A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  The children did not go to the burial ground. They strayed about Pratap’s large yard, eyed other groups of children, town children versus country children. Anand, in his exhibition clothes, led his sisters through the vegetable garden to the cowpen. They examined a broken cartwheel. Behind the pen they surprised a hen and its brood scratching a dung heap. Girls and chickens fled in opposite directions, and the country children tittered.

  Back in Port of Spain, they noticed Mr Biswas’s stillness, his silence, his withdrawal. He did not complain about the noise; he discouraged, but gently, all efforts to engage him in conversation; he went alone for long night walks. He summoned no one to get his matches or cigarettes or books. And he wrote. He told no one what he was writing. He wrote with energy but without enthusiasm, doggedly, destroying sheet after sheet. He ate little, but his indigestion had gone. Shama bought him tinned salmon, his favourite food; she had the girls clean his bicycle and made Anand pump the tyres every morning. But he did not appear to notice these attentions.

  She went to the front room one evening and stood at the head of the bed. He was writing; his back was to her. She was in his light, but he did not shout.

  ‘What’s the matter, man?’

  He said in an expressionless voice, ‘You are blocking the light.’ He laid down paper and pencil.

  She worked her way between the table and bed and sat on the edge of the bed, near his head. Her weight created a minor disturbance. The pillow tilted and his head slipped off it, falling almost into her lap. He tried to move his head, but when she held it he remained still.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ she said.

  He accepted her caresses. She stroked his hair, remarked on its fine quality, said it was going thin, but not, thank God, going grey like hers. She pulled out a hair from her head and laid it across his chest. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘completely grey,’ laughing.

  ‘Grey all right.’

  She looked over his chest to the sheets he had put down. She saw My Dear Doctor, with the My crossed out and written in again.

  ‘Who you writing to?’

  She couldn’t read more, for beyond the first line the handwriting had deteriorated into a racing scrawl.

  He didn’t reply.

  For some time, until the position became uncomfortable for Shama, they remained like that, silent. She stroked his head, looked from him to the open window, heard the buzz and shrieks upstairs and downstairs. He closed his eyes and opened them under her stroking.

  ‘Which doctor?’ Though there had been a long silence, there seemed to be no break between her questions.

  He was silent.

  Then he said, ‘Doctor Rameshwar.’

  ‘The one who …’

  ‘Yes. The one who signed my mother’s death certificate.’

  She went on stroking his head, and, slowly, he began to speak.

  There had been some trouble about the certificate. No, it wasn’t really trouble. Pratap had first dispatched messages; Prasad had come and they had both gone, with urgent grief, to the doctor’s. It was midday, hot; the body would not last. They had been made to wait for very long in the doctor’s verandah; they had complained, and the doctor had damned them and damned their mother. His bad temper continued all the way to the house; with anger and disrespect he had examined Bipti’s body, signed the certificate, demanded his fee and left. This had been told to Mr Biswas by his brothers, not in anger; they told it simply as part of the tribulations of the day: the death, the sending of messages, the arrangements.

  ‘And why didn’t you tell me?’ Shama asked in Hindi.

  He didn’t say. It was something that concerned him alone. By speaking of it he would have exposed himself to the disregard of Shama and the children; he would also have involved them in his own humiliation.

  Shama’s solace was a surprise. She spoke to the children, and he was further strengthened when they expressed, not hurt, but anger.

