A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  Presently, exhausted by their inactivity, the children went downstairs.

  Morning would show the full horror of the past few minutes.

  They awoke with a sense of unease. Almost at once they remembered. They avoided one another. They listened, above the hawking and spitting, the running taps, the continuous scuffling, the fanning of coal-pots, the metallic hiss of the lavatory flush, for the footsteps and voices of Mrs Tulsi and Owad. But the house was quiet upstairs. Then they learned that Owad had left early that morning for a week’s tour of Tobago. The instinct of Mr Biswas’s children was to get away at once, to escape from the house to the separate reality of the streets and school.

  Mr Biswas’s anger had gone stale; it burdened him. Now there was also shame at his behaviour, shame at the whole gross scene. But the uncertainty that had been with him ever since he heard that Owad was returning from England had disappeared. He found it easy to ignore his fears; and after he had had his bath he felt energetic and even light-headed. He too was anxious to get out of the house. And as he left it his sympathy went out to Shama, who had to remain.

  The sisters looked chastened. Unpersecuted, they believed in their righteousness; and though Owad’s departure, in anger, as was reported, involved them all in disgrace and threatened them all, every sister was sure of her own hold on Owad, and her attitude to Shama was one of blame and recoil.

  ‘So, Aunt,’ Suniti, the former contortionist, said, ‘I hear you moving to a new house, man.’

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ Shama said.

  At school Anand defended Eliot, Picasso, Braque, Chagall. He who had been leaving copies of the Soviet Weekly in the readingroom between the pages of Punch and The Illustrated London News now announced that he frowned upon communism. The phrase was thought odd; but the action, coinciding with the widespread renunciation of communism by distinguished intellectuals in Europe and America, caused little comment.

  Shortly after he had been taken on the Sentinel Mr Biswas went late one night to the city centre to interview the homeless people, whose families among them, who regularly slept in Marine Square. ‘That conundrum – the housing question —’ he had begun his article; and though the words were excised by Mr Burnett, Mr Biswas was taken by their rhythm and had never forgotten them. They drummed in his head that morning; he spoke them and sang them under his breath; and throughout the Monday conference at the office he was exceptionally lively and garrulous. When the conference was over he went down St Vincent Street to the café with the gay murals and sat at the bar, waiting for people he knew.

  ‘Got notice to quit, man,’ he said.

  He spoke lightly, expecting solicitude, but his lightness was met with lightness.

  ‘I expect I will be joining you in Marine Square,’ a Guardian reporter said.

  ‘Hell of a thing, though. Married with four children and nowhere to go. Know any places for rent?’

  ‘If I know one I would be there right now.’

  ‘Ah, well. I suppose it will be the square.’

  ‘It look so.’

  The café, close to newspaper offices, government offices and the courts, was frequented by newspapermen and civil servants; by people who came in for a drink before their cases were called and then disappeared, sometimes for months; by solicitors’ clerks and by junior clerks who spent days of tedium tracing titles at the polished desks in the outer room of the Registrar-General’s Department.

  It was a title-tracer who said, ‘If Billy was still here I woulda tell you to go and see Billy. All-you remember Billy?

  ‘Billy used to promise them that he wasn’t only going to get them a house, but that he was going to move them free into the bargain. Everybody rushing to get this free move – you know black people – and paying Billy deposit. When he pick up a good few deposit Billy decide it was time to put a end to this stupidness and to make tracks for the States.

  ‘But listen. The day before he leave, Billy plan leak out. But Billy get to know that the plan leak out. So the next day, Billy ship waiting in the harbour, Billy hire a lorry, put on his khaki working-clothes and went around to all the people he take money from. Everybody so surprise they forgetting they vex. All of them telling Billy how they call police and they saying, “But, Billy, we hear that you was leaving today.” And Billy saying, “I don’t know where you get the niggergram from. I not leaving. You leaving. I come to move you. You got everything pack?” None of them had anything pack, and Billy start getting into one big temper, saying how they make him waste his time, and he was mad not to move them at all. And they calm him down by saying if he pass back in the afternoon they would have everything pack and ready to move. So Billy leave and the people pack and wait for Billy. They still waiting.’

