A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  Moti didn’t go away. He put a Paradise Plum in his mouth and said, ‘I am glad you don’t stock lard. I respect you for it.’ He paused and, closing his eyes, crushed the Paradise Plum between his jaws. ‘I am glad to see a man in your position not giving up his religion for the sake of a few cents. Do you know that these days some Hindu shopkeepers are actually selling salt beef with their own hands? Just for the few extra cents.’

  Mr Biswas knew, and regretted the squeamishness which preventéd him from doing the same.

  ‘And look at that other thing,’ Moti said, talking through the crushed Paradise Plum. ‘Did you hear about the pig?’

  ‘The Tulsi pig? Doesn’t surprise me at all.’

  ‘Still, the blessing is that not everyone is like that. You, for instance. And Seebaran. Do you know Seebaran?’

  ‘Seebaran?’

  ‘Don’t know Seebaran! L. S. Seebaran? The man who has been handling practically all the work in the Petty Civil.’

  ‘Oh, him,’ Mr Biswas said, still in the dark.

  ‘Very strict Hindu. And one of the best lawyers here too, I can tell you. We should be proud of him. The man who was here before you – what’s his name? – anyway, the man before you had a lot to thank Seebaran for. He would be a pauper today if it hadn’t been for Seebaran.’

  Moti put another Paradise Plum in his mouth and absently considered the meagrely filled shelves. Mr Biswas followed Moti’s gaze, which came to rest on the tins with half-eaten labels, left there by the man Seebaran had assisted.

  ‘So everybody going to Dookhie, eh?’ Moti said, more familiar now, and speaking in English. Dookhie was the newest shopkeeper in The Chase. ‘Is a shame. Is a shame the way some people spend their whole life living on credit. Is a form of robbery. Take Mungroo. You know Mungroo?’

  Mr Biswas knew him well.

  ‘A man like Mungroo should be in jail,’ Moti said. ‘I think so too.’

  ‘Is not,’ Moti said judiciously, closing his eyes and cracking the Paradise Plum, ‘as if he was a pauper and can’t afford to pay. Mungroo richer than you and me could ever hope to be, you hear.’ This was news to Mr Biswas.

  ‘Man should be in jail,’ Moti repeated.

  Mr Biswas was about to say that he hadn’t been fooled by Mungroo when Moti said, ‘He don’t rob the rude and crude shopkeepers, people like himself. He frighten they give him a good dose of licks. No, he does look for nice people with nice soft heart, and is them he does rob. Mungroo see you, he think you look nice, and next day his wife come round for two cents this and three cents that, and she forget that she ain’t got no money, and if you could wait till next pay day. Well, you wrap up the goods in good strong paper-bag, you send she home happy, and you sit down and wait till next day. Next pay day Mungroo forget. His wife forget. They too busy killing chicken and buying rum to remember you. Two-three days later, eh-eh, wife suddenly remember you. She bawling again. She want more trust. Don’t tell me about Mungroo. I know him too good. Man should be in jail, if anybody had the guts to throw him there.’

  The account was telescoped and dramatized, but Mr Biswas recognized its truth. He felt exposed, and said nothing.

  ‘Just show me your accounts,’ Moti said. ‘Just to see how much Mungroo owe you.’

  Mr Biswas took down the spike from the nail between the shelves where it hung above a faded advertisement for Cydrax, a beverage which had not caught the village’s fancy. The spike was now a tall, feathery, multi-coloured brush, with the papers at the bottom as brittle and curling as dead leaves.

  ‘Pappa!’ Moti said, and became graver and graver as he looked through the papers. He could not look very far because to get at the lower papers he would have had to remove those at the top altogether. He turned away from Mr Biswas and contemplated the blackness outside, staring past the doorway against which the rear wheel of his decrepit bicycle could be seen. Sadly he sucked his Paradise Plum. ‘Pity you don’t know Seebaran. Seebaran woulda fix you up in two twos. He help out the man before you. Otherwise the man would be a pauper now, man. A pauper. Is a funny thing, but you don’t expect to find people getting fat and rich on credit while the poor shopkeeper, who give the credit, not getting enough to eat, wearing rags, watching his children starve, watching them sick.’

  Mr Biswas, seeing himself as the hero of one of Misir’s stories, could scarcely hide his alarm.

