A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  Afterwards Seth said to Mr Biswas, ‘You can’t trust those buggers. They are going to give a lot of trouble. You better watch out.’

  The labourers never spoke about the land to Mr Biswas, and while the crop was being reaped there was no trouble.

  When the land was bare Seth said, ‘They will want to dig up the roots. Don’t let them.’

  It was not long before Mr Biswas had to report that some roots had been dug up.

  Seth said, ‘It looks as though I will have to horsewhip one or two of them.’

  ‘No, not that. You go back every night to sleep safe and sound in Arwacas. I have to stay here.’

  In the end they decided to employ a watchman, and the land was prepared, without further trouble, for the new crop.

  ‘You think the whole thing worth it?’ Mr Biswas asked. ‘Paying watchman and everything?’

  ‘In a year or so we wouldn’t have any trouble,’ Seth said. ‘People get used to everything.’

  And it seemed that Seth was right. The dispossessed labourers, though they saw Mr Biswas every day, contented themselves with sending him messages by other labourers.

  ‘Dookinan says that he know you have a kind heart and wouldn’t want to do anything to harm him. Five children, you know.’

  ‘Is not me,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Is not my land. I just doing a job and drawing a salary.’

  The labourers’ acceptance, at first touched with hope, turned to resignation. And resignation turned to hostility, directed not against Seth, who was feared, but against Mr Biswas. He was no longer mocked; but no one smiled at him, and outside the fields he was ignored.

  Every night he bolted himself in his room. As soon as he was still he felt the stillness around him and he had to make movements to destroy the stillness, to challenge the alertness of the room and the objects in it.

  He was rocking hard on the creaking board one night when he thought of the power of the rockers to grind and crush and inflict pain, on his hands and toes and the tenderer parts of his body. He rose at once in agony, covering his groin with his hands, sucking hard on his teeth, listening to the chair as, rocking, it moved sideways along the cambered plank. The chair fell silent. He looked away from it. On the wall he saw a nail that could puncture his eye. The window could trap and mangle. So could the door. Every leg of the green table could press and crush. The castors of the dressingtable. The drawers. He lay face down on the bed, not wanting to see and, to drive out the shapes of objects from his head, he concentrated on the shapes of letters, working out design after design for the letter R. At last he fell asleep, with his hands covering the vulnerable parts of his body, and wishing he had hands to cover himself all over. In the morning he was better; he had forgotten his fears.

  There had been many changes at Hanuman House, but though he went there two or three times a week he noticed the changes as from a distance and felt in no way concerned. Marriage had taken away one wave of children, among them the contortionist. Marriage had also overtaken the elder god, though for some time it had looked as though he might be reprieved. The search among the eligible families had failed to provide someone beautiful and educated and rich enough to satisfy Mrs Tulsi or her daughters, who, notwithstanding the chancy haste of their own marriages, based solely on caste, thought that their brother’s bride should be chosen with a more appropriate concern. For a short time afterwards a search was made for an educated, beautiful and rich girl from a caste family who had been converted to Christianity and had lapsed. Finally, it was agreed that any educated, beautiful and rich Indian girl would do, provided she had no Muslim taint. The oil families, whatever their original condition, were too grand. So they searched among the families in soft drinks, the families in ice, the transport families, the cinema families, the families in filling stations. And at last, in a laxly Presbyterian family with one filling station, two lorries, a cinema and some land, they found a girl. Each side patronized the other and neither suspected it was being patronized; after smooth and swift negotiations the marriage took place in a registry office, and the elder god, contrary to Hindu custom and the traditions of his family, did not bring his bride home, but left Hanuman House for good, no longer talking of suicide, to look after the lorries, cinema, land and filling station of his wife’s family.

  His departure was followed by another. Mrs Tulsi went to live in Port of Spain, not caring for the younger god to be in that city by himself, and not trusting anyone else to look after him. She bought not one house, but three: one to live in, two to rent out. She travelled up to Port of Spain with the god every Sunday evening and came down with him every Friday afternoon.

