A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  Almost as soon as the doctor had gone the thaumaturge came, an unsuccessful man with a flashy turban and an anxious manner; his fees were low. He purified the Blue Room and erected invisible barriers against evil spirits. He recommended that strips of aloe should be hung in doorways and windows and said that the family ought to have known that they should always have a black doll in the doorway of the hall to divert evil spirits: prevention was better than cure. Then he inquired whether he couldn’t prepare a little mixture as well.

  The offer was rejected. ‘Ovaltine, Ferrol, Sanatogen,’ Seth said. ‘Give Mohun your mixture and you turn him into a little capsule.’

  But they hung the aloe; it was a natural purgative that cost nothing and large quantities were always in the house. And they hung the black doll, one of a small ancient stock in the Tulsi Store, an English line which had not appealed to the people of Arwacas.

  That same afternoon a lorry brought the furniture from Green Vale. It was all damp and discoloured. The polish on Shama’s dressingtable had turned white. The mattress was soaked and smelly; the coconut fibre had swollen and stained the ticking. The cloth covers of Mr Biswas’s books were still sticky, and their colours had run along the edges of the pages, which had wrinkled and stuck together.

  The metal sections of the fourposter were left unmounted in that part of the long room which had once been Shama’s and Mr Biswas’s; the boards and the mattress were put out to dry in the sun. The safe stood in the hall, near the doorway to the kitchen, looking almost new against the sooty green wall. It still exhibited the Japanese coffee-set (the head of a Japanese woman at the bottom of every cup, an embossed dragon breathing fire outside), Seth’s wedding present to Shama, never used, only cleaned. The green table was also put in the hall, but in that jumble of unmatching furniture was scarcely noticeable. The rockingchair was taken to the verandah upstairs.

  Savi was pained to see the furniture so scattered and disregarded, and angered to see the rockingchair being misused almost at once. At first the children stood on the cane-bottom and rocked violently. From this they evolved a game: four or five climbed into the chair and rocked; another four or five tried to pull them off. They fought over the chair and overturned it: that was the climax of the game. Knowing that to protest was to make herself absurd, Savi went to the Rose Room, with its basins and quaint jugs and tubes and smells, and complained to Shama.

  Shama, always gentle with her children when she was alone with them, and especially gentle during her confinements, stroked Savi’s hair and told her that she was not to mind, she was being selfish, and if she complained to anybody else she would certainly cause a quarrel. Mr Biswas was sick, Shama said; and she herself was sick. Savi ought not to behave in a way that would annoy anyone.

  ‘And where have they put the bureau?’ Shama asked.

  ‘In the long room.’

  Shama looked pleased.

  Some of Mr Biswas’s most elaborate placards had also been brought from Green Vale. They were considered beautiful; though the sentiments, from a man long thought to be an atheist, caused some astonishment. The placards were hung in the hall and the Book Room, and when the children said, ‘Savi, your pappa did really paint those signs?’ the pain at seeing the furniture scattered was lessened.

  The children said, ‘Savi, so all-you staying here for good now?’

  Lying in the room next to Shama’s, perpetually dark, Mr Biswas slept and woke and slept again. The darkness, the silence, the absence of the world enveloped and comforted him. At some far-off time he had suffered great anguish. He had fought against it. Now he had surrendered, and this surrender had brought peace. He had controlled his disgust and fear when the men had come for him. He was glad he had. Surrender had removed the world of damp walls and paper covered walls, of hot sun and driving rain, and had brought him this: this worldless room, this nothingness. As the hours passed he found he could piece together recent happenings, and he marvelled that he had survived the horror. More and more frequently he forgot fear and questioning; sometimes, for as much as a minute or so, he was unable, even when he tried, to re-enter fully the state of mind he had lived through. There remained an unease, which did not seem real or actual and was more like an indistinct, chilling memory of horror.

  Further messages had been sent and visitors came. Pratap and Prasad, abashed by the size of the house and conscious of their own condition, felt obliged to be kind to all the children. They began by giving each child a penny; but they had underestimated the number of children; they ended up by giving out halfpennies. They told Mr Biswas exactly what they had been doing when they got Message; it seemed that they both nearly missed Message; they had both, however, had some signs on the night of the storm that something was wrong with Mr Biswas and had told their wives so; they urged Mr Biswas to get confirmation from their wives. Mr Biswas listened with a sense of withdrawal. He asked after their families. Pratap and Prasad construed this as pure politeness, and though there was little to talk about, dismissed their families as worthless of serious consideration. And after making occasional solemn noises, looking down at their hats, examining them from various angles, brushing the bands, they got up to go, sighing.

