A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
He was at that time touring the island as the Scarlet Pimpernel, in the hope of having people come up to him and say, ‘You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize.’ Every day his photograph appeared in the Sentinel together with his report on the previous day’s journey and his itinerary for the day. The photograph was half a column wide and there was no room for his ears; he was frowning, in an unsuccessful attempt to look menacing; his mouth was slightly open and he stared at the camera out of the corners of his eyes, which were shadowed by the low-pulled brim of his hat. As a circulation raiser the Scarlet Pimpernel was a failure. The photograph concealed too much; and he was too well dressed for ordinary people to accost him in a sentence of such length and correctness. The prizes went unclaimed for days and the Scarlet Pimpernel reports became increasingly fantastic. Mr Biswas visited his brother Prasad and readers of the Sentinel learned next morning that a peasant in a remote village had rushed up to the Scarlet Pimpernel and said, ‘You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize.’ The peasant was then reported as saying that he read the Sentinel every day, since no other paper presented the news so fully, so amusingly, and with such balance.
Then Mr Biswas visited his eldest brother Pratap. And there he had a surprise. He found that his mother had been living with Pratap for some weeks. For long Mr Biswas had considered Bipti useless, depressing and obstinate; he wondered how Pratap had managed to communicate with her and persuade her to leave the hut in the back trace at Pagotes. But she had come and she had changed. She was active and lucid; she was a lively and important part of Pratap’s household. Mr Biswas felt reproached and anxious. His luck had been too sudden, his purchase on the world too slight. When he got back late that evening to the Sentinel office he sat down at a desk, his own (his towel in the bottom drawer), and with memories coming from he knew not where, he wrote:
SCARLET PIMPERNEL SPENDS NIGHT IN A TREE
Anguish of Six-Hour Vigil
Oink! Oink!
The frogs croaked all around me. Nothing but that and the sound of the rain on trees in the black night.
I was dripping wet. My motorcycle had broken down miles from anywhere. It was midnight and I was alone.
The report then described a sleepless night, encounters with snakes and bats, the two cars that passed in the night, heedless of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s cries, the rescue early in the morning by peasants who recognized the Scarlet Pimpernel and claimed their prize.
It was not long after this that Mr Biswas went to Arwacas. He got there in the middle of the morning but did not go to Hanuman House until after four, when he knew the store would be closed, the children back from school and the sisters in the hall and kitchen. His return was as magnificent as he had wished. He was still climbing up the steps from the courtyard when he was greeted by shouts, scampering and laughter.
‘You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize!’
He went around, dropping Sentinel dollar-tokens into eager hands.
‘Send this in with the coupon from the Sentinel. Your money will come the day after tomorrow.’
Savi and Anand at once took possession of him.
Shama, emerging from the black kitchen, said, ‘Anand, you will get your father’s suit dirty.’
It was as though he had never left. Neither Shama nor the children nor the hall carried any mark of his absence.
Shama dusted a bench at the table and asked whether he had eaten. He didn’t reply, but sat where she had dusted. The children asked questions continually, and it was easy not to pay attention to Shama as she brought the food out.
‘Uncle Mohun, Uncle Mohun. You really spend a night up a tree?’
‘What do you think, Jai?’
‘Ma say you make it up. And I don’t see how you could climb up a tree.’
‘I can’t tell you how often I fall down.’
It was better than he had imagined to be back in the sooty green hall with the shelflike loft, the long pitchpine table, the unrelated pieces of furniture, the photographs of Pundit Tulsi, the kitchen safe with the Japanese coffee-set.
‘Uncle Mohun, that man did really chase you with a cutlass when you try to give a coupon to his wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why you didn’t give him one too?’
‘Go away. You children getting too smart for me.’
He ate and washed his hands and gargled. Shama urged him to be careful of his tie and jacket: as though they were not new to her, as though she had a wifely interest even in clothes she had not known from the start.
He went up the stairs, past the landing with the broken piano. In the verandah he saw Hari, the holy man, and Hari’s wife. They barely greeted him. They both seemed untouched by his new fame or his new suit. Hari, in his pundit’s clothes, looked jaundiced and unwell as always; his wife’s solemnity was tinged with worry and fatigue. Mr Biswas had often surprised them in similar quiet domestic scenes, withdrawn from the life about them.
He felt he was intruding, and hurried past the door with the coloured glass panes into the Book Room, which smelled mustily of old paper and worm-eaten wood. His books were there with traces of their soaking: bleached covers, stained and crinkled pages. Anand came into the room. His hair was long on his big head; he was in his ‘home-clothes’. Mr Biswas held Anand to his leg and Anand rubbed against it. He asked Anand about school and got shy, unintelligible replies. They had little to talk about.
‘Exactly when they did start seeing my name in the papers?’ Mr Biswas asked.
Anand smiled, raised one foot off the floor, and mumbled.
‘Who see it first?’
Anand shook his head.
‘And what they say, eh? Not the children, but the big people.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? But what about the photo? Coming out every day. What they say when they see that?’
‘Nothing.’ ‘Nothing at all?’
‘Only Auntie Chinta say you look like a crook.’
