Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

As for Dehuti, he hardly saw her, though she lived close, at Tara’s. He seldom went there except when Tara’s husband, prompted by Tara, held a religious ceremony and needed Brahmins to feed. Then Mr. Biswas was treated with honour; stripped of his ragged trousers and shirt, and in a clean dhoti, he became a different person, and he never thought it unseemly that the person who served him so deferentially with food should be his own sister. In Tara’s house he was respected as a Brahmin and pampered; yet as soon as the ceremony was over and he had taken his gift of money and cloth and left, he became once more only a labourer’s child -father’s occupation : laboure r was the entry in the birth certificate F . Z. Ghany had sent-living with a penniless mother in one room of a mud hut. And throughout life his position was like that. As one of the Tulsi sons-in-law and as a journalist he found himself among people with money and sometimes with graces; with them his manner was unforcedly easy and he could summon up luxurious instincts; but always, at the end, he returned to his crowded, shabby room.

Tara’s husband, Ajodha, was a thin man with a thin, petulant face which could express benignity rather than warmth, and Mr. Biswas was not comfortable with him. Ajodha could read but thought it more dignified to be read to, and Mr. Biswas was sometimes called to the house to read, for a penny, a newspaper column of which Ajodha was particularly fond. This was a syndicated American column called That Body of Yours which dealt every day with a different danger to the human body. Ajodha listened with gravity, concern, alarm. It puzzled Mr. Biswas that he should subject himself to this torment, and it amazed him that the writer, Dr. Samuel S. Pitkin, could keep the column going with such regularity. But the doctor never flagged; twenty years later the column was still going, Ajodha had not lost his taste for it, and occasionally Mr. Biswas’s son read it to him, for six cents.

So, whenever Mr. Biswas was in Tara’s house, it was as a Brahmin or a reader, with a status distinct from Dehuti’s, and he had little opportunity of speaking to her.

Bipti had a specific worry about her children: neither Pratap nor Prasad nor Dehuti was married. She had no plans for Mr. Biswas, since he was still young and she assumed that the education he was receiving was provision and protection enough. But Tara thought otherwise. And just when Mr. Biswas was beginning to do stocks and shares, transactions as unreal to Lai as they were to him, and was learning “Bingen on the Rhine” from Bell’s Standard Elocutionist for the visit of the school inspector, he was taken out of school by Tara and told that he was going to be made a pundit.

It was only when his possessions were being bundled that he discovered he still had the school’s copy of the Standard Elocutionist . It was too late to return it, and he never did. Wherever he went the book went with him, and ended in the blacksmith-built bookcase in the house at Sikkim Street.

For eight months, in a bare, spacious, unpainted wooden house smelling of blue soap and incense, its floors white and smooth from constant scrubbing, its cleanliness and sanctity maintained by regulations awkward to everyone except himself, Pundit Jairam taught Mr. Biswas Hindi, introduced him to the more important scriptures and instructed him in various ceremonies. Morning and evening, under the pundit’s eye, Mr. Biswas did the puja for the pundit’s household.

Jairam’s children had all been married and he lived alone with his wife, a crushed, hard-working woman whose only duty now was to look after Jairam and his house. She didn’t complain. Among Hindus Jairam was respected for his knowledge. He also held scandalous views which, while being dismissed as contentious, had nevertheless brought him much popularity. He believed in God, fervently, but claimed it was not necessary for a Hindu to do so. He attacked the custom some families had of putting up a flag after a religious ceremony; but his own front garden was a veritable grove of bamboo poles with red and white pennants in varying stages of decay. He ate no meat but spoke against vegetarianism: when Lord Rama went hunting, did they think it was just for the sport?

He was also working on a Hindi commentary on the Ramayana , and parts of this commentary were dictated to Mr. Biswas to extend his own knowledge of the language. So that Mr. Biswas could see and learn, Jairam took him on his rounds; and wherever he went with the pundit Mr. Biswas, invested with the sacred thread and all the other badges of caste, found himself, as in Tara’s house, the object of regard. It was his duty on these occasions to do the mechanical side of Jairam’s offices. He took around the brass plate with the lighted camphor; the devout dropped a coin on the plate, brushed the flame with their fingers and took their fingers to their forehead. He took around the consecrated sweetened milk with strips of the tulsi leaf floating on its surface, and doled it out a teaspoonful at a time. When the ceremonies were over and the feeding of Brahmins began, he was seated next to Pundit Jairam; and when Jairam had eaten and belched and asked for more and eaten again it was Mr. Biswas who mixed the bicarbonate of soda for him. Afterwards Mr. Biswas went to the shrine, a platform of earth decorated with flour and planted with small banana trees, and pillaged it for the coins that had been offered, hunting carefully everywhere, showing no respect for the burnt offerings or anything else. The coins, dusted with flour or earth or ash, wet with holy water or warm from the sacred fire, he took to Pundit Jairam, who might then be engaged in some philosophical disputation. Jairam would wave Mr. Biswas away without looking at him. As soon as they got home, however, Jairam asked for the money, counted it, and felt Mr. Biswas all over to make sure he hadn’t kept anything back. Mr. Biswas also had to bring home all the gifts Jairam received, usually lengths of cotton, but sometimes cumbersome bundles of fruit and vegetables.

One particularly large gift was a bunch of Gros Michel bananas. They came to Jairam green and were hung in the large kitchen to ripen. In time the green became lighter, spotted, and soft yellow patches appeared. Rapidly the yellow spread and deepened, and the spots became brown and rich. The smell of ripening banana, overcoming the astringent smell of the glutinous sap from the banana stem, filled the house, leaving Jairam and his wife apparently indifferent, but rousing Mr. Biswas. He reasoned that the bananas would become ripe all at once, that Jairam and his wife could not possibly eat them all, and that many would grow rotten. He also reasoned a banana or two would not be missed. And one day, when Jairam was out and his wife away from the kitchen, Mr. Biswas picked two bananas and ate them. The gaps in the bunch startled him. They were more than noticeable; they offended the eye.

Jairam was no flogger. When he was in a rage he might box Mr. Biswas on the ear; but usually he was less intemperate. For a badly conducted puja , for instance, he might make Mr. Biswas learn a dozen couplets from the Ramayana by heart, confining him to the house until he had. All that day Mr. Biswas wondered what punishment the eating of the bananas would bring, while he copied out Sanskrit verses, which he couldn’t understand, on strips of cardboard, having revealed to Jairam his skill in lettering.

Jairam came late that evening and his wife fed him. Then, as was his habit every evening after he had eaten and rested, he walked heavily about the bare verandah, talking to himself, going over the arguments he had had that day. First he quoted the opposing view. Then he tested various replies of his own; his voice rose shrill at the end of the final version of the repartee, which he said over and over, breaking off to sing a snatch of a hymn. Mr. Biswas, lying on his sugarsack and floursack bed, listened. Jairam’s wife was washing up the dishes in the kitchen; the waste water ran down a bamboo spout to a gutter, where it fell noisily among the bushes.