  The laughter broke, but Mr Biswas could take no part in it. Outside it had grown dark. There was a blue instant of lightning, a crack and roll of thunder. The thought of driving to his area with the windows closed was not appealing. He had drunk many lagers and they had steadily reduced him to silence and stillness. He did not want to go to the country; he did not want to stay in the café. But the rain, which had begun to fall in heavy drops that blotted on the pavement and presently had it wet and running, encouraged him to stay, silent and unlistening on a tall stool, drinking lager, staring at the crude bright murals, surrendering to the gloom.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see a very tall, thin coloured man. He had occasionally seen this man about St Vincent Street and knew him to be a solicitor’s clerk. In the past year or two they had been nodding to one another but they had never spoken.

  ‘Is true?’ the man asked.

  Mr Biswas noted the man’s size, the concern in his voice and in his young-old face. ‘Yes, man.’

  ‘You really got notice?’

  Mr Biswas responded to this sympathy by pursing his lips, looking down at his glass and nodding.

  ‘Hell of a thing. How long?’

  ‘Notice. A month, I suppose.’

  ‘Hell of a thing. Married? Children?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘God! You try the government? You in the Service now, not so? And ain’t they have some sort of housing loans scheme?’

  ‘Only for established people.’

  ‘You can’t get a good place to rent for all the tea in China,’ the man said. He edged his way around Mr Biswas, cutting him off from the talkers, some of whom were beginning to eat, at the bar, at tables. ‘Much easier to buy a house really. In the long run. What you drinking? Lager? Two lagers, miss. A hell of a thing, man.’

  The lagers came.

  ‘I know,’ the man said. ‘I was in the same position not so long ago. I only had my mother. But even that was hell, I could tell you. Is like being sick.’

  ‘Sick?’

  ‘When you sick you forget what it is to be well. And when you well you don’t really know what it is to be sick. Is the same with not having a place to go back to every afternoon.’

  Lights were turned on in the café. People stood silently in every doorway, looking out at the rain. From the dark street came the hiss of wet tyres and the beat of the rain, drowning the scrape of knives and forks on plates, the chatter.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘But look. What you doing now?’

  ‘I got to go to the country. But with all this rain –’

  ‘You know what? You better come and have some lunch with me. No, not here.’ He looked around the café, and in his look Mr Biswas saw the chatterers rebuked for their callousness.

  They went outside and hurried through the rain, brushing against people who stood close to walls. They turned into a side street and entered the grimy green hall of a Chinese restaurant. The coconut-fibre mat was damp and black, the floor wet. They went up bare steps and the solicitor’s clerk seemed to be continually meeting people he knew. To all of them he said, patting Mr Biswas on the shoulder, ‘Hell of a thing here, man. The man got notice. And he got nowhere to go.’ People looked at Mr Biswas, made symp
athetic sounds, and Mr Biswas, muddled by the lager, the strange faces and the unexpected interest, became very tragic.

  They went to a celotex-partitioned cubicle and the solicitor’s clerk ordered food.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But look. My position is this. I living with my mother in a two-storey house in St James. But she a lil old now, you know –’

  ‘My mother dead,’ Mr Biswas said, finding himself, to his surprise, eating. ‘Blasted doctor didn’t want to give a death certificate. Write him a letter, though. A long one –’

  ‘Hell of a thing, man. But the position is this. The old queen have a lil heart trouble. Can’t climb steps and that sort of thing. It does strain the heart, you know.’ The solicitor’s clerk put his hand on his chest and his shoulders see-sawed. ‘And right at this moment I have a offer of a house in Mucurapo which would suit the old lady right down to the ground. Trouble is, I can’t buy it unless somebody buy mine.’

  ‘And you want me buy yours.’

  ‘In a sort of way. I could help you and you could help me. And the old queen.’

  ‘Upstairs house, you say.’

  ‘All modern conveniences and full and immediate vacant possession.’

