A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘Regular bus service,’ he said after a time.

  ‘From Shorthills, the buses always leave on the dot.’

  ‘Instead of giving every child a sheep, better to give them a horse. Ride to school. Ride back.’

  At last the bus came, empty except for the driver and the conductor. The body had been made locally, a crude jangling box of wood and tin and felt and large naked bolts. Mr Biswas bumped exaggeratedly up and down on the rough wooden seat. ‘Just practising,’ he said.

  The city ended abruptly at the Maraval terminus. The road climbed and dipped; hills intermittently shut out the view. After half an hour Mr Biswas pointed to the bush on a roundabout. ‘Estate?’ They went past a puzzling huddle of three crumbling shacks. Two black water barrels stood in the hard yellow yard. ‘Cricket field?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Swimming pool?’

  After many curves and climbs the road straightened out and ran steadily down into a widening valley. The hills looked wild, the tops of trees rising one behind the other: a coagulation of greenery. But here and there the faded thatch of a lean-to, warm against the still, dark green, showed that the wilderness had been charted. Houses and huts appeared on either side of the road, widely separated and so hidden by green that, from the bus, Shorthills was only flitting patches of colour: the rust of a roof, the pink or ochre of a wall.

  ‘Next bus to Port of Spain in ten minutes,’ the conductor said conversationally. Mr Biswas got up. Mrs Tulsi pulled him down. ‘They like to reverse first.’ The bus reversed in a dirt lane and came to rest on the verge, under an avocado pear tree.

  The driver and conductor squatted under the tree, smoking. Across the road and next to the lane in which the bus had reversed Mr Biswas saw an open square of ground, mounds and faded wreaths alone indicating its purpose.

  Mr Biswas waved at the forlorn little cemetery and the dirt lane which, past a few tumbledown houses, disappeared behind bush and apparently led only to more bush and the mountain which rose at the end. ‘Estate?’ he asked.

  Mrs Tulsi smiled. ‘And on this side.’ She waved at the other side of the road.

  Beyond a deep gully, whose sides were sheer, whose bed was strewn with boulders, stones and pebbles, perfectly graded, Mr Biswas saw more bush, more mountains. ‘A lot of bamboo,’ he said. ‘You could start a paper factory.’

  It was easy to see just how far the buses went. Up to the dirt lane the road was smooth, its centre black and dully shining. Past that the road narrowed, was gravelly and dusty, its edges obscured by the untended verge.

  ‘I suppose we go along there,’ Mr Biswas said.

  They began walking.

  Mrs Tulsi bent down and tore up a plant from the verge. ‘Rabbit meat,’ she said. ‘Best food for rabbits. In Arwacas you have to buy it.’

  Below the overarching trees the road was in soft shadow. Sunlight spotted the gravel in white blurs, spotted the wet green verges, the dark ridged trunks of trees. It was cool. And then Mr Biswas began seeing the fruit trees. Avocado pear trees grew at the side of the road as casually as any bush; their fruit, only just out of flower, were tiny but already perfectly shaped, with a shine they would soon lose. The land between the road and the gully widened; the gully grew shallower. Beyond it Mr Biswas saw the tall immortelles and their red and yellow flowers. And then the untrodden road blazed with the flowers. Mr Biswas picked one up, put it between his lips, tasted the nectar, blew, and the bird-shaped flower whistled. Even as they stood flowers fell on them. Under the immortelles he saw the cocoa trees, stunted, their branches black and dry, the cocoa pods gleaming with all the colours between yellow and red and crimson and purple, not like things that had grown, but like varnished wax models stuck on to dead branches. Then there were orange trees, heavy with leafand fruit. And always they walked between two hills. The road narrowed; they heard no sound except that of their feet on the loose gravel. Then, far away, they heard the bus starting on its journey back to bustling, barren, concrete and timber Port of Spain. Impossible that it was less than an hour away!

  The gully grew shallower and shallower, and then it was only a depression carpeted with a soft vine of a tender green. Mrs Tulsi bent down and disturbed it. A vine hung from her fingers; it had a faint smell of mint.

