A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  Anand came running on tiptoe into Mr Biswas’s room and whispered joyfully, ‘Daddy is beating Mummy.’

  Mr Biswas sat up and listened. It sounded true. Vidiadhar’s Daddy was beating Vidiadhar’s Mummy.

  The whole house listened. And when the noises from Govind’s room died down, and Govind resumed whining out the Ramayana, the buzzing downstairs built up again, a new, satisfied sound, and W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone played, music of celebration.

  So it was whenever Chinta was beaten by Govind. Which was often. The readers and learners recovered from their terror, for having found this outlet, Govind sought no other. Her beatings gave Chinta a matriarchal dignity and, curiously, gained her a respect she had never had before. They had the subsidiary effects of quelling her children, killing her song, and rousing her to cultural rivalry.

  Vidiadhar was also in the exhibition class. He was not in the star section, like Anand; but Chinta put this down only to bribery and corruption. And one afternoon, while Anand was sitting on the end stool at the bar in the Dairies, an Indian boy came in. It was Vidiadhar. Anand was surprised. Vidiadhar looked surprised as well. And in their surprise, neither boy spoke to the other. Vidiadhar walked past Anand to the stool at the other end of the bar and asked for a half-pint of milk. Anand was pleased to see him making this mistake: money was first paid at the desk, and the receipt presented to the barman. So Vidiadhar had to walk past the whole row of high stools again, get his receipt from the cashier, and walk past the stools once more to the end he had chosen. Without looking at one another, they drank their milk, slowly, each unwilling to be the first to leave. Neither had intended to cut the other; the cutting had simply happened. But each boy considered he had been cut; and never again, until they were men, did they speak. In the shifting, tangled, multifarious relationships in that crowded house, this silence remained constant. It became historic. Then Vidiadhar said that he had done the cutting that afternoon, and Anand said that he had done it. And every afternoon, at five minutes past three, the people in the Dairies saw two Indian boys sitting at opposite ends of the milk bar, drinking half-pints of milk through straws, not looking at one another, never speaking.

  Myna and Kamla, resenting the challenge of Vidiadhar, who was now openly eating prunes, began to claim astounding scholastic achievements for Anand.

  ‘My brother read more books than all of all-you put together.’

  ‘Hear you. But all right. If Anand read so much, let him tell me who is the author of Singing Guns.’ This from a young Tuttle.

  ‘Tell him, Anand. Tell him who is the author of Singing Guns.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Ah-ah-ah!’

  ‘But how you could expect him to know that?’ Myna said. ‘He does only read books of common sense.’

  ‘Okay. Anand does read a lot of books. But my brother write a book. A whole book. And he writing another right now.’

  The writer had indeed done that. He was the eldest Tuttle boy. He had impressed his parents by a constant demand for exercise books and by a continuous show of writing. He said he was making notes. In fact, he had copied out every word of Nelson’s West Indian Geography, by Captain Cutteridge, Director of Education, author of Nelson’s West Indian Readers and Nelson’s West Indian Arithmetics. He had completed the Geography in more than a dozen exercise books, and was at the moment engaged on the first volume of Nelson’s West Indian History, by Captain Daniel, Assistant Director of Education.

  With the exhibition examination less than two months away, Anand lived a life of pure work. Private lessons were given in the morning for half an hour before school; private lessons were given in the afternoon for an hour after school; private lessons were given for the whole of Saturday morning. Then in addition to all these private lessons from his class teacher, Anand began to take private lessons from the headmaster, at the headmaster’s house, from five to six. He went from school to the Dairies to school again; then he went to the headmaster’s, where Savi waited for him with sandwiches and lukewarm Ovaltine. Leaving home at seven in the morning, he returned at half past six. He ate. Then he did his school homework; then he prepared for all his private lessons.

