A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  Now he would never more be able to go among people.

  He surrendered to the darkness.

  When he roused himself he opened the top half of the door. He saw no one. The barracks had gone to sleep. He would have to wait until morning to find out whether he was really afraid.

  In the morning he had a full minute of lucidity. He remembered that something had nagged and exhausted him the previous evening. Then, still in bed, he remembered, and the anguish returned. He got up. The bedsheet looked tormented. The mattress was exposed in places and he could smell the dingy old coconut-fibre. Slowly and carefully, like his actions the night before, his thoughts came, and he framed each thought in a complete sentence. He thought: ‘The bed is a mess. Therefore I slept badly. I must have been afraid all through the night. Therefore the fear is still with me.’

  Outside, beyond the closed window, the light breaking through the chinks and fanning out in dust-shot rays, was the world. Outside there were people.

  He spoke aloud some of the words of cornfort that hung on the walls. Then, trying to feel them as deeply as he could, he closed his eyes and spoke them again slowly, syllable by syllable. Then he pretended to write the words on his head with his finger.

  Then he prayed.

  But even in prayer he found images of people, and his prayers were perverted.

  He dressed and opened the top half of the door.

  Tarzan was waiting.

  ‘You are glad to see me,’ he thought. ‘You are an animal and think that because I have a head and hands and look as I did yesterday I am a man. I am deceiving you. I am not whole.’

  Tarzan wagged his tail.

  He opened the lower half of the door.

  People!

  Fear seized him and hurt like a pain.

  Tarzan jumped upon him, egg-stained, shining-eyed.

  Grieving, he stroked him. ‘I enjoyed this yesterday and the day before. I was whole then.’

  Already yesterday, last night, was as remote as childhood. And mixed with his fear was this grief for a happy life never enjoyed and now lost.

  He set about doing the things he did every morning. At the beginning of every action he forgot his pain: split seconds of freedom, relished only after they had gone. Breaking the hibiscus twig, for instance, as he did every morning, to brush his teeth with one of the crushed ends, he automatically looked past the trees to see whether his house had been destroyed during the night. Then he remembered how unimportant the house had become.

  Bravely, exposing himself to menace, he stripped to bath at the waterbarrel.

  The labourers were up. He heard the morning sounds: the hawking, spitting, the fanning of coal-pots, the hissing of fryingpans, the fresh, brisk morning talk. Negligible, nondescript people yesterday, each now had to be considered individually.

  He looked at them and checked. Fear.

  The sun was coming up, lighting the dew on the grass, the roof, the trees: a cool sun, a pleasant time of day.

  As with actions, so with people. Meeting them, he began to speak as though it was yesterday. Then the questioning came, and the inevitable answer: another relationship spoiled, another piece of the present destroyed.

  The day which had begun, for that minute while he was still in bed, as a normal, happy day, was ending with him in an exhausting frenzy of questioning. He looked, he questioned, he was afraid. Then he questioned again. The process was taking a fraction of a second.

  By the afternoon, however, he had made some progress. He was not afraid of children. They filled him only with grief. So much that was good and beautiful, from which he was now forever barred, awaited them.

  He went to his room, lay down on the bed and forced himself to cry for all his lost happiness.

  There was nothing he could do. The questioning went on ceaselessly. One photograph after another, one drawing after another, one story after another. He tried not to look at the newspapers on the wall, but always he had to check, always he was afraid, and then always he became uncertain again.

  In the end the futility of lying on the bed caused him to rise and make another of those decisions he had been making all day: decisions to ignore, to behave normally, little decisions, little gestures of defiance that were soon forgotten.

  He decided to cycle to Hanuman House.

  Every man and woman he saw, even at a distance, gave him a twist of panic. But he had already grown used to that; it had become part of the pain of living. Then, as he cycled, he discovered a new depth to this pain. Every object he had not seen for twenty-four hours was part of his whole and happy past. Everything he now saw became sullied by his fear, every field, every house, every tree, every turn in the road, every bump and subsidence. So that, by merely looking at the world, he was progressively destroying his present and his past.

