A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  “Forget it this time,” Mr. Biswas said. “They must be so used by now to seeing you with a water-set in your hand that I am sure they would believe that you did carry one.”

  “I know what I am doing,” Shama said. “My children are going to be married one day too.”

  “And when they give back all the water-sets poor Savi wouldn’t be able to walk, for all the glasses and jugs. If they remember, that is. At least leave it for a few more years.”

  But weddings and funerals had become important to Shama. From weddings she returned tired, heavy-lidded and hoarse after the night-long singing, to find a house in confusion: Savi in tears, the kitchen in disorder, Mr. Biswas complaining about his indigestion. Pleased at the wedding, the gift that did not disgrace her, the singing, the return home, Shama would say, “Well, as the saying goes, you never miss the water till the well runs dry.”

  And for the following day or two, when she held Mr. Biswas and the children absolutely in her power, she would be very gloomy; and it was at these times that she said, “I tell you, if it wasn’t for the children-”

  And Mr. Biswas would sing, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl!”

  As important as weddings and funerals were to Shama, holiday visits became to the children. They went first of all to Hanuman House. But with every succeeding visit they felt more like strangers. Alliances were harder to take up again. There were new jokes, new games, new stories, new subjects of conversation. Too much had to be explained, and Anand and Savi and Myna often ended by remaining together. As soon as they went back to Port of Spain this unity disappeared. Savi returned to bullying Myna; Anand defended Myna; Savi beat Anand; Anand hit back; and Savi complained.

  “What!” Mr. Biswas said. “Hitting your sister! Shama, you see the sort of effect one little trip to the monkey house does have on your children?”

  It was a two-fold attack, for the children preferred visiting Mr. Biswas’s relations. These relations had come as a revelation. Not only were they an untapped source of generosity; Savi and Anand had also felt up to then that Mr. Biswas, like all the fathers at Hanuman House, had come from nothing, and the only people who had a proper family were the Tulsis. It was pleasant and novel, too, for Savi and Anand and Myna to find themselves flattered and cajoled and bribed. At Hanuman House they were three children among many; at Ajodha’s there were no other children. And Ajodha was rich, as they could tell by the house he was building. He offered them money and was absurdly delighted that they should know its value sufficiently well to take it. Anand got an extra six cents for reading That Body of Yours; it would have been worth it for the praise alone. They were feted at Pratap’s; Bipti was embarrassingly devoted and their cousins were shy and admiring and kind. At Prasad’s they were again the only children and lived in a mud hut, which they thought quaint: it was like a large doll’s house. Prasad didn’t give money, but a thick red exercise book, a Shirley Temple fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman’s ink. And so, with this encouragement to milk and prunes, the profitable round of holiday visits ended.

  Then came the news that Mrs. Tulsi had decided to send Owad abroad to study, to become a doctor.

  Mr. Biswas was overwhelmed. More and more students were going abroad; but they were items of news, remote. He had never thought that anyone so close to him could escape so easily. Concealing his sadness and envy, he made a show of enthusiasm and offered advice about shipping lines. And at Arwacas some of Mrs. Tulsi’s retainers defected. Forgetting that they were in Trinidad, that they had crossed the black water from India and had thereby lost all caste, they said they could have nothing more to do with a woman who was proposing to send her son across the black water.

  “Water on a duck’s back,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “The number of times that mother of yours has made herself outcast!”

  There was talk about the suitability and adequacy of the food Owad would get in England.

  “Every morning in England, you know,” Mr. Biswas said, “the scavengers go around picking up the corpses. And you know why? The food there is not cooked by orthodox Roman Catholic Hindus.”

  “Suppose Uncle Owad want more,” Anand said. “You think they will give it to him?”

  “Hear the boy,” Mr. Biswas said, squeezing Anand’s thin arms. “Let me tell you, eh, boy, that you and Savi come out of the monkey house as going concerns only because of the little Ovaltine you drink.”