  ‘I wish I had that sort of money, old man.’

  ‘Wait until you see it.’

  And before the meal was over Mr Biswas had agreed to go to see the house. He knew what he was doing. He knew that he had no more than eight hundred dollars and was only wasting the clerk’s time and his own. But courtesy demanded no less.

  ‘You would be doing me a favour,’ the solicitor’s clerk said. ‘And you would be doing the old queen a favour.’

  So in the pouring rain, the windscreen wiper occasionally sticking, they drove down St Vincent Street and around Marine Square and along Wrightson Road – settled by secure people – and across Woodbrook to the Western Main Road, past the vast grounds and the saman-lined drive of the Police Barracks, and turned into Sikkim Street.

  It was still raining when the car stopped outside the house. The fence, half concrete, with lead pipes running between square concrete pillars, was covered with the vines of the Morning Glory spattered with small red flowers drooping in the rain. The height of the house, the cream and grey walls, the white frames of doors and windows, the red brick sections with white pointing: all these things Mr Biswas took in at once, and knew that the house was not for him.

  When, racing into the house out of the rain, he met the old queen, not as old as the solicitor’s clerk had made out, he was overwhelmed by her courtesy. Continually, with his suit and tie and shining shoes and Prefect car, he felt he was deceiving the public. Here, in this house in Sikkim Street, so desirable, so inaccessible, deception was especially painful. He tried to respond to the old queen’s civility with equal civility; he tried not to think of his crowded room, his eight hundred dollars. Slowly and carefully, aware now of the lager, he sipped tea and smoked a cigarette. Hesitantly, fearing a frank appraisal would be rude, he took in the distempered walls, the washed celotex ceiling with strips of wood painted chocolate and looking brand-new, frosted-glass windows and frosted-glass doors with white woodwork, white lattice work, a polished floor, a polished morris suite. And when the solicitor’s clerk, frank and trusting, ignorant of the eight hundred dollars, insisted that Mr Biswas should see the rooms upstairs, Mr Biswas went round quickly, seeing a bathroom with a toilet bowl and – luxury! – a porcelain wash-basin, two bedrooms with green walls, a verandah, so cool without the sun, the Morning Glory on the fence below, his Prefect in the road, and just for a moment he thought of the house as his own, and the thought was so heady he rejected it at once and hurried downstairs.

  The old queen, whose heart had not permitted her to climb the steps, greeted him as though he had returned from a long journey.

  He sat in one of the morris chairs and drank more tea and took another cigarette.

  Not a word had been said so far about the price. Mr Biswas kept on fixing it in his mind at something high and impossible which would relieve him of responsibility and regret. He thought of eight thousand, nine thousand. So near the busy Main Road: an ideal site for a shop. And yet so quiet in the rain!

  ‘Not bad for six thousand,’ the solicitor’s clerk said.

  Mr Biswas smoked and said nothing.

  The old queen came out from the kitchen with a plate of cakes. The solicitor’s clerk insisted that Mr Biswas should try one. The old queen had made them herself.

  Mr Biswas took a cake. The old queen smiled at him, and he smiled back.

  ‘Well, to be honest. We both want to make a sale in a hurry. So let’s say five five.’

  Once Mr Biswas had read a story by a French writer about a woman who worked for twenty years to pay off a debt on an imitation necklace. He had never been able to understand why it was considered a comic story. Debt was a fearful thing; and with all its ifs and might-have-beens the story came too near the truth: hope followed by blight, the passing of the years, the passing of life itself, and then the revelation of waste: Oh, my poor Matilda! But they were false! Now, sitting in the clerk’s morris chair, Mr Biswas knew he was close to such a debt, a similar blight, a similar waste: and he was again lying awake at night, hearing the snores of the crowded house, looking through the window at the empty sky swept by silent searchlights.

  ‘Five five and we will throw in this morris suite.’ The clerk gave a little laugh. ‘I always hear that Indians was sharp bargainers, but I never know till now just how sharp they was.’

  The old queen smiled as charitably as ever.