  ‘Old man’s beard,’ she said. ‘In Arwacas they grow it in baskets.’

  The house was partly hidden by a large, branching, towering saman tree. Swollen parasite vines veined its branches and massive trunk; wild pines sprouted like coarse hair from every crotch; and it was hung with lianas. Below the tree, beside the gully, there was a short walk lined with orange trees, and around the trunk there was a clump of wild tannia, pale green, four feet tall, nothing but stem and giant heart-shaped leaves, cool with quick beads of dew.

  An old signpost stood slightly askew in the gully. The letters were bleached and faint: Christopher Columbus Road. It was fitting. The land, though fruitful from a former cultivation, felt new.

  ‘This used to be the old road,’ Mrs Tulsi said.

  And Mr Biswas found it easy to imagine the other race of Indians moving about this road before the world grew dark for them.

  Nothing in Shama’s accounts had prepared him for the view of the house from the gully, at the end of the tree-lined drive. It was a two-storeyed house with a long verandah on the lower floor; it stood far from the road on an escarpment on the hill, above a broad flight of concrete steps, white against the surrounding green.

  And everything was as Shama had said. On one side of the drive there was a cricket field; the pitch was red and broken: obviously the village team did not use matting. On the other side, beyond the saman tree, the lianas, the wild tannia, there was a swimming pool, empty, cracked, sandy, plants pushing up through the concrete, but it was easy to see it mended and filled with clear water; and beyond that, on an artificial mound, a cherry tree, its thick branches trimmed level at the bottom above a wrought-iron seat. And in the drive the gri-gri palms, with their white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves; though they were perhaps too old: they had grown so tall they could not be seen whole, and could even be missed.

  Then at the far end of the cricket ground Mr Biswas saw a mule. It looked old and dispirited. Untethered, it remained still, against a camouflage of cocoa-trees.

  ‘Ah!’ Mr Biswas said, breaking the silence. ‘Horses.’

  ‘That’s not a horse,’ Mrs Tulsi said.

  They left the drive and stood among the wild tannia under the saman tree. Mrs Tulsi held a liana and offered it to Mr Biswas. While he felt it, she held a thinner liana and pulled it down. ‘As strong as rope,’ she said. ‘The children could skip with this.’

  They walked along the weed-ridden drive. The narrow canal at one side was silted with fine, rippled sand. ‘You could just sell the sand from this place,’ Mrs Tulsi said. They came to the broad flight of shallow concrete steps. Mr Biswas went up slowly: impossible not to feel regal ascending steps like these.

  On either side of the house there was an abandoned garden, flowerless except for some stray marigolds; but through the bush it was possible to see the pattern of the beds, edged with concrete and the stunted shrubs called ‘green tea’ and ‘red tea’. At the end of one garden a Julie mango tree stood on a concrete-walled circular bed more than three feet high.

  ‘Just the spot for a temple,’ Mrs Tulsi whispered.

  The house was of timber, but the timber had been painted to look like blocks of granite: grey, flecked with black, red, white and blue, and marked with thin white lines. A folding screen separated the regal drawingroom from the regal diningroom; and there was a multiplicity of rooms whose purposes were uncertain. The house had its own electricity plant; not working at the moment, Mrs Tulsi said, but it could be fixed. There was a garage, servants’ quarters, an outdoor bathroom with a deep concrete tub. The kitchen, linked to the house by a roofed way, was vast, with a brick oven. The hill rose directly behind the kitchen; the view through the back window was of the green hillside just a few fee
t away. And tonka beans grew on the hill.

  ‘Who owned the house before?’ Mr Biswas asked.

  ‘Some French people.’

  This, allied to a brief acquaintance during his Aryan days with the writings of Romain Rolland, gave Mr Biswas a respect for the French.

  They walked and looked. The silence, the solitude, the fruitful bush in a broken landscape: it was an enchantment.

  They heard the bus in the distance.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is time to go home now.’

  ‘Home?’ said Mrs Tulsi. ‘Isn’t this your home now?’

