A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘Why you don’t go and tell him yourself?’ Shama was now angry and near to tears.

  He tried to see himself asking Seth for money. He couldn’t. ‘You and all,’ he said, ‘don’t start provoking me. You think I want to talk to that man? You know him for a long time. He is like a second father to you. You must ask him.’

  ‘And suppose he ask for what you owe him?’

  ‘I would give you straight back to him.’

  ‘You owe him more than he owe you.’

  ‘He owe me more than I owe him.’

  They reduced it to a plain argument, which not only killed what remained of his anger, but even left him exhilarated, though a little puzzled as to what he should do next.

  Before he could decide, C and Padma, Seth’s wife, came without knocking into the room. C was crying. Padma begged Mr Biswas, for the sake of family unity and the family name, not to do anything in a temper.

  He became very offended, turned his back to Padma and C and walked heavily up and down the small room.

  With the arrival of the women Shama’s attitude changed. She ceased to be irritated and suppliant and instead looked martyred. She sat stiffly on a low bench, thumb under her chin, elbow on her knee, and opened her eyes until they were as wide and empty as the younger god’s had been a few minutes before in the hall.

  ‘Don’t go, brother,’ C sobbed. ‘Your sister is begging you.’ She tried to grab his ankles.

  He skipped away and looked puzzled.

  C, sobbing, noticed his puzzlement and elucidated: ‘Chinta is begging you.’ She mentioned her own name to indicate the depth of her unhappiness and the sincerity of her plea; and she began to wail.

  By coming up to plead with him Chinta had as good as confessed that it was her husband Govind who had reported Mr Biswas’s blasphemies to Seth; she was also claiming that Govind had triumphed. Mr Biswas knew that when husbands quarrelled it was the duty of the wife of the victorious husband to placate the defeated husband, and the duty of the wife of the defeated husband not to display anger, but skilfully to suggest that her unhappiness was due, in equal measure, to both husbands. Shama, following Chinta’s arrival, had cast herself as the defeated wife and was making a commendable first attempt at this difficult role.

  There was no means of protesting at this subtle humiliation. Up to that moment Mr Biswas had never felt that he had enemies. People were simply indifferent to him. But now an enemy, the enemy, had declared itself. And he resolved not to run away.

  And having made his resolve, he felt he had already won. And, already a winner, he looked upon Chinta and Padma with charity. Chinta was sobbing to herself, dabbing at her eyes with her veil. He said to her, kindly, ‘Why your husband don’t take a job with the Gazette, eh? He is a born reporter.’ This had no effect on the flow of tears from Chinta’s bright eyes. Shama still sat martyred and unmoving, eyes wide, knees apart, skirt draped over knees. ‘What the hell you playing you thinking, eh?’ She didn’t hear. Padma continued to behave with fatigued dignity. He said nothing to her. She resembled Mrs Tulsi but was fatter and looked older. Her sallow, unhealthy skin was oily, and she continually fanned herself, as though tormented by some inner heat. After her first plea she hadn’t looked at Mr Biswas or spoken to him. She didn’t cry or look sadder than usual. She had come on too many of these missions for them to thrill her the way they still thrilled Chinta: there was not a man in the house with whom Seth had not quarrelled at some time or other. Padma simply came, made her plea, sat and looked unwell. She never, in the hall or elsewhere, expressed approval of Seth’s actions or disapproval of those of her nieces’ husbands; this won her much respect and made her a good peacemaker.

  Sternly and impatiently Mr Biswas said, ‘All right. All right. Dry your tears. I not going.’

  Chinta gave a short loud sob; it marked the end of her tears.

  ‘But just tell them not to provoke me, that’s all.’

  Sighing, Padma rose, heavily and unhealthily; and without another word she and Chinta left the room.

  Shama unstiffened. Her eyes narrowed a little, her fingers left her chin. She began to cry, silently, and her body underwent a relaxing, melting process which fascinated Mr Biswas and infuriated him. Her arms seemed to grow rounder; her shoulders rounded and drooped; her back curved; her eyes softened until they were quite liquid with tears; her wrists rested on her knees as if broken; her hands flapped loose; her long fingers swung lifelessly, as if broken at every joint.

  ‘Talk about bad blood,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Talk about bad blood!’

