A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  At the office the authorities remained aloof. There was no criticism, but no reassurance. The new régime was still a forbidden subject and reporters still did not mix easily. Of Mr Burnett’s favourites only the former news editor was generally accepted; he had, indeed, become an office character. He had grown haggard with worry. He lived in Barataria and came up every morning by bus through the packed, narrow and dangerous Eastern Main Road. He had developed a fear that he would die in a road accident and leave his wife and baby daughter unprovided for. All travel terrified him; morning and evening he had to travel; and every day he laid out stories of accidents, with photographs of ‘the twisted wreckage’. He spoke continually of his fear, ridiculed it and allowed himself to be ridiculed. But as the afternoon wore on his agitation became more marked, and at the end he was quite frantic, anxious to go home, yet fearing to leave the office, the only place where he felt safe.

  Untended, the rose trees grew straggly and hard. A blight made their stems white and gave them sickly, ill-formed leaves. The buds opened slowly to reveal blanched, tattered blooms covered with minute insects; other insects built bright brown domes on the stems. The lily-pond collapsed again and the lily-roots rose brown and shaggy out of the thick, muddy water, which was white with bubbles. The children’s interest in the garden was spasmodic, and Shama, claiming that she had learned not to interfere with anything of Mr Biswas’s, planted some zinnias and marigolds of her own, the only things, apart from an oleander tree and some cactus, that had flourished in the garden of Hanuman House.

  The war was beginning to have its effects. Prices were rising everywhere. Mr Biswas’s salary was increased, but the increases were promptly absorbed. And when his salary reached thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents a fortnight the Sentinel started giving COLA, a cost-of-living allowance. Henceforth it was COLA that went up; the salary remained stationary.

  ‘Psychology,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘They make it sound like a tea party at the orphanage, eh?’ He raised his voice. ‘All right, kiddies? Got your cake? Got your icecream? Got your cola?’

  The shorter the money became, the worse the food, the more meticulously Shama kept her accounts, filling reporter’s notebook after reporter’s notebook. These she never threw away; they lay in a swollen, grubby pile on the kitchen shelf.

  There were fights in shops for hoarded, weevil-ridden flour. The police kept a sharp eye on stall holders in markets, and a number of vegetable growers and small farmers were fined and imprisoned for selling above the scheduled price. Flour continued to be scarce and full of weevils; and Shama’s food became worse.

  To Mr Biswas’s complaints she said, ‘I walk miles every Saturday to save a cent here and a cent there.’

  And soon, food forgotten, they were quarrelling. Their quarrels lasted from day to day, from week to week, quarrels differing only in words from those they had had at The Chase.

  ‘Trapped!’ Mr Biswas would say. ‘You and your family have got me trapped in this hole.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shama would say. ‘I suppose if it wasn’t for my family you would have a grass roof over your head.’

  ‘Family! Family! Put me in one poky little barrackroom and pay me twenty dollars a month. Don’t talk to me about your family.’

  ‘I tell you, if it wasn’t for the children –’

  And often, in the end, Mr Biswas would leave the house and go for a long night walk through the city, stopping at some empty shack of a café to eat a tin of salmon, trying to stifle the pain in his stomach and only making it worse; while below the weak electric bulb the sleepy-eyed Chinese shopkeeper picked and sucked his teeth, his slack, bare arms resting on a glasscase in which flies slept on stale cakes. Up to this time the city had been new and held an expectation which not even the deadest two o’clock sun could destroy. Anything could happen: he might meet his barren heroine, the past could be undone, he would be remade. But now not even the thought of the Sentinel’s presses, rolling out at that moment reports of speeches, banquets, funerals (with all names and decorations carefully checked), could keep him from seeing that the city was no more than a repetition of this: this dark, dingy café, the chipped counter, the flies thick on the electric flex, the empty Coca Cola cases stacked in a corner, the cracked glasscase, the shopkeeper picking his teeth, waiting to close.

  And in the house, while he was out, the children would come out of bed and go to Shama. She would take down her bloated reporter’s notebooks and try to explain how she had spent the money given her.

