A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  Mr Biswas had always got on well with Dorothy; he was attracted by her loudness and gaiety and regarded her as an ally against the sisters. But on that hot still afternoon, when a holiday staleness lay over Arwacas, the hall, with its confused furniture, its dark loft and sooty green walls, with flies buzzing in and out of the white sunny spots on the long table, seemed abandoned, deprived of animation; and Mr Biswas, feeling Shekhar’s absence as a betrayal, could sympathize with the sisters.

  Savi said, ‘This is the last Christmas I spend at Hanuman House.’

  Change followed change. At Pagotes Tara and Ajodha were decorating their new house. In Port of Spain new lampposts, painted silver, went up in the main streets and there was talk of replacing the diesel buses by trolley-buses. Owad’s old room was let to a middle-aged childless coloured couple. And at the Sentinel there were rumours.

  Under Mr Burnett’s direction the Sentinel had overtaken the Gazette and, though some distance behind the Guardian, it had become successful enough for its frivolity to be an embarrassment to the owners. Mr Burnett had been under pressure for some time. That Mr Biswas knew, but he had no head for intrigue and did not know the source of this pressure. Some of the staff became openly contemptuous and spoke of Mr Burnett as uneducated; a joke went around the office that he had applied from the Argentine for a job as a sub-editor and his letter had been misunderstood. As if in reply to all this Mr Burnett became increasingly perverse. ‘Let’s face it,’ he said. ‘Editorials from Port of Spain didn’t have much effect in Spain. They are not going to stop Hitler either.’ The Guardian responded to the war by starting a fighter fund: in a box on the front page twelve aeroplanes were outlined, and as the fund rose the outlines were filled in. Right up to the end the Sentinel had been headlining the West Indian cricket tour of England, and when the tour was abandoned it printed a drawing of Hitler which, when cut out and folded along certain dotted lines, became a drawing of a pig.

  Early in the new year the blow fell. Mr Biswas was lunching with Mr Burnett in a Chinese restaurant, in one of those cubicles weakly lit by a low-hanging naked bulb, with lengths of flex loosely attached to the flyblown, grimy celotex partitions, when Mr Burnett said, ‘Amazing scenes are going to be witnessed soon. I’m leaving.’ He paused. ‘Sacked.’ As if divining Mr Biswas’s thoughts, he added, ‘Nothing for you to worry about, though.’ Then, in quick succession, he displayed a number of conflicting moods. He was gay; he was depressed; he was glad to leave; he was sorry to go; he didn’t want to talk about it; he talked about it; he wasn’t going to talk any more about himself; he talked about himself. He ate in spasms, attacking the food as though it had done him some injury. ‘Shoots? Is that what they call this? There’ll be damned little bamboo left in China at this rate.’ He pressed the bell, which lay at the centre of a roughly circular patch of grime on the wall. They heard it ring in some distant cavern, above a multitude of other bells, the pattering of waitresses’ feet and talk in adjacent cubicles.

  The harassed waitress came and Mr Burnett said, ‘Shoots? This is just plain bamboo. What do you think I have inside here?’ He tapped his belly. ‘A paper factory?’

  ‘That was one portion,’ the waitress said.

  ‘That was one bamboo.’

  He ordered more lager and the waitress sucked her teeth and went out, leaving the swing door swinging rapidly to and fro.

  ‘One portion,’ Mr Burnett said. ‘They make it sound like hay. And this damned room is like a stall. I’m not worried. I’ve got other strings to my bow. You too. You could go back to your sign-writing. I leave, you leave. Let’s all leave.’

  They laughed.

  Mr Biswas returned to the office in a state of great agitation. He had been associated, and zestfully, with some of the most frivolous excesses of the Sentinel. Now at the thought of each he felt a stab of guilt and panic. He was expecting to be summoned to mysterious rooms and told by their secure occupants that his services were no longer required. He sat at his desk – but it belonged to him no more than the columns of the Sentinel he filled – and listened to the noises made by the carpenters. Those were the noises he had heard on his first day in the office; building and rebuilding had gone on without interruption ever since. The newsroom came to its afternoon life. Reporters arrived, took off their jackets, opened notebooks and typed; groups gathered at the green water-cooler and broke up again; at some desks proofs were being corrected, the inner pages laid out. For more than four years he had been part of this excitement. Now, waiting for the summons, he could only observe it.

