A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  “Excuse me,” he said, and started on a slow progress down the row, people rising before him, people rising in the row behind, people settling down again in his wake, and “Excuse me,” he kept on saying, quite urbane, unaware of the disturbance. At last he came to his seat, dusted it with a handkerchief, stooping slightly in response to a request from someone behind. While he unbuttoned his jacket a burst of applause came from all. Absently casting a glance at the cricket field, Mr. Biswas applauded. He sat down, hitched up his trousers, crossed his legs, operated the cutter on the lid of the cigarette tin, extracted a cigarette and lit it. There was a tremendous burst of applause. Everyone in the stand stood up. Chairs scraped backwards, some overturned. Mr. Biswas rose and clapped with the others. What crowd there was had advanced on to the field; the cricketers were racing away, flitting blobs of white. The stumps had disappeared; the umpires, separated by the crowd, were walking sedately to the pavilion. The match was over. Mr. Biswas did not inspect the pitch. He went outside, unlocked his bicycle and cycled home, holding the tin of cigarettes in his hand.

  His one suit, hanging out to sun on Shama’s line in the backyard, did not make much of a showing against Govind’s five threepiece suits on Chinta’s line, which had to be supported by two pronged poles. But it was a beginning.

  The interviews completed, it was Mr. Biswas’s duty to analyze the information he had gathered. And here he floundered. He had investigated two hundred households; but after every classification he could never, on adding, get two hundred, and then he had to go through all the questionnaires again. He was dealing with a society that had no rules and patterns, and classifications were a chaotic business. He covered many sheets with long, snakelike addition sums, and the Slumberking was spread with his questionnaires. He pressed Shama and the children into service, damned them for their incompetence, dismissed them, and worked late into the night, squatting on a chair before the diningtable. The table was too high; sitting on pillows had proved unsatisfactory; so he squatted. Sometimes he threatened to cut down the legs of the diningtable by half and cursed the destitute who had made it.

  “This blasted thing is getting me sick,” he shouted, whenever Shama and Anand tried to get him to go to bed. “Getting me sick, I tell you. Sick. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t stay with my little destitutes.”

  “Everywhere you go, is the same,” Shama said.

  He did not tell her of his deeper fears. Already the department was under attack. Citizen, Taxpayer, Pro Bono Publico and others had written to the newspapers to ask exactly what the department was doing and to protest against the waste of taxpayers’ money. The party of Southern businessmen to which Shekhar belonged had started a campaign for the abolition of the department: a distinguishing cause, long sought, for no party had a programme, though all had the same objective: to make everyone in the colony rich and equal.

  This was Mr. Biswas’s first experience of public attack, and it did not console him that such letters had always been written, that the government in all its departments was being continually criticized by all the island’s parties. He dreaded opening the newspapers. Pro Bono Publico had been particularly nasty: he had written the same letter to all three papers, and there was a whole fortnight between the letter’s first appearance and its last. Nor did it console Mr. Biswas that no one else appeared to be worried. Shama considered the government unshakable; but she was Shama. Miss Logie could always go back to where she came from. The other officers had been seconded from various government departments and they could go back to where they came from. He could only go back to the Sentinel and fifty dollars a month less.

  He was glad he had written a mild letter of resignation. And, preparing for misfortune, he took to dropping in at the Sentinel office. The newspaper atmosphere never failed to excite him, and the welcome he received stilled his fears: he was regarded as one who had escaped and made good. Yet with every improvement in his condition, every saving, he felt more vulnerable: it was too good to last.

  In time he completed his charts (to display the classifications clearly he joined three double foolscap sheets and produced a scroll nearly five feet long, which made Miss Logie roar with laughter); and he wrote his report. Charts and report were typed and duplicated and, he was told, sent to various parts of the world. Then he was at last free to get villagers to sing or to take up cottage industries. He was given an area. And a memorandum informed him that, to enable him to move easily about his area, he was to be given a car, on a painless government loan.