  Disappointed in Govind, Mr Biswas began to find virtues in brothers-in-law he had disregarded. There was Hari, a tall, pale, quiet man who spent much time at the long table, working through mounds of rice in a slow, unenthusiastic but efficient way, watched over by his pregnant wife. He spent even more time in the latrine, and this made him feared. ‘They should ring a bell when Hari decide to go to the latrine,’ Mr Biswas told Shama, ‘just as how they ring a bell to tell people they cutting off the water.’ It was generally accepted at Hanuman House that Hari was a sick man; his wife told with sorrow and pride of the terrifying diagnoses of various doctors. No man looked less suitable for work on the estate; it was hard to imagine that thin, gentle voice ordering labourers about, reproving the idle and shouting down the argumentative. He was in fact a pundit, by training and inclination, and never looked so happy as when he changed from estate clothes into a dhoti and sat in the verandah upstairs reading from some huge, ungainly Hindi book that rested on a stylishly carved Kashmiri bookrest. He did the puja when the gods were away and he still conducted occasional ceremonies for close friends. He offended no one and amused no one. He was obsessed with his illnesses, his food and his religious books.

  Between his estate duties, his reading in the verandah and his visits to the latrine, Hari had little free time, and was open to approach only at the long table. But then conversation was not easy. Hari believed in chewing every mouthful forty times, and was a noisy and preoccupied eater.

  Sitting next to Hari one evening, receiving a brief ruminant glance from him and a concerned stare from his wife, Mr Biswas waited until Hari had champed and ground and squelched through a mouthful. Then he hurriedly asked, ‘What do you feel about the Aryans?’

  He was speaking of the protestant Hindu missionaries who had come from India and were preaching that caste was unimportant, that Hinduism should accept converts, that idols should be abolished, that women should be educated, preaching against all the doctrines the orthodox Tulsis held dear.

  ‘What do you feel about the Aryans?’ Mr Biswas asked.

  ‘The Aryans?’ Hari said, and started on another mouthful. His tone declared that it was a frivolous question raised by a mischievous person.

  A look of anguish came over the face of Hari’s wife.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Biswas said, despairingly filling in the pause. ‘The Aryans.’

  ‘I don’t think much about them.’ Hari bit at a pepper, baring sharp little white teeth, like a rat’s, and surprising in such a tall and sluggish man. ‘I hear,’ he went on, the merest hint of amusement and reproof in his voice, ‘that you have been doing a lot of thinking about them.’

  Mr Biswas was almost an Aryan convert.

  It was Misir, the idle journalist, who had encouraged him to go to hear Pankaj Rai. ‘He is not one of those illiterate Trinidad pundits, you know,’ Misir said. ‘Pankaj is a BA and a LLB into the bargain. The man is a real orator. A purist, man.’ Mr Biswas had not asked what a purist was, but the word, pronounced with reverence by Misir, appealed strongly to him, suggesting not only purity and fastidiousness, but also elegance and breeding.

  He had an additional inducement: the meeting was to be held at the home of the Naths. The Naths owned land and a soap factory, and were the Tulsis’ most important rivals in Arwacas. Between Naths and Tulsis of all ages there was an enmity as established and unexamined as the enmity between Hindu and Muslim. The enmity had grown more
acrimonious since the Naths had built a new house in the modern Port of Spain style.

  Purist, Mr Biswas thought, when he saw Pankaj Rai. The man is a purist. He was elegant in a long, black, close-fitting Indian coat; and when he shook Mr Biswas by the hand Mr Biswas surrendered to his graciousness, at the same time noting with satisfaction that Pankaj Rai was as short as himself and had an equally ugly nose. He also had unusually heavy, drooping eyelids which could make him look comic or sinister, benevolent or supercilious. They dropped a fraction of an inch and converted a smile into a faint but devastating sneer. This was particularly effective when he began to ridicule the practices of orthodox Hinduism. He spoke without flourish, and slowly, as if tasting the phrases beforehand, like a good purist; and it was a revelation to Mr Biswas that words and phrases which by themselves were commonplace could be welded into sentences of such balance and beauty. He found he agreed with everything Pankaj Rai said: after thousands of years of religion idols were an insult to the human intelligence and to God; birth was unimportant; a man’s caste should be determined only by his actions.