  Ramchand, Mr Biswas’s brother-in-law, was less restrained. He had acquired a city brashness that went well with his uniform. He had left the country and the rum-factory years before and was now a warden at the Lunatic Asylum in Port of Spain.

  ‘Don’t think I shy of you,’ he told Mr Biswas. ‘I used to this. This is my work.’

  He spoke of himself, his career, the Lunatic Asylum.

  ‘You ain’t got a gramophone here?’ he asked.

  ‘Gramophone?’

  ‘Music,’ Ramchand said. ‘We does play music to them all the time.’

  He spoke of the perquisites of the job as though the Lunatic Asylum had been organized solely for his benefit.

  ‘Take the canteen now. Everything there five cents and six cents cheaper than outside, you know. But that is because they not running it to make a profit. If you ever want anything you must let me know.’

  ‘Sanatogen?’

  ‘I will see. Look, why you don’t leave the country, man, and come to Port of Spain? A man like you shouldn’t remain in this backward place. No wonder this thing happen to you. Come up and spend some time with us. Dehuti always talking about you, you know.’

  Mr Biswas promised to think it over.

  Ramchand walked heavily through the house and when he came into the hall shouted at Sushila, whom he didn’t know, ‘Everything all right, maharajin?’

  ‘He looks like a real chantar-caste-type,’ Sushila said.

  ‘However much you wash a pig,’ Chinta said, ‘you can’t turn it into a cow.’

  That evening Seth went to the Blue Room.

  ‘Well, Mohun. How you feeling?’

  ‘All right, I think.’ Mr Biswas spoke with something like his humorous high-pitched voice.

  ‘You thinking of going back to Green Vale?’

  To his own surprise, Mr Biswas found himself behaving in the old way. With an expression of mock-horror he said, ‘Who? Me?’

  ‘I glad you feel that way. As a matter of fact you can’t go back.’

  ‘Look at me. I crying.’

  ‘Guess what happen.’

  ‘All the cane burn down.’

  ‘Wrong. Only your house.’

  ‘Burn down? You mean it insuranburn.’

  ‘No, no. Not insuranburn. It burn fair and square. Green Vale people. Wicked like hell, man, those people.’

  Seth saw that Mr Biswas was crying and looked away. But Seth misunderstood.

  An immense relief had come upon Mr Biswas. The anxiety, the fear, the anguish which had kept his mind humming and his body taut now ebbed away. He could feel it ebbing; it was a physical sensation; it left him weak and very weary. And he felt an enormous gratitude to Seth. He wanted to embrace him, to promise eternal friendship, to make some vow.

  ‘You mean,’ h
e said at last, ‘that after all that rain they burn it down?’ And he burst out sobbing.

  That night Shama gave birth to her fourth child, another girl.

  Mr Biswas’s books had been placed among those in the Book Room. Somewhere among them was the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare. No entry was made on its endpaper of this new birth.

  The thin, short-winded and repetitive cry of the baby hardly made itself heard outside the Rose Room. The midwife no longer squatted in the hall and smoked. She was busy. She washed, she cleaned, she watched and ruled. After nine days she was paid and dismissed. The sisters told Anand and Savi, ‘You have a new sister. Somebody else to get a share of your father’s property.’ And they told Anand, ‘You are lucky. You are still the only boy. But wait. One day you will get a brother, and he will cut off your nose.’

  Mr Biswas mixed and drank Sanatogen, drank table-spoonfuls of Ferrol and, in the evenings, glasses of Ovaltine. One day he remembered his fingernails. When he looked he saw they were whole, unbitten. There were still the periods of darkness, the spasms of panic; but now he knew they were not real and because he knew this he overcame them. He remained in the Blue Room, feeling secure to be only a part of Hanuman House, an organism that possessed a life, strength and power to comfort which was quite separate from the individuals who composed it.

  ‘Savi, what you drinking?’

  ‘Ovaltine.’