  The rule of the house was followed again. The children were sworn to secrecy. Mr. Biswas brought home glossy booklets which had the aromatic smell of rich art paper and seemed to hold the smell of the new car. Secretly he took driving lessons and obtained a driving licence. Then, on a perfectly ordinary Saturday morning, he drove to the house in a brand-new Prefect, parked it casually before the gate, not quite parallel to the pavement, and walked up the front steps, ignoring the excitement that had broken out.

  “Vidiadhar! Come back here this minute, if you don’t want me to break your hand and your foot.”

  When Govind arrived at lunchtime he found his parking space occupied. His Chevrolet was larger, but old and unwashed; the mudguards had been dented, cut, welded; one door had been ducoed in a lustreless colour that did not exactly match; there was the H-for hire-on the number plate; and the windscreen was made ugly by various stickers and a circular plaque which carried Govind’s photograph and taxi-driver’s permit.

  “Matchbox,” Govind muttered. “Who leave this matchbox here?”

  He did not impress the orphans, and he did not diminish the energy of Mr. Biswas’s children who, ever since the car had been so carelessly parked by Mr. Biswas, had been wiping away dust and saying crossly how a new car collected dust. They found dust everywhere: on the body, the springs, the underside of the mudguards. They wiped and polished and discovered, with distress, that they were leaving scratches on the paintwork, very slight, but visible from certain angles. Myna reported this to Mr. Biswas.

  He was lying on the Slumberking, surrounded by many glossy booklets. He asked, “You hear anything? What they saying, eh?”

  “Govind say it is a matchbox.”

  “Matchbox, eh. English car, you know. Would last for years and still be running when his Chevrolet is on the rubbish dump.”

  He returned to studying an intricate drawing in red and black which explained the wiring of the car. He could not fully understand it, but it was his habit whenever he bought anything new, whether a pair of shoes or a bottle of patent medicine, to read all the literature provided.

  Kamla came into the room and said that the orphans had been fingering the car and blurring the shine.

  Mr. Biswas knelt on the bed and advanced on his knees to the front window. He lifted the curtain and, pushing a vested chest outside, shouted, “You! Boy! Leave the car alone! You think is a taxi?”

  The orphans scattered.

  “I coming to break the hands of some of you,” Basdai, the guardian widow, called. News of her advance and her pause to break a whip from the neem tree at the side of the yard was relayed by hoots and shouts and giggles. Some orphans, disdaining to run, were flogged on the pavement. There was crying, and Basdai said, “Well, some people satisfy now.”

  Shama stayed under the house and did not go out to see the car. And when Suniti, the former contortionist, now baby-swollen, who often stopped at the house on her way to and from Shortfalls after quarrels and reconciliations with her husband, and attempted to shock by talk of getting a divorce, and wore ugly and unsuitable frocks as a mark of her modernity, when Suniti came to Shama and said, “So, Aunt, you come a big-shot now. Car and thing, man!” Shama said, “Yes, my child,” as though the car was another of Mr. Biswas’s humiliating excesses. But she had begun to prepare another hamper.

  There was no need for Mr. Biswas to ask where they wanted to go. They all wanted to go to Balandra, to repeat the experience of delight: the
drive in the private car, the hampers, the beach.

  They went to Balandra, but it was a different experience. They did not attend to the landscape. They savoured the smell of new leather, the sweet smell of a new car. They listened to the soft, steady beat of the engine and compared it with the grinding and pounding of the vehicles they met. And they listened acutely for wrong noises. The grilled cover of an ashtray on one door did not sit properly and tinkled distractingly; they attempted to stop it with a matchstick. The ignition key had already been provided by Mr. Biswas with a chain. The chain struck the dashboard. That distracted them too. At one moment it looked as though it might rain; a few drops flecked the windshield. Anand promptly put the wiper on. “You’ll scratch the glass!” Mr. Biswas cried. They worried about putting their shoes on the floormats. They consulted the dashboard clock constantly, comparing it with those they saw on the road. They marvelled at the working of the speedometer.

  “Man was telling me,” Mr. Biswas said, “that these Prefect clocks go wrong in no time.”

