Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

The picture war started when Mr. Biswas bought two drawings from an Indian bookshop and framed them in passepartout. He found he liked framing pictures. He liked playing with clean cardboard and sharp knives; he liked experimenting with the colours and shapes of mounts. He saw the glass cut to his measurements, he cycled tremulously home with it, and a whole evening was transformed. Framing a picture was like writing a sign: it required neatness and precision; he could concentrate on what his hands did, forget the house, subdue his irritations. Soon his two rooms were as hung with pictures as the barrackroom in Green Vale had been with religious quotations.

W. C. Turtle began with a series of photographs, in large wooden frames, of himself. In one photograph W. C. Tuttle, naked except for dhoti, sacred thread and caste-marks, head shown except for the top-knot, sat crosslegged, fingers bunched delicately on his upturned soles, and meditated with closed eyes. Next to this W. C. Tuttle stood in jacket, trousers, collar, tie, hat, one well-shod foot on the running-board of a motorcar, laughing, his gold tooth brilliantly revealed. There were photographs of his father, his mother, their house; his brothers, in a group and singly; his sisters, in a group and singly. There were photographs of W. C. Tuttle in various transitory phases: W. C. Tuttle with beard, whiskers and moustache, W. C. Tuttle with beard alone, moustache alone; W. C. Tuttle as weight-lifter (in bathing trunks, glaring at the camera, holding aloft the weights he had made from the lead of the dismantled electricity plant at Shorthills); W. C. Tuttle in Indian court dress; W. C. Tuttle in full pundit’s regalia, turban, dhoti, white jacket, beads, standing with a brass jar in one hand, laughing again (a number of blurred, awestruck faces in the background). In between there were pictures of the English countryside in spring, a view of the Matterhorn, a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, and a picture entitled “When Did You Last See Your Father?” It was W. C. Tuttle’s way of blending East and West.

But Govind, taxi-driving, Ramayana -grunting, remained untouched by this or any other rivalry and continued as menacing and offensive as before. The readers and learners openly wished that he would be maimed or killed in a motor accident. Instead, he won a safety award and had his hand shaken by the mayor of Port of Spain. This appeared to free him of all inhibitions, and both Basdai and Mr. Biswas began to talk of calling in the police.

But the police were never called. For, quite suddenly, Govind ceased to be a problem.

An abrupt, stunning silence fell on the house one evening. The learners and readers stopped buzzing. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone went dead. The Ramayana singing broke off in mid-couplet. And from Govind’s room came a series of grunts, thumps, cracks and crashes.

Anand came running on tiptoe into Mr. Biswas’s room and whispered joyfully, “Daddy is beating Mummy.”

Mr. Biswas sat up and listened. It sounded true. Vidiadhar’s Daddy was beating Vidiadhar’s Mummy.

The whole house listened. And when the noises from Govind’s room died down, and Govind resumed whining out the Ramayana , the buzzing downstairs built up again, a new, satisfied sound, and W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone played, music of celebration.

So it was whenever Chinta was beaten by Govind. Which was often. The readers and learners recovered from their terror, for having found this outlet, Govind sought no other. Her beatings gave Chinta a matriarchal dignity and, curiously, gained her a respect she had never had before. They had the subsidiary effects of quelling her children, killing her song, and rousing her to cultural rivalry.

Vidiadhar was also in the exhibition class. He was not in the star section, like Anand; but Chinta put this down only to bribery and corruption. And one afternoon, while Anand was sitting on the end stool at the bar in the Dairies, an Indian boy came in. It was Vidiadhar. Anand was surprised. Vidiadhar looked surprised as well. And in their surprise, neither boy spoke to the other. Vidiadhar walked past Anand to the stool at the other end of the bar and asked for a half-pint of milk. Anand was pleased to see him making this mistake: money was first paid at the desk, and the receipt presented to the barman. So Vidiadhar had to walk past the whole row of high stools again, get his receipt from the cashier, and walk past the stools once more to the end he had chosen. Without looking at one another, they drank their milk, slowly, each unwilling to be the first to leave. Neither had intended to cut the other; the cutting had simply happened. But each boy considered he had been cut; and never again, until they were men, did they speak. In the shifting, tangled, multifarious relationships in that crowded house, this silence remained constant. It became historic. Then Vidiadhar said that he had done the cutting that afternoon, and Anand said that he had done it. And every afternoon, at five minutes past three, the people in the Dairies saw two Indian boys sitting at opposite ends of the milk bar, drinking half-pints of milk through straws, not looking at one another, never speaking.

Myna and Kamla, resenting the challenge of Vidiadhar, who was now openly eating prunes, began to claim astounding scholastic achievements for Anand.

“My brother read more books than all of all-you put together.”

“Hear you. But all right. If Anand read so much, let him tell me who is the author of Singing Guns .” This from a young Tuttle.

“Tell him, Anand. Tell him who is the author of Singing Guns .”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah-ah-ah!”

“But how you could expect him to know that?” Myna said. “He does only read books of common sense.”

“Okay. Anand does read a lot of books. But my brother write a book. A whole book. And he writing another right now.”

The writer had indeed done that. He was the eldest Tuttle boy. He had impressed his parents by a constant demand for exercise books and by a continuous show of writing. He said he was making notes. In fact, he had copied out every word of Nelson’s West Indian Geography , by Captain Cutteridge, Director of Education, author of Nelson’s West Indian Readers and Nelson’s West Indian Arithmetics . He had completed the Geography in more than a dozen exercise books, and was at the moment engaged on the first volume of Nelson’s West Indian History , by Captain Daniel, Assistant Director of Education.

With the exhibition examination less than two months away, Anand lived a life of pure work. Private lessons were given in the morning for half an hour before school; private lessons were given in the afternoon for an hour after school; private lessons were given for the whole of Saturday morning. Then in addition to all these private lessons from his class teacher, Anand began to take private lessons from the headmaster, at the headmaster’s house, from five to six. He went from school to the Dairies to school again; then he went to the headmaster’s, where Savi waited for him with sandwiches and lukewarm Ovaltine. Leaving home at seven in the morning, he returned at half past six. He ate. Then he did his school homework; then he prepared for all his private lessons.

All the boys in the star section of the exhibition class endured almost similar privation, but they strove to maintain the fiction that they were schoolboys given to pranks, enjoying the most carefree days of their lives. There were a few anxious boys who talked of nothing but work. But most talked of the football season just beginning, the Santa Rosa race meeting just concluded, giving one another to understand that their Daddies had taken them to the races in cars with laden hampers and that they had proceeded to bet, and lose, vast sums on the pari mutuel. They discussed the prospects of Brown Bomber and Jetsam at the Christmas meeting (the examination was in early November and this was a means of looking beyond it). Anand was not the most backward in these conversations. Though horseracing bored him to a degree, he had made it his special subject. He knew, for example, that Jetsam was by Flotsam out of Hope of the Valley; he claimed to have seen all three horses and spread a racetrack story that the young Jetsam used to eat clothes left out to dry. Retailing some more racetrack gossip, he maintained (and began to be known for this) that, in spite of a career of almost unmitigated disaster, Whitstable was the finest horse in the colony; it was a pity he was so erratic, but then these greys were temperamental.