  And there were some things he wanted to leave untouched. It was bad enough to deceive Tarzan. He didn’t want to deceive Anand and Savi. He turned and cycled back, past the fields whose terror was already familiar, to Green Vale.

  It occurred to him that by repeating as far as he could all his actions of the previous night he might somehow exorcize the thing that had fallen on him. So, with a deliberation that was like the deliberation of the day before, he bathed, cooked, ate, then sat down and opened Notre Dame.

  But the reading only brought back the memory of the previous night, the discovery of fear, and left his hands dusted with gilt.

  Every morning the period of lucidity lessened. The bedsheet, examined every morning, always testified to a tormented night. Between the beginning of a routine action and the questioning the time of calm grew less. Between the meeting of a familiar person and the questioning there was less and less of ease. Until there was no lucidity at all, and all action was irrelevant and futile.

  But it was always better to be out among real people than to be in his room with the newspapers and his imaginings. And though he continued to solace himself with visions of deserted landscapes of sand and snow, his anguish became especially acute on Sunday afternoons, when fields and roads were empty and everything was still.

  Continually he looked for some sign that the corruption which had come without warning upon him had secretly gone away again. Examining the bedsheet was one thing. Looking at his fingernails was the other. They were invariably bitten down; but sometimes he saw a thin white rim on one nail, and though these rims never lasted, he took their appearance to mean that release was near.

  Then, biting his nails one evening, he broke off a piece of a tooth. He took the piece out of his mouth and placed it on his palm. It was yellow and quite dead, quite unimportant: he could hardly recognize it as part of a tooth: if it were dropped on the ground it would never be found: a part of himself that would never grow again. He thought he would keep it. Then he walked to the window and threw it out.

  One Saturday Seth said, while they were by the unfinished house, ‘What’s the matter, Mohun? You are the colour of this.’ He placed his large hand on one of the grey uprights.

  And Mr Maclean called. Someone he knew had offered him some timber at a bargain price. It would be enough to wall one room.

  They went to look at the house. Mr Maclean saw the asphalt hanging from the roof but said nothing about it. The floorboards in the back bedroom had begun to shrink, cracking and cambering. Mr Maclean said, ‘The man did say that the wood was cured. But cedar is a damn funny wood. It does never cure at all.’

  The new timber was bought. It was cedar.

  ‘No tongue-and-groove,’ Mr Maclean said.

  Mr Biswas said nothing.

  Mr Maclean understood. He had seen this apathy overcome the builders of houses again and again.

  The back bedroom was walled. The door to the partially floored drawingroom was built and hung. The door to the non-existent front bedroom was built and nailed into the doorway: ‘To prevent accident,’ Mr Maclean said, ‘in case you want to move in right away.’ Mr Biswas had wanted doors with panels; he got planks of ced
ar nailed to two cross bars. The window was built in the same fashion and hung; the new black bolts gleamed on the new wood.

  ‘It coming along nice,’ Mr Maclean said.

  Into Mr Biswas’s busy, exhausted mind came the thought: ‘Hari blessed it. Shama made him bless it. They gave the galvanized iron and they blessed it.’

  His sleep was broken by dreams. He was in the Tulsi Store. There were crowds everywhere. Two thick black threads were chasing him. As he cycled to Green Vale the threads lengthened. One thread turned pure white; the black thread became thicker and thicker, purple-black and monstrously long. It was a rubbery black snake; it developed a comic face; it found the chase funny and said so to the white thread, now also a snake.

  When he passed the house and saw the black snakes hanging from the roof, he touched a crapaud pillar and said, ‘Hari blessed it.’ He remembered the suitcase, the whining prayers, the sprinkling with the mango leaf, the dropping of the penny. ‘Hari blessed it.’

