Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

The gloom spread to Savi and Myna and Kamla and Shama, and was deepened by the joy of Vidiadhar’s brothers and sisters. Vidiadhar had been untouched by the day’s events, and was at that moment in the Roxy Theatre, seeing the complete serial of Daredevils of the Red Circle . He had brought home question papers that were quite clean except for gay ticks at the side of those questions he had answered. His arithmetic answers, neatly written on a strip of paper, were all correct. He had known the meanings of all the difficult words; he had spotted the synonyms and had not been fooled by one homonym. And he had not had private lessons. He had not had private lessons after private lessons. No one had taken him Ovaltine and sandwiches at five. He had not been going for very long to a Port of Spain school; he had drunk little milk and eaten few prunes.

“I always say,” Shama said, though she had never said anything of the sort, “I always say that carelessness was going to be your downfall.”

“In a few years you will look back on this and laugh,” Mr. Biswas said. “You did your best. And no true effort is ever wasted. Remember that.”

“What about you?” Anand said.

And though they slept on the same bed, neither spoke to the other for the rest of the evening.

Anand had no more work to do that year and no more milk to drink, but on Monday he went to school. All Saturday’s candidates were there. They had become a superior, leisured caste. A few boys did spend the day writing the examination as nearly as possible as they had done on Saturday. (The Chinese boy, with a mortification that amounted almost to terror, got the correct answer to the sum about the cyclist.) The others flaunted their idleness. At first they were content to be in the classroom and not of the class, seeing the exhibition discipline enforced on next year’s candidates. But this soon palled, and they wandered out into the yard. Their attitude to the examination had changed since Saturday afternoon: they all now had tales of disaster. Anand, believing none of them, magnified his own blunder. In the end they were all boasting of how badly they had done; and apparently none of them really cared. Time hung heavily on their hands, and the afternoon was only partially enlivened by a packet of cigarettes: disappointing, but a prank, at last. For the first time for many years Anand was free to go home as soon as the afternoon bell rang. Up to last week this had seemed the supreme freedom. But now he dreaded leaving the boys, dreaded going back to the house. He did not get home till six.

Unusually, Mr. Biswas was below the house, in that section of it which Shama used as a kitchen. He was in his working clothes, and tired, but very gay.

“Ah, the young man himself,” he greeted Anand. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve got something for you, young man.” He took out an envelope from his jacket pocket.

It was a letter from an English judge. He said he had been following Mr. Biswas’s work in the Sentinel , admired it, and would like to meet Mr. Biswas, to try and persuade him to join a literary group he had formed.

“What about me, eh. What about me. I tell you, man, no true effort is wasted. Not that I expect to get anything from that blasted paper. Or from you.”

Mr. Biswas’s elation was extravagant. Anand thought he knew why. But he was in no mood to give comfort, to associate himself with weakness. He handed back the letter to Mr. Biswas without a word.

Mr. Biswas took the letter absently, told Shama to send up his food, and went to the front room. He was alone, too, when he awoke in the night to the snoring house, Anand asleep beside him, and looked through the window at the clear, dead sky.

He saw the judge the next day, and went to the meeting of the literary group on Friday evening. He was especially glad to be out of the house then, for on Friday evenings the widows came up from Shorthills and spent the night below the house. Encouraged by the success of Indian shirtmakers, the widows had decided to go into the clothesmaking business. Since none of the five could sew at all well, they had decided to learn, and every Friday they went to the sewing classes at the Royal Victoria Institute, each widow specializing in a different aspect of the craft. They came in the late afternoon, they were rapturously welcomed by the readers and learners, and Basdai fed them. The readers and learners, not subject to Basdai’s floggings while their mothers were present, were unusually vociferous; there was an air of festival.

Mr. Biswas found himself a little out of his depth in the literary group. Apart from the poems in the Royal Reader and Bell’s Standard Elocutionist , the only poems he knew were those of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Edward Carpenter; and at the judge’s the emphasis was on poetry. But there was much to drink, and it was late when Mr. Biswas came back and wheeled his bicycle below the house, his head ringing with the names of Lorca and Eliot and Auden. The readers and learners were asleep on benches and tables. The widows, dressed in white and singing softly, sat below a weak bulb, playing cards, drinking coffee, and handling pieces of sewing which had grown grubby over the weeks of tuition. He went up the dark front stairs and turned the light on in his room. Anand sprawled on the bed behind the bank of pillows. He undressed and squeezed himself between the diningtable and the bed. Shama came from the inner room, in answer to the light, and noted those symptoms, of slowness, precision and silence, which she associated with his Sunday excursions to Pagotes.

As a condition of his acceptance by the group he had to read something of his own. He didn’t know what to offer them. He couldn’t write poetry, and he had thrown away the “Escape” stories. He knew that story well, however; it could be written again. He still could think of no satisfactory end, but he had read enough of modern prose to know that a neat end might offend the group. He couldn’t make his hero the faceless “John Lubbard”, who was “tall, broad-shouldered, handsome”; he would be laughed down. He had to be ruthless. His hero would be Gopi, a country shopkeeper, “small, spare and shrunken”. He took a Sentinel pad, got into bed and, neatly, began to write the familiar words: At the age of thirty-three , when he was already the father of four children…

Those words were never read to the group. This story, like the others, was never finished. For, even before Gopi could meet his barren heroine, news came that Bipti, Mr. Biswas’s mother, had died.

He called the children away from school and they went with Shama to Pratap’s. From the road the open verandah and steps, thick with mourners, appeared to be draped with white. He had not expected such a crowd. Tara was there, and Ajodha, looking annoyed. But most of the mourners he didn’t know: the families of his sister-in-law, his brother’s friends, Bipti’s friends. He might have been attending the funeral of a stranger. The body laid out in a coffin on the verandah belonged more to them. He longed to feel grief. He was surprised only by jealousy.

Shama did her duty and wept. Dehuti, who had been ostracized since her marriage, sat halfway up the steps, shrieking at new mourners and grabbing at their feet, as if anxious to trip them up, to prevent them going any further. The mourners, finding their trousers or skirts clutched to a wet face, stroked Dehuti’s covered head and at the same time tried to shake their garments free. No one made any effort to move Dehuti. Her story was known, and it was felt that she was doing a penance which it would have been improper to interrupt. Ramchand was more controlled but equally impressive. He occupied himself with the funeral arrangements, and behaved with such authority that no one would have guessed that he had not spoken to Bipti or Mr. Biswas’s brothers.