A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  Mr. Biswas found himself a stranger in his own yard. But was it his own? Mrs. Tulsi and Sushila didn’t appear to think so. The villagers didn’t think so. They had always called the shop the Tulsi Shop, even after he had painted a sign and hung it above the door:

  The Bonne Esperance Grocery

  M. Biswas Prop

  Goods at City Prices

  With one bedroom reserved for Hari, the other for Mrs. Tulsi, and with the shop full of babies, Mr. Biswas could retreat nowhere. He stood before the shop, fondling his belly under his shirt and working out the quarrel he would have with Shama afterwards.

  A scampering and a series of cries came from the shop.

  Then Sushila’s voice was heard, raised in undoubted authority. “Get away from here. Go and play in the open. Can’t you see you are waking up the babies? Why do you big children like the dark so much?”

  Every sister was perpetually on the alert for any sign, however slight or veiled, of sexual inclination among the children.

  Mr. Biswas knew the disagreeable rumpus that would follow. He had no taste for it, and walked away from the shop to the boundary of the lot. Here, under a hedge, he came upon a group of children playing house.

  “You are Mai,” a girl said to another girl. And to a boy, “You are Seth.”

  Mr. Biswas withdrew. But the girl-whose litter did she belong to?-saw him and, raising her voice from the whisper with which games of house should be played, said with unmistakable malice, “And who will be Mohun? You, Bhoj. You have three-quarter white pants. And you are a great fighter.”

  There was a round of childish laughter which filled Mr. Biswas’s mind with thoughts of murder, though even as he hurried away he felt some desire to see what Bhoj looked like.

  For the last three days, since the arrival of her sisters, Shama had become a Tulsi and a stranger again. Now she was unapproachable. The ceremony in the tent was about to begin and she sat in front of Hari, listening to his instructions with bowed head. Her hair was still wet from her ritual bath and she was dressed in white from top to toe. She looked like someone waiting to be sacrificed and Mr. Biswas thought he could detect pleasure in the curve of her back. Her status, like Hari’s, was only temporary; but while the ceremony lasted, it was paramount.

  Mr. Biswas didn’t want to witness the ceremony. It meant sitting with the brothers-in-law in the tent; and he was sure that the sight of Shama’s submissive and exultant back would eventually infuriate him. Also, it occurred to him that if he kept moving about he might prevent some of the Tulsi army from looting.

  It was then that he thought of the shop.

  He nearly ran there. It was dark, with the front doors closed, and he had to be careful. The shop smelled of babies, who were asleep everywhere: on the counter, flanked by pillows and boxes to keep them from rolling off; under the counter; on the floor planks behind the counter. Then, slowly in the darkness, a group of squatting children defined itself in one corner. They were silent and intent. With equal silence and intentness Mr. Biswas picked his way past the babies to the counter.

  The little group was methodically breaking soda water bottles and extracting the crystal marbles from the necks. The bottles were wrapped in sacking to muffle the noise. There was a deposit of eight cents on every bottle. The sweet jars on the bottom shelf were disarrayed. The Paradise Plums had dwindled substantially. So had the Mintips, a mint sweet with the elasticity and lastingness of rubber. So had the salted prunes. Many tin-lids had not been screwed on properly. Mr. Biswas put out a hand to straighten a lid. It felt sticky. He dropped it. A baby bawled, the children in the corner became alert, and Mr. Biswas shouted, “Get out of here before I lay my hand on some of you.” And at the same time, with the dexterity of the practised shopkeeper, he lifted the flap of the counter and opened the little door, almost in one action, and was on the group in the corner.

  He lifted a boy by the collar. The boy bawled, the girls with him bawled, the babies in the shop bawled.

  From outside a woman asked, “What’s happening? What’s happening?”

  Mr. Biswas dropped the boy he had seized, and the boy ran outside, screaming louder than the babies.

  “Uncle Mohun beat me. Ma, Uncle Mohun beat me.”

  Another woman, doubtless the mother, said, “But he wouldn’t touch you for nothing.” Her tone indicated that Mr. Biswas wouldn’t dare. “You must have been doing something.”

