A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘O God!’ And Anand stamped, regretting the dying day.

  But the checking went on.

  Then Mr Biswas said, ‘Anand, this is not a punishment. I ask you to do this because I want you to help me.’

  He had discovered, with surprise, that this sentence soothed Anand, and he always offered it at the end of these sessions as a consolation.

  It was soon established that he did much of his work in bed and was to be expected to call constantly for paper, pencils to be sharpened, matches, cigarettes, ashtrays to be emptied, books to be brought, books to be taken away. It was also established that his sleep was important. He flew into terrible rages when awakened, even at a time he had fixed.

  ‘Savi,’ Shama would say, ‘go and wake your father.’

  ‘Let Anand go.’

  ‘No, the both of you go.’

  To Shama, who began to complain of his ‘strictness’ – a word which gave him a curious satisfaction – he said, ‘It is not strictness. It is training.’

  Mrs Tulsi, approving if a little surprised, told tales of the severe training to which Pundit Tulsi had submitted his children.

  And whenever Mrs Tulsi was away Shama made claims of her own. She was unable to faint like Mrs Tulsi but she complained of fatigue and liked to be attended by her children. She got Savi and Anand to walk on her and said in Hindi, ‘God will bless you,’ with such feeling that they considered it a sufficient recompense. Soon, and without this recompense, it became the duty of Savi and Anand to walk on Mr Biswas as well.

  Shama herself did not escape training. She had to file all the stories Mr Biswas wrote. Mr Biswas said she did this inefficiently. He gave her his pay-packet unopened and when she said that the money was insufficient he accused her of incompetence. And so Shama started on her laborious, futile practice of keeping accounts. Every evening she sat down at the green table in the back verandah and noted every penny she had spent during the day, slowly filling both sides of the pages of a bloated, oilstained Sentinel notebook with her Mission-school script.

  ‘Your little daily puja, eh?’ Mr Biswas said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I only trying to give you a raise.’

  Mr Biswas never asked to see Shama’s accounts, but she did them partly as a reproach to Mr Biswas and partly because she enjoyed it. Whatever his other qualities, Mr Burnett didn’t believe in paying generously and while he edited the Sentinel Mr Biswas’s salary never rose above fifty dollars a month, money which went almost as soon as it came. Shama’s household accounts were complicated by the rents she collected. She spent the rent money on the household and then had to make it up with the household money. The figures nearly always came out wrong. And every other week-end Shama’s accounting reached a pitch of frenzy, and she was to be seen in the back verandah puzzling over the Sentinel notebook, the rent book, the receipt book, doing innumerable little addition and subtraction sums on scraps of paper and occasionally making memoranda. Shama wrote curious memoranda. She wrote as she spoke and once Mr Biswas came on a note that said, ‘Old creole woman from 42 owe six dollars.’

  ‘I always did say that you Tulsis were a pack of financial geniuses,’ he said.

  She said, ‘I would like you to know that I used to come first in arithmetic’

  And when Savi and Anand came to her for help with their arithmetic homework she said, ‘Go to your father. He was the genius in arithmetic’

  ‘Know more than you anyway,’ he said. ‘Savi, ought twos are how much?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘You are your mother’s daughter all right. Anand?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘But what happening these days? They are not teaching as they used to when I was a boy.’

  He found fault with all the textbooks.

  ‘Readers by Captain Cutteridge! Listen to this. Page sixty-five, lesson nineteen. Some of Our Animal Friends.’ He read in a mincing voice: ‘ “What should we do without our animal friends? The cow and the goat give us milk and we eat their flesh when they are killed.” You hear the savage? And listen. “Many boys and girls have to tie up their goats before going to school in the morning, and help to milk them in the afternoon.” Anand, you tie up your goat this morning? Well, you better hurry up. Is nearly milking time. That is the sort of stuff they fulling up the children head with these days. When I was a boy it used to be the Royal Reader and Blackie’s Tropical Reader. Nesfield’s Grammar!’ he exclaimed. ‘I used to use Macdougall’s.’ And he sent Anand hunting for the Macdougall’s, a typographical antique, its battered boards hinged with strips of blue tape.