  Getting to believe that by staying in the office he was increasing the risk of dismissal, he left early and cycled home. Fear led to fear. Suppose he had to send the children back to Hanuman House, would there be anyone to receive them? Suppose Mrs Tulsi gave him notice – as Shama did so often to the tenement people – where would he go? How would he live?

  The years stretched ahead, dark.

  When he got home he mixed and drank some Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, undressed, got into bed and began to read Epictetus.

  But the days went by and no summons came. And at last it was time for Mr Burnett to leave. Mr Biswas wanted to make some gesture to show his gratitude and sympathy, but he could think of nothing. And after all Mr Burnett was escaping; he was staying behind. The Sentinel reported Mr Burnett’s departure on the society page. There was an unkind photograph of Mr Burnett looking uncomfortable in a dinner jacket, his small eyes popping in the flash of the camera, a cigar stuck in his mouth as if for comic effect. He was reported as being sorry to leave; he had to take up an appointment in America; he had learned much from his association with Trinidad and the Sentinel, and he would take a great interest in the progress of both; he thought the standards of local journalism ‘surprisingly high’. It was left to the other newspapers to reveal the other strings to his bow that Mr Burnett had spoken about. They reported that an Indian troupe, made up of dancers, a fire-walker, a snake-charmer and a man who could rest on a bed of nails, was accompanying Mr Burnett, a former editor of a local newspaper, on his travels to America. One headline was THE CIRCUS MOVES ON.

  And the new régime started at the Sentinel The day after Mr Burnett’s departure the newsroom was hung with posters which said DON’T BE BRIGHT, JUST GET IT RIGHT and NEWS NOT VIEWS and FACTS? IF NOT AXE and CHECK IT OR CHUCK IT. Mr Biswas regarded them all as aimed at himself alone, and their whimsicality scared him. The office was subdued and everyone wore a look of earnestness, those who had gone up, those who had gone down. Mr Burnett’s news editor had been made a sub-editor. His bright reporters had been variously scattered. One went to Today’s Arrangements, Invalids and The Weather, one to Shipping, one to Diana’s Diary on the society page, one to Classified Advertisements. Mr Biswas joined Court Shorts.

  ‘Write?’ he said to Shama. ‘I don’t call that writing. Is more like filling up a form. X, aged so much, was yesterday fined so much by Mr Y at this court for doing that. The prosecution alleged. Electing to conduct his own defence, X said. The magistrate, passing sentence, said.’

  But Shama approved of the new régime. She said, ‘It will teach you to have some respect for people and the truth.’

  ‘Hear you. Hear you! But you don’t surprise me. I expect you to talk like that. But let them wait. New régime, eh. Just see the circulation drop now.’

  It was only to Shama that Mr Biswas spoke about the changes. At the office the subject was never mentioned. Mr Burnett’s favourites avoided one another and, fearing intrigue, mixed with no one else. Apart from the posters there had been no directive, but they had all, so far as their new duties permitted writing, changed their styles. They wrote longer paragraphs of complete sentences with bigger words.

  Presently the directives came, in a booklet called Rules for Reporters; and it was in keeping with the aloof severity of the new authorities that the booklets should have appeared on every desk one morning without explanation, with only the name of the reporter, preceded by a ‘
Mr’, in the top righthand corner.

  ‘He must have got up early this morning,’ Mr Biswas said to Shama.

  The booklet contained rules about language, dress, behaviour, and at the bottom of every page there was a slogan. On the front cover was printed ‘THE RIGHTEST NEWS IS THE BRIGHTEST NEWS’, the inverted commas suggesting that the statement was historical, witty and wise. The back cover said:REPORT NOT DISTORT.

