A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  His bicycle suffered. First the valve-caps were stolen; then the rubber handlegrips; then the bell; then the saddlebag in which he had transported his plunder from Shorthills; and one day the saddle itself. It was a pre-war Brooks saddle, highly desirable, new ones being unobtainable. Cycling that afternoon from the east end of the city to the west end, continually bobbing up and down, unable to sit, had been fatiguing and, judging by the stares, spectacular.

  There were other dangers. He was sometimes accosted by burly Negroes, pictures of health and strength; “Indian, give me some money.” Occasionally exact sums were demanded: “Indian, give me a shilling.” He had been used to such threatening requests from healthy Negroes outside the larger cinemas, but there the bright lights and the watchful police had given him the confidence to refuse. In the east end the lights were not bright and there were few policemen; and, not wishing to antagonize destitutes any more than was necessary, he took the precaution of going on his investigations with coppers distributed about his pockets. These he gave, and later recovered from the Sentinel as expenses.

  And other dangers. Once, climbing up a short flight of steps and pushing past the obstructing lace curtain in a room of exceptional cleanliness, he found himself confronted by a woman of robust appearance. Her large lips were grotesquely painted; rouge flared on her black cheeks. “You from the paper?” she asked. He nodded. “Give me some money,” she said, as roughly as any man. He gave her a penny. His promptness surprised her. She gazed at the coin with awe, then kissed it. “You don’t know what a thing it is, when a man give you money.” His experience on “Court Shorts” enabling him to recognize a piece of the prostitute’s lore, he made perfunctory inquiries and prepared to go. “Where my money?” the woman said. She followed him to the door, shouting, “The man-me right here, behind this curtain, and now he don’t want to pay.” She called the women and children of the yard and the yards on either side to witness her injury; and Mr. Biswas, feeling that his suit, his air of respectability, and the time of day gave some weight to the accusation, hurried guiltily away.

  It was some time before he could distinguish the applications of the fraudulent: people who merely wanted the publicity, those who wanted to work off grudges, those who had wanted merely to write, and an astonishing number of well-to-do shopkeepers, clerks and taxi-drivers who wanted money and publicity, and offered to share what money they got with Mr. Biswas. Many of his early visits were wasted, and since he had to provide a convincing destitute every morning he had sometimes had to take a mediocre destitute and exaggerate his situation.

  The authorities at the Sentinel continued neither to comment on his work nor to interfere; and this policy, which he had at first regarded as sinister, now made his position one of responsibility and power. His recommendations were the only things that mattered; his decision was final. He was given a by-line and described as “Our Special Investigator”, which won Anand some respect at school. And for the first time in his life Mr. Biswas was offered bribes. It was a mark of status. But, largely through a distrust of the Deserving Destees, he accepted nothing, though he did allow a crippled Negro joiner to make him a diningtable at a low price.

  He wished he hadn’t, for when the table came it made the congestion in his rooms absolute. Shama’s glass cabinet was taken to the inner room, and the table placed in his, parallel to the bed and separated from it by a way so narrow that, after bending down to put on his shoes, for instance, he often knocked his head when he straightened up; and if, having put his shoes on, he stood up too quickly, he struck the top of his hip-bone against the table. The generous joiner had made the table six feet long and nearly four feet wide, wide enough to make shutting and opening the side window possible only if you climbed on to the table. On his restless nights Mr. Biswas had been in the habit of relegating Anand to the foot of the Slumberking; now when this happened Anand left the bed in a huff and spent the rest of the night on the table, an arrangement Mr. Biswas tried to make permanent. The window had to remain open: the room would have been stifling otherwise. The afternoon rain came swiftly and violently. Shama could never mount the table quickly enough; and presently that part of the table directly below the window acquired a grey, black-spotted bloom which defied all Shama’s stainings, varnishings and polishings. “First and last diningtable I buy,” Mr. Biswas said.

  He was lying in vest and pants on the Slumberking one evening, reading, trying to ignore the buzzing and shrieks of the readers and learners, and W. C. Tuttle’s new gramophone record of a boy American called Bobby Breen singing “When There’s a Rainbow on the River”. Someone came into the room and Mr. Biswas, his back to the door, added to the pandemonium by wondering aloud who the hell was standing in his light.