  He became almost gay, and addressed himself to the letter now with something like zest. He read out to Anand the drafts he had made and asked for comments. The drafts were hysterical and libellous. But in his new mood, and after many re-writings, the letter developed into a broad philosophical essay on the nature of man. Both he and Anand thought it humorous, charitable and in parts correctly condescending; and it thrilled them to think of the doctor’s surprise at receiving such a letter from the relation of someone he had thought to be only a peasant. Mr Biswas introduced himself as the son of the woman whose death the doctor had so rudely certified. He compared the doctor to an angry hero of a Hindu epic, and asked to be forgiven for mentioning the Hindu epics to an Indian who had abandoned his religion for a recent superstition that was being exported wholesale to savages all over the world (the doctor was a Christian). Perhaps the doctor had done so for political reasons or social reasons, or simply to escape from his caste; but no one could escape from what he was. This theme was developed and the letter concluded that no one could deny his humanity and keep his selfrespect. Mr Biswas and Anand hunted through the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare and found the play of Measure for Measure rich in things that could be quoted. They also quoted from the New Testament and the Gita. The letter ran to eight pages. It was typed on the yellow typewriter and posted; and Mr Biswas, exhilarated by his fortnight’s work, said to Anand, ‘How about a few more letters before Christmas? One to a business man. To fix up Shekhar. One to an editor. Fix up the Sentinel Publish them as a booklet. Dedicate it to you.’

  But the wound was still there, too deep for anger or thoughts of retribution. What had happened was locked away in time. But it was an error, not a part of truth. He wished this stated; and he wanted to do something that would be a defiance of what had happened. The body, lying in earth, was unhallowed, and he owed it honour: the mother who had remained unknown and whom he had never loved. Waking in the night, he felt exposed and vulnerable. He longed for hands to cover him all over, and he could only fall asleep again with his hands over his navel, unable to bear the feel of any alien object, however slight, on that part of his body.

  To do honour he had no gifts. He had no words to say what he wanted to say, the poet’s words, which held more than the sum of their meanings. But awake one night, looking at the sky through the window, he got out of bed, worked his way to the light switch, turned it on, got paper and pencil, and began to write. He addressed his mother. He did not think of rhythm; he used no cheating abstract words. He wrote of coming up to the brow of the hill, seeing the black, forked earth, the marks of the spade, the indentations of the fork prongs. He wrote of a journey he had made a long time before. He was tired; she made him rest. He was hungry; she gave him food. He had nowhere to go; she welcomed him. The writing excited, relieved him; so much so that he was able to look at Anand, asleep beside him, and think, ‘Poor boy. Failed his exam.’

  The poem written, his selfconsciousness violated, he was whole again. And when on Friday the five widows arrived in Port of Spain for their sewing lessons at the Royal Victoria Institute, and the house resounded with clatter and chatter and shrieks and singing and the radio and the gramophone, Mr Biswas went to the meeting of his literary group and announced that he was going to read his offering at last.

  ‘It is a poem,’ he said. ‘In prose.’

  Everything glowed richly in the judge’s dimly-lit verandah. On the table there were bottles of whisky and rum, ginger and soda water, and a bowl of crushed ice.

  Mr Biswas sat in the chair below the reading light and sipped his whisky and soda. ‘There is no title,’ he said. And, as he had expected, this was received with satisfaction.

  Then he disgraced himself. Thinking himself free of what he had written, he ventured on his poem boldly, and even with a touch of selfmockery. But as he read, his hands began to shake, the paper rustled; and when he spoke of the journey his voice failed. It cracked and kept on cracking; his eyes tickled. But he went on, and his emotion was such that at the end no one said a word. He folded the p
aper and put it in his jacket pocket. Someone filled his glass. He stared down at his lap, as if angry, as if he had been completely alone. He said nothing for the rest of the evening, and in his shame and confusion drank much. When he went home the widows were singing softly, the children were asleep, and he shamed Shama by being noisily sick in the outdoor lavatory.

  Whatever happened, Anand would go to college. So Mr Biswas and Shama decided. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be cruel and foolish to give the boy nothing more than an elementary school education. The girls agreed. They had not had any milk and prunes, and their chances of going to high schools were slight; but they did badly in their classes and did not consider themselves worthy. Myna and Kamla insisted that Mr Biswas should make a public declaration that Anand was going to the college, for Vidiadhar was behaving as though he had already won the exhibition and was openly learning Latin and French and algebra and geometry, the wonderful subjects taught at the college.

  The declaration was made, though neither Mr Biswas nor Shama could say where the money was going to come from.

  Shama talked of recovering her cow Mutri from Shorthills.

