A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  Mr. Biswas was taught other things. He learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in Hindi from the King George V Hindi Reader, and he learned many English poems by heart from the Royal Reader. At Lai’s dictation he made copious notes, which he never seriously believed, about geysers, rift valleys, watersheds, currents, the Gulf Stream, and a number of deserts. He learned about oases, which Lai taught him to pronounce “osis”, and ever afterwards an oasis meant for him nothing more than four or five date trees around a narrow pool of fresh water, surrounded for unending miles by white sand and hot sun. He learned about igloos. In arithmetic he got as far as simple interest and learned to turn dollars and cents into pounds, shilling and pence. The history Lai taught he regarded as simply a school subject, a discipline, as unreal as the geography; and it was from the boy in the red bodice that he first heard, with disbelief, about the Great War.

  With this boy, whose name was Alec, Mr. Biswas became friendly. The colours of Alec’s clothes were a continual surprise, and one day he scandalized the school by peeing blue, a clear, light turquoise. To excited inquiry Alec replied, “I don’t know, boy. I suppose is because I is a Portuguese or something.” And for days he gave solemn demonstrations which filled most boys with disgust at their race.

  It was to Mr. Biswas that Alec first revealed his secret, and one morning recess, after Alec had given his demonstration, Mr. Biswas dramatically unbuttoned and gave his. There was a clamour and Alec was forced to take out the bottle of Dodd’s Kidney Pills. In no time the bottle was empty, except for some half a dozen pills which Alec said he had to keep. The pills, like the red bodice, belonged to his sister-in-law. “I don’t know what she going to do when she find out,” Alec said, and to those boys who still begged, he said, “Buy your own. The drugstore full of them.” And many of them did buy their own, and for a week the school’s urinals ran turquoise; and the druggist attributed the sudden rise in sales to the success of the Dodd’s Kidney Pills Almanac which, in addition to jokes, carried story after story of the rapid cures the pills had effected on Trinidadians, all of whom had written the makers profusely grateful letters of the utmost articulateness, and been photographed.

  With Alec Mr. Biswas laid six-inch nails on the railway track at the back of the Main Road and had them flattened to make knives and bayonets. Together they went to Pagotes River and smoked their first cigarettes. They tore off their shirt buttons, exchanged them for marbles and with these Alec won more, struggling continually to repair the depredations of Lai, who considered the game low and had forbidden it in the school grounds. They sat at the same desk, talked, were flogged and separated, but always came together again.

  And it was through this association that Mr. Biswas discovered his gift for lettering. When Alec tired of doing inaccurate erotic drawings he designed letters. Mr. Biswas imitated these with pleasure and growing success. During an arithmetic test one day, finding himself with an astronomical number of hours in answer to a problem about cisterns, he wrote CANCELLED very neatly across the page and became absorbed in blocking the letters and shadowing them. When the period was over he had done nothing else.

  Lai, who had noted Mr. Biswas’s industry with approval, flew into a rage. “Ah! Sign-painter. Come up.”

  He didn’t flog Mr. Biswas. He ordered him to write I AM AN ASS on the blackboard. Mr. Biswas outlined stylish, contemptuous letters, and the class tittered approvingly. Lai, racing about the classroom, waving his tamarind rod for silence, brushed Mr. Biswas’s elbow and a stroke was spoilt. Mr. Biswas turned this into an additional decoration which pleased him and impressed the class. It was too late for Lai to flog Mr. Biswas or order him to clean the blackboard. Angrily he pushed him away, and Mr. Biswas went back to his desk, smiling, a hero.

  Mr. Biswas went to Lai’s school for nearly six years and for all that time he was friendly with Alec. Yet he knew little about Alec’s home life. Alec never spoke about his mother or father and Mr. Biswas knew only that he lived with his sister-in-law, the owner of the red bodice, an unphotographed user of Dodd’s Kidney Pills, and, according to Alec, a great beater. Mr. Biswas never saw this woman. He never went to Alec’s home and Alec never came to his. There was a tacit agreement between them that they would keep their homes secret.

