Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Anand sat in the darkness. Shama came to the room and got into the fourposter. Anand did not want to go downstairs. He lay on the bed beside his father and remained quite still.

He was disturbed by chatter and heavy footsteps, and made wide awake by the light coming in through the two open sections above the partition. Some aunts who had been waiting up below the house were now heard moving about the kitchen. The chatter continued, and laughter.

Mr. Biswas stirred and groaned. “Good God!”

Anand felt Shama awake and anxious. Listened to in this way, the chatter was as unbearable as the dripping of a water-tap.

“God !” Mr. Biswas cried.

There was a moment’s silence in the diningroom.

“Other people in this house,” Mr. Biswas shouted.

The visiting sisters and the readers and learners could be heard awakening downstairs.

Softly, as though speaking only to the people with him, Owad said, “Don’t we all know it, old man.” There were giggles.

The giggles maddened Mr. Biswas. “Go to France!” he cried.

“And you can go to hell.” It was Mrs. Tulsi. Her words, evenly spaced, were cold and firm and clear.

“Ma!” Owad said.

Mr. Biswas didn’t know what to say. Surprise was followed by shock, shock by anger.

Shama got up from the fourposter and said, “Man, man.”

“Let him go to hell,” Mrs. Tulsi said, almost conversationally. Her voice was followed by a groan, a creaking of a bed-spring and a shuffling on the floor.

Lights went on downstairs, lit up the yard and reflected through the jalousied door into Mr. Biswas’s room.

“Go to hell?” Mr. Biswas said. “Go to hell? To prepare the way for you? Praying to God, eh? Cleaning up the old man’s grave.”

“For God’s sake, Biswas,” Owad called, “hold your damned tongue.”

“You don’t talk to me about God. Red and blue cotton! Shooting rice from aeroplanes!”

The girls came into the room.

Savi said, “Pa, stop being stupid. For God’s sake, stop it.”

Anand was standing between the two beds. The room was like a cage.

“Let him go to hell,” Mrs. Tulsi sobbed. “Let him get out.”

“Neighbour! Neighbour!” a woman cried shrilly from next door. “Anything wrong, neighbour?”

“I can’t stand this,” Owad shouted. “I can’t stand it. I don’t know what I’ve come back to.” His footsteps were heard pounding across the drawingroom. He mumbled loudly, angrily, indistinctly.

“Son, son,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

They heard him going down the steps, heard the gate click and shiver.

Mrs. Tulsi began to wail.

“Neighbour! Neighbour!”

A wonderful sentence formed in Mr. Biswas’s mind, and he said, “Communism, like charity, should begin at home.”

Mr. Biswas’s door was pushed open, fresh light and shadows confused the patterns on the walls, and Govind came into the room, his trousers unbelted, his shirt unbuttoned.

“Mohun!”

His voice was kind. Mr. Biswas was overwhelmed to tears. “Communism, like charity,” he said to Govind, “should begin at home.”

“We know, we know,” Govind said.

Sushila was comforting Mrs. Tulsi. Her wail broke up into sobs.

“I am giving you notice,” Mr. Biswas shouted. “I curse the day I step into your house.”

“Man, man.”

“You curse the day,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Coming to us with no more clothes than you could hang on a nail.”

This wounded Mr. Biswas. He could not reply at once. “I am giving you notice,” he repeated at last.

“I am giving you notice,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

“I gave it to you first.”

There was an abrupt silence. Then in the drawingroom there was an outburst of low, amused chatter, and downstairs the readers and learners, who had kept silent all along, were whispering.

“Cha!” the woman next door said. “Bother with people business.”

Govind patted Mr. Biswas on the shoulder, gave a little laugh and left the room.

The whispers downstairs subsided. The light which came through the jalousies from the yard and striped the room was extinguished. The laughter in the drawingroom died away. Throats were cleared with faint satiric intonations, and there were muted apprehensive chuckles. There were shuffles on the floor, and whispers. Then the light went out and the room was in darkness and the house was absolutely silent.

They remained appalled in the room, not daring to move, to break the silence, unable in the dark and the stillness to believe fully in what had just happened.

Presently, exhausted by their inactivity, the children went downstairs.

Morning would show the full horror of the past few minutes.

They awoke with a sense of unease. Almost at once they remembered. They avoided one another. They listened, above the hawking and spitting, the running taps, the continuous scuffling, the fanning of coal-pots, the metallic hiss of the lavatory flush, for the footsteps and voices of Mrs. Tulsi and Owad. But the house was quiet upstairs. Then they learned that Owad had left early that morning for a week’s tour of Tobago. The instinct of Mr. Biswas’s children was to get away at once, to escape from the house to the separate reality of the streets and school.

Mr. Biswas’s anger had gone stale; it burdened him. Now there was also shame at his behaviour, shame at the whole gross scene. But the uncertainty that had been with him ever since he heard that Owad was returning from England had disappeared. He found it easy to ignore his fears; and after he had had his bath he felt energetic and even light-headed. He too was anxious to get out of the house. And as he left it his sympathy went out to Shama, who had to remain.

The sisters looked chastened. Unpersecuted, they believed in their righteousness; and though Owad’s departure, in anger, as was reported, involved them all in disgrace and threatened them all, every sister was sure of her own hold on Owad, and her attitude to Shama was one of blame and recoil.

“So, Aunt,” Suniti, the former contortionist, said, “I hear you moving to a new house, man.”

“Yes, my dear,” Shama said.

At school Anand defended Eliot, Picasso, Braque, Chagall. He who had been leaving copies of the Soviet Weekly in the readingroom between the pages of Punch and The Illustrated London News now announced that he frowned upon communism. The phrase was thought odd; but the action, coinciding with the widespread renunciation of communism by distinguished intellectuals in Europe and America, caused little comment.

Shortly after he had been taken on the Sentinel Mr. Biswas went late one night to the city centre to interview the homeless people, whose families among them, who regularly slept in Marine Square. “That conundrum-the housing question-” he had begun his article; and though the words were excised by Mr. Burnett, Mr. Biswas was taken by their rhythm and had never forgotten them. They drummed in his head that morning; he spoke them and sang them under his breath; and throughout the Monday conference at the office he was exceptionally lively and garrulous. When the conference was over he went down St. Vincent Street to the cafй with the gay murals and sat at the bar, waiting for people he knew.

“Got notice to quit, man,” he said.

He spoke lightly, expecting solicitude, but his lightness was met with lightness.

“I expect I will be joining you in Marine Square,” a Guardian reporter said.

“Hell of a thing, though. Marned with four children and nowhere to go. Know any places for rent?”

“If I know one 1 would be there right now.”

“Ah, well. I suppose it will be the square.”

“It look so.”