A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  4. The Chase

  THE CHASE was a long, straggling settlement of mud huts in the heart of the sugarcane area. Few outsiders went to The Chase. The people who lived there worked on the estates and the roads. The world beyond the sugarcane fields was remote and the village was linked to it only by villagers’ carts and bicycles, wholesalers’ vans and lorries, and an occasional private motorbus that ran to no timetable and along no fixed route.

  For Mr Biswas it was like returning to the village where he had spent his early years. Only, now the surrounding darkness and mystery had gone. He knew what lay beyond the sugarcane fields and where the roads went. They went to villages which were just like The Chase; they went to ramshackle towns where, perhaps, some store or café was decorated by his signs.

  To such towns the villagers made arduous and infrequent excursions to obtain dry goods, to make complaints to the police, to appear in court; for The Chase could support neither a dry goods store nor a police station nor even a school. Its two most important public buildings were the two rumshops. And it abounded in small food-shops, one of which was Mr Biswas’s.

  Mr Biswas’s shop was a short, narrow room with a rusty galvanized iron roof. The concrete floor, barely higher than the earth, was abraded to a pebbly roughness and encrusted with dirt. The walls leaned and sagged; the concrete plaster had cracked and flaked off in many places, revealing mud, tapia grass and bamboo strips. The walls shook easily, but the tapia grass and bamboo strips had given them an astonishing resilience; so that although for the next six years Mr Biswas never ceased to feel an anxiety when someone leaned on the walls or flung sacks of sugar or flour against them, the walls never fell down, never deteriorated beyond the limberness in which he had found them.

  At the back of the shop there were two rooms with un-plastered mud walls and a roof of old, rough thatch that extended over an open gallery at one side. The floor of beaten earth had disintegrated and the chickens of the neighbourhood came there to take dust-baths during the heat of the day.

  The kitchen was a derelict makeshift structure in the yard. It had crooked tree branches for uprights, assorted bits of corrugated iron for roof, and almost anything for walls: sections of tin, strips of canvas and bamboo, boards from shop boxes. One wall had a space for a window, but the rectangular shape that had been intended had become a rhomboid. The window itself, ill-fitting lengths of unmatched wood held together by two crossbars split by massive nails that had been hammered back flat and grown rusty, the window itself was rectangular and was unable to fill the rhomboid vacancy. Though it was small and stood in the open, the kitchen was always dark. The window by day and the flambeau or fire by night showed that the walls were black and fluffy with soot, as though a new species of spider had been bred there, with the ability to spin webs as black and furry as its legs. Everything smelled of woodsmoke.

  But there was space. Space to the back, right up to a boundary that was lost amid a tangle of tall bush, abandoned land called by the villagers and later by Mr Biswas ‘the ’ban-don’. There was more abandoned land to one side; once a well-tilled field, it was now a pasture for those cows of the village that could feed on its weeds and nettles and razor-sharp grass, wild, scrambling growths.

  The Tulsis had bought this unprofitable property on the advice of Seth. He was a member of a Local Road Board and had received information, later proved to be worthless, that a trunk road was to be driven through the very spot on which Mr Biswas’s shop stood.

  Mr Biswas moved from Hanuman House with little trouble. He had little to move: his clothes, a few books and magazines, his painting equipment. Shama had much more. She had many clothes; and just before she left, she was given bolts of cloth by Mrs Tulsi straight from the shelves of the Tulsi Store. It was Shama, too, who thought of buying pots and pans and cups and plates; and though she got them at cost price from the Tulsi Store, Mr Biswas was disturbed to see that his savings, sign-writing money accumulated during his stay at Hanuman House, had begun to melt even before he had moved.

  Their goods barely filled a donkey-cart, and their arrival at The Chase was noted by a waiting crowd with pity and some hostility. The hostility came from rival shopkeepers. And Mr Biswas, shakily perched on one of Shama’s bundles, with the clang of those cost-price but expensive pans in his ears, was unable to ignore the hostility of Shama herself. She had kept up her martyr’s attitude throughout the journey, silently staring at the road through the piquets of the cart, holding on her lap a box containing a Japanese coffee-set of intricate and fantastic design, part of a consignment the Tulsi Store had not been able to sell after three years, and given by Seth as a belated wedding present. Nor did Mr Biswas fail to notice that The Chase appeared to be managing quite well without his shop, which had been closed, as he knew, for many months.

