Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

When the children asked Mr. Biswas what was wrong he complained of his indigestion; and sometimes he slept through the afternoon. He did get indigestion too: his increased consumption of Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, his silence, his unquenchable thirst were symptoms which Shama came to understand, to her shame.

So the children often found themselves on their own at Pagotes. There was only Tara to welcome them, and she was now crippled by asthma. In the large, well-equipped, empty house only the antagonism between Ajodha and his nephews could be felt. Anything could lead to a quarrel: the pronunciation of “Iraq”, a discussion of the merits of the Buick. As quarrels became more frequent they became shorter, but so violent and obscene it seemed impossible that uncle and nephews could ever speak to one another again. Yet in a few minutes Ajodha would come out of his room, his glasses on, papers in his hand, and there would be normal talk and even laughter. Ajodha was bound to his nephews, and they to him. Ajodha needed his nephews in his business, since he distrusted strangers; he needed them more in his house, since he feared to be alone. And Jagdat and Rabidat, with large unacknowledged families, with no money, no gifts, and no status except that they derived from Ajodha’s protection, knew that they were tied to Ajodha for as long as he lived. Rabidat, of the beautiful, exposed body, seemed to have his prognathous mouth perpetually set for a snarl. Jagdat’s giggles could turn in a moment to screams and tears. In Ajodha’s presence he was always on the verge of hysteria: it showed in his small unsteady eyes, which always belied his hearty, back-slapping manner.

More and more the children felt like intruders. They became aware of their status. And they were eventually humiliated.

In response to a plea from Aunt Juanita of the Guardian Tinymites League, Anand had gone around with a blue card collecting money for Polish refugee children. He had collected from teachers, the school caretaker, shopkeepers, and even from W. C. Tuttle. The cashier at the Dairies in Port of Spain had given six cents and congratulated him for undertaking good works while yet so young. And in the back verandah at Pagotes one Sunday morning, after he had read out an article on the importance of breathing, he presented the blue card to Ajodha and asked for a contribution.

Ajodha bunched his eyebrows and looked offended.

“You are a funny sort of family,” Ajodha said. “Father collecting money for destitutes. You collecting for Polish refugees. Who collecting for you?”

It was a long time before Anand went back to Ajodha’s. He collected no more money for Polish refugees, tore up the card. The money he had collected melted away, and for some months he lived in the dread of being summoned by Aunt Juanita to account for it. The kindness he received every afternoon from the woman in the Dairies was like a pain.

These Sunday excursions, mornings of makebelieve, afternoons and evenings of distress, grew less frequent, and Mr. Biswas found himself more fully occupied with his campaigns at home.

To combat W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone Chinta and Govind had been giving a series of pious singings from the Ramayana . The study of the Ramayana , which Chinta had started many years before, while Mr. Biswas still lived at Green Vale, was now apparently complete; she sang very well. Govind sang less mellifluously: he partly whined and partly grunted, from his habit of singing while lying on his belly. Caught in this crossfire of song, which sometimes lasted a whole evening, Mr. Biswas, listening, listening, would on a sudden rush in pants and vest to the inner room and bang on the partition of Govind’s room and bang on the partition of W. C. Tuttle’s drawingroom.

The Tuttles never replied. Chinta sang with added zest. Govind sometimes only chuckled between couplets, making it appear to be part of his song: the Ramayana singer is free to add his own rubric in sound between couplets. Sometimes, however, he interrupted his singing to shout insulting things through the partition. Mr. Biswas shouted back, and then Shama had to run upstairs to silence Mr. Biswas.

Govind had become the terror of the house. It was as if his long spells in his taxi with his back to his passengers had turned him into a complete misanthrope, as if his threepiece suits had buttoned up whatever remained of his eagerness and loyalty and turned it into a brooding which was liable to periodic sour eruptions. He had suffered a corresponding physical change. His weak handsome face had become gross and unreadable, and since he had taken to driving a taxi his body had lost its hardness and broadened into the sort of body that needs a waistcoat to give it dignity, to suggest that the swelling flesh is under control. His behaviour was odd and unpredictable. The Ramayana singing had taken nearly everyone by surprise, and would have been amusing if it hadn’t coincided with several displays of violence. For days he noticed nobody; then, without provocation, he fastened his attention on someone and pursued him with childish taunts and a frightening smile. He insulted Shama and the children; Shama, appreciating the limitations of Mr. Biswas’s hammock-like muscles, bore these insults in silence. He made a number of surprise assaults on Basdai’s readers and learners and generally terrorized them. Appeals to Chinta were useless; the fear Govind inspired was to her a source of pride. The story how Govind had once thrashed Mr. Biswas she passed on to her children, and they passed it on to the readers and learners, terrifying them utterly.

A quarrel between Govind and Mr. Biswas upstairs was invariably accompanied by a quarrel between their children downstairs.

Once Savi said, “I wonder why Pa doesn’t buy a house.”

Govind’s eldest daughter replied, “If some people could put money where their mouth is they would be living in palaces.”

“Some people only have mouth and belly.”

“Some people at least have a belly. Other people have nothing at all.”

Savi took these defeats badly. As soon as the quarrel upstairs subsided she went to the inner room and lay down on the fourposter. Not wishing to hurt herself again or to hurt her father, she could not tell him what had happened; and he was the only person who could have comforted her.

In the circumstances W. C. Tuttle came to be regarded as a useful ally. His physical strength matched Govind’s (though this was denied by Govind’s children), and their dispute about the garage still stood. It helped, too, that W. C. Tuttle and Mr. Biswas had something in common: they both felt that by marrying into the Tulsis they had fallen among barbarians. W. C. Tuttle regarded himself as one of the last defenders of brahmin culture in Trinidad; at the same time he considered he had yielded gracefully to the finer products of Western civilization: its literature, its music, its art. He behaved at all times with a suitable dignity. He exchanged angry words with no one, contenting himself with silent contempt, a quivering of his longhaired nostrils.

And, indeed, apart from the unpleasantness caused by the gramophone, there was between Mr. Biswas and W. C. Tuttle only that rivalry which had been touched off when Myna broke the torchbearer’s torchbearing arm and Shama bought a glass cabinet. The battle of possessions Mr. Biswas lost by default. After the acquisition of the glass cabinet (its broken door unrepaired, its lower shelves filled with schoolbooks and newspapers) and the grateful destitute’s diningtable, Mr. Biswas had no more room. W. C. Tuttle had the whole of the front verandah: he bought two morris rockingchairs, a standard lamp, a rolltop desk and a bookcase with sliding glass doors. Mr. Biswas had gained a slight advantage by being the first to enrol his children in the Guardian Tinymites League; but he had squandered this by imitating W. C. Tuttle’s khaki shorts. W. C. Tuttle’s shorts were proper shorts, and he had the figure for them. Mr. Biswas lacked this figure, and his khaki shorts were only long khaki trousers which Shama, against her judgement, had amputated, and hemmed on her machine with a wavering line of white cotton. Mr. Biswas suffered a further setback when the Tuttle children revealed that their father had taken out a life insurance policy. “Take out one too?” Mr. Biswas said to Myna and Kamla. “If I start paying insurance every month, you think any of you would live to draw it?”