  From time to time he called for their exercise books, said he was horrified, and set himself up as their teacher for a few days. He cured Anand of a leaning towards fancy lettering and got him to abridge the convolutions of his C and J and S. With Savi he could do nothing. As a teacher he was exacting and short-tempered, and when Shama went to Hanuman House she was able to tell her sisters with pride, ‘The children are afraid of him.’

  And, partly to have peace on Sundays, and partly because the combination of the word ‘Sunday’ with the word ‘school’ suggested denial and a spoiling of pleasure, he sent Anand and Savi to Sunday school. They loved it. They were given cakes and soft drinks and taught hymns with catchy tunes.

  At home one day Anand began singing, ‘Jesus loves me, yes I know.’

  Mrs Tulsi was offended. ‘How do you know that Jesus loves you?’

  ‘ ’Cause the Bible tells me so,’ Anand said, quoting the next line of the hymn.

  Mrs Tulsi took this to mean that, without provocation, Mr Biswas was resuming his religious war.

  ‘Roman cat, your mother,’ he told Shama. ‘I thought a good Christian hymn would remind her of happy childhood days as a baby Roman kitten.’

  But the Sunday school stopped. In its place, and also to counter the influence of Captain Cutteridge, Mr Biswas began reading novels to his children. Anand responded but Savi was again a disappointment.

  ‘I can’t see Savi ever eating prunes and drinking milk from the Dairies,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Let her go on. All I see her doing is fighting to make up accounts like her mother.’

  Unmoved by Mr Biswas’s insults, Shama continued to write up her accounts, continued to wrestle once a fortnight with the rent money, and continued to serve eviction notices. Unknown to her family and almost unknown to herself, Shama had become a creature of terror to Mrs Tulsi’s tenants. To get the rents she often had to serve eviction notices, particularly on ‘old creole woman from 42’. It amused Mr Biswas to read the stern, grammatical injunctions in Shama’s placid handwriting, and he said, ‘I don’t see how that could frighten anybody.’

  Shama conducted her exciting operations without any sense that they were exciting. She was unwilling to risk serving notices personally. So late at night, when the tenant was almost certain to be in bed, Shama went out with her notice and pot of glue and pasted the notice on the two leaves of the door, so that the tenant, opening his door in the morning, would tear the notice and would not be able to claim that it had not been served.

  Mr Biswas learned shorthand, though of a purely personal sort. He read all the books he could get on journalism, and in his enthusiasm bought an expensive American volume called Newspaper Management, which turned out to be an exhortation to newspaper proprietors to invest in modern machinery. He discovered, and became addicted to, the extensive literature aimed at people who want to become writers; again and again he read how manuscripts were to be presented and was warned not to ring up the busy editors of London or New York newspapers. He bought Short Stories: How to Write Them by Cecil Hunt and How to Write a Book, by the same author.

  His salary being increased about this time, he ignored Shama’s pleas and bought a secondhand portable typewriter on credit. Then, to make the typewriter pay for itself, he decided to write for English and American periodicals. But he could find nothing to write about. The books he had read didn’t help him. And then he saw an advertisement
for the Ideal School of Journalism, Edgware Road, London, he filled in and cut out the coupon for the free booklet. The booklet came after two months. Printed sheets of various colours fell from it: initialled testimonials from all over the world. The booklet said that the Ideal School not only taught but also marketed; and it wondered whether Mr Biswas might not find it worth his while to take a course in short story writing as well. The principal of the Ideal School (a bespectacled grandfatherly man, from the spotty photograph) had discovered the secret of every plot in the world and his discovery had been accepted by the British Museum in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Mr Biswas was impressed but couldn’t spare the money. There had already been a row with Shama when he had used up the salary increase for a further three months to pay for the first two journalism lessons. In due course the first lesson came.