  ‘Where you going to keep it?’ Mr Biswas asked. ‘With the boarders downstairs?’

  ‘Milk selling at ten and twelve cents a bottle,’ Shama said.

  ‘What about grass, eh? You think you could just tie out Mutri in Adam Smith Square or the Murray Street playground? You’ve been reading too much Captain Cutteridge. And how much milk you think poor old Mutri going to give after living all those years with your family?’

  Commercial ventures were running high in Shama’s mind since one of the widows, despairing of any but long-term returns from the clothesmaking scheme, had brought up a bag of oranges from Shorthills one Friday. She was exceptionally grave. She called one of her sons aside and ordered him to place the oranges on a tray, the tray on a box, and the box on the pavement. Then she went to the Royal Victoria Institute. The widow’s idea was simplicity itself: it required little effort and no outlay. There was much agitated discussion among the sisters that evening; many plans were adumbrated, and futures tremulously envisaged. The widow herself said nothing, and continued as grave and mournful as before, sucking thread, threading needles, and sewing.

  The appearance of a shallow heap of oranges on a tray outside the tall blank walls of the house created a small sensation in the residential street. And it increased Mr Biswas’s dread of being traced to his home by impatient destitutes.

  With the exhibition examination and the death of his mother he had been neglecting the destitutes. Correspondence had accumulated, and as he was sitting in the Sentinel office one morning and typing for the tenth time, Dear Sir, Your letter awaited me on my return from holiday …, a reporter came to his desk and said, ‘Congrats, old man.’

  It was the Sentinel’s education correspondent. He held some typewritten sheets. They were the exhibition results.

  In a page of names the name stood out.

  Anand had been placed third, had got one of the twelve exhibitions.

  As bewitching as the news was the generosity with which it was welcomed by the older members of the staff. The very young, who had sat the examination not many years before, were aloof and unimpressed.

  But third! Third in the island! It was fantastic. Only two boys more intelligent! It couldn’t be grasped right away.

  Recovering, Mr Biswas attempted to deflect some of the praise. ‘Mark you, the teacher knows his stuff.’ But he couldn’t keep this up. ‘Careless boy, too, you know. Left out one whole question. In the spelling paper. Synonyms and homonyms.’

  He began to lose his audience.

  ‘He knew them. Thought they were easy.’

  Reporters returned to their desks.

  ‘And then didn’t do them at all. Left them out. A whole question.’

  After a light-hearted morning in which he investigated the circumstances of two destitutes with a good humour which offended those people, he returned to the office and invited the education correspondent and Mr Burnett’s news editor to have beers with him at the café on the corner. There, surrounded by flamboyant murals of revelry on tropical beaches, they drank: three men, none over forty, who considered their careers closed and rested their ambitions on the achievements of their children. The success of the son of one gave the others hope. They shared Mr Biswas’s joy; they could not achieve his delirium.

  ‘You could leave old Mutri to die in peace,’ he said to Shama when he got back to the quiet house at midday; and his gaiety had her guessing. ‘What about oranges? Want to go in the selling business? Join the widows? The five financial wizards.’

  The orange venture had in fact failed. Three oranges had been sold to a stray American soldier for a penny; the others had gone bad in the sun. The failure was put down to the unsuitability of the site and the snobbishness and jealousy of the neighbours who, to spite the widow, had preferred to go all the way to the city market to buy their oranges at a higher price. The widow’s son was also blamed for his lack of enthusiasm and his false pride: he had stood some distance from the tray of oranges and tried to pretend that they had nothing to do with him.

  When Mr Biswas broke the news of the exhibition, Shama set about defending the widows, and she and Mr Biswas had a long and friendly squabble about the Tulsi family. It was like old times, and Mr Biswas, the victor as always, solaced Shama by saying, what he had forgotten for some time, ‘Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! One of these days.’

  ‘I suppose it would look nice in my coffin.’