  So the Tulsis left Arwacas. The lands were rented out and it fell to the tenants to contend with Seth’s claims. The Tulsi Store was leased to a firm of Port of Spain merchants. At Port of Spain one of the tenements was sold and Shama relieved of her rent-collecting duties. It was only then that Shama, still sulking after her victory, disclosed that Mrs Tulsi had decided to raise the rent of the Port of Spain house. Mr Biswas was shocked, and to shock him further Shama brought down her account books and showed how his salary went to the grocer almost as soon as it came, how her debts were rising.

  The solitude and silence of Shorthills was violated. The villagers bore the invasion without protest and almost with indifference. They were an attractive mixture of French and Spanish and Negro and, though they lived so near to Port of Spain, formed a closed, distinctive community. They had a rural slowness and civility, and spoke English with an accent derived from the French patois they spoke among themselves. They appeared to exercise some rights on the grounds of the house. They played cricket on the cricket field most afternoons and there was a match every Sunday, when the grounds were virtually taken over by the villagers. For some time after the coming of the Tulsis courting couples strolled about the orange walks and the drive in the afternoon, disappearing from time to time into the cocoa woods. But this custom soon ceased. The couples, finding themselves surprised at every turn by a Tulsi, moved further up the gully.

  Mr Biswas’s first impression on moving to Shorthills was that the Tulsi family had increased. Seth and his family were absent; but those sisters who for one reason and another had lived away from Hanuman House had brought their families; and there were many married grandchildren as well, and their families.

  Mr Biswas was given a room on the upper floor, one of six rooms of equal size about a central corridor. It was a hotel-like arrangement, with a couple in each room, and widows and children moving about the common area downstairs. Mr Biswas’s room became the headquarters of his family; it was there that Anand did his homework, there that the children came to complain, there that Mr Biswas gave them delicacies to eat in private. The fourposter, Shama’s dressingtable, the bookcase and desk and the table were in this room; the rest of his furniture, rockingchair, hatrack, kitchen safe, was disposed, like his children at night, about the house.

  The drawingroom furnishings of Hanuman House had been similarly scattered. There could be no division of this house into the used and the unused, and the thronelike chairs, the statuary and the vases were left in the drawingroom, which in appearance and purpose presently became the equivalent of the Hanuman House hall.

  A certain unpleasantness was added to Mr Biswas’s situation by the presence directly across the corridor of a brother-in-law he had never seen at Hanuman House, a tall, contemptuous man who had taken an immediate dislike to him and expressed this dislike by a quivering of the nostrils.

  Anand said, ‘Prakash say his pappa got more books than you.’

  Mr Biswas sent Anand to find out what books Prakash’s father had.

  Anand reported, ‘All the books exactly the same size. On the cover they have a green shield marked “Boots”. And they are all by a man called W. C. Turtle.’

  ‘Trash,’ Mr Biswas said.

  ‘Trash,’ Anand told Prakash.

  ‘You call my books trash?’ Prakash’s father asked Mr Biswas some mornings later, when they opened their doors at the same time.

  ‘I didn’t call your books trash.’

  The nostrils quivered. ‘What about your Epictetus and Manxman and Samuel Smiles?’

  ‘How do you know about my Epictetus?’

  ‘How do you know about my books?’

  Thereafter Mr Biswas locked his room whenever he left it. The news spread and there were comments.

  ‘So you start up already?’ Shama said.

  And having got to Shorthills, everyone waited, for the sheep, the horses, for the swimming pool to be repaired, the drive weeded, the gardens cleaned, the electricity plant fixed, the house repainted.

  Waiting, the children stripped the saman tree of its lianas. But there was no use to which they could put these improbable and pleasing growths; they were not good for skipping, as Mrs Tulsi had said: the thin ones frayed easily, the fat ones were unwieldy. Hari cut down the Julie mango tree on the raised bed at the end of the garden and built a small, kennel-like box-board hut; this was the temple. The reader of W. C. Tuttle put up a large framed print of the goddess Lakshmi in the drawingroom and offered up his own prayers before it every evening; Prakash said his father knew more of these matters than Hari. The brick oven in the kitchen was levelled; the roofed way between the house and kitchen was pulled down and the open area roofed with old corrugated iron and tree-branches from the hillside at the back.