‘Who is the pretty baby? Tell me, who is the pretty baby?’
It was Shama, coming into the room and wandering about it with a baby in her arms.
Mr Biswas had not seen his fourth child. And now he was embarrassed to look.
Shama came closer but did not raise her eyes. ‘Who is that man?’ she said to the baby. ‘Do you know that man?’
Mr Biswas did not respond. He felt suffocated, sickened by the picture of mother and child as by the whole furtive domestic scene in this room above the hall: father, mother, children.
‘And who is this?’ Shama had taken the baby to Anand. ‘This is brother.’ Anand tickled her chin and the baby gurgled.
‘Yes, this is brother. Oh, isn’t she a pretty baby?’
He noticed that Shama had grown a little plumper.
He relented. He took a step towards Shama and immediately she held up the baby to him.
‘Her name is Kamla,’ Shama said in Hindi, her eyes still on the baby.
‘Nice name,’ he said in English. ‘Who give it?’
‘The pundit.’
‘This one register too, I suppose?’
‘But you were here when she was born –’ And Shama stopped, as though she had ventured on to dangerous ground.
Mr Biswas took the baby.
‘Give her back to me,’ Shama said after a short time. ‘She might get your clothes dirty.’
The reconciliation was soon complete, and on terms that made Mr Biswas feel he had won a victory. It was arranged for him to meet Mrs Tulsi in Port of Spain. She pretended not to know that he had ever left Shama and Hanuman House; he had come to Port of Spain to see the doctor, hadn’t he? Mr Biswas said he had. She was glad he was better; Pundit Tulsi always used to say that good health was worth any fortune. She never asked about his job, though she said that she expected much from Mr Biswas and always had; which was why she had been so ready to agree when he came that afternoon to ask for Shama’s hand.
The offer was stupendous: a house, no less. It was the climax of his current good fortune, which must now, he felt, surely end. To delay acceptance, to cover up his nervousness, he talked about the difficulty of collecting rents. Mrs Tulsi talked about Pundit Tulsi and he listened with solemn sympathy.
They were in the front verandah. Ferns in baskets hung from the eaves, softening the light, cooling the air. Mr Biswas reclined on his morris chair. It was an experience, so new he could not yet savour it, to find himself turned all at once from a visitor into a dweller, in a house that was solid and finished and painted and elegant all over, with a level, gapless floor, straight concrete walls, panelled doors with locks, a complete roof, a ceiling varnished in the drawingroom, painted elsewhere. Finishing details, which up to a few minutes before he had taken for granted, he now noted, one by one, as for the first time. Nothing had to be added, nothing was makeshift; there were no surprises of mud walls or tree-branches, no secret ways of doing anything; everything worked as it was meant to.
The house stood on high pillars and was one of the newest and most imposing in the street. The district had been recently redeveloped and was rising fast, though in every street there were still a number of dwellings of the stubborn poor, unfenced wooden huts which spoke of the time when the district was part of a sugar-estate. The streets were straight; every lot measured one hundred feet by fifty; and a sewerage trace, almost a street itself, ran down the middle of each block, separating back fences. So there was space; space below the floor of the house itself, space at the back, space at the sides, space for a garden at the front.
Could this luck have been more complete?
Ramchand and Dehuti were delighted. The camplife which Mr Biswas’s presence enforced on them in their two rooms, though pleasant at first, had begun to be irksome. They were glad, too, that Mr Biswas had been settled. They felt responsible for that as well as the reconciliation. One unexpected result of the negotiations was that Dehuti attached herself to Hanuman House, joining the dozens of strange women who, to Mr Biswas’s surprise, were always willing to turn up days before any large function at Hanuman House, abandoning husbands and children, to cook and clean and generally serve, without payment. Dehuti worked hard and was always invited. She often went with the Tulsi sisters to other functions; and at weddings sang the sad songs which had not been sung for her. In time no one thought of her as Mr Biswas’s sister, not even Mr Biswas, to whom she became only one of the women attached to the Tulsis.
Once more, then, the furniture moved. And what had choked the barrackroom made little impression on the house at Port of Spain. The fourposter and Shama’s dressingtable went into a bedroom; the kitchen safe with the coffee-set remained in the back verandah with the green table. The hatrack and the rockingchair alone had places of honour, in the front verandah; they were put out every morning and brought in every night, to prevent them being stolen. For the rest, the house remained furnished in the manner which Mrs Tulsi had thought appropriate to the city. In the drawingroom four cane-bottomed bentwood chairs stood stiffly around a marble topped three-legged table which carried a potted fern on a crocheted and tasselled white cloth. In the diningroom there was a frigid-looking washstand with a ewer and basin. Mrs Tulsi had brought none of the statuary from Hanuman House but many of the brass vases, which, filled with potted plants, were disposed about the verandah and brought in every night.
Anand and Savi were not easily persuaded to leave Hanuman House. They remained there for some weeks after Shama had left with Myna and Kamla. Then Savi came one Sunday evening with Mrs Tulsi and the god. She saw the street lamps and the lights of the ships in the harbour. Mrs Tulsi took her to the Botanical Gardens; she saw the ponds and grassy slopes of the sunken Rock Gardens; she heard the band play; and she stayed. Anand, however, refused to be allured, until the younger god said, ‘They have a new sweet drink in Port of Spain. Something called Coca Cola. The best thing in the world. Come with me to Port of Spain, and I will get your father to buy you a Coca Cola and some real icecream. In cardboard cups. Real icecream. Not home-made.’
