A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  The cup trembled in Bhandat’s hand. The woman ran to the bed and opened her mouth wide. No words came out of that mouth: only a clacking of the tongue that erupted, at the end, into a shrill croak.

  The tea had spilled on the bed, on Bhandat. And Mr Biswas, thinking of deafness, dumbness, insanity, the horror of the sexual act in that grimy room, felt the yellow cake turn to a sweet slippery paste in his mouth. He could neither chew nor swallow. On the bed Bhandat was in a paroxysm of rage, cursing in Hindi, while the woman, unheeding, took the cup from his hand, ran behind the screen and brought out a floursack rag, burned in places, and began rubbing briskly on the sheet and Bhandat’s vest.

  ‘You awkward barren cow!’ Bhandat screamed in Hindi. ‘Always full to the brim! Always full to the brim!’

  As she rubbed, her thin dress shook, revealing the thick coarse hair under her arms, the shape of her graceless body, the outline of one of her undergarments. Mr Biswas forced himself to swallow the paste in his mouth and washed it down with the strong sweet tea. He was glad when the woman rolled up the floursack rag, put it under Bhandat’s vest, and went behind the screen.

  Bhandat calmed down at once. He smiled impishly at Mr Biswas and said, ‘She doesn’t understand Hindi.’

  Mr Biswas rose to go.

  The woman appeared again, and croaked at Bhandat.

  ‘Stay and eat a proper meal, Mohun,’ Bhandat said. ‘I am not so poor that I can’t afford to feed my child.’

  Mr Biswas shook his head and tapped the notebook in his jacket pocket.

  The woman withdrew.

  ‘Antiseptic, fragrant, refreshing and inexpensive, eh? God will thank you for this, Mohun. As for those worthless sons of mine –’ Bhandat smiled. ‘Come and let me kiss you before you go, Mohun.’

  Mr Biswas smiled, left Bhandat hooting, and went behind the screen to say good-bye to the woman. A lighted coal-pot stood on a box; on another box there were vegetables and plates. A basin of dirty water rested on the wet, black floor.

  He said, ‘I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything.’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Is his back, really.’

  The words were low but clear. She was not dumb!

  He did not wait for an explanation. He hurried out of the room into the lane. It was chokingly warm. Once more he received the shock of the street’s hot smells. The bees, honey-makers, buzzed around the exporters’ sweating sugarsacks. Bits of the coarse cake were still between his teeth. He swallowed. Instantly his mouth filled with saliva again.

  As soon as he got to the house he went to the old bookcase, dug past his newspaper clippings, his correspondence from the Ideal School, a nest of pink blind baby mice, and took out his unfinished Escape stories, the dreams of the barren heroine. He took the stories to the lavatory in the yard and stayed there for some time, creating a din of his own, pulling the chain again and again. When he came out there was a little queue of readers and learners, impatient but interested.

  On Sundays the din of the readers and learners was at its peak, and Mr Biswas started once more to take his children on visits to Pagotes. But now he spent little time with them when they got there. Jagdat, like a vicious schoolboy eager to corrupt, was always anxious to get Mr Biswas out of the house, and Mr Biswas was always willing. Between Jagdat and Mr Biswas there had developed an easy, relaxing relationship. They had never quarrelled; they could never be friends; yet each was always pleased to see the other. Neither believed or was interested in what the other said, and did not feel obliged even to listen. Mr Biswas liked, too, to be with Jagdat in Pagotes, for once outside the house Jagdat was a person of importance, Ajodha’s heir, and his manner was that of someone used to obedience and affection. Despite his age, his family, his premature, attractive grey hair, Jagdat was still treated as the young man for whom allowances had to be made. His main pleasure lay in breaking Ajodha’s rules, and for a few hours Mr Biswas had to pretend that these rules applied to him as well. Smoking was forbidden: they began to smoke as soon as they were in the road. Drinking was forbidden, and on Sunday mornings rumshops were closed by law: therefore they drank. Jagdat had an arrangement with a rumshop-keeper who, in return for free petrol from Ajodha’s pumps, offered the use of his drawingroom for this Sunday morning drinking. In this drawingroom, which was strangely respectable, with four highly polished morris chairs around a small table, Mr Biswas and Jagdat drank whisky and soda. In the beginning they were young men, for whom the world was still new, and neither mentioned the affections to which he had that day to return. But there always came a time when, after a silence, with each willing the talk to continue as before, anxieties and affections returned. Jagdat mentioned his family; he spoke their names: they became individuals. Mr Biswas spoke about the Sentinel, about Anand and the exhibition. And always at the end the talk turned to Ajodha. Mr Biswas heard old and new stories of Ajodha’s selfishness and cruelty; again and again he heard how it was Bhandat who had made Ajodha’s early success possible. Distrustful of the family, despite the drink, Mr Biswas listened and made no comments, only squeezing in words about the Tulsis from time to time, half-heartedly trying to suggest that he had suffered as grand a betrayal as Bhandat. One Sunday morning he told Jagdat about his visit to Bhandat.