  “I wasn’t doing nothing, Ma,” the boy wailed in English.

  “He wasn’t doing nothing, Ma.” This was from one of the girls. Mr. Biswas knew her: a dumpy little thing, with big contemptuous eyes and full, pendulous lips; she was capable of fantastic physical contortions and often performed for visitors at Hanuman House.

  “Blasted liar!” Mr. Biswas said. He ran out of the shop, past a woman who was coming, cooing, to a bawling baby. “Wasn’t doing nothing? And who break up all those soda water bottles?”

  In the tent Hari droned imperturbably on. Shama remained bowed in her white cocoon. The brothers-in-law sat on their blankets, reverentially still.

  Mr. Biswas was lucid enough to hope that he wasn’t antagonizing a father.

  Padma went into the shop in her slow way and came out and said judicially. “Some bottles have been broken.”

  “And is eight cents a bottle,” Mr. Biswas said. “Wasn’t doing nothing!”

  The mother of the boy, suddenly enraged, flew to a hibiscus bush and began breaking off a switch. It was a tough bush and she had to bend the switch back and forth several times. Torn leaves fell on the ground.

  The boy’s bawls were now touched with genuine anguish.

  The mother broke two switches on the boy, speaking as she beat. “This will teach you not to meddle with things that don’t belong to you. This will teach you not to provoke people who don’t make any allowances for children.” She caught sight of the marks left on the boy’s collar by Mr. Biswas’s fingers, sticky from the tin-lid. “And this will teach you not to let big people make your clothes dirty. This will teach you that they don’t have to wash them. You are a big man. You know right. You know wrong. You are not a child. That is why I am beating you as though you are a big man and can take a big man’s blows.”

  The beating had ceased to be a simple punishment and had become a ritual. Sisters came out to witness, rocking crying babies in their arms, and said without urgency, “You will damage the boy, Sumati.” And: “Stop it now, Sumati. You have beaten him enough.”

  Sumati continued to beat, and didn’t stop talking.

  In the tent Hari intoned. From the set of Shama’s back Mr. Biswas could divine her displeasure.

  “House-blessing party!” Mr. Biswas said.

  The beating went on.

  “Is just a form of showing-off,” Mr. Biswas said. He had seen enough of these beatings to know that later it would be said admiringly, “Sumati beats her children really well”; and that the sisters would say to their children, “Do you want to be beaten the way Sumati beat her son that day at The Chase?”

  The boy, no longer crying, was at last released. He sought comfort from an aunt, who calmed her baby, calmed the boy, said to the baby, “Come, kiss him. His mother has beaten him really badly today”; then to the boy, “Come, look how you are making him cry.” The whimpering boy kissed the crying baby and slowly the noise subsided.

  “Good!” Sumati said, tears in her eyes. “Good! Everyone is satisfied now. And I suppose the soda water bottles have been made whole again. Nobody is losing eight cents a bottle now.”

  “I didn’t ask anybody to beat their child, you hear,” Mr. Biswas said.

  “Nobody asked,” Sumati said, to no one in particular. “I am just saying that everybody is now satisfied.”

  She went to the tent and sat down in the section set aside for women and girls. The boy sat among the men.

  The road was now lined with villagers and a few outsiders as well. They had not been attracted by the flogging, though that had encouraged
the children of the village to gather a little earlier than might have been expected. They came for the food that would be distributed after the ceremony. Among these expectant uninvited guests Mr. Biswas noticed two of the village shopkeepers.

  The cooking was being done, under the superintendence of Sushila, over an open fire-hole in the yard. Sisters stirred enormous black cauldrons brought for the occasion from Hanuman House. They sweated and complained but they were happy. Though there was no need for it, some had stayed awake all the previous night, peeling potatoes, cleaning rice, cutting vegetables, singing, drinking coffee. They had prepared bin after bin of rice, bucket upon bucket of lentils and vegetables, vats of tea and coffee, volumes of chapattis.

  Mr. Biswas had given up trying to work out the cost. “Just going to leave me a damn pauper,” he said. He walked along the hibiscus hedge, plucked leaves, chewed them and spat them out.

  “You have a nice little property here, Mohun.”