  At school one day Anand asked the boy who shared his desk, ‘Your father and mother does quarrel?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh, about anything. About food, for instance.’

  ‘Nah. But suppose he ask her to go to town and buy something. And suppose she don’t buy it. Boy!’

  One evening, after a quarrel had flared up and died without being concluded, Anand went to Mr Biswas’s room and said, ‘I have a story to tell you.’

  Something in his manner warned Mr Biswas. He put down his book, settled a pillow against the head of the bed and smiled.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a man —’ Anand’s voice broke.

  ‘Yes?’ Mr Biswas said, in a mocking friendly voice, still smiling, scraping his lower lip with his teeth.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a man who –’ His voice broke again, his father’s smile confused him, he forgot what he had planned to say and abandoning grammar, added quickly, ‘Who, whatever you do for him, wasn’t satisfied.’

  Mr Biswas burst out laughing, and Anand ran out of the room, trembling with rage and humiliation, to the kitchen, where Shama comforted him.

  For many days Anand didn’t speak to Mr Biswas and, in secret revenge, didn’t drink milk at the Dairies, but iced coffee. Mr Biswas was effusive towards Savi and Myna and Kamla, and relaxed with Shama. The atmosphere in the house was less heavy and Shama, now Anand’s defender, took much pleasure in urging Anand to speak to his father.

  ‘Leave him, leave him,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Leave the storyteller.’

  Anand became steadily more morose. When he came home after private lessons one afternoon he refused to eat or talk. He went to his room, lay down on the bed and, despite Shama’s coaxings, stayed there.

  Mr Biswas came in and presently walked into the room, saying in his rallying voice, ‘Well, well. What happen to our Hans Andersen?’

  ‘Eat some prunes, son,’ Shama said, taking out the little brown paper-bag from the table drawer.

  Mr Biswas saw the distress on Anand’s face and his manner changed. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Anand said, ‘The boys laugh at me.’

  ‘He who laughs last laughs best,’ Shama said.

  ‘Lawrence say that his father is your boss.’

  There was silence.

  Mr Biswas sat on the bed and said, ‘Lawrence is the night editor. Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘He say they have you like an office boy in the office.’

  ‘You know I write features.’

  ‘And he say that when you go to his father house you have to go to the back door.’

  Mr Biswas stood up. His linen suit was crumpled, the jacket pulled out of shape by the notebooks in the pockets, the tops of which were dirty and a little frayed.

  ‘You never went to his father house?’

  ‘Why should he go to Lawrence’s house?’ Shama said.

  ‘And you never went to the back door?’

  Mr Biswas walked to the window. It was dark; his back was to them.

  ‘Let me put on the light,’ Shama said briskly. Her footsteps were heavy. The light went on. Anand covered his face with his arm. ‘Is that all that’s been upsetting you?’ Shama asked. ‘Your father has nothing to do with Lawrence. You heard what he said.’

  Mr Biswas went out of the room.

  Shama said, ‘You shouldn’t have told him that, you know, son.’

  For the rest of that evening Shama walked and talked and did everything as n
oisily as she could.

  The next morning, with his books and lunch parcel in his bag and the six cents for milk in his pocket, Anand was kissing Shama in the back verandah when Mr Biswas came to him and said, ‘I don’t depend on them for a job. You know that. We could go back any time to Hanuman House. All of us. You know that.’

  On Saturday he took the children on a surprise visit to Ajodha’s. Tara and Ajodha were as delighted as the children, and the visit lasted till Sunday. There was much to look at in the new house. It was a grand two-storeyed concrete house built and decorated and furnished in the modern manner. The concrete blocks looked like rough-hewn stone; there was no dust-collecting fretwork hanging from the eaves; doors and windows were varnished, not painted, and closed and opened in interesting ways; chairs were upholstered and vast, not small and cane-bottomed; floors were stained and polished; the lavatory flushes were chainless. In the drawingroom they studied Tara’s photographs of the dead; they saw Raghu in his flower-strewn coffin surrounded by his thin, big-eyed children. The kitchen was enormous and abounded in modern contrivances; Tara, old, slow and oldfashioned, seemed out of place in it. When they were tired of the house they wandered about the yard, which had not changed. They talked to the cowman and the gardener, examined the various people who called, and played among the abandoned frames of motor vehicles. After lunch on Saturday they went to the cinema, and on Sunday Ajodha arranged an excursion.