  ‘Ah! So you see the old man then, Mohun? How he keeping? Tell me, he say anything about that bloodsucking hog?’

  This was clearly Ajodha. Mr Biswas, looking down at his glass as though deeply moved, shook his head.

  ‘You see the sort of man he is, Mohun. No malice.’

  Mr Biswas drank some whisky. ‘He tell me that none of you does go to see him or give him a little help or anything.’

  After a pause Jagdat said, ‘Son of a bitch lying like hell. That old bitch he living with smart too, you know. She always putting him up to something or the other.’

  Thereafter Jagdat never spoke of Bhandat, and Mr Biswas resolved only to listen.

  At these sessions Jagdat gave every indication of growing drunk. Mr Biswas nearly always became drunk, and when they left the rumshop-keeper’s drawingroom they sometimes decided to break more rules. They went to Ajodha’s garage, filled one of Ajodha’s vans or lorries with Ajodha’s petrol and drove to the river or the beach. Jagdat drove very fast, but with acute judgement; and it was a recurring mortification to Mr Biswas to find that as soon as they got back to Ajodha’s Jagdat became quite sober. He said that he had been out on some business, described conversations and incidents with an abundance of inconsequential, credible detail, and talked happily all through lunch. Mr Biswas said little and moved with a slow precision. His children noted his bloodshot eyes and wondered what had happened to subdue the vivacity he had shown earlier that morning in the bus-station in Port of Spain.

  At lunch Ajodha invariably spoke to Mr Biswas of his business problems. ‘They didn’t give me that contract, you know, Mohun. I think you should write an article about these Local Road Board contracts.’ And: ‘Mohun, they are not giving me a permit to import diesel lorries. Can you find out why? Will you write them a letter for me? I am sure the oil companies are behind it. Why don’t you write an article about it, Mohun?’ And there and then followed the looking at official forms, correspondence, illustrated booklets from American firms, with Mr Biswas adopting a side-sitting attitude, breathing away from Ajodha, mumbling inanities through half-closed lips about the war and restrictions.

  When the children asked Mr Biswas what was wrong he complained of his indigestion; and sometimes he slept through the afternoon. He did get indigestion too: his increased consumption of Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, his silence, his unquenchable thirst were symptoms which Shama came to understand, to her shame.

  So the children often found themselves on their own at Pagotes. There was only Tara to welcome them, and she was now crippled by asthma. In the large, well-equipped, empty house only the antagonism between Ajodha and his nephews could be felt. Anything could lead to a quarrel: the pronunciation of
‘Iraq’, a discussion of the merits of the Buick. As quarrels became more frequent they became shorter, but so violent and obscene it seemed impossible that uncle and nephews could ever speak to one another again. Yet in a few minutes Ajodha would come out of his room, his glasses on, papers in his hand, and there would be normal talk and even laughter. Ajodha was bound to his nephews, and they to him. Ajodha needed his nephews in his business, since he distrusted strangers; he needed them more in his house, since he feared to be alone. And Jagdat and Rabidat, with large unacknowledged families, with no money, no gifts, and no status except that they derived from Ajodha’s protection, knew that they were tied to Ajodha for as long as he lived. Rabidat, of the beautiful, exposed body, seemed to have his prognathous mouth perpetually set for a snarl. Jagdat’s giggles could turn in a moment to screams and tears. In Ajodha’s presence he was always on the verge of hysteria: it showed in his small unsteady eyes, which always belied his hearty, back-slapping manner.