  It was Mrs. Tulsi, looking tired after her rest on the cast iron fourposter. She had used the English word “property”; it had an acquisitive, self-satisfied flavour; he would have preferred it if she had said “shop” or “place”.

  “Nice?” he said, not sure whether she was being satirical or not.

  “Very nice little property.”

  “Walls falling down in the shop.”

  “They wouldn’t fall.”

  “Roof leaking in the bedroom.”

  “It doesn’t rain all the time.”

  “And I don’t sleep all the time either. Want a new kitchen.”

  “The kitchen looks all right to me.”

  “And who does eat all the time, eh? We could do with a extra room.”

  “What’s the matter? You want a Hanuman House right away?”

  “I don’t want a Hanuman House at all.”

  “Look,” Mrs. Tulsi said. They were in the gallery now. “You don’t want an extra room at all. You could just hang some sugarsacks on these posts during the night, and you have your extra room.”

  He looked at her. She was in earnest.

  “Take them away in the morning,” she said, “and you have your gallery again.”

  “Sugarsack, eh?”

  “Just six or seven. You wouldn’t need any more.”

  I would like to bury you in one, Mr. Biswas thought. He said, “You going to send me some of these sugarsacks?”

  “You’re a shopkeeper,” she said. “You have more than me.”

  “Don’t worry. I was just joking. Just send me a coal barrel. You could get a whole family in a coal barrel. You didn’t know that?”

  She was too surprised to speak.

  “I don’t know why they still building houses,” Mr. Biswas said. “Nobody don’t want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn’t see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.”

  Mrs. Tulsi patted her lips with her veil, turned away and stepped into the yard. Faintly she called, “Sushila.”

  “And you could get Hari to bless the barrels right in Hanuman House,” Mr. Biswas said. “No need to bring him all the way to The Chase.”

  Sushila came and, giving Mr. Biswas a hard stare, offered her arm to Mrs. Tulsi. “What has happened, Mai?”

  In the shop a baby woke and screamed and drowned Mrs. Tulsi’s words.

  Sushila led Mrs. Tulsi to the tent.

  Mr. Biswas went to the bedroom. The window was closed and the room was dark, but enough light came in to make everything distinct: his clothes on the wall, the bed rumpled from Mrs. Tulsi’s rest. Violating his fastidiousness, he lay down on the bed. The musty smell of old thatch was mingled with the smell of Mrs. Tulsi’s medicaments: bay rum, soft candles, Canadian Healing Oil, ammonia. He didn’t feel a small man, but the clothes which hung so despairingly from the nail on the mud wall were definitely the clothes of a small man, comic, make-believe clothes.

  He wondered what Samuel Smiles would have thought of him.

  But perhaps he could change. Leave. Leave Shama, forget the Tulsis, forget everybody. But go where? And do what? What could he do? Apart from becoming a bus-conductor, working as a labourer on the sugar-estates or on the roads, owning a shop. Would Samuel Smiles have seen more than that?

  He was in a state between waking and sleeping when there was a rattling on the door: no ordinary rattling: this was rattling with a purpose: he recognized Shama’s hand. He shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He heard the hook lift and fall. She came into the room and even on the earth floor her footsteps were heavy, meant to be noticed. He felt her standing at the side of the fourposter, looking down at him. He stiffened; his breathing changed.

  “Well, you make me really proud of you today,” Shama said.

  And, really, it wasn’t what he was expecting at all. He had grown so used to her devotion at The Chase that he expected her to take his side, if only in private. All the softness went out of him.

  Shama sighed.

  He got up. “The house done bless?”

  She flung back her long hair, still damp and straight, and he could see the sandalwood marks on her forehead: so strange on a woman. They made her look terrifyingly holy and unfamiliar.

  “What you waiting for? Get out and make sure it properly bless.”

  She was surprised by his vehemence and, without sighing or speaking, left the room.

  He heard her making excuses for him.

  “He has a headache.”

  He recognized the tone as the one used by friendly sisters to discuss the infirmities of their husbands. It was Shama’s plea to a sister to exchange intimacies, to show support.

