Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Glancing to his left, Anand saw the mule in the cricket field. It was following them, moving along the snarled fence-wires. They reached the end of the drive. The mule reached the corner of the field and stopped.

They ran up the concrete steps, avoiding the overhanging nutmeg tree. They fumbled with the bolt on the verandah gate and the noise frightened them. They scratched at doors and windows, tapped the wall of Mrs. Tulsi’s room, rattled the tall drawingroom doors. They called. There was no reply. Every noise they made seemed to them an explosion. But in the silence and blackness they were only whispering. Their footsteps, their knockings, Anand’s stumbling among the stale cakes and the widow’s corn, sounded only like the scuttling of rats.

Then they heard voices: low and alarmed: one aunt whispering to another, Mrs. Tulsi calling for Sushila.

Anand shouted: “Aunt!”

The voices were silenced. Then they were raised again, this time defiantly. Anand knocked hard on a window.

A woman’s voice said, “Two of the little people!”

There was an exclamation.

They were thought to be the spirits of Hari and Padma.

Mrs. Tulsi groaned and spoke a Hindi exorcism. Inside, doors were opened, the floor pounded. There was loud aggressive talk about sticks, cutlasses and God, while Sushila, the sickroom widow, an expert on the supernatural, asked in a sweet conciliatory voice, “Poor little people, what can we do for you?”

“Fire!” Anand cried.

“Fire,” Savi said.

“Our house on fire!”

And Sushila, though she had taken part in the whisperings against Savi and Mr. Biswas, found herself obliged to continue talking sweetly to Savi and Anand.

The apprehension of the house turned to joyous energy at the news of the fire.

“But really,” Chinta said, as she happily got ready, “what fool doesn’t know that to set fire to land in the night is to ask for trouble?”

Lights went on everywhere. Babies squealed, were hushed. Mrs. Tuttle was heard to say, “Put something on your head, man. This dew isn’t good for anyone.” “A cutlass, a cutlass,” Sharma’s widow called. And the children excitedly relayed the news: “Uncle Mohun’s house is burning down!” Some thrilled alarmists feared that the fire might spread through the woods to the big house itself; and there was speculation about the effects of the fire on the explosives.

The journey to the fire was like an excursion. Once there, the Tulsi party fell to work with a will, cutting, clearing, beating. It became a celebration. Shama, host for the second time to her family, prepared coffee in the kitchen, which was untouched. And Mr. Biswas, forgetful of animosities, shouted to everyone, “Is all right. Is all right. Everything under control.”

Some eggs were discovered, burnt black, and dry inside. Whether they were snakes’ eggs or the eggs of the widows’ errant hens no one knew. A snake was found burnt to death less than twenty yards from the kitchen. “The hand of God,” Mr. Biswas said. “Burning the bitch up before it bite me.”

Morning revealed the house, still red and raw, in a charred and smoking desolation. Villagers came running to see, and were confirmed in their belief that their village had been taken over by vandals.

“Charcoal, charcoal,” Mr. Biswas called to them. “Anybody want charcoal?”

For days afterwards the valley darkened with ash whenever the wind blew. Ash dusted the plot Bipti had forked.

“Best thing for the land,” Mr. Biswas said. “Best sort of fertilizer.”

He could not simply leave the house in Shorthills. He had to be released from it. And presently this happened. Transport became impossible. The bus service deteriorated; the sports car began to give as much trouble as its predecessor and had to be sold. And just about this time Mrs. Tulsi’s house in Port of Spain fell vacant. Mr. Biswas was offered two rooms in it, and he immediately accepted.

He considered himself lucky. The housing shortage in Port of Spain had been aggravated by the steady arrival of illegal immigrants from the other islands in search of work with the Americans. A whole shanty town had sprung up at the east end of the city; and even to buy a house was not to assure yourself of a room, for there were now laws against the indiscriminate eviction Shama had so coolly practised.

He put up a sign in the midst of the desolation he had created: HOUSE FOR RENT OR SALE, and moved to Port of Spain. The Shorthills adventure was over. From it he had gained only two pieces of furniture: the Slumberking bed and Theophile’s bookcase. And when he moved back to the house in Port of Spain, he did not move alone.

The Tuttles came, Govind and Chinta and their children came, and Basdai, a widow. The Tuttles occupied most of the house. They occupied the drawingroom, the diningroom, a bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom; this gave them effective control of both the front and back verandahs, for which they paid no rent. Govind and Chinta had only one room. Chinta hinted that they could afford more, but were saving and planning for better things; and, as if in promise of this, Govind suddenly gave up wearing rough clothes, and for six successive days, during which he smiled maniacally at everyone, appeared in a different threepiece suit. Every morning Chinta hung out five of Govind’s suits in the sun, and brushed them. She cooked below the tall-pillared house, and her children slept below the house, on long cedar benches which Theophile had made at Shorthills. Basdai, the widow, lived in the servantroom, which stood by itself in the yard.

Mr. Biswas’s two rooms could be entered only through the front verandah, which was Tuttle territory. At first Mr. Biswas slept in the inner room. Light and noise from the Tuttles’ drawingroom came through the ventilation gaps at the top of the partition and drove him to the front room, where he was enraged by the constant passage of Shama and the children to and from the inner room. Shama, like Chinta, cooked below the house; and when Mr. Biswas shouted for his food or his Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, it had to be taken to him up the front steps, in full view of the street.

The house was never quiet, and became almost unbearable when W. C. Tuttle bought a gramophone. He played one record over and over:

One night when the moon was so mellow

Rosita met young man Wellow.

He held her like this, his loveliness,

And stole a kiss, this fellow.

Tippy-tippy-tum tippy-tum

– and here W. C. Tuttle always joined in, whistling, singing, drumming; so that whenever the record came on, Mr. Biswas was compelled to listen, waiting for W. C. Tuttle’s accompaniment to:

Tippy-tippy-tum tippy-tum

Tippy-tippy-teeeee pi-tum-tum tum

A dispute also arose between W. C. Tuttle and Govind. They both parked their vehicles in the garage at the side of the house, and in the morning one was invariably in the way of the other. They conducted this quarrel without ever speaking to one another. W. C. Tuttle told Mrs. Tuttle that her brothers-in-law were unlettered, Govind grunted at Chinta, and both wives listened penitentially. And now, away from Mrs. Tulsi, the sisters also had daily squabbles of their own, about whose children had dirtied the washing, whose children had left the we filthy. Basdai, the widow, often mediated, and sometimes there were maudlin reconciliations in the Tuttles’ back verandah. It was Chinta who remarked that these reconciliations had the habit of taking place after the Tuttles had acquired some new item of furniture or clothing.

Despite the strict brahminical regime of his household, W. C. Tuttle was all for modernity. In addition to the gramophone he possessed a radio, a number of dainty tables, a morris suite; and he created a sensation when he bought a four foot high statue of a naked woman holding a torch. An especially long truce followed the arrival of the torchbearer, and Myna, wandering about the Tuttles’ establishment one day, accidentally broke off the torchbearing arm. The Tuttles sealed their frontiers again. Myna, in response to wordless pressure, was flogged, and a frostiness came once more into the relations between the Tuttles and the Biswases. Matters were not helped when Shama announced that she had ordered a glass cabinet from the joiner in the next street.