Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Bipti helped with the housework and on the land. When, after Bipti’s death, Mr. Biswas wished to be reminded of her, he thought less of his childhood and the back trace than of this fortnight at Shorthills. He thought of one moment in particular. The ground in front of the house had been only partly cleared, and one afternoon, when he had pushed his bicycle up the earth steps to the top of the hill, he saw that part of the ground, which he had left that morning cumbered and unbroken, had been cleared and levelled and forked. The black earth was soft and stoneless; the spade had cut cleanly into it, leaving damp walls as smooth as mason’s work. Here and there the prongs of the fork had left shallow parallel indentations on the upturned earth. In the setting sun, the sad dusk, with Bipti working in a garden that looked, for a moment, like a garden he had known a dark time ages ago, the intervening years fell away. Thereafter the marks of a fork in earth made him think of that moment at the top of the hill, and of Bipti.

The children looked forward to the firing of the land as to a celebration. The Civil Defence authorities had given them a taste for large conflagrations, and now they were to have a hill on fire in their own backyard. It would be almost as good as the mock air-raid on the Port of Spain race course. Of course there would be no dummy houses to burn, no ambulances, no nurses attending to people groaning at mock wounds, no Boy Scouts on motor bicycles dashing about through the thick smoke with dummy dispatches; but at the same time there would be none of those eager firefighters who, in spite of the public outcry, had rescued some of the dummy buildings before they were even scorched.

Mr. Biswas, displaying manual skills which his children secretly distrusted, dug trenches and prepared little nests of twigs and leaves at what he called strategic points. On Saturday afternoon he summoned the children, soaked a brand in pitch-oil, set it alight, and ran from nest to nest, poking the brand in and jumping back, as though he had touched off an explosion. A leaf caught here and a twig there, blazed, shrank, smouldered, died. Mr. Biswas didn’t wait to see. Ignoring the cries of the children, he ran on, leaving a trail of subsiding wisps of dark smoke.

“Is all right,” he said, coming down the hillside, the brand dripping fire. “Is all right. Fire is a funny thing. You think it out, but it blazing like hell underground.”

One of the smoke wisps shrank like a failing fountain.

“That one take your advice and gone underground,” Savi said.

“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing one itching ankle against the other. “Perhaps it is a little too green. Perhaps we should wait until next week.”

There were protests.

Savi put her hand to her face and backed away.

“What’s the matter?”

“The heat,” Savi said.

“You just carry on. See if you don’t get hot somewhere else. Clowns. That’s what I’m raising. A pack of clowns.”

From the kitchen Shama shouted, “Hurry up, all-you. The sun going down.”

They went to examine the nests Mr. Biswas had fired. They found them collapsed, reduced: shallow heaps of grey leaves and black twigs. Only one had caught, and from it the fire proceeded unspectacularly, avoiding thick branches and nibbling at lesser ones, making the bark curl, attacking the green wood with a great deal of smoke, staining it, then retreating to run up a twig with a businesslike air, scorching the brown leaves, creating a brief blaze, then halting. On the gound there were a few isolated flames, none higher than an inch.

“Fireworks,” Savi said.

“Well, do it yourself.”

The children ran to the kitchen and seized the pitch-oil Shama had bought for the lamps. They poured the pitch-oil haphazardly on the bush and set it alight. In minutes the bush blazed and became a restless sea of yellow, red, blue and green. They exchanged theories about the various colours; they listened with pleasure to the chatter and crackle of the quick fire. Too soon the tall flames contracted. The sun set. Charred leaves rose in the air. After dinner they had the sad task of beating down the fire at the edge of the trench. The brown sea had turned black, with red glitters and twinkles.

“All right,” Mr. Biswas said. “Puja over. Books now.”

They retired to the bare drawingroom. From time to time they went to the window. The hill was black against a lighter sky. Here and there it showed red and occasionally burst into yellow flame, which seemed unsupported, dancing in the air.

Anand was in a bus, one of those dilapidated, crowded buses that ran between Shorthills and Port of Spain. Something was wrong. He was lying on the floor of the bus and people were looking down at him and chattering. The bus must have been running over a newly-repaired road: the wheels were kicking up pebbles against the wings.

Myna and Kamla stood over him, and he was being shaken by Savi. He lay on his bedding in the drawingroom.

“Fire!” Savi said.

“What o”clock it is?”

“Two or three. Get up. Quick.”

The chattering, the pebbles against the wings, was the noise of the fire. Through the window he saw that the hill had turned red, and the land was red in places where no fire had been intended.

“Pa? Ma?” he asked.

“Outside. We have to go to the big house to tell them.”

The house appeared to be encircled by the red, unblazing bush. The heat made breathing painful. Anand looked for the two poui trees at the top of the hill. They were black and leafless against the sky.

Hurriedly he dressed.

“Don’t leave us,” Myna said.

He heard Mr. Biswas shouting outside, “Just beat it back. Just beat it back from the kitchen. House safe. No bush around it. Just keep it back from the kitchen.”

“Savi!” Shama called. “Anand wake?”

“Don’t leave us,” Kamla cried.

All four children left the house and walked past the newly-forked land in front to the path that led to the road. Just below the brow of the hill they were surprised by an absolute darkness. Between the path and the road there was no fire.

Myna and Kamla began to cry, afraid of the darkness before them, the fire behind them.

“Leave them,” Shama called. “And hurry up.”

Savi and Anand picked their way down the earth steps they couldn’t see.

“You can hold my hand,” Anand said.

They held hands and worked their way down the hill, into the gully, up the gully and into the road. Trees vaulted the blackness. The blackness was like a weight; it was as if they wore hats that came down to their eyebrows. They didn’t look up, not willing to be reminded that darkness lay above them and behind them as well as in front of them. They fixed their eyes on the road and kicked the loose gravel for the noise. It was chilly.

“Say Rama Rama ,” Savi said. “It will keep away anything.”

They said Rama Rama ,

“Is Pa to blame for this,” Savi said suddenly.

The repetition of Rama Rama comforted them. They became used to the darkness. They could distinguish trees a few yards ahead. The squat concrete box, where behind a steel door estate explosives were kept, was a reassuring white blur on the roadside.

At last they came to the bridge of coconut trunks. The white fretwork along the eaves of the house were visible. In Mrs. Tulsi’s room, as always at night, a light burned. They made their way across the dangerous bridge and emerged into the open, grateful at that moment for the tree-cutting of Govind and W. C. Tuttle. The tall wet weeds on the drive stroked their bare legs. They sniffed, alert for the smell of snakes.

They heard a heavy breathing. They could not tell from which direction it came. They stopped muttering Rama Rama , came close together and began to run towards the concrete steps, a distant grey glow. The breathing followed, and a dull, unhurried tramp.