  ‘All right, then, man.’ Moti fixed his bicycle clips around his ankles. ‘I got to go. Thanks for the chat. I hope everything go all right with you.’

  ‘But you know Seebaran,’ Mr Biswas said.

  ‘Know him, yes. But I don’t know whether I could just go and ask him to help out a friend of mine. Busy man, you know. Handling nearly all the work in the Petty Civil.’

  ‘Still, you could tell him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Moti said, without conviction. ‘I could tell him. But Seebaran is a big man. You can’t go troubling him with just one or two little things.’

  Mr Biswas brushed his hand up and down the papers on the spike. ‘It have a lot of work here for him,’ he said aggressively. ‘You tell him.’

  ‘All right. I go tell him.’ Moti got on his cycle. ‘But I ain’t promising nothing.’

  Savi was asleep when Mr Biswas went to the back room.

  ‘Going to settle Mungroo and the rest of them,’ Mr Biswas said to Shama. ‘Putting Seebaran on their tail.’

  ‘Who is Seebaran?’

  ‘Who is Seebaran! You mean you don’t know Seebaran? The man who handling practically all the work in the Petty Civil.’

  ‘I know all that. I hear what the man was saying too.’ ‘Why the hell you ask me then for?’

  ‘You don’t think you better get advice before you start bringing up people?’

  ‘Advice? Who from? The old thug and the old she-fox? I know they know everything. You don’t have to tell me that. But they know law?’

  ‘Seth bring up a lot of people.’

  ‘And every time he bring somebody up, he lose. You don’t have to tell me that either. Everybody in Arwacas know about Seth and the people he bring up. He don’t know everything.’

  ‘He used to study doctor. Doctor or druggist.’

  ‘Used to study doctor! Horse-doctor, if you ask me. He look like a doctor to you? You ever look at his hands? Fat, thick. Can’t even hold a pencil properly.’

  ‘He cut open that boil Chanrouti had the other day.’

  ‘And yes. That is another thing I want to tell you, eh. In advance. In advance. I don’t want Seth cutting open any boil on any of my children. And I don’t want him prescribing any blasted sulphur and condensed milk for any of them either.’

  Mungroo was the leader of the village stick-fighters. He was a tall, wiry, surly man, made ferocious in appearance by a large handlebar moustache, for which the villagers called him Moush, then Moach. As a stickman he was a champion. He had reach and skill, and his responses were miraculous. He converted a parry into a lunge so fluently it seemed to be a single action. He fought every duel as though he had rehearsed its every development. It was Mungroo who had organized the young men of The Chase into a fighting band, ready to defend the honour of the village on the days of the Christian Carnival and the Muslim Hosein. Under his direction and in his yard they practised assiduously in the evenings by the light of flambeaux. The village boys went to watch this evening practice. So, despite Shama’s disapproval, did Mr Biswas.

  As much as the game he liked the making of the sticks. Designs were cut into the bark of the poui, which was then roasted in a bonfire; the burnt bark was peeled off, leaving the design burnt into the white wood. There was no scent as pleasant as that of barely roasted poui: faint, yet so lasting it seemed to come from afar, from some immeasurable depth captive within the wood: as faint as the scent of the pouis Raghu roasted in the village like this, in a yard like this, in a bonfire like this: bringing sensations, not pictures, of an evening meal being cooked over a fire that shone on a mud wall and kept out the night, o
f cool, new, unused mornings, of rain muffled on a thatched roof and warmth below it: sensations as faint as the scent of the poui itself, but sadly evanescent, refusing to be seized or to be translated into a concrete memory.

  Afterwards, the sticks, their heads carved, were soaked in coconut oil in bamboo cylinders, to give them greater strength and resilience. Then Mungroo took the sticks to an old stickman he knew, to have them ‘mounted’ with the spirit of a dead Spaniard. So that the ritual ended in romance, awe and mystery. For the Spaniards, Mr Biswas knew, had surrendered the island one hundred years before, and their descendants had disappeared; yet they had left a memory of reckless valour, and this memory had passed to people who came from another continent and didn’t know what a Spaniard was, people who, in their huts of mud and grass where time and distance were obliterated, still frightened their children with the name of Alexander, of whose greatness they knew nothing.