  ‘Is the sort of place you could build up,’ he said to the carter.

  The carter nodded non-committally, looking neither at Mr Biswas nor at the crowd but straight at his donkey, and aiming a gentle lash at the animal’s eye.

  And Shama sighed: the sigh which now told Mr Biswas that she thought him stupid, boring and shaming.

  The cart stopped.

  ‘Whoa!’ some boys shouted.

  Looking stern, preoccupied and, as he hoped, dangerous, Mr Biswas became very busy, helping the carter to unload. They carried bundles and boxes through the back rooms smelling of dust to the dark shop, warm in the late afternoon with the smell of coarse brown sugar and stale coconut oil. The white lines of light between the boards of the front door carne from a bright, open world; movements inside the shop sounded furtive.

  Their possessions, spread out on the counter, didn’t take up much space.

  ‘Only the first load,’ Mr Biswas said to the carter. ‘Have a pile of other stuff to come.’

  The carter said nothing.

  ‘Oh.’ Mr Biswas remembered the carter had to be paid. More money.

  The man took the dirty blue dollar-note and left.

  ‘Is the last time he carry anything for me,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I could tell him that.’

  There was silence in the closed, stuffy shop.

  ‘Is the sort of place you could build up,’ Mr Biswas said.

  His eyes became accustomed to the darkness and he looked about him. On a top shelf he saw some tins, apparently abandoned by the previous shopkeeper. About this person Mr Biswas now began to speculate. There was ambition and despair in these tins: their faded labels had been nibbled by rats and stained by flies; some tins had no labels at all.

  He heard the carter shouting at his donkey as the cart turned in the narrow road; villagers gave advice, boys shouted encouragement, a whip repeatedly cracked, hoof beats sounded awkward and irregular; then, with a jangle of harness, a cracking of the whip and a shout, the cart was off, cheered by the village boys.

  Shama started to cry. But this time she didn’t cry silently, with the tears running down from the expressionless eyes. She sobbed like a child, leaning over the box with the Japanese coffee-set on the counter. ‘You wanted this. You wanted to paddle your own canoe. In all my life I never was so shamed as today. People standing up and laughing. This is what you want to paddle your own canoe with.’ She covered her eyes with one hand and waved at the bundles on the counter with the other.

  He wanted to comfort her. But he needed comfort himself. How lonely the shop was! And how frightening! He had never thought it would be like this when he found himself in an establishment of his own. It was late afternoon; Hanuman House would be warm and noisy with activity. Here he was afraid to disturb the silence, afraid to open the door of the shop, to step into the light.

  And in the end it was Shama who gave him comfort. For presently she stopped crying, gave a long, decisive blow to her nose and began sweeping, setting up, putting away. He followed her about, watching, offering help, glad to be told to do something and enjoying it when she reproved him for doing it badly.

  In his careless retreat the previous tenant h
ad abandoned two articles of furniture to the Tulsis; these had now passed to Mr Biswas. In one of the back rooms there was a large, canopy-less cast iron fourposter whose black enamel paint was chipped and lacklustre.

  ‘Smell,’ Shama said, holding a bedboard to Mr Biswas’s nose. It had the piercing acrid smell of bedbugs. She doused the boards with kerosene. It wouldn’t kill the bugs, she said. But it would keep them quiet for the time being.

  And for years Mr Biswas was to know, particularly on a Saturday morning, the smell of kerosene and bedbugs. The boards changed; the mattress changed; but the bugs remained, following the fourposter wherever it went, from The Chase to Green Vale to Port of Spain to the house at Shorthills and, finally, to the house in Sikkim Street, where it nearly filled one of the two bedrooms on the upper floor.

