Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

It was at one of these sessions that Anand told how at school boys were being challenged to say what their fathers did. This, a new school game, had spread even to the exhibition class. The most assiduous challengers came from the most harassed and insecure strata, and their aggressive manner suggested that they were neither harassed nor insecure themselves. Anand, who had read in an American newspaper that “journalist” was a pompous word, had said that his father was a reporter; which, though not grand, was unimpeachable. Vidiadhar, Govind’s son, had said that his father worked for the Americans. “That is what all of them are saying these days,” Anand said. “Why didn’t Vidiadhar say that his father was a taxi-driver?”

Mr. Biswas didn’t smile. Govind had six suits, Govind was making money, Govind would soon have his own house. Vidiadhar would be sent abroad to get a profession. And what awaited Anand? A job in the customs, a clerkship in the civil service: intrigue, humiliation, dependence.

Anand felt his joke going bad. And a few days later, when a new quiz was going round the school-what did the boys call their parents?-Anand, wishing only to debase himself, lied and said, “Bap and Mai,” and was duly derided; while Vidiadhar, shrewd despite his short stay at the school, unhesitatingly said, “Mummy and Daddy.” For these boys, who called their parents Ma and Pa, who all came from homes where the sudden flow of American dollars had unleashed ambition, push and uncertainty, these boys had begun to take their English compositions very seriously: their Daddies worked in offices, and at week-ends Daddy and Mummy took them in cars to the seaside, with laden hampers.

Mr. Biswas knew that for all his talk he would never leave the Sentinel to go to work for the Americans as labourer, clerk or taxi-driver. He lacked the taxi-driver’s personality, the labourer’s muscles; and he was frightened of throwing up his job: the Americans would not be in the island forever. But as a gesture of protest against the Sentinel , he enrolled all his children in the Tinymites League of the Guardian , the rival paper; and in the Junior Guardian , for years thereafter, Mr. Biswas’s children were greeted on their birthdays. The pleasure he got from this was enhanced when W. C. Turtle, imitating, enrolled his children among the Tinymites as well.

The Sentinel had its revenge. A small but steady decline in circulation hinted to the directors that there might be something wrong with their policy that conditions in the colony could not be better; they began to admit that readers might occasionally want views instead of news, and that news was not necessarily bright if right. For not only was the Guardian winning over Sentinel readers, the Guardian was also getting people who had never read newspapers. So the Sentinel started the Deserving Destitutes Fund, the name suggesting that there was not a necessary inconsistency between the fund and the leaders which spoke of the unemployed as the unemployable. The Deserving Destitutes Fund was an answer to the Guardians Neediest Cases Fund; but while the Neediest Cases Fund was a Christmas affair, the Deserving Destitutes Fund was to be permanent.

Mr. Biswas was appointed investigator. It was his duty to read the applications from destitutes, reject the undeserving, visit the others to see how deserving or desperate they were, and then, if the circumstances warranted it, to write harrowing accounts of their plight, harrowing enough to encourage contributions for the fund. He had to find one deserving destitute a day.

“Deserving Destitute number one,” he told Shama. “M. Biswas. Occupation: investigator of Deserving Destitutes.”

The Sentinel could not have chosen a better way of terrifying Mr. Biswas, of reviving his dread of the sack, illness or sudden disaster. Day after day he visited the mutilated, the defeated, the futile and the insane living in conditions not far removed from his own: in suffocating rotting wooden kennels, in sheds of box-board, canvas and tin, in dark and sweating concrete caverns. Day after day he visited the eastern sections of the city where the narrow houses pressed their scabbed and blistered faзades together and hid the horrors that lay behind them: the constricted, undrained backyards, coated with green slime, in the perpetual shadow of adjacent houses and the tall rubble-stone fences against which additional sheds had been built: yards choked with flimsy cooking sheds, crowded fowl-coops of wire-netting, bleaching stones spread with sour washing: smell upon smell, but none overcoming the stench of cesspits and overloaded septic tanks: horror increased by the litters of children, most of them illegitimate, with navels projecting inches out of their bellies, as though they had been delivered with haste and disgust. Yet occasionally there was the neat room, its major piece of furniture, a table, a chair, polished to brilliance; giving no hint of the squalor it erupted into the yard. Day after day he came upon people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them. But he could only lift his trouser turn-ups, pick his way through mud and slime, investigate, write, move on.

He was treated with respect by most of the DDS or Deserving Destees, as, in order to lessen the dread they inspired, he had begun to call them. But sometimes a destitute turned sullen and, suddenly annoyed by Mr. Biswas’s probings, refused to divulge the harrowing details Mr. Biswas needed for his copy. On these occasions Mr. Biswas was accused of being in league with the rich, the laughing, the government. Sometimes he was threatened with violence. Then forgetting shoes and trouser turn-ups, he retreated hastily to the street, pursued by words, his undignified movements followed with idle interest by several dozen people, all destitute, all perhaps deserving. “Deserving Destitute Turns Desperate,” he thought, visualizing the morning’s headline. (Though that would never have done: the Sentinel wanted only the harrowing details, the grovelling gratitude.)

His bicycle suffered. First the valve-caps were stolen; then the rubber handlegrips; then the bell; then the saddlebag in which he had transported his plunder from Shorthills; and one day the saddle itself. It was a pre-war Brooks saddle, highly desirable, new ones being unobtainable. Cycling that afternoon from the east end of the city to the west end, continually bobbing up and down, unable to sit, had been fatiguing and, judging by the stares, spectacular.

There were other dangers. He was sometimes accosted by burly Negroes, pictures of health and strength; “Indian, give me some money.” Occasionally exact sums were demanded: “Indian, give me a shilling.” He had been used to such threatening requests from healthy Negroes outside the larger cinemas, but there the bright lights and the watchful police had given him the confidence to refuse. In the east end the lights were not bright and there were few policemen; and, not wishing to antagonize destitutes any more than was necessary, he took the precaution of going on his investigations with coppers distributed about his pockets. These he gave, and later recovered from the Sentinel as expenses.

And other dangers. Once, climbing up a short flight of steps and pushing past the obstructing lace curtain in a room of exceptional cleanliness, he found himself confronted by a woman of robust appearance. Her large lips were grotesquely painted; rouge flared on her black cheeks. “You from the paper?” she asked. He nodded. “Give me some money,” she said, as roughly as any man. He gave her a penny. His promptness surprised her. She gazed at the coin with awe, then kissed it. “You don’t know what a thing it is, when a man give you money.” His experience on “Court Shorts” enabling him to recognize a piece of the prostitute’s lore, he made perfunctory inquiries and prepared to go. “Where my money?” the woman said. She followed him to the door, shouting, “The man-me right here, behind this curtain, and now he don’t want to pay.” She called the women and children of the yard and the yards on either side to witness her injury; and Mr. Biswas, feeling that his suit, his air of respectability, and the time of day gave some weight to the accusation, hurried guiltily away.