  During her absences the accepted degrees of precedence at Hanuman House lost some of their meaning. Sushila, the widow, was reduced to nonentity. Many sisters attempted to seize power and a number of squabbles ensued. Offended sisters ostentatiously looked after their own families, sometimes even cooking separately for a day or two. Padma, Seth’s wife, alone continued to be respected, but she showed no inclination to assert authority. Seth exacted the obedience of everyone; he could not impose harmony. That was reestablished every week-end, when Mrs Tulsi and the younger god returned.

  And just before the school holidays all quarrels were forgotten. The house was scrubbed and cleaned, the brass polished and the yard tidied, as though to receive passing royalty; and the brothers-in-law vied with one another in laying aside offerings for the god: a Julie mango, a bunch of bananas, an especially large purple-skinned avocado pear.

  Mr Biswas brought nothing. Shama complained.

  ‘And what about my son, eh?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘He lost in the crowd? Who looking after him? He not studying too?’

  For, halfway through the term, Anand had begun to go to the mission school. He hated it. He soaked his shoes in water; he was flogged and sent to school in wet shoes. He threw away Captain Cutteridge’s First Primer and said it had been stolen; he was flogged and given another copy.

  ‘Anand is a coward,’ Savi told Mr Biswas. ‘He still frightened of school. And you know what Aunt Chinta say to him yesterday? “If you don’t look out you will come a grass-cutter just like your father.” ’

  ‘Grass-cutter! Look, look, Savi. The next time your aunt Chinta open that big mouth’ – he broke off, remembering grammar – ‘the next time she opens her big mouth –’

  Savi smiled.

  ‘– you just ask her whether she has ever read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.’

  These were household names to Savi.

  ‘Munnih-munnih-munnih,’ Mr Biswas muttered.

  ‘Munnih-munnih?’

  ‘Money. Checking munnih-munnih-munnih. That is the only way your mother’s family like to get their fat little hands dirty. Look, the next time Chinta or anybody else says I am a grass-cutter, you just tell them that it is better to be a grass-cutter than a crab-catcher. You got that? Better to be a grass-cutter than a crab-catcher.’

  And he opened the campaign himself. He had seen some large blue-backed crabs scrambling awkwardly about the black tank in the yard. ‘Whoo!’ he said in the hall. ‘Those are big crabs in the tank. Where did they come from?’

  ‘Govind bought them for Mai and Owad,’ Chinta said proudly.

  ‘Bought them?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Anybody would say that he caught them.’

  When he next went to Hanuman House he found that Savi had delivered all his messages.

  Chinta came straight up to him and said, with the mannishness she put on when Mrs Tulsi was away, ‘Brother-in-law, I want you to know that until you came to this house there were no crab-catchers here.’

  ‘Eh? No what?’

  ‘Crab-catchers.’

  ‘Crab-catchers? What about crab-catchers? You don’t have enough here?’

  ‘Marcus Aurelius-Aurelius,’ Chinta said, retreating to the kitchen. ‘Shama sister, I don’t want to meddle in the way you are bringing up your children, but you are turning them into men and women before their time.’

  Mr
Biswas winked at Savi.

  Presently Chinta came out to the hall again. She had obviously thought of something to say. Sternly and needlessly she rearranged chairs and benches and straightened the photographs of Pundit Tulsi and a huge Chinese calendar which showed a woman of sly beauty against a background of tamed trees and waterfalls. ‘Savi,’ Chinta said at last, and her voice was gentle, ‘you reach first standard at school and you must know the poetry Captain Cutteridge have in that book. I don’t think your father know it because I don’t think your father reach first standard.’

  Mr Biswas had not been brought up on Captain Cutteridge but on the Royal Reader. Nevertheless he said, ‘First standard? I skipped that one. I went straight from Introductory to second standard.’

  ‘I thought so, brother-in-law. But you, Savi, you know the poetry I mean. The one about felo-de-se. The little pigs. You know it?’