  After he had spoken Pankaj Rai distributed copies of his book, Reform the Only Way, and Mr Biswas asked for his to be autographed. Pankaj Rai did more. He wrote Mr Biswas’s name as well, describing him as a ‘dear friend’. Below this inscription Mr Biswas wrote: ‘Presented to Mohun Biswas by his dear friend Pankaj Rai, BA LLB.’

  He showed book and inscriptions to Shama when he got back to Hanuman House.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Shama said.

  ‘Let me hear what you have against him. You people say you are high-caste. But you think Pankaj would call you that? Let me see. I wonder where Pankaj would place the Big Bull. Ha! With the cows. Make him a cowherd. No. That is a good job.’ He remembered his own cowherd days. ‘Better make him a leather-worker, skinning dead animals. Yes, that’s it. The Big Bull is a member of the leather-worker caste. And what about the two gods? Where you think Pankaj would place them?’

  ‘Just where you would place your brothers.’

  ‘Road-sweeper? Little washerboys? Barber? Yes, little barbers. Pankaj would just look at them and feel that he want a trim. And what about your mother?’ He paused. ‘Sha-ma! It just hit me. Pankaj would say that your mother ain’t a Hindu at all! I mean, look at the facts. Marrying off her favourite daughter in a registry office. Sending the two little barbers to a Roman Catholic college. As soon as Pankaj see your mother he would start making the sign of the cross. Roman Catholic, that’s what she is!’

  ‘Why don’t you shut your mouth?’ Shama tried to sound amused, but he could tell that she was getting angry.

  ‘Ro-man Cat-o-lic! Roman cat, the bitch. You think she could fool Pankaj? And here you have Pankaj bringing the woman a message of hope, saying that Hindus should take in converts and treat them like their own, saying that it is not necessary to be born a high-caste to be a high-caste. A message of hope, man. And what? Your mother running the man down, when she should be grateful like hell, kissing the man foot. Gratitude, eh?’

  ‘I just hope this Pankaj Rai come to lift you out of this gum-pot you surely going to land yourself in. Go ahead.’

  ‘Shama.’

  ‘Why you don’t wrap your little tail up and go to sleep?’

  ‘Shama, we have another problem, girl. You think any good Hindu would get married to a Roman Catholic girl, if he was really a good Hindu? Shama, you know what? It look to me that your whole family is just one big low-caste bunch.’

  ‘You should know. You married into it.’

  ‘Married into it. Ha! You think that make me happy. I look as if I happy?’

  ‘Why you should look as if you happy? It should make you miserable. Is the first time in your life you eating three square meals a day. It giving your stomach too much exercise, I should say.’

  ‘Licking up my stomach, you mean. My biggest item of food and drink in this house is soda powder and water.’

  He pressed his foot against the wall and with his big toe drew circles around one of the faded lotus decorations.

  He intended to discuss the Aryans less flippantly with Hari. He imagined that Hari, like Pundit Jairam and many other pundits, would welcome disputation. But at the long table Hari remained cold, his wife looked aghast, and Mr Biswas left him to his food.

  When Hari had changed and was sitting in the verandah upstairs, humming from some holy book in his cheerless way, Mr Biswas, piqued and anxious to provoke some reaction, brought out his copy of Reform the Only Way and showed it, drawing Hari’s attention to the inscriptions. Hari looked briefly at the book and said, ‘Mm.’

  Having failed with Hari, Mr Biswas decided that it would be prudent to withhold the message of hope from the other brothers-in-law, who were less intelligent and more temperamental.

  About a week later Seth met Mr Biswas in the hall and said, laughing, ‘How is your dear friend Pankaj Rai?’

  ‘What you asking me for?’ Mr Biswas nearly always spoke English at Hanuman House, even when the other person spoke Hindi; it had become one of his principles. ‘Why you don’t ask Hari, the stargazer?’

  ‘You know Rai nearly went to jail?’

  ‘Some people would say anything.’ But Mr Biswas was disturbed by this news about the purist.

  ‘These Aryans say all sorts of things about women,’ Seth said. ‘And you know why? They want to lift them up to get on top of them. You know Rai was interfering with Nath’s daughter-in-law? So they asked him to leave. But a lot of other things left the house when he left.’