  By profession Mungroo was a roadmender. He preferred to say that he worked for the government, and he preferred not to work at all. He made it plain that because he defended the honour of the village, the village owed him a living. He exacted contributions for pitch-oil for the flambeaux, for the ‘mounting’ fees, and for the expensive costumes the stick-fighters wore on days of battle. At first Mr Biswas contributed willingly. Then Mungroo, the better to devote himself to his art, abandoned the road-gang for weeks at a time and lived on credit from Mr Biswas and other shopkeepers. Mr Biswas admired Mungroo. He felt it would be disloyal to refuse Mungroo credit, unbecoming to remind him of his debts, and dangerous to do either. Mungroo became steadily more demanding. Mr Biswas complained to other customers; they told Mungroo. Mungroo didn’t reply, as Mr Biswas had feared, with violence, but with a dignity which, though it struck Mr Biswas as hollow, hurt him as deeply as the silences and sighs of Shama. Mungroo refused to speak to Mr Biswas and spat, casually, whenever he passed the shop. Mungroo’s bills remained unpaid; and Mr Biswas lost a few more customers.

  Earlier than Mr Biswas had expected, Moti returned and said, ‘You are a lucky man. Seebaran has decided to help you. I told him you were a friend of mine and a good Hindu, and he’s a very strict Hindu himself, as you know. He is going to help you. Even though he’s busy.’ He took out the papers from his shirt pocket, found the one he wanted and slapped it down on the counter. At the top a mauve stamp, slightly askew, said that L. S. Seebaran was a solicitor and conveyancer. Below that there were many dotted lines between printed sentences. ‘Seebaran going to full up those for you as soon as he get your papers,’ Moti said, using English, the language of the law.

  Unless this sum, Mr Biswas read with a thrill, together with One Dollar and Twenty Cents ($1.02c), the cost of this letter, is paid within ten days, legal proceedings shall he instituted against you. And there was another dotted line below that, where L. S. Seebaran was to sign himself yours faithfully.

  ‘Powerful, powerful, man,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Legal proceedings, eh. I didn’t know it was so easy to bring people up.’

  Moti gave a knowing little grunt.

  ‘One dollar and twenty cents, the cost of this letter,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘You mean I don’t even have to pay that?’

  ‘Not with Seebaran fighting your case for you.’

  ‘One dollar and twenty cents. You mean Seebaran getting that just for fulling up those dotted lines? Education, boy. It have nothing like a profession.’

  ‘You is your own boss, if you is a professional man,’ Moti said, his voice touched with a remote sadness.

  ‘But one twenty, man. Five minutes’ writing for one twenty.’

  ‘You forgetting that Seebaran had to spend years and years studying all sort of big and heavy books before they allow him to send out papers like this.’

  ‘You know, the thing to do is to have three sons. Make one a doctor, one a dentist, and one a lawyer.’

  ‘Nice little family. If you have the sons. And if you have the money. They don’t give trust in those places.’

  Mr Biswas brought out Shama’s accounts. Moti asked to see the credit slips again, and his face fell as he looked through them. ‘A lot of these ain’t signed,’ he said.

  Mr Biswas had for long thought it discourteous to ask his creditors to do so. He said, ‘But they wasn’t signed the last time either.’

  Moti gave a nervous laugh. ‘Don’t worry. I know cases where Seebaran recover people money even without paper or anything. But is a lot of work here, you know. You got to show Seebaran that you serious.’

  Mr Biswas went to the drawer below the shelves. The drawer was large but not heavy, and pulled out in an easy, awkward way; the wood inside was oily but surprisingly white. ‘A dollar and twenty cents?’ he said.

  A throat was cleared. Shama’s.

  ‘Maharajin,’ Moti said.

  There was no reply.

  Mr Biswas didn’t turn. ‘One twenty?’ he repeated, rattling the coins in the drawer.

  Moti said unhappily, ‘You can’t give a man like Seebaran one twenty to fight a case for you.’

  ‘Five,’ Mr Biswas said.

  ‘That would be good,’ Moti said, as though he had hoped to get ten.

  ‘Two,’ Mr Biswas said, walking briskly to the counter and laying down a red note.

  ‘Is all right,’ Moti said. ‘Don’t bother to count it.’

  ‘And one is three.’ Mr Biswas put down a blue note. ‘And one is four. And one is five.’

  ‘Five,’ Moti said.

  ‘Tell Seebaran I send that.’