  It was Shama. “Hurry up and get some clothes on,” she said excitedly. “Some people have come to see you.”

  He had a moment of panic. He had kept his address secret, yet since he had become investigator of destitutes he had been repeatedly traced. Once, indeed, he had been accosted by a destitute just as he was wheeling his bicycle between the high walls. He had pretended that he was investigating a deserving case, and as this had looked likely, he had managed to get rid of the man by taking down his particulars there and then, standing on the pavement, and promising to investigate him as soon as possible.

  Now he twisted his head and saw that Shama was smiling. Her excitement contained much self-satisfaction.

  “Who?” he asked, jumping out of bed, striking the top of his hip-bone against the diningtable. Standing between the table and the bed, it was impossible for him to bend down to get his shoes. He sat down carefully on the bed again and fished out a shoe.

  Shama said it was the widows from Shorthills.

  He relaxed. “I can’t see them outside?”

  “Is private.”

  “But how the hell I can see them inside here?” It was a problem. The widows would have to stand just inside the door, in the narrow area between the bed and the partition; and he would have to stand between the bed and the table. However, it was evening. He took the cotton sheet from below the pillow and threw it over himself.

  Shama went out to summon the widows, and the five widows entered almost at once, in their best white clothes and veils, their faces roughened by sun and rain, their demeanour grave and conspiratorial as it always was whenever they were hatching one of their disastrous schemes: poultry farming, dairy farming, sheep raising, vegetable growing.

  Mr. Biswas, the sheet pulled halfway up his chest, scratched his bare, slack arms. “Can’t ask you to sit down,” he said. “Nowhere to sit down. Except the table.”

  The widows didn’t smile. Their solemnity affected Mr. Biswas. He stopped scratching his arms and pulled the sheet up to his armpits. Only Shama, already conspicuous in her patched and dirty home-clothes, continued to smile.

  Sushila, the senior widow, came to the foot of the bed and spoke.

  Could they be considered Deserving Destitutes?

  She spoke in a steady, considered way.

  Mr. Biswas was too embarrassed to reply.

  Of course, Sushila said, they couldn’t all be Deserving Destitutes. But couldn’t one?

  It was impossible. However destitute they might be, they were relations. But they had put on their best clothes and jewellery and come all the way from Shorthills, and he could not reject them at once. “What about the name?” he asked.

  That had occurred to them. The Tulsi name need not be mentioned. Their husbands’ names could be used.

  Mr. Biswas thought rapidly. “But what about the children at school?”

  They had thought of that too. Sushila had no children. And as for the photograph: with veil, glasses and a few pieces of facial jewellery she could be effectively disguised.

  Mr. Biswas could think of no other delaying objection. He scratched his arms slowly.

  The widows gazed solemnly, then accusingly at him. As his silence lengthened, Shama’s smile turned to a look of annoyance;
in the end she, too, was accusing.

  Mr. Biswas slapped his left arm. “I would lose my job.”

  “But that time,” Sushila said, “when you were the Scarlet Pimpernel, you went around dropping tokens-okens to your mother, your brothers and all the children.”

  “That was different,” Mr. Biswas said. “I am sorry. Really.”

  The five widows were silent. For some time they remained immobile, staring at Mr. Biswas until their eyes went blank. He avoided their eyes, felt for cigarettes, and patted the bed until the matchbox rattled.

  Sushila started on a deep sigh, and one by one the widows, staring at Mr. Biswas’s forehead, sighed and shook their heads. Shama gave Mr. Biswas a look of perfect fury. Then she and the widows trooped out of the door.

  A child was being flogged downstairs. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone was playing “One Night When the Moon Was so Mellow”.

  “I am sorry,” Mr. Biswas said, to the back of the last widow. “But I would lose my job. Sorry.”