  He was on a hill, a bare, brown-green hill. It was hot but the wind was cool and blew his hair. A woman was at the foot of the hill. She was crying and coming to him for help. He felt her pain but didn’t want to be seen. What help could he give? And the woman – Shama, Anand, Savi, his mother – kept coming up the hill. He heard her sobs and wanted to cry to her to go away.

  Tarzan was whining outside his door.

  One of his paws had been damaged.

  ‘You like eggs too much.’

  Then he remembered the dispossessed labourers.

  Some nights later he was awakened by barking and shouts.

  ‘Driver! Driver!’

  He opened the top half of the door.

  ‘They set fire to Dookinan land,’ the watchman said.

  He put on his clothes and hurried to the spot, followed by excited labourers.

  There was no great danger or damage. Dookinan’s plot was small and was separated from the other fields by a trace and a ditch. Mr Biswas ordered the boundary canes of the adjoining fields to be cut, and the labourers, though disappointed at the blaze, which from a distance had promised much, worked with zest. The firelight lit up their bodies and kept away the chill.

  The tall red and yellow flames shrank; the trash smouldered, red and black, crackled and collapsed, uncovering the red heart of the fire, quickly cooling to black and grey. Glowing scraps rose, twinkling redly, blackened and diminished. At the roots the canes glowed like charcoal; in places it was as if the earth itself had caught fire. The labourers beat the roots and the trash with sticks; ash floated up; smoke turned from grey to white, and thinned.

  Only then, when the danger had disappeared, Mr Biswas realized that for more than an hour he had not questioned himself.

  Instantly the questionings, the fear, came.

  When the labourers returned to the barracks their chatter lasted a short time, and he was left alone.

  But the hour had proved one thing. He was going to get better soon.

  It was the first of many disappointments. In time he came to disregard these periods of freedom, just as he no longer expected to wake up one morning and find himself whole again.

  At the beginning of the Christmas school holidays, when the sugarcane was in arrow once more and the Christmas shop-signs were going up at Arwacas, Shama sent word by Seth that she was bringing the children to Green Vale for a few days.

  Mr Biswas waited for them with dread. On the day they were to arrive he began to wish for some accident that would prevent their coming. But he knew there would be no accident. If anything was to happen he had to act. He decided that he had to get rid of Anand and Savi and himself, in such a way that the children would never know who had killed them. All morning he was possessed of visions in which he cutlassed, poisoned, strangled, burned, Anand and Savi; so that even before they came his relationship with them had been perverted. About Myna and Shama he didn’t care; he didn’t want to kill them.

  They came. At once his designs became insubstantial and absurd. He felt only resignation and a great fatigue. And the deception and especial pain he had wished to avoid began. Even while he allowed himself to be touched and kissed by Anand and Savi he was questioning himself about them, looking for the fear, and wondering whether they had seen the deception and could tell what was going on in his mind.

  Of Shama he was not afraid; only envious, for her unthinking assurance. Then almost immediately he began to hate her. Her pregnancy was grotesque; he hated the way she sat down; when she ate he listened for the noises she made; he hated the way she fussed and clucked over the children; he hated it when she puffed and fanned and sweated in her pregnant way; he was nauseated by the frills and embroidery and other ornamentation on her clothes.

  Shama, Savi and Myna slept on bedding on the floor. Anand slept with Mr Biswas on the fourposter. Dreading the boy’s touch, Mr Biswas built a bank of pillows between Anand and himself.

  His fatigue deepened. The next day, Sunday, he scarcely got out of bed. Whereas before he felt he had to be out of the room, now he didn’t wish to leave it. He said he was sick and found it easy to simulate the symptoms of malaria.

  When Seth came Mr Biswas told him, ‘Is ague, I think.’

  After a week his fatigue hadn’t left him. Sitting up in bed he made kites and toy-carts for Anand and built a chest-of-drawers with matchboxes for Savi. The longer he stayed in the room the less he wanted to leave it. He became constipated. Yet from time to time he had to go outside; then he came back hurriedly, anxiously, relaxing only when he was on the bed again.