  ‘Report not distort,’ Mr Biswas said to Shama. ‘That is all the son of a bitch doing now, you know, and drawing a fat salary for it too. Making up those slogans. Rules for Reporters. Rules!’

  A few days later he came home and said, ‘Guess what? Editor peeing in a special place now, you know. “Excuse me. But I must go and pee – alone.” Everybody peeing in the same place for years. What happen? He taking a course of Dodd’s Kidney Pills and peeing blue or something?’

  In Shama’s accounts Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder appeared more often, always written out in full.

  ‘Just watch and see,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Everybody going to leave. People not going to put up with this sort of treatment, I tell you.’

  ‘When you leaving?’ Shama asked.

  And worse was to come.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose they just want to frighten me. I will henceforward – henceforward: you hear the sort of words that son of a bitch using – I will henceforward spend my afternoons at the cemeteries of Port of Spain. Just hand me that yellow book. Rules for Reporters! Let me see. Anything about funerals? By God! They damn well have it in! “The Sentinel reporter should be soberly dressed on these occasions, that is, in a dark suit.” Dark suit! The man must think I haven’t got a wife and four children. He must think he paying me a fortune every fortnight. “Neither by his demeanour nor by his dress should the reporter offend the mourners, since this will certainly lose the paper much goodwill. The Sentinel reporter should remember that he represents the Sentinel. He should encourage trust. It cannot be stressed too often that the reporter should get every name right. A name incorrectly spelt is offensive. All orders and decorations should be mentioned, but the reporter should use his discretion in making inquiries about these. To be ignorant of an individual’s decorations is almost certain to offend him. To ask an OBE whether he is an MBE is equally likely to offend. Far better, in this hypothetical case, to make inquiries on the assumption that the individual is a CBE. After the immediate family, the names of all mourners should be set out in alphabetical order.”

  ‘God! God! Isn’t this just the sort of arseness to make you go and dance on the grave afterwards? You know, I could turn the funeral column into a bright little feature. Yesterday’s Undertakings. By Gravedigger. Just next to Today’s Arrangements. Or set it next to Invalids. Heading: Going Going, Gone. How about this? Photo of weeping widow at graveside. Later, photo of widow hearing about will and laughing. Caption: “Smiling, Mrs X? We thought so. Where there’s a will there is a way.” Two photos side by side.’

  In the meantime he bought a dark serge suit on credit. And while Anand walked beside the wall of Lapeyrouse Cemetery on his way to the Dairies in the afternoon, Mr Biswas was often inside the cemetery, moving solemnly among the tombstones and making discreet inquiries about names and decorations. He came home tired, complaining of headaches, his stomach rising.

  ‘A capitalist rag,’ he began to say. ‘Just another capitalist rag.’

  Anand remarked that his name no longer appeared in it.

  ‘Glad like hell,’ Mr Biswas said.

  And on four Saturdays in succession he was sent to unimportant cricket matches, just to get the scores. The game of cricket meant nothing to him, but he was made to understand that the assignment was part of his retraining and he cycled from fourth-class match to fourth-class match, copying symbols and scores he did not understand, enjoying only the brief esteem of surprised and thrilled players under trees. Most of the matches finished at half past five and it was impossible to be at all the grounds at the same time. It sometimes happened that when he got to a ground there was no one there. Then secretaries had to be hunted out and there was more cycling. In this way those Saturday afternoons and evenings were ruined, and often Sunday as well, for many of the scores he had gathered were not printed.

  He began to echo phrases from the prospectus of the Ideal School of Journalism. ‘I can make a living by my pen,’ he said. ‘Let them go ahead. Just let them push me too far.’ At this period one-man magazines, nearly all run by Indians, were continually springing up. ‘Start my own magazine,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Go around like Bissessar, selling them myself. He tell me he does sell his paper like hot cakes. Like hot cakes, man!’

  He abandoned his own régime of strictness at home and instead spoke so long of various members of the Sentinel staff that Shama and the children got to feel that they knew them well. From time to time he indulged in a tiny rebellion.