  ‘I know it! I know it!’ a boy exclaimed. This was Jai, the expert lace-knotter, fourteen months younger than Savi. He had developed into something of an exhibitionist. He ran to the centre of the hall, held his hands behind his back and said, ‘The Three Little Piggies. By Sir Alfred Scott-Gatty.’

  A jolly old sow once lived in a sty.

  And three little piggies had she,

  And she waddled about, saying, ‘Umph! Umph! Umph!’

  While the little ones said, ‘Wee! Wee!’

  ‘My dear little brothers,’ said one of the brats,

  ‘My dear little piggies,’ said he,

  ‘Let us all for the future say, “Umph! Umph! Umph!”

  ‘Tis so childish to say, “Wee! Wee!” ’

  While Jai recited Chinta moved her head up and down in time to the rhythm and stared smilingly at Savi.

  ‘So after a time,’ Jai went on,

  So after a time these little pigs died,

  They all died of ‘felo-de-se’,

  From trying too hard to say, ‘Umph! Umph! Umph!’

  When they could only say, ‘Wee! Wee!’

  ‘A moral there is to this little song,’ Chinta said, continuing the poem with Jai and wagging her finger at Savi. ‘A moral that’s easy to see.’

  ‘Felo-de-se?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Sounds like the name of a crab-catcher to me.’

  Chinta stamped, irritated as when she lost at cards, and, looking as though she was about to cry, went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Shama sister,’ Mr Biswas heard her say in a breaking voice, ‘I want you to ask your husband to stop provoking me. Otherwise I will just have to tell him’ – her husband, Govind – ‘and you know what happened when he had a little falling-out with your husband.’

  ‘All right, Chinta sister, I will tell him.’

  Shama came out and said, with annoyance, ‘Man, stop provoking C. You know she can’t take jokes.’

  ‘Jokes? What jokes? Crab-catching is no joke, you hear.’

  Chinta had her revenge a few days later.

  Mr Biswas arrived at Hanuman House when the evening meal was over and the children were sitting about the hall in groups of three or four, reading primers or pretending to read. One of the economies of the house was that as many children as possible shared a book; and the children were talking among themselves and trying to hide the fact by holding their hands over their mouths and turning pages regularly. When Mr Biswas came they looked at him with amusement and expectancy.

  Chinta smiled. ‘You have come to see your son, brother-in-law?’

  A rustle of turning pages coincided with many muffled titters.

  Savi left a group around a book and came to Mr Biswas. She looked unhappy. ‘Anand upstairs.’ When they were halfway up she whispered, ‘He kneeling down.’

  In the hall Chinta was singing.

  ‘Kneeling down? What for?’

  ‘He mess up himself at school today and had to leave.’

  They went through the Book Room to the long room, which he and Shama had occupied after their marriage. The lotus decorations on the wall were as faded as before; the Demerara window through which he had gargled was propped open with a section of a broomstick.

  Anand was kneeling in a corner with his face to the wall.

  ‘He kneeling down since this afternoon,’ Savi said.

  Mr Biswas didn’t feel this was true. Anand had been left to himself, and was now kneeling upright, without a sign of fatigue, as though he had just begun.

  ‘Stop kneeling,’ Mr Biswas said.

  He was surprised at Anand’s outraged and querulous reply. ‘They tell me to kneel down and I going to kneel down.’

  It was the first time he had seen Anand in a temper. He looked at the boy’s narrow shoulder blades below the thin cotton shirt; the slender neck, the large head; the thin eczema-stained legs in small, loose trousers; the blackened soles – shoes were to be worn only outside the house – and the big toes.

  ‘He was frightened,’ Savi said.

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Frightened to ask Teacher permission to leave the room. And when he leave the room he was frightened again. Frightened to use the school wc.’

  ‘Is a nasty, stinking place,’ Anand burst out, getting off his knees and turning to face them.