  All the boys in the star section of the exhibition class endured almost similar privation, but they strove to maintain the fiction that they were schoolboys given to pranks, enjoying the most carefree days of their lives. There were a few anxious boys who talked of nothing but work. But most talked of the football season just beginning, the Santa Rosa race meeting just concluded, giving one another to understand that their Daddies had taken them to the races in cars with laden hampers and that they had proceeded to bet, and lose, vast sums on the pari mutuel. They discussed the prospects of Brown Bomber and Jetsam at the Christmas meeting (the examination was in early November and this was a means of looking beyond it). Anand was not the most backward in these conversations. Though horseracing bored him to a degree, he had made it his special subject. He knew, for example, that Jetsam was by Flotsam out of Hope of the Valley; he claimed to have seen all three horses and spread a racetrack story that the young Jetsam used to eat clothes left out to dry. Retailing some more racetrack gossip, he maintained (and began to be known for this) that, in spite of a career of almost unmitigated disaster, Whitstable was the finest horse in the colony; it was a pity he was so erratic, but then these greys were temperamental.

  The talk turned one Monday lunchtime to films, and it appeared that nearly every boy who lived in Port of Spain had been to see the double programme at the London Theatre over the week-end: Jesse James and The Return of Frank James.

  ‘What a double!’ the boys exclaimed. ‘A major double!’

  Anand, whose championship of Whitstable had established him as the holder of the perverse opinion, said he didn’t care for it.

  The boys rounded on him.

  Anand, who had not seen the double, repeated that he didn’t care for it. ‘Give me When the Daltons Rode and The Daltons Ride Again. Any day, old man.’

  It was just his luck for one boy to say then, ‘I bet you he didn’t go to see it! You could see that old crammer going to a theatre?’

  ‘You are a hypocritical little thug,’ Anand said, using two words he had got from his father. ‘You are a bigger crammer than me.’

  The boy wished to shift the conversation: he was a tremendous crammer. He repeated, less warmly, ‘I bet you didn’t go.’ By now, however, the other boys had prepared to listen, and the accuser, gaining confidence, said, ‘All right-all right. He went. Just let him tell me what happened when Henry Fonda –’

  Anand said, ‘I don’t like Henry Fonda.’

  This created a minor diversion.

  ‘How you mean, you don’t like Fonda. Anybody would think that you never see Fonda walk.’ ‘That is walk, old man.’

  ‘All right-all right,’ the accuser went on. ‘What happened when Henry Fonda and Brian Donlevy –’

  ‘I don’t like him either,’ Anand said. And, to his great relief, the bell rang.

  He could tell from the annoyance of his accuser that the cross-examination would be continued. He went straight after school to the Dairies; when he came back it was time for private lessons; and after private lessons he managed to slip away to the headmaster’s. When he got home he said he could do no work that evening and wanted to go to the London Theatre, to give his brain a rest.

  ‘I have no money,’ Shama said. ‘You will have to ask your father.’

  Mr Biswas said, ‘When you get to my age you wouldn’t care for Westerns.’

  Anand lost his temper. ‘When I get to your age I don’t want to be like you.’

  He regretted what he had said. He was, indeed, fatigued; and Mr Biswas’s dismissing manner had seemed to him callous. But he made no apology. He talked instead about the headaches he was getting and said he was sure he was suffering from brainfag and brainfever, crammer’s afflictions, which his rivals at school had often prophesied for him.

  Mr Biswas said
, ‘I haven’t got a red cent on me. I don’t get pay till the day after tomorrow. Right now I am dipping into the Deserving Destees’ petty cash at the office. Go and ask your mother.’

  As usual, it turned out that she did have some money. ‘How much you want?’

  Anand calculated. Adult, twelve cents, children, half price. Just to make sure, however, he said, ‘Thirty-six cents.’ He would return the change afterwards.

  ‘Thirty-six cents. Well, boy, you clean me out. Look.’

  All he saw in her purse were a few coppers. But she always managed. And pay day was the day after tomorrow.

  The evening show began at half past eight. Mr Biswas and Anand left the house at about eight. Not far from the cinema there was a Chinese café. Something had to be bought there; it was part of the cinema ritual. They had eighteen cents to spend. They bought peanuts, chauna and some mint sweets, six cents in all.