  The other piece of furniture that came with the shop was a kitchen table, small, low, and so neatly made that it stood, not in the kitchen in the yard, but in a bedroom. It was on this table, after much dusting and washing and wiping, that Shama placed her clothes and bolts of cloth; the parcel with the Japanese coffee-set she put below it, on the earth floor. Mr Biswas no longer thought the coffee-set, and Shama’s attitude to it, absurd. Feeling grateful to Shama, he felt tender towards her coffee-set. He was not prepared for such a change in himself; but then he was astonished at the change in Shama. Till the last she had protested at leaving Hanuman House, but now she behaved as though she moved into a derelict house every day. Her actions were assertive, wasteful and unnecessarily noisy. They filled shop and house; they banished silence and loneliness.

  And, further miracle, she produced a meal from that kitchen in the yard. He could not look on it as simply food. For the first time a meal had been prepared in a house which was his own. He felt abashed; and was glad that Shama did not treat it as an occasion. Only, feeding him at the table in the bedroom, by the light of a brand-new cost-price oil lamp from the Tulsi Store, she didn’t sigh or stare or look weary and impatient as she had done in the lotus-decorated long room at Hanuman House.

  In a few weeks the house became cleaner and habitable. The atmosphere of decay and disuse, while not disappearing, was made to retreat and held in check. Nothing could be done about the walls of the shop; no amount of washing could remove the smell of oil and sugar; the lower shelves and the two planks on the concrete floor behind the counter remained black with grease that had dried, and rough with dust that had stuck. They poured disinfectant everywhere, until they were almost choked by its fumes. But as the days passed, their zeal abated. They remembered the previous tenants less and less; and the grime, increasingly familiar, eventually became their own, and therefore supportable. Only slight improvements were made to the kitchen. ‘It standing up just by the grace of God,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Pull out one board, and the whole thing tumble down.’ The earth floor of the bedrooms and gallery was mended, packed a little higher and plastered to a smooth, grey dustlessness. The Japanese coffee-set was taken out of its box and displayed on the table, where it appeared to be in peril; but Shama said it would remain there only until a better place was found.

  And that was what Mr Biswas continued to feel about their venture: that it was temporary and not quite real, and it didn’t matter how it was arranged. He had felt that on the first afternoon; and the feeling lasted until he left The Chase. Real life was to begin for them soon, and elsewhere. The Chase was a pause, a preparation.

  In the meantime he became a shopkeeper. Selling had seemed to him such an easy way of making a living he had often wondered why people bothered to do anything else. On market days in Pagotes, for instance, you could buy a bag of flour, open it, sit down before it with a scoop and a set of scales on one side; and, ridiculously, people came and bought your flour and put money in your pocket. It looked such a simple process that Mr Biswas felt it wouldn’t work if he tried it. But when he had stocked the shop, using the rest of his savings, and opened his doors, he found that people did come to him and buy and hand over real money. After every sale in those early days he felt he had pulled off a deep confidence trick, and had difficulty in hiding his exultation.

  He thought of the tins on the top shelf – he had not got around to taking them down – and was as puzzled by his success as he was delighted by it. At the end of the first month he found he had made the vast profit of thirty-seven dollars. He knew nothing about keeping books and it was Shama who had suggested that he should make notes of goods given on credit on squares of brown shop-paper. It was Shama who suggested that these squares should be spiked. It was Shama who made the spike. And it was Shama who kept the accounts, writing in her round, stylish, slow Mission-school hand in a Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook (the words were printed on the cover).

  During these weeks the strangeness of their solitude lessened. But they were as yet unused to their new relationship and though they never quarrelled their talk remained impersonal and constrained. The solitude embarrassed Mr Biswas by the intimacy it imposed, especially during the serving of food. The atmosphere of service and devotion was flattering, but at the same time unsettling. It strained Mr Biswas and he was even glad when abruptly, it broke.

  One evening Shama said, ‘We must have a house-blessing ceremony, and get Hari to bless the shop and house, and have Mai and Uncle and everybody else here.’

  He was taken completely by surprise, and lost his temper. ‘What the hell you think I look like?’ he asked in English. ‘The Maharajah of Barrackpore? And what the hell for I should get Hari to come and bless this place? This place? Look for yourself.’ He pointed to the kitchen and slapped the wall of the shop. ‘Is bad enough as it is. To feed your family on top of all this is really going too damn far.’

