A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  One afternoon Mr. Biswas came back from the Sentinel and as soon as he pushed his cycle through the front gate he saw that the rose garden at the side of the house had been destroyed and the ground levelled, red earth mingling with the black. The plants were in a bundle against the corrugated iron fence. The stems, hard and stained and blighted on the outside, yet showed white and wet and full of promise where they had been cleanly gashed; their illformed leaves had not begun to quail; they still looked alive.

  He threw his bicycle against the concrete steps.

  “Shama!”

  He walked briskly, his footsteps resounding, through the drawingroom to the back verandah. The floor was littered with scraps of cloth and tangles of thread.

  “Shama!”

  She came out of the kitchen, her face taut. Her eyes sought to still his voice.

  He took in the table and the sewingmachine, the scraps of cloth, the thread, the pins, the kitchen safe, the rails, the banister. Below, in the yard, standing in a group against the fence, he saw the children. They were looking up at him. Then he saw the back of a lorry, a pile of old corrugated iron sheets, a heap of new scantlings, two Negro labourers with dusty heads, faces and backs. And Seth. Rough and managerial in his khaki uniform and heavy bruised bluchers, the ivory cigarette holder held down in one shirt pocket by the buttoned flap.

  He saw it clearly. For what seemed a long time he contemplated it. Then he was running down the back steps; Seth looked up, surprised; the labourers, stooping on the lorry, looked up; and he was fumbling among the scantlings. He tried to take one up, had misjudged its size, abandoned it, Shama saying from the verandah, “No, no,” picked up a large stained wet stone from the bleaching-bed and “Who tell you you could come and cut down my rose trees? Who?” Scraping the words out of his throat so that they didn’t seem to come from where he stood, but from someone just behind him. A labourer jumped down from the lorry, there was surprise and even dread in Seth’s eyes. “Pa!” one girl cried, and he hoisted his arm, Shama saying “Man, man.” His wrist was seized, roughly, by large hot gritty fingers. The stone fell to the ground.

  Disarmed, he was without words. Beside the three men he felt his frailty, his baggy linen suit beside Seth’s tight khaki clothes and the labourers’ working rags. The cuffs of his jacket bore the imprints of dirty fingers; his wrist burned where it had been held.

  Seth said, “You see. You make your children frighten like hell.” And to the loaders, “All right, all right.”

  The unloading continued.

  “Rose trees?” Seth said. “They did just look like black sage bush to me.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Biswas said. “Yes! I know they just look like bush to you. Tough!” he added. “Tough!” As he turned he stumbled against the bed of bleaching stones.

  “Oops!” Seth said.

  “Tough!” Mr. Biswas repeated, walking away.

  Shama followed him.

  Heads were withdrawn from the fence on either side. Curtains dropped back into place.

  “Thug!” Mr. Biswas said, going up the steps.

  “Eh, eh,” Seth said, smiling at the children. “Helluva temper, man. But my lorries can’t sleep in the road.”

  From the verandah Mr. Biswas, unseen, said, “This is not the end of this. The old lady will have something to say about this, I guarantee you. And Shekhar.”

  Seth laughed. “The old hen and the big god, eh?” He looked up at the verandah and said in Hindi, “Too many people have the idea that everything belongs to the Tulsis. How do you think this house was bought?”

  Mr. Biswas appeared at the banister of the verandah.

  Anand looked away.

  “You will be hearing from my solicitor,” Mr. Biswas said. “And those two rakshas you have with you. They too.” He disappeared again.

  The labourers, unaware of their identification with Hindu mythological forces of evil, unloaded.

  Seth winked at the children. “Your father is a damn funny sort of man. Behaving as though he own the place. Let me tell you that when you children born your father couldn’t feed you. Ask him. And see the gratitude I get? Everybody defying me these days. Or you don’t know?”

  “Savi! Myna! Kamla! Anand!” Shama called.

  “You know what your father was doing when I pick him up and marry him to your mother? You know? He tell you? He wasn’t even catching crab. He was just catching flies.”

  “Savi! Anand!”

  They hesitated, afraid of Seth, afraid of the house and Mr. Biswas.