  ‘But the man is a BA.’

  ‘And LLB. I know. I wouldn’t trust an Aryan with my great-grandmother.’

  ‘Is a trick. The man is a dear friend. A purist. Pankaj wouldn’t do a thing like that. You never hear him talk, that’s why.’

  ‘Nath’s daughter-in-law heard, though. She didn’t like what she heard.’

  ‘Scandal, scandal. Is just a piece of scandal you stick-in-the-mud Sanatanists dig up.’

  ‘If I had my way,’ Seth said, ‘I would cut the balls off all these Aryans. Have they converted you yet?’

  ‘That is my own business.’

  ‘I hear they have made some creole converts. Brothers for you, Mohun!’

  In the verandah Mr Biswas saw Hari in dhoti, vest and beads, reading.

  ‘Hello, pundit!’ Mr Biswas said.

  Hari stared blankly at Mr Biswas and returned to his book.

  Mr Biswas went past a door with glass panes of many colours into the Book Room. Here, along the length of one wall, was a bookcase choked with the religious literature Hari was working through. Few of the books were bound. Many were simply stacks of large loose brown-edged sheets which looked stained rather than printed. Each sheet carried partial impressions of the sheet above and the sheet below; the ink had turned russet; and each letter lay in a patch of oil.

  Mr Biswas turned and walked back to the verandah. He put his head around a brilliant blue pane and whispered loudly down the verandah to Hari, ‘Hello, Mr God.’

  Hari, humming, didn’t hear.

  ‘I got a name for another one of your brother-in-laws,’ he told Shama that evening, lying on his blanket, his right foot on his left knee, peeling off a broken nail from his big toe. ‘The constipated holy man.’

  ‘Hari?’ she said, and pulled herself up, realizing that she had begun to take part in the game.

  He slapped his yellow, flabby calf and pushed his finger into the flesh. The calf yielded like sponge.

  She pulled his hand away. ‘Don’t do that. I can’t bear to see you do that. You should be ashamed, a young man like you, being so soft.’

  ‘That is all the bad food I eating in this place.’ He was still holding her hand. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I have quite a few names for him. The holy ghost. You like that?’

  ‘Man!’

  ‘And what about the two gods? It ever strike you that they look like two monkeys? So, you have one concrete monkey-god outside the house and two living o
nes inside. They could just call this place the monkey house and finish. Eh, monkey, bull, cow, hen. The place is like a blasted zoo, man.’

  ‘And what about you? The barking puppy dog?’

  ‘Man’s best friend.’ He flung up his legs and his thin slack calves shook. With a push of his finger he kept the calves swinging.

  ‘Stop doing that!’

  By now Shama’s head was on his soft arm, and they were lying side by side.

  Abandoning the brothers-in-law altogether, Mr Biswas contented himself with the company of the Aryans at the Naths’. Pankaj Rai was no longer with them and no one was willing to talk about him. His place had been taken by a man who introduced himself as Shivlochan, BA (Professor). He was no purist. He spoke pompous Hindi and little English, and continually allowed himself to be bullied by Misir. Misir was keen on discussions and resolutions, and under his guidance they passed resolutions that education was important, that child marriage should be abolished, that young people should choose their own spouses.

  Misir, who had suffered from his parents’ choice, said, ‘The present system is nothing more than cat-in-bag.’

  (Mr Biswas loved Misir’s phrases. ‘That is all your family do for you,’ he said to Shama that evening. ‘Marry off the whole pack of you cat-in-bag.’

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know where you picking up all that,’ Shama said. ‘Go ahead.’)

  ‘Look what I got,’ Misir said, ‘from marrying cat-in-bag. What about you, Mohun? You happy about this cat-in-bag business?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Mr Biswas said, ‘I didn’t get married cat-in-bag. I did see the girl first.’

  ‘You mean they let you see the child first?’ Whatever remained of Misir’s orthodox instincts was clearly outraged.

  ‘Well, she was just there, you know, in the shop, selling cloth and socks and ribbon. And I see her and then –’

  ‘All the old confusion, eh?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. Things just happen after that.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Misir said. ‘Well, you ask for what you get. Anyway, I think we could say we are against this early cat-in-bag marriage business.’