  “No wonder the others can hold Anand and beat his little tail,” Shama said.

  “Your family are tough,” Mr. Biswas said. He spat the word out and made it an insult. “Tough,” he repeated.

  “Well, I could say one thing. None of us have calves swinging like hammocks.”

  “Of course not. Your calves are tough. Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother’s bad blood flowing in your veins you could wake up one morning and find yourself hairy like a monkey.”

  Then, after a trip to Hanuman House, Shama reported that the decision to send Owad abroad had reduced Shekhar, the elder god, married man though he was, to tears.

  “Send him some rope and soft candle,” Mr. Biswas said.

  “He never did want to get married,” Shama said.

  “Never did want to get married! Never see anybody skip off so smart to check mother-in-law’s money.”

  “He wanted to go to Cambridge.”

  “Cambridge!” Mr. Biswas exclaimed, startled by the word, starded to hear it coming so easily from Shama. “Cambridge, eh? Well, why the hell he didn’t go? Why the hell the whole pack of you didn’t go to Cambridge? Frighten of the bad food?”

  “Seth was against it.” Shama’s tone was injured and conspiratorial.

  Mr. Biswas paused. “Well, you don’t say. You don’t say!”

  “I glad it please somebody.”

  She could give no more information, and at last said impatiently, “You getting like a woman.”

  She clearly felt that an injustice had been done. And he knew the Tulsis too well to be surprised that the sisters, who never questioned their own neglected education, cat-in-bag marriage and precarious position, should yet feel concerned that Shekhar, whose marriage was happy and whose business was nourishing, had not had all that he might.

  Shekhar was coming to spend a week-end in Port of Spain. His family would not be with him and old Mrs. Tulsi would be in Arwacas: the brothers were to be boys together for one last week-end. Mr. Biswas waited for Shekhar with interest. He came early on Friday evening. The taxi hooted; Shama switched on the lights in the verandah and the porch; Shekhar ran up the front steps in his white linen suit and breezed through the house on his leather-heeled shoes, charging it with excitement, depositing on the diningtable a bottle of wine, a tin of peanuts, a packet of biscuits, two copies of Life and a paper-backed volume of Halevy’s History of the English People. Shama greeted him with sadness, Mr. Biswas with a solemnity which he hoped could be mistaken for sympathy. Shekhar responded with geniality: the absent geniality of the businessman sparing time from his business, the family man away from his family.

  Owad’s expensive new suitcases were in the back verandah and Mr. Biswas was painting Owad’s name on them.

  “Sort of thing to make you feel you want to go away,” Mr. Biswas said.

  Shekhar wasn’t drawn. After the wine and peanuts and biscuits had been shared he showed himself almost paternally preoccupied with the arrangements for Owad’s journey, and in spite of Mr. Biswas’s coaxings never once mentioned Cambridge.

  “You and your mouth,” Mr. Biswas told Shama.

  She had no time for argument. She felt honoured at having to entertain her two brothers at once, on such an important occasion, and was determined to do it well. She had prepared all week for the week-end, and shortly after breakfast that morning had begun to cook.

  From time to time Mr. Biswas went into the kitchen and whispered, “Who payi
ng for all this? The old she-fox or you? Not me, you hear. Nobody sending me to Cambridge. Next week, when I eating dry ice, nobody sending me food by parcel post from Hanuman House, you hear.”

  It was a Hanuman House festival in miniature, and to the children almost like a game of makebelieve. They had the freedom of the kitchen and nibbled and tasted whenever they could. Shekhar bought sweets for them and on Sunday sent them to the one-thirty children’s show at the Roxy. And Mr. Biswas got on so well with the brothers that he was invaded by the holiday feeling that they were all men together, and he thought himself privileged to be host to the two sons of the family, one of whom was going abroad to become a doctor. He attempted genuinely to contribute to the enthusiasm, talking again about shipping lines and ships as though he had travelled in them all; he hinted at the write-up he was going to give Owad and flattered him by asking him to refuse to see reporters from the other newspapers; he spoke deprecatingly about Anand’s achievements and obtained compliments from Shekhar.

