Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“By himself,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Just by himself.”

Owad threw back his shoulders and laughed. His teeth showed; his moustache widened; his cheeks, shining and perfectly round, rose and rested against his nose.

“Thank you,” the photographer said.

A young reporter, whom Mr. Biswas didn’t know, came up with a notebook and pencil, and from the way he handled these implements Mr. Biswas could tell that he was inexperienced, as inexperienced as he himself had been when he interviewed the English novelist and tried to get him to say sensational things about Port of Spain.

Many emotions came to him and, saying good-bye to no one, he left the crowd and got into the Prefect, oven-hot with the windows closed, and drove to his area.

“Tulips and daffodils!” he muttered, remembering Owad’s horticultural letters as he drove along the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, past the swamplands, the crumbling huts, the rice fields.

It was just after ten when he got back to Port of Spain. The house was silent and upstairs was in darkness: Owad had gone to bed. But downstairs and in the tent lights blazed. Only the younger children were asleep; for everyone else, including those of the morning’s visitors who had decided to stay the night, the excitement of the day still lingered. Some were eating, some were playing cards; many were talking in whispers; and a surprising number were reading newspapers. Anand and Savi and Myna ran to Mr. Biswas as soon as they saw him and breathlessly began telling of Owad’s adventures in England: his firefighting during the war, the rescues he had conducted, his narrow escapes; the operations he had been called in to perform at the last minute on famous men, the jobs that had been offered to him as a result, the seat in parliament; the distinguished men he had known and sometimes defeated in public debate: Russell, Joad, Radhakrishnan, Laski, Menon: these had already become household names. The whole house had fallen under Owad’s spell, and everywhere in the tent little groups were going over Owad’s tales. Chinta had already worked up a great antipathy for Krishna Menon, whom Owad particularly disliked. And in one afternoon the family reverence for India had been shattered: Owad disliked all Indians from India. They were a disgrace to Trinidad Indians; they were arrogant, sly and lecherous; they pronounced English in a peculiar way; they were slow and unintelligent and were given degrees only out of charity; they were unreliable with money; in England they went around with nurses and other women of the lower classes and were frequently involved in scandals; they cooked Indian food badly (the only true Indian meals Owad had in England were the meals he had cooked himself); their Hindi was strange (Owad had repeatedly caught them out in solecisms); their ritual was debased; the moment they got to England they ate meat and drank to prove their modernity (a brahmin boy had offered Owad curried com beef for lunch); and, incomprehensibly, they looked down on colonial Indians. The sisters said they had never really been fooled by Indians from India; they spoke of the behaviour of the missionaries, merchants, doctors and politicians they had known; and they grew grave as they realized their responsibilities as the last representatives of Hindu culture.

The pundit, in dhoti, vest, sacred thread, caste-marks and wrist-watch, reclined on a blanket spread on the swept and flattened earth. He was reading a paper Mr. Biswas had never seen before. And Mr. Biswas saw then that the many other newspapers in the tent were similar to the pundit’s. It was the Soviet Weekly .

It was past midnight before Mr. Biswas, moving from group to group, decided he had heard enough; and when Anand tried to tell of Owad’s meeting with Molotov, of the achievements of the Red Army and the glories of Russia, Mr. Biswas said it was time for them to go to sleep. He went up to his room, leaving Anand and Savi in the festival atmosphere downstairs. His head rang with the great names the children and the sisters had spoken so casually. To think that the man who had met those people was sleeping under the same roof! There, where Owad had been, was surely where life was to be found.

For a full week the festival continued. Visitors left; fresh ones arrived. Perfect strangers-the ice-man, the salted-peanuts-man, the postman, the beggars, the street-sweepers, many stray children-were called in and fed. The food was supplied by Mrs. Tulsi and there was communal cooking, as in the old days, which seemed to have returned with Owad. The fruit hanging from the coconut-frond arches in the tent disappeared; the fronds became yellow. But Owad was still followed by admiring eyes, it was still an honour to be spoken to by him, and everything he had said was to be repeated. At any time and to anyone Owad might start on a new tale; then a crowd instantly collected. Regularly in the evening there were gatherings in the drawingroom or, when Owad was tired, in his bedroom. Mr. Biswas attended as often as he could. Mrs. Tulsi, forgetting her own illnesses and anxious instead to nurse, held Owad’s hand or head while he spoke.

He had canvassed for the Labour Party in 1945 and was considered by Kingsley Martin to be one of the architects of the Labour victory. In fact Kingsley Martin had pressed him to join the New Statesman and Nation ; but he, laughing as at a private joke, said he had told Kingsley no. He had earned the bitter hatred of the Conservative Party by his scathing denunciations of Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech. Scathing was one of his favourite words, and the person he had handled most scathingly was Krishna Menon. He didn’t say, but it appeared from his talk that he had been gratuitously insulted by Menon at a public meeting. He had collected funds for Maurice Thorez and had discussed Party strategy in France with him. He spoke familiarly of Russian generals and their battles. He pronounced Russian names impressively.

“Those Russian names are ugly like hell,” Mr. Biswas ventured one evening.

The sisters looked at Mr. Biswas, then looked at Owad.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Owad said. “Biswas is a funny name, if you say it in a certain way.”

The sisters looked at Mr. Biswas.

“Rokossovsky and Coca-cola-kowsky,” Mr. Biswas said, a little annoyed. “Ugly like hell.”

“Ugly? Vyacheslav Molotov. Does that sound ugly to you, Ma?”

“No, son.”

“Joseph Dugashvili,” Owad said.

“That’s the one I had in mind,” Mr. Biswas said. “Don’t say you think that pretty.”

Owad replied scathingly, “I think so.”

The sisters smiled.

“Gawgle,” Owad said, raising his chin (he was lying in bed) and making a strangulated noise.

Mrs. Tulsi passed her hand from his chin to his Adam’s apple.

“What was that?” Mr. Biswas asked.

“Gogol,” Owad said. “The world’s greatest comic writer.”

“It sounded like a gargle.” Mr. Biswas waited for the applause, but Shama only looked warningly at him.

“You couldn’t say that in Russia,” Chinta said.

This led Owad from the beauty of Russian names to Russia itself. “There is work for everyone and everyone must work. It is distinctly written in the Soviet Constitution-Basdai, pass me that little book there-that he who does not work shall not eat.”

“That is fair,” Chinta said, taking the copy of the Soviet Constitution from Owad, opening it, looking at the title page, closing it, passing it on. “Is exactly the sort of law we want in Trinidad.”

“He who does not work shall not eat,” Mrs. Tulsi repeated slowly.

“I just wish they could send some of my people to Russia,” Miss Blackie said, sucking her teeth, shaking her skirt and shifting in her chair to express the despair to which her people reduced her.