yard, riding an imaginary horse, wielding an imaginary whip and shouting, “And I going to get a car! I going to get a car!”

  He bought the car; not, despite his promise, the big one Anand wanted, but a clockwork miniature; and on Saturday, after the labourers had been paid, he took it to Arwacas. His arrival was noted from the arcade and, as he pushed the side gate open, he heard the message being relayed by the children in awed and expectant tones: “Savi, your pappa come to see you.”

  She came crying to the doorway of the hall. When he embraced her she burst into loud sobs.

  The children were silent. He heard the stairs creaking continually, and he became aware of a thick shuffling and whispering in the black kitchen at the far end.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She stifled her sobs. “They break it up.”