  “Today, look! White suit, collar and tie. And me. Still in the same dirty clothes you see me with since you born. Gratitude, eh? But I will tell you children that if I leave them today, all of them-your father, mother and all-all of them start catching crab tomorrow, I guarantee you.”

  From somewhere in the house Mr. Biswas’s voice came, raised, indistinct, heated.

  Seth moved to the lorry.

  “Eh, Ewart?” he said gently to one of the loaders. “They was nice roses, eh?”

  Ewart smiled, his tongue over his top lip, and made sounds which committed him in no way.

  Seth jerked his chin toward the house, still the source of angry, indistinct words. He smiled. Then he stopped smiling and said, “We mustn’t pay any mind to these damn jackasses.”

  The children moved to the foot of the back steps, where they were hidden from Seth and the loaders.

  Mr. Biswas’s mutterings died away.

  Suddenly an obscenity cracked out from the house. The children were quite still. There was silence, even from the lorry. Anand could have wept. Then the corrugated iron sheets jangled again.

  A series of resonant crashes came from the kitchen.

  “Cut down the rose trees,” Mr. Biswas was shouting. “Cut them down. Break up everything else.”

  The children, now below the house, heard his footsteps on the floor above as he went from room to room, pulling things down.

  Anand walked under the house to the front, past Mr. Biswas’s abandoned bicycle. The fence cast a shadow over the pavement and part of the road. Anand leaned against the fence and envied the calm of the other houses in the street, the group of boys and young men, the cricket players, the night chatterers, around the lamp-post.

  Fresh noises came from the yard. It was not Mr. Biswas pulling things down, but Seth and Ewart and Ewart’s colleague putting up a shed for Seth’s lorries at the side of the house, over Mr. Biswas’s garden.

  On the road the shadows of houses and trees quickly lengthened, were distorted, became unrecognizable and finally dissolved into darkness.

  Mr. Biswas came down the front steps.

  “Come with me for a walk.”

  Anand would have liked to go, if only because he didn’t want to hurt by refusing. But he wanted more to inspect the damage and comfort Shama.

  The damage was slight. Mr. Biswas had ordered his destruction with economy. The mirror of Shama’s dressingtable had been unhinged and thrown on the bed, where it lay intact, reflecting the ceiling. The books had been knocked about a good deal; Selections from Sankamcharya had suffered especially. Mrs. Tulsi’s marble topped tables had all been overturned; the marble tops, crashing, must have been responsible for some of the more frightening noises. Many of the brass vases had been dented, and two potted palms had lost their pots without in any way losing their shape. The hatrack was in a semi-recumbent position against the half-wall of the front verandah, but it had been thrown there gently: a few hooks had snapped, but the glass was whole. In the kitchen no glass or china had been thrown, only noisy things like pots and pans and enamel plates.

  When Mr. Biswas returned his mood had changed.

  “Shama, how did those marble tops break?” he asked, mimicking Mrs. Tulsi. Then he acted himself. “Break, Mai? What break? Oh, marble top. Yes, Mai. It really break. It look as if it break. Now I wonder how that happened.” He examined the broken hooks of the hatrack. “Didn’t know metal was such a funny thing. Come and look, Savi. Is n
ot smooth inside, you know. Is more like packed sand.” As for the re-diffusion set, which he had kicked from room to room and disembowelled, he said, “I wanted to do that for a long time. The company always saying that they replace sets free.”

  When the engineers saw the battered box and asked what had happened, he said, “I feel we listen to it too hard.” They left a brand-new set in exchange, of the latest design.

  Every night Seth’s lorries rested in the shed at the side of the house. Mr. Biswas had never thought of Tulsi property as belonging to any particular person. Everything, the land at Green Vale, the shop at The Chase, belonged simply to the House. But the lorries were Seth’s.

  3. The Shortfalls Adventure

  Despite the solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. Only the death of Pundit Tulsi had prevented them from going back to India; and ever since they had talked, though less often than the old men who gathered in the arcade every evening, of moving on, to India, Demerara, Surinam. Mr. Biswas didn’t take such talk seriously. The old men would never see India again. And he could not imagine the Tulsis anywhere else except at Arwacas. Separate from their house, and lands, they would be separate from the labourers, tenants and friends who respected them for their piety and the memory of Pundit Tulsi; their Hindu status would be worthless and, as had happened during their descent on the house in Port of Spain, they would be only exotic.