  ‘Even people with outstanding writing ability say they cannot find subjects. But in reality nothing is easier. You are sitting at your desk.’ (Mr Biswas read this in bed.) ‘You look through your window. But wait. There is an article in that window. The various types of window, the history of the window, windows famous in history, houses without windows. And the story of glass itself can be fascinating. Already, then, you have subjects for two articles. You look through your window and you see the sky. The weather is always a subject of conversation and there is no reason why you cannot make it the subject of a lively article. The demand for such material is enormous. For your first exercise, then, I want you to write four bright articles on the seasons. You may incorporate as many of these hints as you wish:

  ‘Summer. The crowded trains to the seaside, the chink of ice in a glass, the slap offish on the fishmonger’s slab …’

  ‘Slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘The only fish I see is the fish that does come around every morning in a basket on the old fishwoman head.’

  ‘… the tradesmen’s blinds, the crack of bat on ball on the village green, the lengthening shadows …’

  Mr Biswas wrote the article on summer; and with the help of the hints, wrote other articles on spring, winter and autumn.

  ‘Autumn is with us again!’ “Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness,” as the celebrated poet John Keats puts it so well. We have chopped up logs for the winter. We have gathered in the corn which soon, before a blazing fire in the depths of winter, we shall enjoy, roasted or boiled on the cob …’

  He received a letter of congratulation from the Ideal School and was told that the articles were being submitted without delay to the English Press. In the meantime he was asked to apply himself to the second lesson and write pieces on Guy Fawkes Night, Some Village Superstitions, The Romance of Place-Names (‘Your vicar is likely to prove a mine of colourful information’), Characters at the Local.

  He was stumped. No hints were given for these exercises and he wrote nothing. He didn’t tell Shama. Not long after he received a heavy envelope from England. It contained his articles on the seasons which he had typed out neatly on Sentinel paper and in the manner prescribed by the Ideal School. A printed letter was attached.

  ‘We regret to inform you that your articles have been submitted without success to: Evening Standard, Evening News, The Times, The Tatler, London Opinion, Geographical Magazine, The Field, Country Life. At least two editors spoke highly of the work but were forced to reject it through lack of space. We ourselves feel that work of such quality should not be consigned to oblivion. Why not try your local newspaper? That could very well be the beginning of a regular Nature column. Editors are always looking for new ideas, new material, new writers. At any rate let us know what happens. We at the Ideal like to hear of our pupils’ successes. In the meantime continue with your exercises.’

  ‘Continue with your exercises!’ Mr Biswas said. He thankfully abandoned Guy Fawkes and Characters at the Local, and ignored the expostulations which reached him at regular intervals for the next two years from the Edgware Road.

  The typewriter became idle.

  ‘It pay for itself,’ Shama said. ‘No wonder it now have to rest.’

  But soon the machine drew him again; and often, while Shama moved heavily about the back verandah and kitchen, Mr Biswas sat before the typewriter on the green table, inserted a sheet of Sentinel paper, typed his name and address at the top righthand corner, as the Ideal School and all the books had recommended, and wrote:

  ESCAPE

  by M. Biswas

  At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children …

  Here he often stopped. Sometimes he went on to the end of the page; sometimes, but rarely, he typed frenziedly for page after page. Sometimes his hero had a Hindi name; then he was short and unattractive and poor, and surrounded by ugliness, which was anatomized in bitter detail. Sometimes his hero had a Western name; he was then faceless, but tall and broad-shouldered; he was a reporter and moved in a world derived from the novels Mr Biswas had read and the films he had seen. None of these stories was finished, and their theme was always the same. The hero, trapped into marriage, burdened with a family, his youth gone, meets a young girl. She is slim, almost thin, and dressed in white. She is fresh, tender, unkissed; and she is unable to bear children. Beyond the meeting the stories never went.

  Sometimes these stories were inspired by an unknown girl in the advertising department of the Sentinel. She often remained unknown. Sometimes Mr Biswas spoke; but whenever the girl accepted his invitation – to lunch, a film, the beach – his passion at once died; he withdrew the invitation and avoided the girl; thus in time creating a legend among the girls of the advertising department, all of whom knew, though he did not suspect, for he kept it as a heavy, shameful secret, that at the age of thirty-three Mohun Biswas was already the father of four children.

  Still, at the typewriter, he wrote of his untouched barren heroines. He began these stories with joy; they left him dissatisfied and feeling unclean. Then he went to his room, called for Anand, and to Anand’s disgust tried to play with him as with a baby, saying, ‘Shompo! Gomp!’