  And they decided to call in on Ajodha.

  They parked the car in the road and walked around the house to the back verandah. Tara was in the kitchen. Ajodha was reading the Sunday Guardian. Mr. Biswas said they were going to the beach and had just dropped in for a minute. There was a pause, and each of them wondered whether they should tell.

  Ajodha commented on the sickliness of them all, pinched Anand’s arms and laughed when the boy winced. Then, as though to cure them at once, he made them drink glasses of fresh milk and had the servant girl peel some oranges from the bag in the corner of the verandah.

  Jagdat came in, his funeral clothes relieved by his broad, bright tie, his unbuttoned cuffs folded back above hairy wrists. He asked jocularly, “Is your car outside, Mohun?”

  The children studied their glasses of milk.

  Mr. Biswas said gently, “Yes, man.”

  Jagdat roared as at a good joke. “The old Mohun, man!”

  “Car?” Ajodha said, puzzled, petulant. “Mohun?”

  “A little Prefect,” Mr. Biswas said.

  “Some of those pre-war English cars can be very good,” Ajodha said.

  “This is a new one,” Mr. Biswas said. “Got it yesterday.”

  “Cardboard.” Ajodha bunched his fingers. “It will mash like cardboard.”

  “A drive, man, Mohun!” Jagdat said.

  The children, Shama, were alarmed. They looked at Mr. Biswas, Jagdat smiling, slapping his hands together.

  Mr. Biswas was aware of their alarm.

  “You are right, Mohun,” Ajodha said. “He will lick it up.”

  “It isn’t that,” Mr. Biswas said. “Seaside.” He looked at his Cyma watch. Then, noticing that Jagdat had stopped smiling, he added, “Running in, you know.”

  “I run in more cars than you,” Jagdat said angrily. “Bigger and better.”

  “He will lick it up,” Ajodha repeated.

  “It isn’t that,” Mr. Biswas said again.

  “Hear him,” Jagdat said. “But don’t give me that, eh, man. Listen. I was driving motorcars before you even learn to drive a donkey-cart. Look at me. You think I pining to drive in your sardine can? You think that?”

  Mr. Biswas looked embarrassed.

  The children didn’t mind. The car was safe.

  “Mohun! You think that?”

  At Jagdat’s scream the children jumped.

  “Jagdat,” Tara said.

  He strode out of the verandah into the yard, cursing.

  “I know what it is, Mohun,” Ajodha said. “The first time you get a car is always the same.” He waved at his yard, the graveyard of many vehicles.

  He went out with them to the road. When he saw the Prefect he hooted.

  “Six horse power?” he said. “Eight?”

  “Ten,” Anand said, pointing to the red disc below the bonnet.

  “Yes, ten.” He turned to Shama. “Well, niece, where are you going in your new car?”

  “Balandra.”

  “I hope the wind doesn’t blow too hard.”

  “Wind, Uncle?”

  “Or you will never get there. Poof! Blow you off the road, man.”

  They continued in gloom for some way.

  “Wanting to drive my car,” Mr. Biswas said. “As if I would let him. I know the way he does drive cars. Lick them up in no time at all. No respect for them. And getting vexed into the bargain, I ask you.”

  “I always say you have some low people in your family,” Shama said.

  “Another man wouldn’t even ask a thing like that,” Mr. Biswas said. “I wouldn’t ask it. Feel how the car sitting nice on the road? Feel it, Anand? Savi?”

  “Yes, Pa.”

  “Poof! Blow me off the road. You wouldn’t expect an old man like that to be jealous, eh? But that is exactly what he is. Jealous.”

  Yet whenever they saw another Prefect on the road they could not help noticing how small and fussy it looked; and this was strange, for their own car enclosed them securely and did not feel small in any way. They continued to listen for noises. Anand held the chain of the ignition key to keep it from striking the dashboard. When they stopped at Balandra they made sure the car was parked away from coconut trees; and they worried about the effect of the salt air on the body.