  The following week-end they went again, and the week-end after that; and soon this week-end visit was established. They travelled up on Saturday morning, since that was the only time it was reasonably easy to get a bus out of Port of Spain. As soon as they got on the bus in the George Street station Mr Biswas changed, dropping his week-day moroseness and becoming gay and even impish. The mood lasted until Sunday evening; then they were all silent as they got nearer the city, the house, Shama, Monday morning. For a day or two afterwards the house in Port of Spain seemed dark and clumsy.

  Shama went on only one of these visits, and that she almost ruined. The old, unspoken antagonism between the families still existed and she was not eager to go. There had been a minor quarrel just before they went through the gate, and Shama was sullen when she stepped into Tara’s house. Then, either from pride, or because she was made uneasy by the grandeur of the house, or because she was unable to make the effort, she remained sullen throughout the week-end. She said afterwards that she had known all along that Ajodha and Tara did not care for her; and she never went again.

  She was often alone in Port of Spain. The children were not anxious to go with her to Hanuman House, and as dissension there increased she went less often herself, regretting the old warmth, fearing to be involved in new quarrels. She had hardly moved outside her own family and did not know how to get on with strangers. She was shy of people of another race, religion or way of life. Her shyness had got her a reputation for hardness among the tenants, and she had done little to get to know the woman who lived in Owad’s old room. But now, alone at the week-ends, she felt the need of company and sought out the woman, who not only responded, but showed herself exceedingly curious. And Shama took down her account books and explained.

  So the house became Shama’s, the place where she stayed, the place to which Mr Biswas and the children returned with sadness after the week-end.

  And during the week Anand’s life was a misery. While Mr Biswas struggled with features on the splendid work of the Chacachacare Leper Settlement (with a photograph of lepers at prayer) and the Young Offenders’ Detention Institution (with a photograph of young offenders at prayer), Anand wrote down and learned by heart copious notes on geography and English. Textbooks were discarded; only the notes of the teacher mattered; any deviation was instantly and severely punished; and there was not a day when some boy was not flogged and put to stand behind the blackboard. For this was the exhibition class, where no learning mattered except that which led to good examination results; and the teacher knew his job. At home Mr Biswas read Anand Self-Help and on his birthday gave him Duty, adding as a pure frivolity a school edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Childhood, as a time of gaiety and irresponsibility, was for these exhibition pupils only one of the myths of English Composition. Only in compositions did they give delirious shouts of joy and their spirits overflowed into song; only there did they indulge in what the composition notes called ‘schoolboy’s pranks’.

  Anand, following the example of those Samuel Smiles heroes who had in youth concealed the brilliance of their later years, did what he could to avoid school. He pretended to be ill; he played truant, forged excuses, was found out and flogged; he destroyed his shoes. He abandoned private lessons one afternoon, telling the teacher that he was wanted at home for a Hindu prayer ceremony which could take place only at half past three that afternoon, and telling his parents that the teacher’s mother had died and the teacher had gone to the funeral. Mr Biswas, anxious to remain in the teacher’s favour, cycled to the school the next day to offer his condolences. Anand was called a young scamp (the teacher sank in his estimation for using a word that sounded so slangy), flogged and left behind the blackboard. At home Mr Biswas said, ‘Those private lessons are costing me money, you know.’ ‘Pranks’ were permitted only in English Composition.

