Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

The poem written, his selfconsciousness violated, he was whole again. And when on Friday the five widows arrived in Port of Spain for their sewing lessons at the Royal Victoria Institute, and the house resounded with clatter and chatter and shrieks and singing and the radio and the gramophone, Mr. Biswas went to the meeting of his literary group and announced that he was going to read his offering at last.

“It is a poem,” he said. “In prose.”

Everything glowed richly in the judge’s dimly-lit verandah. On the table there were bottles of whisky and rum, ginger and soda water, and a bowl of crushed ice.

Mr. Biswas sat in the chair below the reading light and sipped his whisky and soda. “There is no title,” he said. And, as he had expected, this was received with satisfaction.

Then he disgraced himself. Thinking himself free of what he had written, he ventured on his poem boldly, and even with a touch of selfmockery. But as he read, his hands began to shake, the paper rustled; and when he spoke of the journey his voice failed. It cracked and kept on cracking; his eyes tickled. But he went on, and his emotion was such that at the end no one said a word. He folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket. Someone filled his glass. He stared down at his lap, as if angry, as if he had been completely alone. He said nothing for the rest of the evening, and in his shame and confusion drank much. When he went home the widows were singing softly, the children were asleep, and he shamed Shama by being noisily sick in the outdoor lavatory.

Whatever happened, Anand would go to college. So Mr. Biswas and Shama decided. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be cruel and foolish to give the boy nothing more than an elementary school education. The girls agreed. They had not had any milk and prunes, and their chances of going to high schools were slight; but they did badly in their classes and did not consider themselves worthy. Myna and Kamla insisted that Mr. Biswas should make a public declaration that Anand was going to the college, for Vidiadhar was behaving as though he had already won the exhibition and was openly learning Latin and French and algebra and geometry, the wonderful subjects taught at the college.

The declaration was made, though neither Mr. Biswas nor Shama could say where the money was going to come from.

Shama talked of recovering her cow Mutri from Shorthills.

“Where you going to keep it?” Mr. Biswas asked. “With the boarders downstairs?”

“Milk selling at ten and twelve cents a bottle,” Shama said.

“What about grass, eh? You think you could just tie out Mutri in Adam Smith Square or the Murray Street playground? You’ve been reading too much Captain Cutteridge. And how much milk you think poor old Mutri going to give after living all those years with your family?”

Commercial ventures were running high in Shama’s mind since one of the widows, despairing of any but long-term returns from the clothesmaking scheme, had brought up a bag of oranges from Shorthills one Friday. She was exceptionally grave. She called one of her sons aside and ordered him to place the oranges on a tray, the tray on a box, and the box on the pavement. Then she went to the Royal Victoria Institute. The widow’s idea was simplicity itself: it required little effort and no outlay. There was much agitated discussion among the sisters that evening; many plans were adumbrated, and futures tremulously envisaged. The widow herself said nothing, and continued as grave and mournful as before, sucking thread, threading needles, and sewing.

The appearance of a shallow heap of oranges on a tray outside the tall blank walls of the house created a small sensation in the residential street. And it increased Mr. Biswas’s dread of being traced to his home by impatient destitutes.

With the exhibition examination and the death of his mother he had been neglecting the destitutes. Correspondence had accumulated, and as he was sitting in the Sentinel office one morning and typing for the tenth time, Dear Sir , Your letter awaited me on my return from holiday…, a reporter came to his desk and said, “Congrats, old man.”

It was the Sentinel’s education correspondent. He held some typewritten sheets. They were the exhibition results.

In a page of names the name stood out.

Anand had been placed third, had got one of the twelve exhibitions.

As bewitching as the news was the generosity with which it was welcomed by the older members of the staff. The very young, who had sat the examination not many years before, were aloof and unimpressed.

But third! Third in the island! It was fantastic. Only two boys more intelligent! It couldn’t be grasped right away.

Recovering, Mr. Biswas attempted to deflect some of the praise. “Mark you, the teacher knows his stuff.” But he couldn’t keep this up. “Careless boy, too, you know. Left out one whole question. In the spelling paper. Synonyms and homonyms.”

He began to lose his audience.

“He knew them. Thought they were easy.”

Reporters returned to their desks.

“And then didn’t do them at all. Left them out. A whole question.”

After a light-hearted morning in which he investigated the circumstances of two destitutes with a good humour which offended those people, he returned to the office and invited the education correspondent and Mr. Burnett’s news editor to have beers with him at the cafй on the corner. There, surrounded by flamboyant murals of revelry on tropical beaches, they drank: three men, none over forty, who considered their careers closed and rested their ambitions on the achievements of their children. The success of the son of one gave the others hope. They shared Mr. Biswas’s joy; they could not achieve his delirium.

“You could leave old Mutri to die in peace,” he said to Shama when he got back to the quiet house at midday; and his gaiety had her guessing. “What about oranges? Want to go in the selling business? Join the widows? The five financial wizards.”

The orange venture had in fact failed. Three oranges had been sold to a stray American soldier for a penny; the others had gone bad in the sun. The failure was put down to the unsuitability of the site and the snobbishness and jealousy of the neighbours who, to spite the widow, had preferred to go all the way to the city market to buy their oranges at a higher price. The widow’s son was also blamed for his lack of enthusiasm and his false pride: he had stood some distance from the tray of oranges and tried to pretend that they had nothing to do with him.

When Mr. Biswas broke the news of the exhibition, Shama set about defending the widows, and she and Mr. Biswas had a long and friendly squabble about the Tulsi family. It was like old times, and Mr. Biswas, the victor as always, solaced Shama by saying, what he had forgotten for some time, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! One of these days.”

“I suppose it would look nice in my coffin.”

The school had taken the first four places and won seven of the twelve exhibitions. The teacher’s notes and private lessons, legendarily virtuous, had triumphed once again. Five of the exhibitions went to known crammers like Anand and the Chinese boy and aroused little comment. The sixth went to one of the mild, hamper-fed boys; he was now considered sly. But the biggest surprise was provided by the boy who had come first. He was a Negro boy of astonishing size. He was a year younger than Anand but looked incomparably older. His forearms were already veined, and his chin and cheeks were dotted with little springs of hair. He had been loud in his denunciation of crammers; he had taken a leading part in discussions about films and sport; he had a phenomenal knowledge of English county cricket scores throughout the nineteen-thirties; and he had introduced the topic of sex. He claimed to have had many sexual encounters and his talk encouraged the belief that when he left school after private lessons, his satchel bouncing off his high bottom, it was not to do homework but to indulge in sexual intrigue and, joyously, to be pursued by older women. He displayed a convincing knowledge of the female body and its functions; and the conception of his life away from school as one of indifference to books and notes and homework was reinforced by his passionate devotion to the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, whose style he successfully imitated in his English compositions. His popularity was at its lowest that morning; his success cast doubt on all his tales of sexual adventure. He protested that he had not worked, that he had done no more than a hasty last-minute revision, and that the result had surprised him more than anyone else. But he protested in vain.