  The entrance to the London pit was through a narrow tunnel, as to a dungeon of romance. It allowed not more than one person to advance at a time and enabled the ticket-collector, who sat at the end with a stout stick laid across the arms of his chair, to repel gate-crashers. Mr Biswas and Anand arrived to find the mouth of the tunnel blocked by a turbulent, unaccommodating mob. They stood hesitantly at the edge of the mob, and in an instant, driven from behind, found themselves part of it. They lost control of their hands and feet. Anand, wedged between tall men, shut off from light and air, could only allow himself to be carried along. Cries of frustration and anguish ran through the mob: the film had started: they could hear the opening music. The pressure on Anand increased; he feared he would be crushed against the angle of wall and tunnel; Mr Biswas called to him in a voice that seemed to come from far; he could not answer; he could not look up or down. There was only the thought that at the end of this lay Henry Fonda and Brian Donlevy and Tyrone Power, all of whom, despite what he had said at school, commanded Anand’s highest esteem. He heard men crying for tickets; they were getting near. Through a small, semicircular, lighted hole in the wall of the tunnel money was being pushed in, tickets out, and the hands of the ticketseller occasionally flashed: a woman’s hands, fat and cool.

  It was Mr Biswas’s turn. Struggling to remain in front of the hole, to prevent himself being swept down, ticketless, to the ticket-collector with the stick, he placed a shilling on the smooth, shining wood. ‘One and a half.’

  A woman’s voice said, ‘Half price only at matinée.’ The hands, about to tear a ticket from the reel, waited.

  ‘Two, then.’

  Two green tickets were pushed towards him, and he and Anand yielded gratefully to the pressure at their backs.

  ‘Hey, you!’ the woman’s voice called from the hole.

  Selling had stopped, and the clamour redoubled all down the tunnel.

  ‘You!’

  Mr Biswas went back to the lighted hole.

  ‘What you mean, giving me only a shilling?’ The coin lay on her palm. ‘Two twelves.’

  ‘Two twenties. Sixteen cents more.’

  Anand stood where he was. The turmoil and the shouting became remote.

  The soundtrack indicated that a fire was in progress. People who had seen the film before recognized the sound; it wound them up to a frenzy.

  How could he have forgotten that there was half price only at matinées? How could he have forgotten that on Mondays as on Saturdays and Sundays, the price was not twelve cents, but twenty?

  Mr Biswas put the two green tickets down. One was torn off and given back to him, with four cents.

  They stood against the wall next to the ticket-collector, while the men who had been behind them hurried past, rearranging their disordered clothes.

  ‘You go,’ Mr Biswas said.

  Anand’s cheeks bulged over the mint sweet. He had stopped sucking it; it felt cold and wet. He shook his head. Shock had taken away all desire to see the films; if he stayed he would have to walk home alone at midnight.

  They were continually jostled. They were in the way.

  Mr Biswas said, ‘I’ll come back for you.’

  Anand hesitated. But at that moment there was a new scramble up the tunnel; someone shouted, ‘Why the hell you don’t go if you going?’; the ticket-collector said, ‘Make up your mind. You blocking the way.’ And Anand said to Mr Biswas, ‘You go,’ and Mr Biswas, appearing to obey instantly, vanished behind many backs and was propelled into the cinema to see films he hadn’t wanted to see.

  Anand stayed in the tunnel, pressed flat against the wall, while people passed inside. Presently, with the film well advanced, the tunnel was empty. The distempered ochre walls were rubbed shiny. In the lighted hole the hands were knitting.

  He walked past the Woodbrook Market Square, the Chinese café, the Murray Street playground. The house, when he returned to it, was humming. But no one saw him. He went straight to the front room, took off his shoes and lay down on the Slumberking.

  There Shama found him when she came upstairs and turned on the light.

  ‘Boy! You had me frightened. You didn’t go to the theatre?’

  ‘Yes. But I had a headache.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘He is there.’

  The front gate clicked, and someone came up the concrete steps. The door opened and they saw Mr Biswas. ‘Well!’ Shama said. ‘You had a headache too?’

  He didn’t answer. He worked his way between table and bed, and sat on the bed.

  ‘I can’t understand the pair of you,’ Shama said. She went into the inner room, came out with some sewing and went downstairs.

  Mr Biswas said, ‘Boy, get me the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare. And my pen.’

  Anand climbed over the head of the bed and got the book and the pen.