  And really he was sorry. But even if they were not relations, he could not have made their case convincing. How could one speak of a woman as destitute when she lived on her mother’s estate, in one of her mother’s three houses; when her brother was studying medicine in the United Kingdom; and when another brother was a figure of growing importance in the South, his name all over the paper, in the gossip columns, in the news columns for his business deals and political statements, in his own stylish advertisements (“Tulsi Theatres Trinidad proudly present…”)?

  It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas had another request which disturbed him. It came from Bhandat, Ajodha’s ostracized brother. Mr. Biswas had never seen Bhandat since Bhandat had left the rumshop in Pagotes for his Chinese mistress in Port of Spain; he had only heard from Jagdat, Bhandat’s son, that Bhandat was living in a poverty which he bore with fortitude. Mr. Biswas could do nothing for Bhandat. They were related, and again it would have been impossible to make a case for a man whose brother was known to be one of the wealthiest men in the colony.

  Bhandat had given an address in the city centre which might have led someone without a knowledge of the city’s slums to believe that Bhandat was a dealer in cocoa or sugar, an import-and-export king. In fact he lived in a tenement that lay between an importer of eastern goods and an exporter of sugar and copra. It was an old, Spanish style building. The flat faзade, diversified by irregular areas of missing plaster, small windows with broken shutters, and two rusty iron balconies, rose directly from the pavement.

  From the exporter came the rancid smell of copra and the heavy smell of sacked sugar, a smell quite different from the fetid, sweet smell of the sugar factories and buffalo ponds Mr. Biswas remembered from his boyhood. From the importer came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the smell of dust, straw, the urine and droppings of horses, donkeys and mules. At every impediment the gutters had developed a wrinkled film of scum, as white as the skin on boiled milk, with a piercing, acrid smell, which, blended and heated by the afternoon sun, rose suffocatingly from the road and pursued Mr. Biswas as he turned off into the sudden black shadow of an archway between the tenement and the exporter’s. He leaned his bicycle against the cool wall, fought off the bees from the exporter’s sugar, and made his way down a cobbled lane along which ran a shallow green and black gutter, glittering in the gloom. The lane opened out into a paved yard which was only slightly wider. On one side was the high blank wall of the exporter’s; on the other was the wall of the tenement, with windows that gaped black above dingy curtains. A leaning standpipe dripped on a mossy base and fed the gutter; at the end of the yard, their doors open, were a newspaper-littered lavatory and a roofless bathroom. Above was the sky, bright blue. Sunlight struck diagonally across the top of the exporter’s wall.

  Beyond the standpipe Mr. Biswas turned into a passage. He was passing a curtained doorway when a shrill voice cried out, almost gaily, “Mohun!”

  He felt he had become a boy again. All the sense of weakness and shame returned.

  It was a low, windowless room, lit only by the light from the passage. A folding screen barred off one corner. In another corner there was a bed, and from it came gurgling happy sounds. Bhandat was not decrepit. Mr. Biswas, who had feared to find him shrunken to a melodramatic Indian decrepitude, was relieved. The face was thinner; but the bumps on the top lip were the same; the eyebrows, still those of a worrying man, bunched over eyes that were still bright.

  Bhandat raised thin arms. “You are my child, Mohun. Come.” The shrillness in the voice was new.

  “How are you, Uncle?”

  Bhandat didn’t seem to hear. “Come, come. You may think you are a big man, but to me you are still my child. Come, let me kiss you.”

  Mr. Biswas stood on the sugarsack rug and bent over the stale-smelling bed. He was at once pulled vigorously down. He saw that the distempered ceiling and walls were coated with dust and soot, felt Bhandat’s unshaven chin scraping against his neck, felt Bhandat’s dry lips on his cheek. Then he cried out. Bhandat had pulled sharply at his hair. He jumped back and Bhandat hooted.

  Waiting for Bhandat to calm down, Mr. Biswas looked around the room. Clothes hung on one wall from nails that had been driven into the mortar between the stones. On the gritty concrete floor what had at first looked like bundles of clothes turned out to be stacks of newspapers. Next to the screen there was a small table with more newspapers, a cheap writingpad, a bottle of ink and a chewed pen: it was at that table, no doubt, that Bhandat had written his letter.