  Sunday brought the Sunday Sentinel and Mr. Biswas’s scandalous feature, “I Am Trinidad’s Most Evil Man”, one of a series of interviews with Trinidad’s richest, poorest, tallest, fattest, thinnest, fastest, strongest men; which was following a series on men with unusual callings: thief, beggar, night-soil remover, mosquito-killer, undertaker, birth-certificate searcher, lunatic-asylum warden; which had followed a series on one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed men; which had come about when, after an M. Biswas interview with a man who had been shot years before in the neck and had to cover up the hole in order to speak, the Sentinel office had been crowded with men with interesting mutilations, offering to sell their story.

  Mr. Biswas’s article was hilariously received by Owad and Shekhar, particularly as the most evil man was a wellknown Arwacas character. He had committed one murder under great provocation and after his acquittal had developed into a genial bore. The title of the interview promised for the following week, with Trinidad’s maddest man, aroused further laughter.

  After breakfast all the men-and this included Anand-went for a bathe at the harbour extension at Docksite. The dredging was incomplete, but the sea-wall had been built and in the early morning parts of the sea provided safe, clean bathing, though at every footstep the mud rose, clouding the water. The reclaimed land, raised to the level of the sea-wall, was not as yet real land, only crusted mud, sharp along the cracks which patterned it like a coral fan.

  The sun was not out and the high, stationary clouds were touched with red. Ships were blurred in the distance; the level sea was like dark glass. Anand was left at the edge of the water, near the wall, and the men went ahead, their voices and splashings carrying far in the stillness. All at once the sun came out, the water blazed, and sounds were subdued.

  Aware of his unimpressive physique, Mr. Biswas began to clown; and, as he did more and more now, he tried to extend his clowning to Anand.

  “Duck, boy!” he called. “Duck and let us see how long you can stay under water.”

  “No!” Anand shouted back.

  This abrupt denial of his father’s authority had become part of the clowning.

  “You hear the boy?” Mr. Biswas said to Owad and Shekhar. He spoke an obscene Hindi epigram which had always amused them and which they now associated with him.

  “You know what I feel like doing?” he said a little later. “See that rowingboat there, by the wall? Let us untie it. By tomorrow morning it will be in Venezuela.”

  “And let us throw you in it,” Shekhar said.

  They chased Mr. Biswas, caught him, held him above the water while he laughed and squirmed, his calves swinging like hammocks.

  “One,” they counted, swinging him. “Two-”

  Suddenly he became affronted and angry.

  “Three!”

  The smooth water slapped his belly and chest and forehead like something hard and hot. Surfacing, his back to them, he took some time to rearrange his hair, in reality wiping away the tears that had come to his eyes. The pause was long enough to tell Owad and Shekhar that he was angry. They were embarrassed; and he was recognizing the unreasonableness of his anger when Shekhar said, “Where is Anand?”

  Mr. Biswas didn’t turn. “The boy is all right. Ducking. His grandfather was a champion diver.”

  Owad laughed.

  “Ducking, hell!” Shekhar said, and began swimming towards the wall.

  There was no sign of Anand. In the shadow of the wall the rowingboat barely rocked above its reflection.

  Silently Mr. Biswas and Owad watched Shekhar. He dived. Mr. Biswas scooped up a handful of water and let it fall on his head. Some of it ran down his face; some of it sprinkled the sea.

  Shekhar reappeared near the sea-wall, shook the water from his head and dived again.

  Mr. Biswas began to wade towards the wall. Owad began to swim. Mr. Biswas began to swim.

  Shekhar surfaced again, near the rowingboat. There was alarm on his face. He was holding Anand under his left arm and was pulling strongly with his right.