  Most of his male cousins had undergone the brahminical initiation, and though Anand shared Mr Biswas’s distaste for religious ritual, he was immediately attracted by this ceremony. His cousins had had their heads shaved, they were invested with the sacred thread, told the secret verses, given little bundles and sent off to Benares to study. This last was only a piece of play-acting. The attraction of the ceremony lay in the shaving of the head: no boy with a shaved head could go to a predominantly Christian school. Anand began a strong campaign for initiation. But he knew Mr Biswas’s prejudices and worked subtly. He told Mr Biswas one evening that he was unable to offer up the usual prayers with sincerity, since the words had become meaningless. He needed an original prayer, so that he could think of each word. He wanted Mr Biswas to write this prayer for him, though he made it clear that, unlike Mr Biswas, he wanted no east-west compromise: he wanted a specifically Hindu prayer. The prayer was written. And Anand got Shama to bring a coloured print of the goddess Lakshmi from Hanuman House. He hung the print on the wall above his table and objected when lights were turned on in the evening before he had said his prayer to Lakshmi. Shama was delighted at this example of blood triumphing over environment; and Mr Biswas, despite his Aryan aversion to Sanatanist, Tulsi-like idol worship, could not hide the honour he felt at being asked to write Anand’s prayer. After some time Anand complained that the whole procedure was improper, a mockery, and would continue to be so until he had been initiated.

  Shama was thrilled.

  But Mr Biswas said, ‘Wait till the long holidays.’

  And so, during the long holidays, when Savi and Myna and Kamla were making their round of holiday visits, including a fortnight at a beach house Ajodha had rented, Anand, shaved and thoroughly brahmin, but ashamed of showing his bald head, stayed in Port of Spain and Mr Biswas gave him portions of Macdougall’s Grammar to learn and listened to him recite his geography and English notes. The evening worship of Lakshmi stopped.

  Towards the end of that year a letter came to Mr Biswas from Chicago. The stamp was cancelled: REPORT OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POSTMASTER. Though the envelope was long the letter was short, a third of the paper being taken up by the florid, raised red and black letterhead of a newspaper. The letter was from Mr Burnett.

  Dear Mohun, As you can see, I have left my little circus and am back in the old business. As a matter of fact I didn’t leave the circus. It left me. Perhaps fire in Trinidad is different. But when that boy from St James was given one small American fire to walk through, he just ran. Away. My guess is that he is somewhere on Ellis Island, with nobody to claim him. The snake-charmer was all right until his snake bit him. We gave him a good funeral. I hunted high and low to get a Hindu priest to say
the last few words, but no luck. I was going to do the job myself, but I couldn’t dress the part, not being able to tie the headpiece or the tailpiece. Now and then I see a copy of the Sentinel. Why don’t you give America a try?

  Though the letter was a joke and nothing in it was to be taken seriously, Mr Biswas was moved that Mr Burnett had written at all. He immediately began to reply, and went on for pages, writing detailed denigrations of the new members of the staff. He thought he was being light and detached, but when at lunchtime he re-read what he had written he saw how bitter he appeared, how much he had revealed of himself. He tore the letter up. From time to time, until he died, he thought of writing. But he never wrote. And Mr Burnett never wrote again.

  The school term ended and the children, forgetting the disappointment of the previous year, talked excitedly of going to Hanuman House for Christmas. Shama spent hours in the back verandah sewing clothes on an old hand machine which, mysteriously, was hers, how or since when no one knew. The broken wooden handle was swathed in red cotton and looked as though it had bled profusely from a deep wound; the chest, waist, rump and hind quarters of the animal-like machine, and its wooden stall, were black with oil and smelled of oil; and it was a wonder that cloth emerged clean and unmangled from the clanking, champing and chattering which Shama called forth from the creature by the touch of a finger on its bloody bandaged tail. The back verandah smelled of machine oil and new cloth and became dangerous with pins on the floor and pins between floorboards. Anand marvelled at the delight of his sisters in the tedious operations, and marvelled at their ability to put on dresses bristling with pins and not be pricked. Shama made him two shirts with long tails, the fashion among the boys at school (even exhibition pupils have their unscholarly moments) being for billowing shirts, barely tucked into the trousers.

  But none of the clothes Shama made then were worn at Hanuman House.