  ‘It really is,’ Savi said. ‘And then – well –’

  Anand cried.

  ‘He went back to the classroom and Teacher ask him to leave.’

  Anand looked down at the floor, sniffing and running his fingers along the grooves between the floorboards.

  ‘Well, just then school was over and everybody walk behind Anand. Everybody was laughing.’

  ‘And when I come home Ma beat me,’ Anand said. He wasn’t complaining. He was angry. ‘Ma beat me. She beat me.’ Repeated, the words lost their anger and became pleas for sympathy.

  Mr Biswas became the buffoon. He told about his own misadventure at Pundit Jairam’s, caricaturing himself, and ridiculing Anand’s shame.

  Anand didn’t look up or smile. But he had ceased to cry. He said, ‘I don’t want to go back to that school.’

  ‘You want to come with me?’

  Anand didn’t reply.

  They all went down to the hall.

  Mr Biswas said, ‘Look, Shama, don’t make this boy kneel down again, you hear.’

  Sushila, the widow, said, ‘When we were small Mai used to make us kneel on graters for a thing like that.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want my children to grow up like you, that is all.’

  Sushila, childless, husbandless and now without the protection of Mrs Tulsi, swept upstairs, complaining that advantage was being taken of her situation.

  Chinta said, ‘You are taking your son home with you, brother-in-law?’

  Shama, noting Mr Biswas’s serene mood, said sternly, ‘Anand not going anywhere. He got to stay here and go to school.’

  ‘Why?’ Chinta asked. ‘Brother-in-law could teach him. I sure he know the ABC’

  ‘A for apple, B for bat, C for crab,’ Mr Biswas said.

  Anand followed Mr Biswas outside and seemed unwilling to let him leave. He said nothing; he simply hung around the bicycle, occasionally rubbing up against it. Mr Biswas was irritated by his shyness, but he was again touched by the boy’s fragility and the carefully ragged ‘home clothes’ which Anand, like the other children, wore the minute he came from school. Anand’s washed-out khaki shorts were spectacularly patched, had slits but no pockets and a gaping empty fob. His shirt was darned and frayed and the collar was chewed; from the crooked stitches, the irregular cut, the weak and absurd decoration on the pocket Mr Biswas could tell that the shirt had been made by Shama.

  He asked, ‘You want to come with me?’

  Anand only smiled and looked down and spun the bicycle pedal with his big toe.

  It would soon be dark. Mr Biswas had no lamp (every bicycle lamp and every bicycle pump he bought was promptly stolen) and he could never contrive, as some cyclists did, less to light their way than to appease the police, to ride with a lighted candle in an open paper-bag i
n one hand.

  He cycled down the High Street. Just past the shop with the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign, he looked back. Anand was still under the arcade, next to one of the thick white pillars with the lotus-shaped base; standing and staring like that other boy Mr Biswas had seen outside a low hut at dusk.

  When he got to Green Vale it was dark. Under the trees it was night. The sounds from the barracks were assertive and isolated one from the other: snatches of talk, the sound of frying, a shout, the cry of a child: sounds thrown up at the starlit sky from a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world. The dead trees ringed the barracks, a wall of flawless black.

  He locked himself in his room.

  That week he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. Unless he started his house now he never would. His children would stay at Hanuman House, he would remain in the barrackroom, and nothing would arrest his descent into the void. Every night he wound himself up to a panic at his inaction, every morning he reaffirmed his decision, and on Saturday he spoke to Seth about a site.

  ‘Rent you land?’ Seth said. ‘Rent? Look, man, there is the land. Why don’t you just choose a site and build? Don’t talk to me about renting.’

  The site Mr Biswas had in mind was about two hundred yards from the barracks, screened from it by the trees and separated from it by a shallow damp depression which ran with muddy water after rain. Trees also screened the road. But when he thought of the land as the site of his house, the trees did not seem unfriendly; and he liked to think of the spot as a ‘bower’, a word that had come to him from Wordsworth by way of the Royal Reader.