  Moti put the notes in his side pocket and Shama’s Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook in his hip pocket. He fixed on his bicycle clips and, looking up, said, ‘Maharajin,’ directing a brief smile over Mr Biswas’s shoulder. Then, briskly, not looking back, he wheeled his shaky bicycle across the yellow dirt yard, dusty and cracked, with here and there a bleached and flattened Anchor cigarette packet. ‘Right,’ he called from the road, hopping on the saddle and pedalling rapidly away.

  ‘Right, man, Moti!’ Mr Biswas called back.

  He remained where he was, palms pressed against the edge of the counter, staring at the road, at the mango tree and the side wall of the hut in the lot obliquely opposite, and the sugarcane fields stretching away with an occasional blob of trees, to the low hills of the Central Range.

  ‘All right!’ he said. ‘Somebody turn you into a statue?’

  Shama sighed.

  ‘I suppose I is my own boss.’

  ‘And a professional man,’ she said.

  ‘Shoulda give him ten dollars.’

  ‘Is not too late. Why you don’t empty the drawer and run after him?’

  And having stimulated his rage and his appetite for argument, she left the doorway and went to the back room, where after much thumping and sighing she began to sing a popular Hindi song:

  Slowly, slowly,

  Brothers and sisters,

  Bear his corpse to the water’s edge.

  He didn’t have the Hindu delight in tragedy and the details of death, and he had often asked Shama not to sing this cremation song. Now he had to listen while she sang with sweet lugubriousness to the end. And when, fretted to defeat, he went to the back room, he found Shama, in her best satin bodice and most elaborately worked veil, putting bootees on a fully dressed Savi.

  ‘Hello!’ he said.

  Shama tied one bootee and slipped on the other.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ She tied the other bootee.

  At last she said in Hindi, ‘You may have lost all shame. But everyone hasn’t. Just remember that.’

  He knew that the Tulsi daughters who lived with their husbands often went back after a quarrel to Hanuman House, where they complained and got sympathy and, if they didn’t stay too long, respect. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Pack up and go. I suppose they are going to give you some medal at the monkey house.’

  After she left, he stood in the shop doorway, fondling his belly and watching his creditors coming back from the fields. The only thin
g that gave him pleasure was the thought of the surprise these people were going to get in a few days: a flutter of disturbances throughout The Chase for which he, inactive in his shop, would be responsible.

  *

  ‘Biswas!’ Mungroo shouted from the road. ‘Come out, before I come in.’

  The day had arrived. Mungroo was holding a sheet of paper in one hand and slapping at it with the other.

  ‘Biswas!’

  A crowd was beginning to gather. Many held papers.

  ‘Paper,’ Mungroo said. ‘He has sent me a paper. I am going to make him eat this piece of paper. Biswas!’

  Unhurriedly Mr Biswas lifted the counter-flap, pulled the little door open and passed to the front of the shop. The law was on his side – he had, indeed, brought it into play – and he felt this gave him complete protection. He leaned against the doorpost, felt the wall quiver, stifled his fear about the wall tumbling down, and crossed his legs.

  ‘Biswas! I am going to make you eat this paper.’

  Women screamed from the road.

  ‘Touch me,’ Mr Biswas said.

  ‘Paper,’ Mungroo said, stepping into the yard.

  ‘Touch me and I bring you up.’

  Still Mungroo advanced.

  ‘I bring you up and you spend Carnival in jail.’

  The effect was startling. Carnival was less than a month away. Mungroo halted. His followers, seeing themselves leaderless during the two most important days of the stick-fighting year, at once ran to Mungroo and held him back.

  ‘I call all of all-you as witnesses,’ Mr Biswas said, unaware of the reasons for his deliverance. ‘Let him touch me. And all of all-you have to come to court to be my witnesses.’ He believed that by being the first to ask them he had bound them legally. ‘Can’t ask my wife,’ he went on. ‘They don’t take wife as witness. But I asking all of all-you here.’

  ‘Paper. The man has sent me a paper,’ Mungroo muttered, while he allowed himself, without loss of prestige, to be pushed slowly back to the road by his followers.

  ‘Well,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘One man get his paper. He had it coming to him a long time. Let me tell you, eh. Don’t let Tom, Dick or Harry think he can play with me, you hear. One man get his paper. A lot more going to get their paper before I finish. And don’t come to talk to me. Go and talk to Seebaran.’