  ‘Anand, on your way to school stop at the café and telephone the Sentinel. Tell them I don’t feel like coming to work today.’

  ‘Why you don’t telephone them yourself? You know I don’t like telephoning.’

  ‘We can’t always do what we like, boy.’

  ‘And you want me to say that you just don’t feel like going out to work today.’

  ‘Tell them I’m sick. Cold, headache, fever. You know.’

  When Anand left, Mr Biswas would say, ‘Let them sack me. Let them sack me like hell. Think I care? I want them to sack me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shama said. ‘You want them to sack you.’

  But he was careful to space out these days.

  He made himself unpopular among the boys and young men of the street who played cricket on the pavement in the afternoons and chattered under the lamp-post at night. He shouted at them from his window and, because of his suit, his job, the house he lived in, his connexion with Owad, his influence with the police, they were cowed. Sometimes he ostentatiously went to the café and telephoned the local police sergeant, whom he had known well in happier days. And he rejoiced in the glares and the mutterings of the players when, soberly dressed, unlikely to offend mourners, he cycled out to his funerals in the afternoon.

  He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear with the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times was for him almost like an act of sacrifice. He shared his discovery with Anand; and though he abstracted some of the pleasure of Dickens by making Anand write out and learn the meanings of difficult words, he did this not out of his strictness or as part of Anand’s training. He said, ‘I don’t want you to be like me.’

  Anand understood. Father and son, each saw the other as weak and vulnerable, and each felt a responsibility for the other, a responsibility which, in times of particular pain, was disguised by exaggerated authority on the one side, exaggerated respect on the other.

  Suddenly the pressure ceased at the Sentinel. Mr Biswas was taken off court shorts, funerals and cricket matches, and put into the Sunday Magazine, to do a weekly feature.

  ‘If they did just push me so much farther,’ he told Shama, ‘I would have resigned.’

  ‘Yes. You would have resigned.’

  ‘Sometimes I don’t know why the hell I ever bother to talk to you.’

  He had in fact mentally composed many sonorous letters of resignation, varying from the abusive to the dignified to the humorous and even to the charitable (these ended with his best wishes for the continued success of the Sentinel).

  Bu
t the features he now wrote were not the features he wrote for Mr Burnett. He didn’t write scandalous interviews with one-eyed men: he wrote serious surveys of the work done by the Institute for the Blind. He didn’t write ‘I Am Trinidad’s Maddest Man’: he wrote about the splendid work of the Lunatic Asylum. It was his duty to praise, to look always beyond the facts to the official figures; for it was part of the Sentinel’s new policy of sobriety that this was the best of all worlds and Trinidad’s official institutions its most magnificent aspects. He had not so much to distort as to ignore: to forget the bare, toughened feet of the children in an orphanage, the sullen looks of dread, the shameful uniforms; to accept a temporary shaming eminence and walk through workshops and vegetable gardens, noting industry, rehabilitation and discipline; to have lemonade and a cigarette in the director’s office, and get the figures; to put himself on the side of the grotesques.

  These features were not easy to write. In the days of Mr Burnett once he had got a slant and an opening sentence, everything followed. Sentence generated sentence, paragraph led to paragraph, and his articles had a flow and a unity. Now, writing words he did not feel, he was cramped, and the time came when he was not sure what he did feel. He had to note down ideas and juggle them into place. He wrote and rewrote, working extremely slowly, nagged by continual headaches, completing his articles only to meet the Thursday dead-line. The results were laboured, dead, incapable of giving pleasure except to the people written about. He didn’t look forward to Sunday. He was up early as usual, but the paper remained on the front steps until Shama or one of the children brought it in. He avoided turning to his article for as long as possible. It was always a surprise, when he did turn to it, to see how photographs and lay-out concealed the dullness of the matter. Even then he did not read through what he had written, but glanced at odd paragraphs, looking for cuts and changes that would indicate editorial disapproval. He said nothing to Shama, but he lived now in constant expectation of the sack. He knew his work was not good.