  Owad and Mr. Biswas moved towards him. He shouted to them to keep away. All at once he stopped pulling with his right hand, stood up, and was only waist-high in water. Behind him, in shadow, the rowingboat barely moved.

  They carried Anand to the top of the wall and rolled him. Then Shekhar did some kneading exercises on his thin back. Mr. Biswas stood by, noticing only the large safetypin-one of Shama’s, doubtless-on Anand’s blue striped shirt, which lay in the small heap of his clothes.

  Anand spluttered. His expression was one of anger. He said, “I was walking to the boat.”

  “I told you to stay where you were,” Mr. Biswas said, angry too.

  “And the bottom of the sea drop away.”

  “The dredging,” Shekhar said. He had not lost his look of alarm.

  “The sea just drop away,” Anand cried, lying on his back, covering his face with a crooked arm. He spoke as one insulted.

  Owad said, “Anyway, you’ve got the record for ducking, Shompo.”

  “Shut up!” Anand screamed. He began to cry, rubbing his legs on the hard, cracked ground, then turning over on his belly.

  Mr. Biswas took up the shirt with the safetypin and handed it to Anand.

  Anand snatched the shirt and said, “Leave me.”

  “We shoulda leave you,” Mr. Biswas said, “when you was there, ducking.” As soon as he spoke the last word he regretted it.

  “Yes!” Anand screamed. “You shoulda leave me.” He got up and, going to his heap of clothes, began to dress furiously, forcing his clothes over his wet and gritty skin. “I am never going to come out with any of you again.” His eyes were small and red, the lids swollen.

  He walked away from them, quickly, his small body silhouetted against the sun, across the weed-ridden mud flat. Unused, his towel remained rolled, a large bundle below his arm.

  “Well,” Mr. Biswas said. “Back for a little duck?”

  Owad and Shekhar smiled. Then, slowly, they all dressed.

  “I never thought the day would come when I would be glad that I was a sea scout,” Shekhar said. “It was just like a hole in the sea, you know. And there was a helluva pull. By tomorrow little Anand would really have been in Venezuela.”

  They found Shama anxious to know why Anand had been sent back. He had said nothing and had locked himself in his room.

  Savi and Myna burst into tears when they heard.

  The lunch was the climax of the week-end festivities, but Anand did not come out of his room. He ate only a slice of water melon which Savi took to him.

  Later that afternoon, after Shekhar had left, Shama gave vent to her annoyance. Anand had spoiled the week-end for everybody and she was going to flog him. She was dissuaded only by Owad’s pleas.

  “My children! My children!” Shama said. “Well, the example set. They just following.”

  The next day Mr. Biswas wrote an angry article about the lack of warning notices at Docksite. In the afternoon Anand came hom
e from school a little more composed and, extraordinarily, without being asked, took out a copy book from his bag and handed it to Mr. Biswas, who was in the hammock in the back verandah. Then Anand went to change.

  The copy book contained Anand’s English compositions, which reflected the vocabulary and ideals of Anand’s teacher as well as Anand’s obsession with the stylistic device of the noun followed by a dash, an adjective and the noun again: for example, “the robbers-the ruthless robbers”.

  The last composition was headed “A Day by the Seaside”. Below that the phrases supplied by the teacher had been copied down: project a visit-feverish preparations-eager anticipation-laden hampers-wind blowing through open car-spirits overflowing into song-graceful curve of coconut trees-arc of golden sand-crystalline water-pounding surf-majestic rollers-energetically battling the waves-cries of delirious joy-grateful shade of coconut trees-glorious sunset-sad to leave-memory to be cherished in future days-looking forward in eager anticipation to paying a return visit.

  Mr. Biswas was familiar with the clarity and optimism of the teacher’s vision, and he expected Anand to write: “With anticipation-eager anticipation-we projected a visit to the seaside and we made preparations-feverish preparations-and then on the appointed morning we struggled with hampers-laden hampers-into the motorcar.” For in these compositions Anand and his fellows knew nothing but luxury.