  ‘I will have to think about it.’

  The old queen smiled.

  On the way back Mr Biswas decided to be aggressive.

  ‘You so anxious to sell your house I don’t understand why you don’t go to an agent.’

  ‘Me? You mean you didn’t hear what those people was saying in the café. Those agents are just a bunch of crooks, man.’

  He felt he had seen the last of the house. He did not know then that, in the five years of life left to him, that drive along the Western Main Road, through Woodbrook to Wrightson Road and South Quay was to become familiar and even boring.

  Alone once more, his depression, his panic returned. But when he got back to the house he assumed an air of confidence and sternness and said loudly to Shama, who was surprised to see him back so soon. ‘Didn’t go to the country today. Been looking at some properties.’

  The headache which had been nagging him, which he had put down to his uneasiness, now defined itself as the alcoholic headache he always had when he drank in the day. He went up to the room, stripped to pants and vest, tried to read Marcus Aurelius, failed, and soon fell asleep, to the astonishment of his children, who wondered how in a crisis which affected them all their father could find time for sleep so early in the afternoon.

  He had seen the house like a guest under heavy obligation to his host. If it had not been raining he might have walked around the small yard and seen the absurd shape of the house. He would have seen where the celotex panels on the eaves had fallen away, providing unrestricted entry to the bats of the neighbourhood. He would have seen the staircase that hung at the back, open, with only a banister, and sheltered by unpainted corrugated iron. He would not have been deceived into cosiness by the thick curtain over the back doorway on the lower floor. He would have seen that the house had no back door at all. If he had not had to rush out of the rain he might have noticed the street lamp just outside the house; he would have known that a street lamp, so near the main road, attracted idlers like moths. But he saw none of these things. He had only a picture of a house cosy in the rain, with a polished floor, and an old lady who baked cakes in the kitchen.

  If he had not been disturbed he might have queried the clerk’s eagerness more impolitely. But events were too rapid, too neat. A quarrel in the night, the offer of a house with immediate possession the very next afternoon. And before the evening was out the sum of five thousand f
ive hundred dollars had become less inaccessible.

  ‘Somebody come for you,’ Shama was saying. He awoke and was puzzled to find it was evening. ‘Another destee?’ His fame had survived his resignation from the Sentinel; destitutes still occasionally sought him out. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  He dressed, his head humming, walked through the house downstairs to the foot of the front steps and surprised the visitor, a respectably dressed Negro of the artisan class, who was waiting for him at the top of the steps.

  ‘Good night,’ the Negro said. His accent betrayed him as an illegal immigrant from one of the smaller islands. ‘Is about the house I come. I want to buy it.’

  Everybody wanted to buy or sell houses that day. ‘I ain’t even pay down for it yet,’ Mr Biswas said.

  ‘The house in Shorthills?’

  ‘Oh, that. That. But I can’t sell that. The land isn’t mine. I don’t even rent it.’

  ‘I know. If I buy the house I would take it away.’ He went on to explain. He had bought a lot in Petit Valley. He wanted to build his own house, but building materials were scarce and expensive and he was offering to buy Mr Biswas’s house, not as a house, but for the materials. He said he was not prepared to haggle. He had studied the building carefully and was prepared to offer four hundred dollars.

  And when Mr Biswas went back to the room with the rumpled beds, the disarrayed furniture, the chaos on Shama’s dressingtable, he had twenty twenty-dollar bills in his pocket.

  ‘You don’t believe in God,’ he said to Anand. ‘But look.’

  Between eight hundred dollars and one thousand two hundred dollars there is a great difference. Eight hundred dollars are petty savings. One thousand two hundred dollars stand for real money. The difference between eight hundred and five thousand is immense. The difference between one thousand two hundred and five thousand is negotiable.

  A week before Mr Biswas would have dismissed any thought of buying a house for five thousand dollars. He wanted one at three thousand or three thousand five hundred; he never looked at any above four thousand. And the strange thing now was that, having raised his sights, it did not occur to him to look at other five-thousand-dollar houses.