  ‘Anand, what you drinking?’

  ‘Ovaltine.’

  ‘It nice?’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Ma, Savi and Anand drinking Ovaltine. Their pappa give it to them.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you, eh, boy, your father is not a millionaire to give you Ovaltine. You hear?’

  And the next day:

  ‘Jai, what you drinking?’

  ‘Ovaltine, like you.’

  ‘Vidiadhar, you drinking Ovaltine too?’

  ‘No. We drinking Milo. We like it better.’

  Mr Biswas came out from the Blue Room to the drawingroom with the thronelike chairs and the statuary. He felt safe and even a little adventurous. He went through to the wooden house. In the verandah Hari was reading. Instinctively Mr Biswas took a step back. Then he remembered there was no need. The two men looked at one another and looked away again.

  Leaning on the verandah half-wall, with his back to Hari, Mr Biswas thought about Hari’s position in the family. Hari spent all his free time reading. He used this reading for nothing; he disliked disputation of any sort. No one was able to check his knowledge of Sanskrit and his scholarship had to be taken on trust. Yet he was respected inside the family and outside it. How did Hari get to that position? Mr Biswas wondered. Where did he start?

  What would happen if he, Mr Biswas, made a sudden appearance in the hall in dhoti and beads and sacred thread? Let his top-knot grow again, as it had grown at Pundit Jairam’s. Would Hanuman House care to have two sick scholars? But he couldn’t see himself as a holy man for long. Sooner or later someone was bound to surprise him, in dhoti, top-knot, sacred thread and caste-marks, reading The Manxman or The Atom.

  Speculating about this, he reviewed his situation. He was the father of four children, and his position was as it had been when he was seventeen, unmarried and ignorant of the Tulsis. He had no vocation, no reliable means of earning a living. The job at Green Vale was over; he could not rest in the Blue Room forever; soon he would have to make a decision. Yet he felt no anxiety. The second to second agony and despair of those days at Green Vale had given him an experience of unhappiness against which everything had now to be measured. He was more fortunate than most people. His children would never starve; they would always be sheltered and clothed. It didn’t matter if he were at Green Vale or Arwacas, if he were alive or dead.

  His money dwindled: Ovaltine, Ferrol, Sanatogen; the doctor’s fees, the midwife’s, the thaumaturge’s. And there was no more money to come.

  One evening Seth said, ‘That tin of Ovaltine could very well be your last, if you don’t decide to do something.’

  Decide. What was there to decide?

  There was room for him at Hanuman House if he stayed. If he left he would not be missed. He had not claimed his children; they avoided him and were embarrassed when they met him.

  But it was only when Seth said, ‘Mai and Owad are coming home this week-end,’ meaning that the Blue Room had to be prepared for Owad, it was only then that Mr Biswas thought of action, unwilling to move to any other part of the house, unwilling to face Mrs Tulsi and the god.

  The small brown cardboard suitcase, acquired in exchange for a large number of Anchor Cigarette packets, and decorated on both sides with his monogram, was enough for what he intended to take. He remembered Shama’s taunt: ‘When you came to us you had no more clothes than you could hang up on a nail.’ He still had few clothes; they were all crumpled and dirty. The cork hat he decided to leave; he had always found it absurd, and it belonged to the barracks. He could always send for his books. But he packed his paintbrushes. Through every move they had survived; the soft candle on the bristle of one or two had hardened, cracked and turned to powder.

  He wanted to leave early in the morning, to have as much time as possible before it became dark. The crumpled clothes felt loose when he put them on; his trousers sagged; he had grown thinner. He remembered the morning the towel had fallen from him in front of the twelve barrackrooms.

  When Savi brought him the cocoa and biscuits and butter he told her, ‘I am going away.’

  She didn’t look surprised or disappointed, and didn’t ask where he was going.

  He was going out into the world, to test it for its power to frighten. The past was counterfeit, a series of cheating accidents. Real life, and its especial sweetness, awaited; he was still beginning.

  He wondered whether he should go to see Shama and the baby. His senses recoiled. As soon as he heard the children leave for school he went downstairs. He was seen, but no one called out to him: the suitcase was not of a significant size.

