Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

It was some time before he could distinguish the applications of the fraudulent: people who merely wanted the publicity, those who wanted to work off grudges, those who had wanted merely to write, and an astonishing number of well-to-do shopkeepers, clerks and taxi-drivers who wanted money and publicity, and offered to share what money they got with Mr. Biswas. Many of his early visits were wasted, and since he had to provide a convincing destitute every morning he had sometimes had to take a mediocre destitute and exaggerate his situation.

The authorities at the Sentinel continued neither to comment on his work nor to interfere; and this policy, which he had at first regarded as sinister, now made his position one of responsibility and power. His recommendations were the only things that mattered; his decision was final. He was given a by-line and described as “Our Special Investigator”, which won Anand some respect at school. And for the first time in his life Mr. Biswas was offered bribes. It was a mark of status. But, largely through a distrust of the Deserving Destees, he accepted nothing, though he did allow a crippled Negro joiner to make him a diningtable at a low price.

He wished he hadn’t, for when the table came it made the congestion in his rooms absolute. Shama’s glass cabinet was taken to the inner room, and the table placed in his, parallel to the bed and separated from it by a way so narrow that, after bending down to put on his shoes, for instance, he often knocked his head when he straightened up; and if, having put his shoes on, he stood up too quickly, he struck the top of his hip-bone against the table. The generous joiner had made the table six feet long and nearly four feet wide, wide enough to make shutting and opening the side window possible only if you climbed on to the table. On his restless nights Mr. Biswas had been in the habit of relegating Anand to the foot of the Slumberking; now when this happened Anand left the bed in a huff and spent the rest of the night on the table, an arrangement Mr. Biswas tried to make permanent. The window had to remain open: the room would have been stifling otherwise. The afternoon rain came swiftly and violently. Shama could never mount the table quickly enough; and presently that part of the table directly below the window acquired a grey, black-spotted bloom which defied all Shama’s stainings, varnishings and polishings. “First and last diningtable I buy,” Mr. Biswas said.

He was lying in vest and pants on the Slumberking one evening, reading, trying to ignore the buzzing and shrieks of the readers and learners, and W. C. Tuttle’s new gramophone record of a boy American called Bobby Breen singing “When There’s a Rainbow on the River”. Someone came into the room and Mr. Biswas, his back to the door, added to the pandemonium by wondering aloud who the hell was standing in his light.

It was Shama. “Hurry up and get some clothes on,” she said excitedly. “Some people have come to see you.”

He had a moment of panic. He had kept his address secret, yet since he had become investigator of destitutes he had been repeatedly traced. Once, indeed, he had been accosted by a destitute just as he was wheeling his bicycle between the high walls. He had pretended that he was investigating a deserving case, and as this had looked likely, he had managed to get rid of the man by taking down his particulars there and then, standing on the pavement, and promising to investigate him as soon as possible.

Now he twisted his head and saw that Shama was smiling. Her excitement contained much self-satisfaction.

“Who?” he asked, jumping out of bed, striking the top of his hip-bone against the diningtable. Standing between the table and the bed, it was impossible for him to bend down to get his shoes. He sat down carefully on the bed again and fished out a shoe.

Shama said it was the widows from Shorthills.

He relaxed. “I can’t see them outside?”

“Is private.”

“But how the hell I can see them inside here?” It was a problem. The widows would have to stand just inside the door, in the narrow area between the bed and the partition; and he would have to stand between the bed and the table. However, it was evening. He took the cotton sheet from below the pillow and threw it over himself.

Shama went out to summon the widows, and the five widows entered almost at once, in their best white clothes and veils, their faces roughened by sun and rain, their demeanour grave and conspiratorial as it always was whenever they were hatching one of their disastrous schemes: poultry farming, dairy farming, sheep raising, vegetable growing.

Mr. Biswas, the sheet pulled halfway up his chest, scratched his bare, slack arms. “Can’t ask you to sit down,” he said. “Nowhere to sit down. Except the table.”

The widows didn’t smile. Their solemnity affected Mr. Biswas. He stopped scratching his arms and pulled the sheet up to his armpits. Only Shama, already conspicuous in her patched and dirty home-clothes, continued to smile.

Sushila, the senior widow, came to the foot of the bed and spoke.

Could they be considered Deserving Destitutes?

She spoke in a steady, considered way.

Mr. Biswas was too embarrassed to reply.

Of course, Sushila said, they couldn’t all be Deserving Destitutes. But couldn’t one?

It was impossible. However destitute they might be, they were relations. But they had put on their best clothes and jewellery and come all the way from Shorthills, and he could not reject them at once. “What about the name?” he asked.

That had occurred to them. The Tulsi name need not be mentioned. Their husbands’ names could be used.

Mr. Biswas thought rapidly. “But what about the children at school?”

They had thought of that too. Sushila had no children. And as for the photograph: with veil, glasses and a few pieces of facial jewellery she could be effectively disguised.

Mr. Biswas could think of no other delaying objection. He scratched his arms slowly.

The widows gazed solemnly, then accusingly at him. As his silence lengthened, Shama’s smile turned to a look of annoyance; in the end she, too, was accusing.

Mr. Biswas slapped his left arm. “I would lose my job.”

“But that time,” Sushila said, “when you were the Scarlet Pimpernel, you went around dropping tokens-okens to your mother, your brothers and all the children.”

“That was different,” Mr. Biswas said. “I am sorry. Really.”

The five widows were silent. For some time they remained immobile, staring at Mr. Biswas until their eyes went blank. He avoided their eyes, felt for cigarettes, and patted the bed until the matchbox rattled.

Sushila started on a deep sigh, and one by one the widows, staring at Mr. Biswas’s forehead, sighed and shook their heads. Shama gave Mr. Biswas a look of perfect fury. Then she and the widows trooped out of the door.

A child was being flogged downstairs. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone was playing “One Night When the Moon Was so Mellow”.

“I am sorry,” Mr. Biswas said, to the back of the last widow. “But I would lose my job. Sorry.”

And really he was sorry. But even if they were not relations, he could not have made their case convincing. How could one speak of a woman as destitute when she lived on her mother’s estate, in one of her mother’s three houses; when her brother was studying medicine in the United Kingdom; and when another brother was a figure of growing importance in the South, his name all over the paper, in the gossip columns, in the news columns for his business deals and political statements, in his own stylish advertisements (“Tulsi Theatres Trinidad proudly present…”)?

It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas had another request which disturbed him. It came from Bhandat, Ajodha’s ostracized brother. Mr. Biswas had never seen Bhandat since Bhandat had left the rumshop in Pagotes for his Chinese mistress in Port of Spain; he had only heard from Jagdat, Bhandat’s son, that Bhandat was living in a poverty which he bore with fortitude. Mr. Biswas could do nothing for Bhandat. They were related, and again it would have been impossible to make a case for a man whose brother was known to be one of the wealthiest men in the colony.