  More and more the children felt like intruders. They became aware of their status. And they were eventually humiliated.

  In response to a plea from Aunt Juanita of the Guardian Tinymites League, Anand had gone around with a blue card collecting money for Polish refugee children. He had collected from teachers, the school caretaker, shopkeepers, and even from W. C. Tuttle. The cashier at the Dairies in Port of Spain had given six cents and congratulated him for undertaking good works while yet so young. And in the back verandah at Pagotes one Sunday morning, after he had read out an article on the importance of breathing, he presented the blue card to Ajodha and asked for a contribution.

  Ajodha bunched his eyebrows and looked offended.

  ‘You are a funny sort of family,’ Ajodha said. ‘Father collecting money for destitutes. You collecting for Polish refugees. Who collecting for you?’

  It was a long time before Anand went back to Ajodha’s. He collected no more money for Polish refugees, tore up the card. The money he had collected melted away, and for some months he lived in the dread of being summoned by Aunt Juanita to account for it. The kindness he received every afternoon from the woman in the Dairies was like a pain.

  These Sunday excursions, mornings of makebelieve, afternoons and evenings of distress, grew less frequent, and Mr Biswas found himself more fully occupied with his campaigns at home.

  To combat W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone Chinta and Govind had been giving a series of pious singings from the Ramayana. The study of the Ramayana, which Chinta had started many years before, while Mr Biswas still lived at Green Vale, was now apparently complete; she sang very well. Govind sang less mellifluously: he partly whined and partly grunted, from his habit of singing while lying on his belly. Caught in this crossfire of song, which sometimes lasted a whole evening, Mr Biswas, listening, listening, would on a sudden rush in pants and vest to the inner room and bang on the partition of Govind’s room and bang on the partition of W. C. Tuttle’s drawingroom.

  The Tuttles never replied. Chinta sang with added zest. Govind sometimes only chuckled between couplets, making it appear to be part of his song: the Ramayana singer is free to add his own rubric in sound between couplets. Sometimes, however, he interrupted his singing to shout insulting things through the partition. Mr Biswas shouted back, and then Shama had to run upstairs to silence Mr Biswas.

  Govind had become the terror of the house. It was as if his long spells in his taxi with his back to his passengers had turned him into a complete misanthrope, as if his threepiece suits had buttoned up whatever remained of his eagerness and loyalty and turned it into a brooding which was liable to periodic sour eruptions. He had suffered a corresponding physical change. His weak handsome face had become gross and unreadable, and since he had taken to driving a taxi his body had lost its hardness and broadened into the sort of body that needs a waistcoat to give it dignity, to suggest that the swelling flesh is under control. His behaviour was odd and unpredictable. The Ramayana singing had taken nearly everyone by surprise, and would have been amusing if it hadn’t coincided with several displays of violence. For days he noticed nobody; then, without provocation, he fastened his attention on someone and pursued him with childish taunts and a frightening smile. He insulted Shama and the children; Shama, appreciating the limitations of Mr Biswas’s hammock-like muscles, bore these insults in silence. He made a number of surprise assaults on Basdai’s readers and learners and generally terrorized them. Appeals to Chinta were useless; the fear Govind inspired was to her a source of pride. The story how Govind had once thrashed Mr Biswas she passed on to her children, and they passed it on to the readers and learners, terrifying them utterly.

  A quarrel between Govind and Mr Biswas upstairs was invariably accompanied by a quarrel between their children downstairs.

  Once Savi said, ‘I wonder why Pa doesn’t buy a house.’

  Govind’s eldest daughter replied, ‘If some people could put money where their mouth is they would be living in palaces.’

  ‘Some people only have mouth and belly.’

  ‘Some people at least have a belly. Other people have nothing at all.’

  Savi took these defeats badly. As soon as the quarrel upstairs subsided she went to the inner room and lay down on the fourposter. Not wishing to hurt herself again or to hurt her father, she could not tell him what had happened; and he was the only person who could have comforted her.