  The school had taken the first four places and won seven of the twelve exhibitions. The teacher’s notes and private lessons, legendarily virtuous, had triumphed once again. Five of the exhibitions went to known crammers like Anand and the Chinese boy and aroused little comment. The sixth went to one of the mild, hamper-fed boys; he was now considered sly. But the biggest surprise was provided by the boy who had come first. He was a Negro boy of astonishing size. He was a year younger than Anand but looked incomparably older. His forearms were already veined, and his chin and cheeks were dotted with little springs of hair. He had been loud in his denunciation of crammers; he had taken a leading part in discussions about films and sport; he had a phenomenal knowledge of English county cricket scores throughout the nineteen-thirties; and he had introduced the topic of sex. He claimed to have had many sexual encounters and his talk encouraged the belief that when he left school after private lessons, his satchel bouncing off his high bottom, it was not to do homework but to indulge in sexual intrigue and, joyously, to be pursued by older women. He displayed a convincing knowledge of the female body and its functions; and the conception of his life away from school as one of indifference to books and notes and homework was reinforced by his passionate devotion to the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, whose style he successfully imitated in his English compositions. His popularity was at its lowest that morning; his success cast doubt on all his tales of sexual adventure. He protested that he had not worked, that he had done no more than a hasty last-minute revision, and that the result had surprised him more than anyone else. But he protested in vain.

  Photographers from the newspapers came. The exhibitioners straightened their ties and were photographed. Then they were free. They had ceased to be members of the school. School and teacher dwindled, and the boys were anxious to be out of the yard. None dared say he wanted to go home to break the news; besides, none wanted to put an end to the day.

  The city was black and white in the sun. Trees were still, the sky high. They walked up to the Savannah, sat and looked at the people going in and out of the Queen’s Park Hotel. In the whitewashed bays on either side of the hotel entrance two doorkeepers of a rare blackness stood in stiff snow-white tunics. The effect was severe but picturesque. The boys wondered aloud what made the hotel get the blackest men in the island for that job, and what made the men take the job. Then they had a long discussion whether, given such a blackness, they woul
d take the job themselves. The taxi-drivers, squatting on the asphalt pavement, chuckled; and the doorkeepers, compelled because of the constant coming and going to maintain their statuesque pose, could only make furtive threatening gestures and open their mouths to frame silent, hurried obscenities. The boys laughed and retreated. They walked along the Savannah, always in the shade of large trees. At Queen’s Park West they came on a mobile stall selling syrupy ice shavings in two colours. They bought; they sucked; they stained hands, faces, shirts. Then the Negro boy, anxious to regain his character, suggested that they should go to the Botanical Gardens to look for copulating couples. They went, they looked. Deployed by the Negro boy, they surprised one couple into a hasty show of decency. The second time they were chased by an enraged American sailor. They retreated to the Rock Gardens, and walked past the architectural marvels of Maraval Road. They walked past the Scottish baronial castle, the Moorish mansion, the semi-Oriental palace, the Bishop’s Spanish Colonial residence, and came to the blue and red Italianate college, empty now, though there were two cars below a pillared and balustraded balcony. They were proud and a little frightened. Kings for half a day, they would soon be new boys here, and nothing. The clock struck three. They looked up at the tower. The dial would be seen for weeks and months and years; those chimes would become familiar. They would warn of many things; they would mark many beginnings and ends. Now they said that the half-holiday was over. ‘See you next term,’ the boys said, and went their separate ways.

  That evening, while Mr Biswas and the parents of the other exhibitioners beat their way to the teacher’s door with gifts of rum and whisky, trussed fowls and hobbled goats, the Tuttle children were set to their books with a new rigidity, although Christmas was not far off and the school term nearly ended. The writer, encouraged, completed the first volume of Captain Daniel’s West Indian History. For Vidiadhar it was an unhappy evening. He was given no food. For he had not won an exhibition, Vidiadhar who had brought home clean question papers with ticks beside the questions he had done and a neat list of correct answers to the arithmetic sums, who had begun to learn Latin and French, who had gone to the intercollegiate football match and uttered partisan cries. Now, deprived of his Latin and French books, he was made to sit up late before his exhibition notes, and was repeatedly flogged by Chinta.