Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“Excuse me,” he said, and started on a slow progress down the row, people rising before him, people rising in the row behind, people settling down again in his wake, and “Excuse me,” he kept on saying, quite urbane, unaware of the disturbance. At last he came to his seat, dusted it with a handkerchief, stooping slightly in response to a request from someone behind. While he unbuttoned his jacket a burst of applause came from all. Absently casting a glance at the cricket field, Mr. Biswas applauded. He sat down, hitched up his trousers, crossed his legs, operated the cutter on the lid of the cigarette tin, extracted a cigarette and lit it. There was a tremendous burst of applause. Everyone in the stand stood up. Chairs scraped backwards, some overturned. Mr. Biswas rose and clapped with the others. What crowd there was had advanced on to the field; the cricketers were racing away, flitting blobs of white. The stumps had disappeared; the umpires, separated by the crowd, were walking sedately to the pavilion. The match was over. Mr. Biswas did not inspect the pitch. He went outside, unlocked his bicycle and cycled home, holding the tin of cigarettes in his hand.

His one suit, hanging out to sun on Shama’s line in the backyard, did not make much of a showing against Govind’s five threepiece suits on Chinta’s line, which had to be supported by two pronged poles. But it was a beginning.

The interviews completed, it was Mr. Biswas’s duty to analyze the information he had gathered. And here he floundered. He had investigated two hundred households; but after every classification he could never, on adding, get two hundred, and then he had to go through all the questionnaires again. He was dealing with a society that had no rules and patterns, and classifications were a chaotic business. He covered many sheets with long, snakelike addition sums, and the Slumberking was spread with his questionnaires. He pressed Shama and the children into service, damned them for their incompetence, dismissed them, and worked late into the night, squatting on a chair before the diningtable. The table was too high; sitting on pillows had proved unsatisfactory; so he squatted. Sometimes he threatened to cut down the legs of the diningtable by half and cursed the destitute who had made it.

“This blasted thing is getting me sick,” he shouted, whenever Shama and Anand tried to get him to go to bed. “Getting me sick, I tell you. Sick . I don’t know why the hell I didn’t stay with my little destitutes.”

“Everywhere you go, is the same,” Shama said.

He did not tell her of his deeper fears. Already the department was under attack. Citizen, Taxpayer, Pro Bono Publico and others had written to the newspapers to ask exactly what the department was doing and to protest against the waste of taxpayers’ money. The party of Southern businessmen to which Shekhar belonged had started a campaign for the abolition of the department: a distinguishing cause, long sought, for no party had a programme, though all had the same objective: to make everyone in the colony rich and equal.

This was Mr. Biswas’s first experience of public attack, and it did not console him that such letters had always been written, that the government in all its departments was being continually criticized by all the island’s parties. He dreaded opening the newspapers. Pro Bono Publico had been particularly nasty: he had written the same letter to all three papers, and there was a whole fortnight between the letter’s first appearance and its last. Nor did it console Mr. Biswas that no one else appeared to be worried. Shama considered the government unshakable; but she was Shama. Miss Logie could always go back to where she came from. The other officers had been seconded from various government departments and they could go back to where they came from. He could only go back to the Sentinel and fifty dollars a month less.

He was glad he had written a mild letter of resignation. And, preparing for misfortune, he took to dropping in at the Sentinel office. The newspaper atmosphere never failed to excite him, and the welcome he received stilled his fears: he was regarded as one who had escaped and made good. Yet with every improvement in his condition, every saving, he felt more vulnerable: it was too good to last.

In time he completed his charts (to display the classifications clearly he joined three double foolscap sheets and produced a scroll nearly five feet long, which made Miss Logie roar with laughter); and he wrote his report. Charts and report were typed and duplicated and, he was told, sent to various parts of the world. Then he was at last free to get villagers to sing or to take up cottage industries. He was given an area. And a memorandum informed him that, to enable him to move easily about his area, he was to be given a car, on a painless government loan.

The rule of the house was followed again. The children were sworn to secrecy. Mr. Biswas brought home glossy booklets which had the aromatic smell of rich art paper and seemed to hold the smell of the new car. Secretly he took driving lessons and obtained a driving licence. Then, on a perfectly ordinary Saturday morning, he drove to the house in a brand-new Prefect, parked it casually before the gate, not quite parallel to the pavement, and walked up the front steps, ignoring the excitement that had broken out.

“Vidiadhar! Come back here this minute, if you don’t want me to break your hand and your foot.”

When Govind arrived at lunchtime he found his parking space occupied. His Chevrolet was larger, but old and unwashed; the mudguards had been dented, cut, welded; one door had been ducoed in a lustreless colour that did not exactly match; there was the H-for hire-on the number plate; and the windscreen was made ugly by various stickers and a circular plaque which carried Govind’s photograph and taxi-driver’s permit.

“Matchbox,” Govind muttered. “Who leave this matchbox here?”

He did not impress the orphans, and he did not diminish the energy of Mr. Biswas’s children who, ever since the car had been so carelessly parked by Mr. Biswas, had been wiping away dust and saying crossly how a new car collected dust. They found dust everywhere: on the body, the springs, the underside of the mudguards. They wiped and polished and discovered, with distress, that they were leaving scratches on the paintwork, very slight, but visible from certain angles. Myna reported this to Mr. Biswas.

He was lying on the Slumberking, surrounded by many glossy booklets. He asked, “You hear anything? What they saying, eh?”

“Govind say it is a matchbox.”

“Matchbox, eh. English car, you know. Would last for years and still be running when his Chevrolet is on the rubbish dump.”

He returned to studying an intricate drawing in red and black which explained the wiring of the car. He could not fully understand it, but it was his habit whenever he bought anything new, whether a pair of shoes or a bottle of patent medicine, to read all the literature provided.

Kamla came into the room and said that the orphans had been fingering the car and blurring the shine.

Mr. Biswas knelt on the bed and advanced on his knees to the front window. He lifted the curtain and, pushing a vested chest outside, shouted, “You! Boy! Leave the car alone! You think is a taxi?”

The orphans scattered.

“I coming to break the hands of some of you,” Basdai, the guardian widow, called. News of her advance and her pause to break a whip from the neem tree at the side of the yard was relayed by hoots and shouts and giggles. Some orphans, disdaining to run, were flogged on the pavement. There was crying, and Basdai said, “Well, some people satisfy now.”

Shama stayed under the house and did not go out to see the car. And when Suniti, the former contortionist, now baby-swollen, who often stopped at the house on her way to and from Shortfalls after quarrels and reconciliations with her husband, and attempted to shock by talk of getting a divorce, and wore ugly and unsuitable frocks as a mark of her modernity, when Suniti came to Shama and said, “So, Aunt, you come a big-shot now. Car and thing, man!” Shama said, “Yes, my child,” as though the car was another of Mr. Biswas’s humiliating excesses. But she had begun to prepare another hamper.