  Anand’s patience broke. Spreading a rumour among the children that the house was going to be repainted right away but that the old paint had to be scraped off first, he soon had more than a dozen helpers working on the granite blocks. They made many pink and cream scars on the grey verandah walls before they were noticed; and this effort to force improvements ended in a mass flogging.

  Mr Biswas, too, was waiting for improvements. But he did not greatly care about them. For him Shorthills was an adventure, an interlude. His job made him independent of the Tulsis; and Shorthills was an insurance against the sack. It also provided an opportunity to save, an opportunity to plunder. And secretly he was plundering: half a dozen oranges at a time, half a dozen avocado pears or grapefruit or lemons, sold to a café keeper in St Vincent Street with some story about the variety of fruit trees he had in his backyard. The money was little but regular, the thrill of plundering delicious. Plunder! The very sound of the word excited Mr Biswas. Cycling to work in the cool of the morning and whistling in his way, he would suddenly jump off his bicycle, look right, look left, pull down oranges or avocado pears, drop them into his saddlebag, hop on to his saddle and cycle me asuredly away, whistling.

  He came back one afternoon to find the cherry tree cut down, the artificial mound partly dug up, the swimming pool partly filled in. By the end of the week the mound was a flat black patch and the swimming pool did not exist. A tent was put up over the area occupied by the pool and sisters and husbands remarked again and again that it was wonderful not only to have so much bamboo so near but not to have to pay for it either, as they had had to at Arwacas.

  The tent was for wedding guests. It appeared that a whole wave of Shama’s nieces was to be married off. One marriage had been arranged before the move, and during the idle weeks at Shorthills the idea had grown. Action was swift and sudden. Details – the bridegrooms and dowries – had been easily settled, and now the puzzling estate was forgotten and all energy went to preparing for the weddings. Days before the ceremony guests and retainers and dancers, singers and musicians came from Arwacas. They slept in the tent, the verandah, the garage, the covered space between the kitchen and house, and by day wandered through the grounds and woods, plundering.

  Much bamboo was used in the decorations. The drive and walks were lined with bamboo poles placed horizontally on vertical bamboo poles; every horizontal section was filled with oil and fitted with a wick. On the night of the weddings many small flickering flames seemed to be suspended in the darkness; trees, outlined, not illuminated, looked solid; and the grounds felt protected, a warm cave in the night. The seven bridegrooms came in seve
n cavalcades with seven teams of drummers, followed by the stupefied villagers. At the foot of the concrete steps there were seven ceremonies of welcome, and in the wedding-tent, built over one of the gardens flattened for the purpose, the seven wedding ceremonies went on all night, while in the tent over the swimming pool there was singing, dancing and feasting.

  When the weddings were over, the population of the house temporarily reduced by seven, the guests gone away, and the tents over the ruined garden and swimming pool taken down, everyone began waiting again, for the small cricket pavilion to be restored, the drive cleaned, its culverts mended, the canal cleared of silt, for the evergreen hedges at the bottom of the hill to be trimmed, for the unruined garden to be replanted. Unasked, the children did what they could, but their scattered efforts made no impression on the grounds. They collected tonka beans from the hillside and, not knowing what to do with them, left them in the garage, where they presently rotted and smelled.

  Then suddenly some sheep appeared. Haifa dozen scraggy, bare, bewildered sheep. The children had been promised sheep, but they had expected fleecy things, and there was no rush to claim these. The sheep remained nibbling in the cricket field, offending the children and the cricketers.

  Nothing was done to the cocoa trees or the orange trees. Week by week the bush advanced and the estate, from looking neglected, began to look abandoned. There was still no one to plan or direct. As suddenly as she had emerged from her sickroom to supervise the move, so Mrs Tulsi had now withdrawn. She had a small room on the lower floor, overlooking the ruined garden and Hari’s box-board temple. But her window was closed, the room was sealed against light and air, and there, in an ammoniac darkness, she spent much of the day, looked after by Sushila and Miss Blackie. It was as though her energy had been stimulated only by the quarrel with Seth and, ebbing, had depressed her further into exhaustion and grief.