  The High Street was already busy. The market was alive: a high smell of meat and fish, a steady dull roar enlivened by shrieks and the ringing of bells. The haberdashers were coming in, on horse-carts, donkey-carts and ox-carts: ambitious men who set up little boxes and exposed stocks of combs and hairpins and brushes in front of large stores that sold the same things.

  The spasms of terror didn’t come. The knots of fear were still in his stomach, but they were so subdued he knew he could ignore them. The world had been restored to him. He looked at the nails of his left hand; they were still whole. He tested them against his palm; they were sharp and cutting.

  He walked past the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign; past the rumshop with the vast awning; past the Roman Catholic church; the court house; past the police station, primly ochre-and-red, its lawn and hedges trimmed, the drive lined with large whitewashed stones and palm trees which, whitewashed halfway up their trunks, looked like the legs of Pratap and Prasad when, as boys, they returned from the buffalo-pond.

  PART TWO

  1. ‘Amazing Scenes’

  TO THE city of Port of Spain, where with one short break he was to spend the rest of his life, and where at Sikkim Street he was to die fifteen years later, Mr Biswas came by accident. When he left Hanuman House and his wife and four children, the last of whom he had not seen, his main concern was to find a place to pass the night. It was still early morning. The sun was rising directly above the High Street in a dazzling haze, against which everyone was silhouetted, outlined in gold, and attached to shadows so elongated that movements appeared uncoordinated and awkward. The buildings on either side were in damp shadow.

  At the road junction Mr Biswas had still not decided where to go. Most of the traffic moved north: tarpaulin-covered lorries, taxis, buses. The buses slowed down to pass Mr Biswas, and the conductors, hanging out from the footboard, shouted to him to come aboard. North lay Ajodha and Tara, and his mother. South lay his brothers. None of them could refus
e to take him in. But to none of them did he want to go: it was too easy to picture himself among them. Then he remembered that north, too, lay Port of Spain and Ramchand, his brother-in-law. And it was while he was trying to decide whether Ramchand’s invitation could be considered genuine that a bus, its engine partially unbonneted, its capless radiator steaming, came to a stop inches away with a squeal of brakes and a racking of its tin and wood body, and the conductor, a young man, almost a boy, bent down and seized Mr Biswas’s cardboard suitcase, saying imperiously, impatiently, ‘Port of Spain, man, Port of Spain’.

  As a conductor of Ajodha’s buses Mr Biswas had seized the suitcases of many wayfarers, and he knew that in these circumstances a conductor had to be aggressive to combat any possible annoyance. But now, finding himself suddenly separated from his suitcase and hearing the impatience in the conductor’s voice, he was cowed, and nodded. ‘Up, up, man,’ the conductor said, and Mr Biswas climbed into the vehicle while the conductor stowed away his suitcase.

  Whenever the bus stopped to release a passenger or kidnap another, Mr Biswas wondered whether it was too late to get off and make his way south. But the decision had been made, and he was without energy to go back on it; besides, he could get at his suitcase only with the cooperation of the conductor. He fixed his eyes on a house, as small and as neat as a doll’s house, on the distant hills of the Northern Range; and as the bus moved north, he allowed himself to be puzzled that the house didn’t grow any bigger, and to wonder, as a child might, whether the bus would eventually come to that house.

  It was the crop season. In the sugarcane fields, already in parts laid low, cutters and loaders were at work, knee-deep in trash. Along the tracks between fields mudstained, grey-black buffaloes languidly pulled carts carrying high, bristling loads of sugarcane. But soon the land changed and the air was less sticky. Sugarcane gave way to rice-fields, the muddy colour of their water lost in the flawless reflections of the blue sky; there were more trees; and instead of mud huts there were wooden houses, small and old, but finished, painted and jalousied, with fretwork, frequently broken, along the eaves, above doors and windows and around fern-smothered verandahs. The plain fell behind, the mountains grew nearer; but the doll’s house remained as small as ever and when the bus turned into the Eastern Main Road Mr Biswas lost sight of it. The road was strung with many wires and looked important; the bus moved westwards through thickening traffic and increasing noise, past one huddled red and ochre settlement after another, until the hills rose directly from the road on the right, and from the left came a smell of swamp and sea, which presently appeared, level, grey and hazy, and they were in Port of Spain, where the stale salt smell of the sea mixed with the sharp sweet smells of cocoa and sugar from the warehouses.