  “You are examining my mansion, Mohun?”

  Mr. Biswas refused to be moved. “I don’t know. It seems to me that you are all right here. You should see how some people live.” And he nearly added, “You should see how I live.”

  “I am an old man,” Bhandat said, in his new, hooting voice. His eyes became wet, and a small, unreliable smile appeared on his lips.

  Mr. Biswas edged further away from the bed.

  Sounds came from behind the dingy cotton-print screen: a clink of a coal-pot ring, the striking of a match, brisk fanning. The Chinese woman. A thrill of curiosity ran through Mr. Biswas. White charcoal smoke rose above the screen, coiled about the room and escaped, racing, through the door.

  “Why do you use Lux Toilet Soap?”

  Mr. Biswas saw that Bhandat was staring at him earnestly. “Lux Toilet? I think we use Palmolive. A green thing-”

  Bhandat said in English, “I use Lux Toilet Soap because it is the soap used by lovely film stars.”

  Mr. Biswas was disturbed.

  Bhandat turned on his side and began to rummage among the newspapers on the floor. “None of my worthless sons ever come to see me. You are the only one, Mohun. But you were always like that.” He frowned at a newspaper. “No. This one is over. Fernandes Rum. The perfect round in every circle. That is the sort of thing they want. Rum, Mohun. Remember? Ah! Yes, this is the one.” He handed Mr. Biswas a newspaper and Mr. Biswas read the details of the Lux slogan competition. “Help an old man, Mohun. Tell me why you use Lux Toilet Soap.”

  Mr. Biswas said, “I use Lux Toilet Soap because it is antiseptic, refreshing, fragrant and inexpensive.”

  Bhandat frowned. The words had made no impression on him. And Mr. Biswas knew for sure then, what he had intuited and dismissed: Bhandat was deaf.

  “Write it down, Mohun,” Bhandat cried. “Write it down before I forget it. I don’t have any luck with these things. Crosswords. Missing Ball competitions. Slogans. They are all the same.”

  While Mr. Biswas wrote, Bhandat began on an account of his life. His deafness must have occurred some time ago: he spoke in complete sentences, which gave his talk a literary quality. It was a familiar story of jobs acquired and lost, great enterprises which had failed, wonderful opportunities Bhandat had not taken because of his own honesty or the dishonesty of his associates, all of whom were now famous and rich.

  He liked the slogan. “This is bound to win, Mohun.
Now, what about the crosswords, Mohun. Couldn’t you make me win just one?”

  Mr. Biswas was saved from replying, for just then the woman came from behind the screen. She moved briskly, furtively, setting an enamel plate with small yellow cakes on the table, pulling out the chair, placing it next to where Mr. Biswas stood, then hurrying behind the screen again. She was middle-aged, very thin, with a long neck and a small face. She gave an impression of perpendicularity: her unwashed black hair hung straight, her washed-out blue cotton dress dropped straight, her thin legs were straight.

  Mr. Biswas looked at Bhandat for signs of embarrassment. But Bhandat went on talking undisturbed about the competitions he had entered and lost.

  The woman came out again with two tall enamel cups of tea. She put a cup on the table and pushed the plate of cakes towards Mr. Biswas, who was now seated on the chair she had pulled out. She gave the other cup to Bhandat, who sat up to receive it, handing her the sheet of paper on which Mr. Biswas had written the slogan.

  Bhandat sipped his tea, and for a moment he could have been Ajodha. The gesture was the same: the slow bringing of the cup to the lips, the half-closing of the eyes, the lips resting on the brim, the blowing at the tea. Then came the sip with closed eyes, as though the drink had been consecrated; and peace spread across the tormented face.

  He opened his eyes: torment returned. “It good, eh?” he said to the woman in English. She glanced hastily at Mr. Biswas. She seemed anxious to return behind her screen.

  “He is a big man now,” Bhandat said. “But you know, I did know him when he was a boy so high.” He gave a hoot. “Yes, so high.”

  Mr. Biswas tried to avoid Bhandat’s gaze by taking one of the yellow cakes and biting at it.