  And Shama did something he hadn’t heard for weeks: she sighed, the old weary Shama sigh. And she said nothing.

  In the days that followed he learned something new: how a woman nagged. The very word, nag, was known to him only from foreign books and magazines. It had puzzled him. Living in a wife-beating society, he couldn’t understand why women were even allowed to nag or how nagging could have any effect. He saw that there were exceptional women, Mrs Tulsi and Tara, for example, who could never be beaten. But most of the women he knew were like Sushila, the widowed Tulsi daughter. She talked with pride of the beatings she had received from her short-lived husband. She regarded them as a necessary part of her training and often attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband.

  To this class Mr Biswas belonged. So Shama nagged; and nagged so well that from the first he knew she was nagging. It amazed him that someone so young should show herself so competent in such an alien skill. But there were things which should have warned him. She had never run a house, but at The Chase she had always behaved like an experienced housewife. Then there was her pregnancy. She took that as easily as if she had borne many children; she never spoke about it, ate no special foods, made no special preparations, and generally behaved so normally that at times he forgot she was pregnant.

  So Shama nagged. With her gloom and a refusal to speak, first of all; then with a precise, economical and noisy efficiency. She didn’t ignore Mr Biswas. She made it clear that she noted his presence, and that it filled her with despair. At nights, next to him, but without touching him, she sighed loudly and blew her nose just at those moments when he was dropping off to sleep. She turned heavily and impatiently from side to side.

  For the first two days he pretended not to notice.

  On the third day he asked, ‘What happen to you?’

  She didn’t reply, sitting next to him at the table, sighing, watching him while he ate. He asked again.

  She said, ‘Talk about ungrateful!’ and was up and out of the room.

  He ate with diminished appetite.

  That night Shama blew her nose repeatedly, and turned over in bed.

  Mr Biswas prepared to stick it out.

  Then Shama was silent.

  Mr
Biswas thought he had won.

  Then Shama snuffled, very low, as though ashamed that the sound had escaped her.

  Mr Biswas grew very still, and listened to his own breathing. It sounded regular and unnatural. He opened his eyes and looked up at the thatched roof. He could make out the rafters and the loose straws that hung straight down, threatening to fall into his eyes.

  Shama groaned and blew her nose loudly, once, twice, three times. Then she got out of the cast iron fourposter and it rattled. Suddenly silent and energetic, she went out of the room. The latrine was right at the back of her yard.

  When she came back, minutes later, he acknowledged defeat. ‘What happen, man?’ he asked. ‘You can’t sleep?’

  ‘I been sleeping sound sound,’ she said.

  The next morning he said, ‘All right, send for the old queen and the big boss and Hari and the gods and everybody else and get the shop bless.’

  Shama was determined to do things well. Three labourers worked for three days to put up a large tent in the yard. It was a simple affair, with bamboo uprights and a roof of coconut branches; but the bamboos had to be transported from a neighbouring village, and the labourers, after many aggrieved and unintelligible mutterings about the Workmen’s Compensation Act, had to be paid extra for climbing the coconut trees to get branches. Enormous quantities of food were bought; and, to assist in its preparation, sisters began arriving at The Chase three days before the house-blessing ceremony. With their arrival Mr Biswas’s protests ceased. He consoled himself with the thought that not all of the Tulsis would come.

  They all came, except Seth, Miss Blackie and the two gods.

  ‘Owad and Shekhar learning,’ Mrs Tulsi said in English, meaning only that the gods were at school.

  She wandered about the yard, opening doors, inspecting, no expression on her face.

  Hari, the holy man, who was to be the pundit that day, was just as Mr Biswas remembered him, just as soft-spoken and lymphatic. His felt hat sat softly on his head. He greeted Mr Biswas without rancour, without pleasure, without interest. Then he went into the bedroom that was reserved for him and changed into his pundit’s garb, which he had brought in a small cardboard suitcase. When he emerged as a pundit everyone treated him with a new respect.