  For some time Mr Biswas wrote.

  ‘Blasted thing blot like hell. But, still, read it.’

  On the fly-leaf, below the four masculine names that had been chosen for Savi before she was born, Anand read: ‘I, Mohun Biswas, do hereby promise my son Anand Biswas that in the event of his winning a College Exhibition, I will buy him a bicycle.’ Signature and date followed.

  Mr Biswas said, ‘I think you’d better witness it.’

  Anand wrote the latest version of his signature and added ‘witness’ in brackets.

  ‘All fair and square now,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Just a minute though. Let me see the book again. I think I left out something.’

  He took the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare, changed the full stop of his declaration into a comma and added, war conditions permitting.

  In the house the eruptions of sound had ceased. The humming had subsided to a low, steady burr. It was late. Shama and Savi came up and went to the inner room, where Myna and Kamla were already asleep. Anand lay down on the Slumberking, separated from Mr Biswas by a bank of pillows. He pulled the cotton sheet over his face to keep out the light, and soon fell asleep. Mr Biswas stayed awake for some time, reading. Then he got up, turned off the light, and felt his way back to the bed.

  He awoke, as nearly always now, when it was still night. He never wished to know the time: it would be too early or too late. The house was full of sound: with renters, readers and learners upstairs and downstairs, the house snored. The world was without colour; it awaited no one’s awakening. Through the open window, above the silhouette of trees and the roof of the house next door, he could see the deep starlit sky. It magnified his distress. Anguish quickened to panic, the familiar knot in his stomach.

  He slept late next morning; bathed in the open-air bathroom, ate in the sunny front room, put on yesterday’s shirt (he wore one shirt for two days), wrist-watch, tie, jacket, hat; and, respectably attired, cycled out to interview destitutes.

  And at school, when confronted by his accuser, Anand said, ‘Of course I went. But I hated it so much I left before it began.’

  It was agreed that it was a characteristic remark.

  Anand’s attacks of asthma occurred at intervals of four weeks or less, and
Mr Biswas and Shama feared that he might get one during the week of the exhibition examination. But the attack came in the week before, ran for its three days, and then, his chest discoloured and peeling from the medicated wadding, Anand was free to attend to his last, intensive private lessons. His labours were increased when Mr Biswas, determined to leave as little as possible to chance, wrote essays on the Grow More Food Campaign and the Red Cross and made Anand commit them to memory, Mr Biswas flattering himself that he had concealed his own personality in these essays and made them the work, not of a dissident adult, but of a brilliant and loyal schoolboy. They were as full of noble sentiments as a Sentinel leader; they appealed urgently for support for campaign and society; they said that the war had to be won, to preserve those free institutions which Anand dearly loved.

  The examination was on a Saturday. On Friday evening Shama laid out Anand’s speechday clothes and all his equipment. Anand, objecting to the clothes, said it was like preparing for a puja. And Chinta, who had kept her plans secret, did have a little puja for Vidiadhar. A pundit came up from Arwacas on his motorbike on Friday evening and spent the night among the readers and learners below the house. On Saturday morning, while Anand was doing a last-minute revision, Vidiadhar bathed in consecrated water, put on a dhoti and faced the pundit across a sacrificial fire. He listened to the pundit’s prayers, burned some ghee and chipped coconut and brown sugar, and the readers and learners rang bells and struck gongs.

  Anand did not escape ritual himself. He had to wear the dark-blue serge shorts, the white shirt, the unchewed school tie; and Shama, braving his anger, sprinkled his shirt with lavender water when he wasn’t looking. He said he was willing to rely on the clock in the school hall, but he was given Mr Biswas’s Cyma wrist-watch; it hung on his wrist like a loose bracelet and had to be pulled down to his forearm. He was given Mr Biswas’s pen, in case his own should fail. He was given a large new bottle of ink, in case the examiners didn’t provide enough. He was given many blotters, many Sentinel pencils, a pencil sharpener, a ruler, and two erasers, one for pencil, one for ink. He said, ‘Anybody would believe I am going to this place to get married.’ Lastly, Shama gave him two shillings. She didn’t say what this was a precaution against, and he didn’t ask.