To the children of Hanuman House home-made was not a word of commendation. Home-made icecream was the flavourless (officially coconut) congelation churned out by Chinta after lunch on Christmas Day. She used an old, rusted freezer; she said it ‘skipped’; and to hasten the freezing she threw lumps of ice into the mixture. The rust from the freezer dripped on the icecream and penetrated it, like a ripple of chocolate.
And it was purely this promise of real icecream and Coca Cola that drew Anand to Port of Spain.
On a Sunday afternoon, when shadows had withdrawn to under the eaves of houses, when the city was hard and bright and empty, with doors closed everywhere, and the glass windows of shops reflected only those opposite, Mr Biswas took Anand on a tour of Port of Spain. They walked with a sense of adventure in the middle of empty streets; they heard their footsteps; like this, the city could be known; it held no threat. They looked at café after café, rejecting, at Anand’s insistence, all those which claimed to sell only home-made cakes and icecream. At last they found one which was suitable. On a high red stool, a revelation and luxury in itself, Anand sat at the counter, and the icecream came. In a cardboard tub, frosted, cold to the touch. With a wooden spoon. The cover had to be taken off and licked; the icecream, light pink and spotted with red, steamed: one preparatory delight after another.
‘It don’t taste like icecream at all,’ Anand said. He cleaned the tub, and it was such a perfectly made thing he would have liked to keep it.
When he sipped the Coca Cola he said, ‘It is like horse pee.’ Which was what some cousin had said of a drink at Hanuman House.
‘Anand!’ Mr Biswas said, smiling at the man behind the counter. ‘You’ve got to stop talking like that. You are in Port of Spain now.’
The house faced east, and the memories that remained of these first four years in Port of Spain were above all memories of morning. The newspaper, delivered free, still warm, the ink still wet, sprawled on the concrete steps, down which the sun was moving. Dew lay on trees and roofs; the empty street, freshly swept and washed, was in cool shadow, and water ran clear in the gutters whose green bases had been scratched and striped by the sweepers’ harsh brooms. Memories of taking the Royal Enfield out from under the house and cycling in a sun still cool along the streets of the awakening city. Stillness at noon: stripping for a short nap: the window of his room open: a square of blue above the unmoving curtain. In the afternoon, the steps in shadow; tea in the back verandah. Then an interview at a hotel, perhaps, and the urgent machinery of the Sentinel. The promise of the evening; the expectation of the morning.
With Mrs Tulsi and Owad away on week-ends and during the holidays it was possible at times for Mr Biswas to forget that the house belonged to them. And their presence was hardly a strain. Mrs Tulsi never fainted in Port of Spain, never stuffed soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub into her nostrils, never wore bay-rum-soaked bandages around her forehead. She was neither distant nor possessive with the children, and her relations with Mr Biswas became less cautious and formal as his friendship with Owad grew. Owad appreciated Mr Biswas’s work and Mr Biswas, flattered to be established as a wit and a madman, developed a respect for the young man who read such big books in foreign languages. They became companions; they went to the cinema and the seaside; and Mr Biswas showed Owad transcripts, which no paper printed, of court proceedings in cases of rape
Mr Biswas ceased to ridicule or resent the excessive care Mrs Tulsi gave to her younger son. Mrs Tulsi believed that prunes, like fish brains, were especially nourishing for people who exercised their brains, and she fed Owad prunes every day. Milk was obtained for him from the Dairies in Phillip Street; it came in proper milk bottles with silver caps; not like the milk Shama got from a man six lots away who, oblivious of the aspirations of the district, kept cows and delivered milk in rum bottles stopped with brown paper.
Though with Owad and Mrs Tulsi Mr Biswas’s attitude towards his children was gently deprecatory, he was watching and learning, with an eye on his own household and especially on Anand. Soon, he hoped, Anand would qualify to eat prunes and drink milk from the Dairies.
His household established, Mr Biswas set about establishing his tyrannies.
‘Savi!’
No answer.
‘Savi! Savi! Oh-Savi-yah! Oh, you there. Why you didn’t answer?’
‘But I come.’
‘Is not enough. You must come and answer.’
‘All right.’
‘All right what?’
‘All right, Pa.’
‘Good. On that table in the corner you will find cigarettes, matches and a Sentinel notebook. Hand them to me.’
‘O God! That is all you call me for?’
‘Yes. That is all. Answer back again, and I make you read out something for me to take down in shorthand.’
Savi ran out of the room.
‘Anand! Anand!’
‘Yes, Pa.’
‘That is better. You are getting a little training now. Sit down there and call out this speech.’
Anand snatched Bell’s Standard Elocutionist and angrily read out some Macaulay.
‘You reading too fast.’
‘I thought you was writing shorthand.’
‘You answering back too! You see what happen to you children, spending all that time at Hanuman House. Just for that, check while I read back.’