  He continued to observe Shama closely, with suspicion, hatred and nausea. He never spoke to her directly, but through one of the children; and it was some time before Shama realized this.

  As he was lying in bed one morning she came and placed her palm, then the back of her hand, on his forehead. The action offended him, flattered him, and made him uneasy. She had been cutting vegetables and he couldn’t bear their smell on her hand.

  ‘No fever,’ she said.

  She undid his shirt and put her hand, large and dark and foreign, on his pale, soft chest.

  He wanted to scream.

  He said, ‘No, I not fat enough yet. You got to put me back and feed me some more. Here, why don’t you just feel my finger?’

  She took her hand away. ‘Something on your mind, man?’

  ‘Something on your mind?’ he mimicked. ‘Something in my mind and you know what it is.’ He was violently angry; never before had he been so disgusted by her. Yet he wished her to remain there. Half hoping she would take him seriously, half hoping only to amuse and bewilder her, he said in his quick, high-pitched voice, ‘Something in my mind all right. Clouds. Lots of little black clouds.’

  ‘What you say?’

  ‘Is a funny thing. You ever notice that when you insult people or tell them the truth they always pretend not to hear you the first time?’

  ‘Is my own fault for meddling in what is not my business. I don’t know why I come here for. If it wasn’t for the children –’

  ‘So all-you send Hari with his little black box, eh? All-you must think I look like a real fool.’

  ‘Black box?’

  ‘You see what I mean? You didn’t hear the first time.’

  ‘Look, I just don’t have the time to stand up here talking to you like this, you hear. I wish you had a real fever. That would stop your mouth.’

  He was beginning to enjoy the argument. ‘I know you want me to get a real fever. I know all-you want to see me dead. And then see the old she-fox crying, the little gods laughing, you crying – dressed up like hell to boot. Nice, eh? I know that is what all-you want.’

  ‘Dress-up and powder-up? Me? On what you give me?’

  Abruptly Mr Biswas went cold with fear.

  Seth and the land and the corrugated iron; Hari and the black box; the blessing; and now, since Shama had come, this fatigue.

  He was dying.

  They were killing him. He would just remain in this r
oom and die.

  She was in the kitchen area, cooing to the baby in the hammock.

  ‘Get out!’

  Shama looked up.

  He jumped out of bed and grabbed the walking-stick. He was cold all over. His heart beat fast and painfully.

  Shama climbed up the step to the room. ‘Get out!

  Don’t come inside. Don’t touch me!’

  Myna was crying.

  ‘Man,’ Shama said.

  ‘Don’t come into this room. Don’t set foot in it again.’ He waved the stick. He moved to the window and, looking at her, waving the stick, began to draw the bolt. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he bawled, and there were sobs mixed with his words.

  She blocked the door.

  But he had thought of the window. He pushed it open. It swung out shakily. Light came into the room and fresh air mingled with the musty smell of old boards and newspapers – he had forgotten how musty they smelled. Beyond the flat barrackyard he saw the trees that lined the road and screened his house.

  Shama walked towards him.

  He began screaming and crying. He pressed his palms on the window-sill and tried to hoist himself up, looking back at her, the stick now useless as a weapon of defence since his hands were occupied.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said in Hindi. ‘Look, you will damage yourself.’

  He was aware of Tarzan, Savi and Anand below the window. Tarzan was wagging his tail, barking and leaping up against the wall.

  Shama came closer.

  He was on the sill.

  ‘O God!’ he cried, winding his head up and down. ‘Go away.’

  She was near enough to touch him.

  He kicked at her.

  She gave a yelp of pain.

  He saw, too late, that he had kicked her on the belly.

  The women from the barracks rushed up when they heard Shama cry out, and helped her from the room.

  Savi and Anand came round to the kitchen area in front. Tarzan ran in puzzlement between them and the women and Mr Biswas.

  ‘Pack up your clothes and go home,’ Dookhnee, one of the barrack-women, said. She had often been beaten and had witnessed many wife-beatings; they made all women sisters.