  It would have pained Mr. Biswas if anyone from the school saw where he lived, in one room of a mud hut in the back trace. He was not happy there and even after five years considered it a temporary arrangement. Most of the people in the hut remained strangers, and his relations with.Bipti were unsatisfying because she was shy of showing him affection in a house of strangers. More and more, too, she bewailed her Fate; when she did this he felt useless and dispirited and, instead of comforting her, went out to look for Alec. Occasionally she had ineffectual fits of temper, quarrelled with Tara and muttered for days, threatening, whenever there was anyone to hear, that she would leave and get a job with the road-gang, where women were needed to carry stones in baskets on their heads. Continually, when he was with her, Mr. Biswas had to struggle against anger and depression.

  At Christmas Pratap and Prasad came from Felicity, grown men now, with moustaches; in their best clothes, their pressed khaki trousers, unpolished brown shoes, blue shirts buttoned at the collar, and brown hats, they too were like strangers. Their hands were as hard as their rough, sunburnt faces, and they had little to say. When Pratap, with many self-deprecating sighs, half-laughs and pauses which enabled him to deliver a short sentence in easy instalments without in any way damaging its structure, when Pratap told about the donkey he had bought and the current lengths of tasks, Mr. Biswas was not really interested. The buying of a donkey seemed to him an act of pure comedy, and it was hard to believe that the dour Pratap was the frantic boy who had rushed about the room in the hut threatening to kill the men in the garden.

  As for Dehuti, he hardly saw her, though she lived close, at Tara’s. He seldom went there except when Tara’s husband, prompted by Tara, held a religious ceremony and needed Brahmins to feed. Then Mr. Biswas was treated with honour; stripped of his ragged trousers and shirt, and in a clean dhoti, he became a different person, and he never thought it unseemly that the person who served him so deferentially with food should be his own sister. In Tara’s house he was respected as a Brahmin and pampered; yet as soon as the ceremony was over and he had taken his gift of money and cloth and left, he became once more only a labourer’s child -father’s occupation: labourer was the entry in the birth certificate F. Z. Ghany had sent-living with a penniless mother in one room of a mud hut. And throughout life his position was like that. As one of the Tulsi sons-in-law and as a journalist he found himself among people with money and sometimes with graces; with them his manner was unforcedly easy and he could summon up luxurious instincts; but always, at the end, he returned to his crowded, shabby room.

  Tara’s husband, Ajodha, was a thin man with a thin, petulant face which could express benignity rather than warmth, and Mr. Biswas was not comfortable with him. Ajodha could read but thought it more dignified to be read to, and Mr. Biswas was sometimes called to the house to read, for a penny, a newspaper column of which Ajodha was particularly fond. This was a syndicated American column called That Body of Yours which dealt every day with a different danger to the human body. Ajodha listened with gravity, concern, alarm. It puzzled Mr. Biswas that he should subject himself to this torment, and it amazed him that the writer, Dr. Samuel S. Pitkin, could keep the column going with such regularity. But the doctor never flagged; twenty years later the column was still going, Ajodha had not lost his taste for it, and occasionally Mr. Biswas’s son read it to him, for six cents.

  So, whenever Mr. Biswas was in Tara’s house, it was as a Brahmin or a reader, with a status distinct from Dehuti’s, and he had little opportunity of speaking to her.

  Bipti had a specific worry about her children: neither Pratap nor Prasad nor Dehuti was married. She had no plans for Mr. Biswas, since he was still young and she assumed that the education he was receiving w
as provision and protection enough. But Tara thought otherwise. And just when Mr. Biswas was beginning to do stocks and shares, transactions as unreal to Lai as they were to him, and was learning “Bingen on the Rhine” from Bell’s Standard Elocutionist for the visit of the school inspector, he was taken out of school by Tara and told that he was going to be made a pundit.

  It was only when his possessions were being bundled that he discovered he still had the school’s copy of the Standard Elocutionist. It was too late to return it, and he never did. Wherever he went the book went with him, and ended in the blacksmith-built bookcase in the house at Sikkim Street.

  For eight months, in a bare, spacious, unpainted wooden house smelling of blue soap and incense, its floors white and smooth from constant scrubbing, its cleanliness and sanctity maintained by regulations awkward to everyone except himself, Pundit Jairam taught Mr. Biswas Hindi, introduced him to the more important scriptures and instructed him in various ceremonies. Morning and evening, under the pundit’s eye, Mr. Biswas did the puja for the pundit’s household.