  But when Shama went hurrying to Arwacas to give her news of Seth’s blasphemies, she found Hanuman House in commotion. The Tulsis had decided to move on. The clay-brick house was to be abandoned, and everyone was full of talk of the new estate at Shorthills, to the northeast of Port of Spain, among the mountains of the Northern Range.

  The High Street was bright and noisy as always at the Christmas season, though because of the war there were few imported goods in the shops. In the Tulsi Store there were no Christmas goods except for the antique black dolls, and no decorations except Mr. Biswas’s faded, peeling signs. Many shelves were empty; everything that could be of use at Shorthills had been packed.

  And Shama’s news was stale. The disagreement between Seth and the rest of the family had already turned to open war. He and his wife and children had left Hanuman House and were living in a back street not far away; they were taking no part in the move to Shortfalls. The cause of the quarrel remained obscure, each side accusing the other of ingratitude and treachery, and Seth abusing Shekhar in particular. Neither Mrs. Tulsi nor Shekhar had made any statement. Shekhar, besides, was seldom in Arwacas, and it was the sisters who carried on the quarrel. They had forbidden their children to speak to Seth’s children; Seth had forbidden his children to speak to the Tulsi children. Only Padma, Seth’s wife, was welcome, as Mrs. Tulsi’s sister, at Hanuman House; she could not be blamed for her marriage and continued to be respected for her age. Since the breach she had paid one clandestine visit to Hanuman House. The sisters regarded her loyalty as a tribute to the rightness of their cause; that she had had to come secretly was proof of Seth’s brutality.

  The crop season was at hand and the sugarcane fields, managerless, were open to the malice of those who bore the Tulsis grudges. Two fires had already been started and there were rumours that Seth was stirring up fresh trouble, claiming Tulsi property as his own. The husbands of some sisters said they had been threatened.

  Yet the talk was less of Seth than of the new estate. Shama heard its glories listed again and again. In the grounds of the estate house there was a cricket field and a swimming pool; the drive was lined with orange trees and gri-gri palms with slender white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves. The land itself was a wonder. The saman trees had lianas so strong and supple that one could swing on them. All day the immortelle trees dropped their red and yellow bird-shaped flowers through which one could whistle like a bird. Cocoa trees grew in the shade of the immortelles, coffee in the shade of the cocoa, and the hills were covered with tonka bean. Fruit trees, mango, orange, avocado pear, were so plentiful as to seem wild. And there were nutmeg trees, as well as cedar, poui, and the bois-canot which was light yet so springy and strong it made you a better cricket bat than the willow. The sisters spoke of the hills, the sweet springs and hidden waterfalls with all the excitement of people who had known only the hot, open plain, the flat acres of sugarcane and the muddy ricelands. Even if one didn’t have a way with land, as they had, if one did nothing, life could be rich at Shorthills. There was talk of dairy fanning; there was talk of growing grapefruit. More particularly, there was talk of rearing sheep, and of an idyllic project of giving one sheep to every child as his very own, the foundation, it was made to appear, of fabulous wealth. And there were horses on the estate: the children would learn to ride.

  Though it was never clear afterwards why this large decision had been taken so suddenly, and puzzling that the last corporate effort of the Tulsis should have been directed towards this uprooting, Shama left for Port of Spain full of enthusiasm. She wanted to be part of her family again, to share the adventure.

  “Horses?” Mr. Biswas said. “I bet you when you go there all you find is one old monkey swinging from the liana on the saman tree. I can’t understand this craziness that possess your family.”

  Shama spoke about the sheep.

  “Sheep?” Mr. Biswas said. “To ride?”

  She said that Seth was no longer part of the family and that two husbands who had left Hanuman House after disagreements with Seth had rejoined the family for the move to Shortfalls.