  In the circumstances W. C. Tuttle came to be regarded as a useful ally. His physical strength matched Govind’s (though this was denied by Govind’s children), and their dispute about the garage still stood. It helped, too, that W. C. Tuttle and Mr Biswas had something in common: they both felt that by marrying into the Tulsis they had fallen among barbarians. W. C. Tuttle regarded himself as one of the last defenders of brahmin culture in Trinidad; at the same time he considered he had yielded gracefully to the finer products of Western civilization: its literature, its music, its art. He behaved at all times with a suitable dignity. He exchanged angry words with no one, contenting himself with silent contempt, a quivering of his longhaired nostrils.

  And, indeed, apart from the unpleasantness caused by the gramophone, there was between Mr Biswas and W. C. Tuttle only that rivalry which had been touched off when Myna broke the torchbearer’s torchbearing arm and Shama bought a glass cabinet. The battle of possessions Mr Biswas lost by default. After the acquisition of the glass cabinet (its broken door unrepaired, its lower shelves filled with schoolbooks and newspapers) and the grateful destitute’s diningtable, Mr Biswas had no more room. W. C. Tuttle had the whole of the front verandah: he bought two moms rockingchairs, a standard lamp, a rolltop desk and a bookcase with sliding glass doors. Mr Biswas had gained a slight advantage by being the first to enrol his children in the Guardian Tinymites League; but he had squandered this by imitating W. C. Tuttle’s khaki shorts. W. C. Tuttle’s shorts were proper shorts, and he had the figure for them. Mr Biswas lacked this figure, and his khaki shorts were only long khaki trousers which Shama, against her judgement, had amputated, and hemmed on her machine with a wavering line of white cotton. Mr Biswas suffered a further setback when the Tuttle children revealed that their father had taken out a life insurance policy. ‘Take out one too?’ Mr Biswas said to Myna and Kamla. ‘If I start paying insurance every month, you think any of you would live to draw it?’

  The picture war started when Mr Biswas bought two drawings from an Indian bookshop and framed them in passepartout. He found he liked framing pictures. He liked playing with clean cardboard and sharp knives; he liked experimenting with the colours and shapes of mounts. He saw the glass cut to his measurements, he cycled tremulously home with it, and a whole evening was transformed. Framing a picture was like writing a sign: it required neatness and precision; he could concentrate on what his hands did, forget the house, subdue his irritations. Soon his two rooms were as hung with pictures as the barrackroom in Green Vale had been with religious quotations.

  W. C. Tuttle began with a series of photographs
, in large wooden frames, of himself. In one photograph W. C. Tuttle, naked except for dhoti, sacred thread and caste-marks, head shown except for the top-knot, sat crosslegged, fingers bunched delicately on his upturned soles, and meditated with closed eyes. Next to this W. C. Tuttle stood in jacket, trousers, collar, tie, hat, one well-shod foot on the running-board of a motorcar, laughing, his gold tooth brilliantly revealed. There were photographs of his father, his mother, their house; his brothers, in a group and singly; his sisters, in a group and singly. There were photographs of W. C. Tuttle in various transitory phases: W. C. Tuttle with beard, whiskers and moustache, W. C. Tuttle with beard alone, moustache alone; W. C. Tuttle as weight-lifter (in bathing trunks, glaring at the camera, holding aloft the weights he had made from the lead of the dismantled electricity plant at Shorthills); W. C. Tuttle in Indian court dress; W. C. Tuttle in full pundit’s regalia, turban, dhoti, white jacket, beads, standing with a brass jar in one hand, laughing again (a number of blurred, awestruck faces in the background). In between there were pictures of the English countryside in spring, a view of the Matterhorn, a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, and a picture entitled ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’ It was W. C. Tuttle’s way of blending East and West.

  But Govind, taxi-driving, Ramayana-grunting, remained untouched by this or any other rivalry and continued as menacing and offensive as before. The readers and learners openly wished that he would be maimed or killed in a motor accident. Instead, he won a safety award and had his hand shaken by the mayor of Port of Spain. This appeared to free him of all inhibitions, and both Basdai and Mr Biswas began to talk of calling in the police.

  But the police were never called. For, quite suddenly, Govind ceased to be a problem.

  An abrupt, stunning silence fell on the house one evening. The learners and readers stopped buzzing. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone went dead. The Ramayana singing broke off in mid-couplet. And from Govind’s room came a series of grunts, thumps, cracks and crashes.