  Jairam’s children had all been married and he lived alone with his wife, a crushed, hard-working woman whose only duty now was to look after Jairam and his house. She didn’t complain. Among Hindus Jairam was respected for his knowledge. He also held scandalous views which, while being dismissed as contentious, had nevertheless brought him much popularity. He believed in God, fervently, but claimed it was not necessary for a Hindu to do so. He attacked the custom some families had of putting up a flag after a religious ceremony; but his own front garden was a veritable grove of bamboo poles with red and white pennants in varying stages of decay. He ate no meat but spoke against vegetarianism: when Lord Rama went hunting, did they think it was just for the sport?

  He was also working on a Hindi commentary on the Ramayana, and parts of this commentary were dictated to Mr. Biswas to extend his own knowledge of the language. So that Mr. Biswas could see and learn, Jairam took him on his rounds; and wherever he went with the pundit Mr. Biswas, invested with the sacred thread and all the other badges of caste, found himself, as in Tara’s house, the object of regard. It was his duty on these occasions to do the mechanical side of Jairam’s offices. He took around the brass plate with the lighted camphor; the devout dropped a coin on the plate, brushed the flame with their fingers and took their fingers to their forehead. He took around the consecrated sweetened milk with strips of the tulsi leaf floating on its surface, and doled it out a teaspoonful at a time. When the ceremonies were over and the feeding of Brahmins began, he was seated next to Pundit Jairam; and when Jairam had eaten and belched and asked for more and eaten again it was Mr. Biswas who mixed the bicarbonate of soda for him. Afterwards Mr. Biswas went to the shrine, a platform of earth decorated with flour and planted with small banana trees, and pillaged it for the coins that had been offered, hunting carefully everywhere, showing no respect for the burnt offerings or anything else. The coins, dusted with flour or earth or ash, wet with holy water or warm from the sacred fire, he took to Pundit Jairam, who might then be engaged in some philosophical disputation. Jairam would wave Mr. Biswas away without looking at him. As soon as they got home, however, Jairam asked for the money, counted it, and felt Mr. Biswas all over to make sure he hadn’t kept anything back. Mr. Biswas also had to bring home all the gifts Jairam received, usually lengths of cotton, but sometimes cumbersome bundles of fruit and vegetables.

  One particularly large gift was a bunch of Gros Michel bananas. They came to Jairam green and were hung in the large kitchen to ripen. In time the green became lighter, spotted, and soft yellow patches appeared. Rapidly the yellow spread and deepened, and the spots became brown and rich. The smell of ripening banana, overcoming the astringent smell of the glutinous sap from the banana stem, filled the house, leaving Jairam and his wife apparently indifferent, but rousing Mr. Biswas. He reasoned that the bananas would become ripe all at once, that Jairam and his wife could not possibly eat them all, and that many would grow rotten. He also reasoned a banana or two would not be missed. And one day, when Jairam was out and his wife away from the kitchen, Mr. Biswas picked two bananas and ate them. The gaps in the bunch startled him. They were more than noticeable; they offended the eye.

  Jairam was no flogger. When he was in a rage he might box Mr. Biswas on the ear; but usually he was less intemperate. For a badly conducted puja, for instance, he might make Mr. Biswas learn a dozen couplets from the Ramayana by heart, confining him to the house until he had. All that day Mr. Biswas wondered what punishment the eating of the bananas would bring, while he copied out Sanskrit verses, which he couldn’t understand, on strips of cardboard, having revealed to Jairam his skill in lettering.

  Jairam came late that evening and his wife fed him. Then, as was his habit every evening after he had eaten and rested, he walked heavily about the bare verandah, talking to himself, going over the arguments he had had that day. First he quoted the opposing view. Then he tested various replies of his own; his voice rose shrill at the end of the final version of the repartee, which he said over and over, breaking off to sing a snatch of a hymn. Mr. Biswas, lying on his sugarsack and floursack bed, listened. Jairam’s wife was washing up the dishes in the kitchen; the waste water ran down a bamboo spout to a gutter, where it fell noisily among the bushes.