  He hated Shama for it, yet found himself anxiously waiting for someone to reply, to discuss his illness sympathetically, headache though it was.

  But no one even said, “Give him an aspirin.”

  Still, he was pleased that Shama had tried.

  The house-blessing seriously depleted Mr. Biswas’s resources; and after the ceremony, affairs in the shop began to go less well. One of the shopkeepers Mr. Biswas had fed sold his establishment. Another man moved in; his business prospered. It was the pattern of trade in The Chase.

  “Well, one thing sure,” Mr. Biswas said. “The house bless. You think everybody was just waiting for all that free food to stop coming here?”

  “You give too much credit,” Shama said. “You must get those people to pay you.”

  “You want me to go and beat them?”

  And when she took out the Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook, he said, “What you want to bust your brains adding up accounts for? I could tell you straight off. Ought oughts are ought.”

  She worked out the expenses of the house-blessing and added up the outstanding credit.

  “I don’t want to know,” Mr. Biswas said. “I just don’t want to know. How about getting the house un-bless? You think Hari could manage that?”

  She had a theory. “The people feeling shame. They owe too much. It used to happen in the store at home.”

  “You know what I think it is? Is my face. I don’t think I have the face of a shopkeeper. I have the sort efface of a man who does give credit but can’t get it.” He got a mirror and studied his face. “That nose, with that ugly lump on top of it. Those Chinese eyes. Look, girl, suppose-I mean, just supposing you see me for the first time. Look at me and try to imagine that.”

  She looked.

  “All right. Close your eyes. Now open them. First time you see me. You just see me. What you would say I was?”

  She couldn’t say.

  “That is the whole blasted trouble,” he said. “I don’t look like anything at all. Shopkeeper, lawyer, doctor, labourer, overseer-I don’t look like any of them.”

  The Samuel Smiles depression fell on him.

  Shama was a puzzle. Within the girl who had served in the Tulsi Store and romped up and down the s
taircase of Hanuman House, the wit, the prankster, there were other Shamas, fully grown, it seemed, just waiting to be released: the wife, the housekeeper, and now the mother. With Mr. Biswas she continued to be brisk, uncomplaining and almost unaware of her pregnancy. But when she was visited by her sisters, who made it plain that the pregnancy was their business, Tulsi business, and had little to do with Mr. Biswas, a change came over her. She did not cease to be uncomplaining; but she also became someone who not so much suffered as endured. She fanned herself and spat often, which she never did when she was alone; but pregnant women were supposed to behave in this way. It was not that she was trying to impress the sisters and get their sympathy; she was anxious not to disappoint them or let herself down. And when her feet began to swell, Mr. Biswas wanted to say, “Well, you are complete and normal now. Everything is going as it should. You are just like your sisters.” For there was no doubt that this was what Shama expected from life: to be taken through every stage, to fulfil every function, to have her share of the established emotions: joy at a birth or marriage, distress during illness and hardship, grief at a death. Life, to be full, had to be this established pattern of sensation. Grief and joy, both equally awaited, were one. For Shama and her sisters and women like them, ambition, if the word could be used, was a series of negatives: not to be unmarried, not to be childless, not to be an undutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow.

  Secretly, with the help of her sisters, the baby clothes were made. A number of Mr. Biswas’s floursacks disappeared; later they turned up as diapers. And the time came for Shama to go to Hanuman House. Sushila and Chinta came to fetch her; the pretence was still maintained that Mr. Biswas didn’t know why.

  Then he discovered that Shama had made preparations for him as well. His clothes had been washed and darned; and he was moved, though not surprised, to find on the kitchen shelf little squares of shop-paper on which, in her Mission-school script that always deteriorated after the first two or three lines, Shama had pencilled recipes for the simplest meals, writing with a disregard for grammar and punctuation which he thought touching. How quaint, too, to find phrases he had only heard her speak committed to paper in this handwriting! In her instructions for the boiling of rice, for example, she told him to “throw in just a little pinch of salt”-he could see her bunching her long fingers-and to use “the blue enamel pot without the handle”. How often, crouched before the chulha fire, she had said to him, “Just hand me the blue pot without the handle.”