  Disaster came when they were leaving. The rear wheels sank into the hot loose sand. They watched the wheels spinning futilely, kicking up sand, and felt that the car had been irremediably damaged. They pushed coconut branches and coconut shells and bits of driftwood under the wheels and at last got the car out. Shama said she was convinced that the car now leaned to one side; the whole body, she said, had been strained.

  On Monday Anand cycled to school on the Royal Enfield, and the promise in the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare was thereby partly fulfilled. War conditions had at last permitted; in fact, the war had been over for some time.

  And during all this time W. C. Tuttle had remained quiet. He had not attempted to reply to Mr. Biswas’s new suits, the new car, the holiday; so that it seemed that these reverses, coming one after the other, had been too much for him. But when the glory of the Prefect began to fade, when it was accepted that floormats became dirty, when washing the car became a chore and was delegated by the children to Shama, when the dashboard clock stopped and no one noticed the tinkle of the ashtray lid, W. C. Tuttle with one stroke wiped out all Mr. Biswas’s advantages, and killed the rivalry by rising above it.

  Through Basdai, the widow, he announced that he had bought a house in Woodbrook.

  Mr. Biswas took the news badly. He neglected Shama’s consolations and picked quarrels with her. “ ‘What is for you is for you’,” he mocked. “So that is your philosophy, eh? I’ll tell you what your philosophy is. Catch him. Marry him. Throw him in a coal barrel. That is the philosophy of your family. Catch him and throw him in a coal barrel.” He became acutely sensitive to criticism of the Community Welfare Department. The books on social work and juvenile delinquency gathered dust on the diningtable, and he returned to his philosophers. The Tuttles’ gramophone played with infuriating gaiety, and he banged on the partition and shouted, “Some people still living here, you know.”

  Philosophically, he attempted to look on the brighter side. The garage problem would be simplified: with three vehicles the position had become impossible, and he had often had to leave his car on the road. There would be no gramophone. And he might even rent the rooms the Tuttles were vacating.

  But the days passed and the Tuttles didn’t move.

  “Why the hell doesn’t he take up his gramophone and naked woman and clear out?” Mr. Biswas asked Shama. “If he got this house.”

  Basdai came up with fresh information. The house was full of tenants, and W. C. Tuttle, for all his calm, was at that moment engaged in tortuous litigation to get them out.

  “Oh,” Mr. Biswas said. “Is that sort of house.” He imagined one of those rotting warrens he had visited when investigating destitutes. A
nd now at one moment Mr. Biswas wished W. C. Tuttle out of the house immediately and at another moment wanted him to fail in his litigation. “Throwing those poor people out. Where they going to live, eh? But your family don’t care about things like that.”

  One morning Mr. Biswas saw W. C. Tuttle leaving the house in a suit, tie and hat. And that afternoon Basdai reported that litigation had failed.

  “I thought he was going to Ace Studios to take out another photo,” Mr. Biswas said.

  Overjoyed, he did what he had so far resisted doing: he drove to see the house. To his disappointment he found that it was in a good area, on a whole lot: a sound, oldfashioned timber building that needed only a coat of paint.

  Not long after Basdai reported that the tenants were leaving. W. C. Tuttle had persuaded the City Council that the house was dangerous and had to be repaired, if not pulled down altogether.

  “Any old trick to throw the poor people out,” Mr. Biswas said. “Though I suppose with ten fat Tuttles jumping about no house could be safe. Repairs, eh? Just drive the old lorry down to Shorthills and cut down a few more trees, I suppose.”

  “That is exactly what he is doing,” Shama said, affronted at the piracy.

  “You want to know why I can’t get on in this place? That is why.” And even as he spoke he recognized that he was sounding like Bhandat in the concrete room.

  The Tuttles left without ceremony. Only Mrs. Tuttle, braving the general antagonism, kissed her sisters and those of the children she found in the way. She was sad but stern, and her manner suggested that though she had nothing to do with it, her husband’s piracy was justified and she was ready for trouble. Cowed, the sisters could only be sad in their turn, and the leave-taking was as tearful as if Mrs. Tuttle had just been married.