  Waiting, Mr. Biswas fell asleep. When he awoke it was morning and for a moment he had no fears. Then his error returned to him.

  He had his bath in the yard, cut a hibiscus twig, crushed one end and cleaned his teeth with it, split the twig and scraped his tongue with the halves. Then he collected marigolds and zinnias and oleanders from the garden for the morning puja, and sat without religious fervour before the elaborate shrine. The smell of brass and stale sandalwood paste displeased him; it was a smell he was to recognize later in all temples, mosques and churches, and it was always disagreeable. Mechanically he cleaned the images, the lines and indentations of which were black or cream with old sandalwood paste; it was easier to clean the small smooth pebbles, whose significance had not yet been explained to him. At this stage Pundit Jairam usually came to see that he did not scamp the ritual, but this morning he did not come. Mr. Biswas chanted from the prescribed scriptures, applied fresh sandalwood paste to the images and smooth pebbles, decked them with fresh flowers, rang the bell and consecrated the offering of sweetened milk. With the sandalwood marks still wet and tickling on his forehead, he sought out Jairam to offer him some of the milk.

  Jairam, bathed and dressed and fresh, was sitting against some pillows in one corner of the verandah, spectacles low down on his nose, a brown Hindi book on his lap. When the verandah shook below Mr. Biswas’s bare feet Jairam looked up and then down through his spectacles, and turned a page of his dingy book. Spectacles made him look older, abstracted and benign.

  Mr. Biswas held the brass jar of milk toward him. “Baba.”

  Jairam sat up, rearranged a pillow, held a cupped palm, touching the elbow of the outstretched arm with the fingers of his free hand. Mr. Biswas poured. Jairam brought the inside of his wrist against his forehead, blessed Mr. Biswas, threw the milk into his mouth, passed his wet palm through his thin grey hair, readjusted his spectacles and looked down again at his book.

  Mr. Biswas went to his room, put on his workaday clothes and came out to breakfast. They ate in silence. Suddenly Jairam pushed his brass plate towards Mr. Biswas.

  “Eat this.”

  Mr. Biswas’s fingers, ploughing through some cabbage, stood still.

  “Of course you won’t eat it. And I will tell you why. Because I have been eating from this plate.”

  Mr. Biswas’s fingers, feeling dry and dirty, bent and straightened.

  “Soanie!”

  Jairam’s wife thumped out from the kitchen and stood between them, with her back to Mr. Biswas. He looked at the creases on the edge of her soles and saw that the soles were hard and dirty. This surprised him, because Soanie was always washing the floor and bathing herself.
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  “Go and bring the bananas.”

  She pulled the veil over her forehead. “Don’t you think you had better forget it? It is such a small thing.”

  “Small thing! A whole hand of bananas!”

  She went to the kitchen and came back, cradling the bananas.

  “Put them here, Soanie. Mohun, nobody else can touch these bananas now but yourself. When people, out of the goodness of their hearts, give me gifts, they are for you. Eh?” Then the edge went out of his voice and he became like the benign, expounding pundit he was in company. “We mustn’t waste, Mohun. I have told you that again and again. We mustn’t let these bananas get rotten. You must finish what you have begun. Start now.”

  Mr. Biswas had been lulled by Jairam’s calm, even manner, and the abruptness of the command took him by surprise. He looked down at his plate and flexed his fingers, the tips of which were stuck with drying shreds of cabbage.

  “Start now.”

  Soanie stood in the doorway, blocking the light. Though it was bright day, the room, with bedrooms on one side and the low roof of the verandah on the other, was gloomy.

  “Look. I have peeled one for you.”

  The banana hovered in Jairam’s clean hand before Mr. Biswas’s face. He took it with his dirty fingers, bit and chewed. Surprisingly, it tasted. But the taste was so localized it gave no pleasure. He then discovered that chewing killed the taste, and chewed deliberately, not tasting, only listening to the loud squelchy sound that filled his head. He had never heard bananas eaten with so much noise.

  Presently the banana was finished, except for the hard little cone buried at the heart of the banana skin, open like a huge and ugly forest flower.

  “Look, Mohun. I have peeled you another.”

  And while he ate that, Jairam slowly peeled another. And another, and another.