  Mr. Biswas didn’t listen. “About those sheep. Savi get one, Anand get one, Myna get one, Kamla get one. Make four in all. What are we going to do with four sheep. Breed more? To sell and kill? Hindus, eh? Feeding and fattening just in order to kill. Or you see the six of us sitting down and making wool from four sheep? You know how to make wool? Any of your family know how to make wool?”

  The children did not want to move to a place they didn’t know, and they were a little frightened of living with the Tulsis again. Above all, they did not want to be referred to as “country pupils” at school; the advantages-being released fifteen minutes earlier in the afternoon-could not make up for the shame. And Mr. Biswas turned Shama’s propaganda into a joke. He read out “The Emperor’s New Clothes” from Bell’s Standard Elocutionist; he drove imaginary flocks of sheep through the drawingroom, making bleating noises. As always during the holidays, he announced his arrival by ringing his bicycle bell from the road; then the children walked out in single file to meet him, staggering under imaginary loads. “Watch it, Savi!” he would call. “Those tonka beans are heavy like hell, you know.” Later he would ask, “Make a lot of wool today?” And once, when Anand came into the drawingroom just as the lavatory chain was pulled, Mr. Biswas said, “Walking back? What’s the matter? Forgot your horse at the waterfall?”

  Shama sulked.

  “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! Anand, Savi, Myna! Come and sing a Christmas carol for your mother.”

  They sang “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night”.

  Shama’s gloom, persisting, defeated them all. And that Christmas, the first they spent by themselves, was made more memorable by Shama’s gloom. She could not make icecream because she didn’t have a freezer, but she did what she could to turn the day into a miniature Hanuman House Christmas. She got up early and waited to be kissed, like Mrs. Tulsi. She spread a white cloth on the table and put out nuts and dates and red apples; she cooked an extravagant meal. She did everything punctiliously, but as one martyred. “Anybody would think you were making another baby,” Mr. Biswas said. And in his diary, a Sentinel reporter’s notebook which he had begun to fill at Mr. Biswas’s suggestion, as an additional exercise in English Composition and as practice in natural writing, Anand wrote, “This is the worst Christmas Day I have ever spent;” and, not forgetting the literary purpose of the
diary, added, “I feel like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.”

  But Shama never relented.

  Soon she received impressive assistance. The house became full of sisters and husbands on their way to and from Shorthills. The fine dresses, veils and jewellery of the sisters contrasted with their mood, which they seemed to get from Shama. They fixed Mr. Biswas with injured, helpless, accusing woman’s looks which he found difficult to ignore. The jokes about sheep and waterfalls and tonka beans stopped; he locked himself in his room. Sometimes Shama, after much coaxing from her sisters, dressed and went to Shorthills with them. She came back gloomier than ever, and when Mr. Biswas said, “Well, tell me, girl, tell me,” she did not reply and only cried silently. When Mrs. Tulsi came Shama cried all the time.

  Since the quarrel with Seth Mrs. Tulsi had ceased to be an invalid. She had left the Rose Room to direct the move from Arwacas and was, indeed, the source of the new enthusiasm. She tried to persuade Mr. Biswas to join the move, and Mr. Biswas, flattered at this attention, listened sympathetically. There would be no Seth, Mrs. Tulsi said; one could live for nothing at Shorthills; Mr. Biswas would be able to save his salary; there were many good sites for houses, and with timber from the estate Mr. Biswas might even build himself a little house.

  “Leave him, leave him,” Shama said. “All this talk about house was only to spite me.”

  “But if I keep my job in Port of Spain I don’t see how I would be able to do anything on the estate,” Mr. Biswas said.

  “Never mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

  He wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to move for Shama’s sake; or whether, without Seth, she needed as many men as possible around her; or whether she wanted no one, by his coolness, to make her question her own enthusiasm. And he agreed to go to Shorthills with her one morning, to have a look at the estate.

  He made Anand telephone the Sentinel and went with Mrs. Tulsi to the bus stop. There he suffered some moments of anxiety, for with her long white skirt, her veil, her arms braceleted from wrist to elbow and a thick gold yoke around her neck, Mrs. Tulsi was noticeable in any Port of Spain street, and Mr. Biswas feared he would be spotted by someone from the office. He leaned against the lamp-post, hiding his face.