  Forgetting that in his strictness, and as part of her training, he had ordered Shama to file all his papers, he thought that these stories were as secret at home as his marriage and four children were at the office. And one Friday, when he found Shama puzzling over her accounts and had scoffed as usual, she said, ‘Leave me alone, Mr John Lubbard.’

  That was one of the names of his thirty-three-year-old hero.

  ‘Go and take Sybil to the pictures.’

  That was from another story. He had got the name from a novel by Warwick Deeping.

  ‘Leave Ratni alone.’

  That was the Hindi name he had given to the mother of four in another story. Ratni walked heavily, ‘as though perpetually pregnant’; her arms filled the sleeves of her bodice and seemed about to burst them; she sucked in her breath through her teeth while she worked at her accounts, the only reading and writing she did.

  Mr Biswas recalled with horror and shame the descriptions of the small tender breasts of his barren heroines.

  Shama sucked her teeth loudly.

  If she had laughed he would have hit her. But she never looked at him, only at her account books.

  He ran to his room, undressed, got his own cigarettes and matches, took down Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and got into bed.

  It was not long after this that Mr Biswas, painting the kitchen safe and the green table with a tin of yellow paint, yielded to an impulse and painted the typewriter-case and parts of the typewriter as well.

  For long the typewriter remained unused, until Anand and Savi began learning to type on it.

  But still, in the office, whenever he had cleaned his typewriter or changed the ribbon and wished to test the machine, the sentence he always wrote was: At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children …

  So used to thinking of the house as his own, and in his new confidence, he made a garden. He planted rose-bushes at the side of
the house, and at the front dug a pond for water-lilies, which spread prodigiously. He acquired more possessions, the most massive of which was a combined bookcase and desk, of such weight and sturdiness that three men were required to put it into place in his bedroom, where it stayed until they all moved from Port of Spain to Shorthills. Mice nested in the bookcase, protected and nourished by the mass of paper with which the bookcase was stuffed: newspapers (Mr Biswas insisted that all the newspapers for a month should be kept, and there were quarrels when a particular issue could not be found); every typewritten letter Mr Biswas had received, from the Sentinel, the Ideal School, people anxious or grateful for publicity; the rejected articles on the seasons, the unfinished Escape stories (at first shamefully glanced at, though later Mr Biswas read them and regretted he had not taken up short story writing seriously).

  Encouraged by Shama, he took an increasing interest in his personal appearance. In his silk suit and tie he had never ceased to surprise her by his elegance and respectability; and whenever she bought him anything, a shirt, cufflinks, a tiepin, he said, ‘Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! One of these days.’ Sometimes, while he was dressing, he would make an inventory of all the things he was wearing and think, with wonder, that he was then worth one hundred and fifty dollars. Once on the bicycle, he was worth about one hundred and eighty. And so he rode to his reporter’s job and its curious status: welcomed, even fawned upon, by the greatest in the land, fed as well as anybody and sometimes even better, yet always, finally, rejected.

  ‘A hell of a thing today,’ he told Shama. ‘As we were leaving Government House H.E. asked me, “Which is your car?” I don’t know. I suppose reporters in England must be rich like hell’

  But Shama was impressed. At Hanuman House she started dropping names, and Padma, Seth’s wife, traced a tenuous and intricate family relationship between Seth and the man who had driven the Prince of Wales during his visit to Trinidad.

  On herself Shama spent little. Unable to buy the best and, like all the Tulsi sisters, having only contempt for the second-rate in cloth and jewellery, she bought nothing at all and made do with the gifts of cloth she received every Christmas from Mrs Tulsi. Her bodices became patched on the breasts and under the arms; and the more Mr Biswas complained the more she patched. But though her indifference to clothes seemed at times almost like inverted pride, she did not wholly lose her concern for appearances. At Hanuman House a wedding invitation to Mrs Tulsi was meant for her daughters as well; and one large gift, invariably part of the Tulsi Store stock, went from the House. But now Shama got invitations in her own right and during the Hindu wedding season she borrowed deeply from the rent money, committing herself to almost inextricable entanglement with her accounts, to buy presents, usually water-sets.