Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Bhandat stopped.

Mr. Biswas had been cut on the cheek-bone and the blood had run below his eye.

“Get out, you nasty tale-carrying lout. Get out of here at once before I peel the skin off your back.” The bumps on Bhandat’s lip were trembling again and his arm, when he raised it, was quivering.

The sun had not risen and the back trace was still and empty when Mr. Biswas roused Bipti.

“Mohun! What has happened?”

“I fell down. Don’t ask me.”

“Come, tell me. What’s the matter?”

“Why do you keep on sending me to stay with other people?”

“Who beat you?” She pressed a finger under the cut on the cheek-bone and he winced. “Bhandat beat you?” She undid his shirt and saw the weals on his back. “He beat you? He beat you?”

She made him lie face down on the bed in her room, and, for the first time since he was a baby, rubbed his body down with oil. She gave him a cup of hot milk sweetened with brown sugar.

“I am never going back there,” Mr. Biswas said.

Instead of giving the consolation he expected, Bipti said, as though arguing with him, “Where will you go then?”

He became impatient. “You have never done a thing for me. You are a pauper.”

He had meant to hurt her, but she was not hurt. “It is my fate. I have had no luck with my children. And with you, Mohun, I have the least luck of all. Everything Sitaram said about you was true.”

“I have heard you and everybody else talking a lot about this Sitaram. What exactly did he say?”

“That you were going to be a spendthrift and a liar and that you were going to be lecherous.”

“Oh yes. Spendthrift with two dollars a month. Two whole dollars. Two hundred cents. Very heavy if you put that in a bag. And lecherous?”

“Leading a bad life. With women. But you are too small.”

“Bhandat’s children are more lecherous than me. And with their mother too.”

“Mohun!” Then Bipti said, “I don’t know what Tara is going to say.”

“Again! Why do you keep on caring what Tara says? I don’t want you to go and see Tara. I don’t want anything from her. And Ajodha can keep that body of his. Let Bhandat’s boys read to him. I am finished with that.”

But Bipti went to see Tara, and that afternoon Tara, still in her mourning clothes and her jewellery, fresh from her funeral duties and her struggles with the funeral photographer, came to the back trace.

“Poor Mohun,” Tara said. “He’s shameless, that Bhandat.”

“I am sure he stole the money himself,” Mr. Biswas said. “He’s got a lot of practice. He steals all the time. And I can always tell when he is stealing. He spins the coin.”

“Mohun!” Bipti said.

“He’s the lecher, spendthrift and liar. Not me.”

“Mohun!”

“And I know all about that other woman. His sons know about her too. They boast about it. He quarrels with his wife and beats her. I am not going back to that shop if he comes and asks me on bended knee.”

“I can’t see Bhandat doing that,” Tara said. “But he is sorry. The dollar wasn’t missing. It was at the bottom of his trouser pocket and he didn’t notice it.”

“He was too drunk, if you ask me.” Then the humiliation hurt afresh and he began to cry. “You see, Ma. I have no father to look after me and people can treat me how they want.”

Tara became coaxing.

Mr. Biswas, enjoying the coaxing and his misery, still spoke angrily. “Dehuti was quite right to run away from you. I am sure you treated her badly.”

By mentioning Dehuti’s name he had gone too far. Tara at once stiffened and, without saying more, left, her long skirt billowing about her, the silver bracelets on her arm clanking.

Bipti ran out after her to the yard. “You mustn’t mind the boy, Tara. He is young.”

“I don’t mind, Bipti.”

“Oh Mohun,” Bipti said, when she came back to the room, “you will reduce us all to pauperdom. You will see me spending the rest of my days in the Poor House.”

“I am going to get a job on my own. And I am going to get my own house too. I am finished with this.” He waved his aching arm about the mud walls and the low, sooty thatch.

On Monday morning he set about looking for a job. How did one look for a job? He supposed that one looked. He walked up and down the Main Road, looking.

He passed a tailor and tried to picture himself cutting khaki cloth, tacking, and operating a sewingmachine. He passed a barber and tried to picture himself stropping a razor; his mind wandered off to devise elaborate protections for his left thumb. But he didn’t like the tailor he saw, a fat man sulkily sewing in a dingy shop; and as for barbers, he had never liked those who cut his own hair; he thought too how it would disgust Pundit Jairam to learn that his former pupil had taken up barbering, a profession immemorially low. He walked on.

He had no wish to enter any of the shops he saw and ask for a job. So he imposed difficult conditions on himself. He tried, for example, to walk a certain distance in twenty paces, and interpreted failure as a bad sign. For a moment he was perversely tempted by an undertaker’s, a plain corrugated iron shed that made no concession to grief, smelling of new wood, fish-glue and french polish, with coffins lying on the floor among sawdust, shavings and unfashioned planks. Cheap coffins and raw wood stood in rows against one wall; expensive polished coffins rested on shelves; there were unfinished coffins around a work-bench and pieces of coffin everywhere else; in one corner there was a tottering stack of cheap toy coffins for babies. Mr. Biswas had often seen babies’ funerals; one in particular he remembered, where the coffin was carried under the arm of a man who rode slowly on a bicycle. “Get a job there,” he thought, “and help to bury Bhandat.” He passed dry goods shops-strange name: dry goods-and the rickety little rooms bulged with dry goods, things like pans and plates and bolts of cloth and cards of bright pins and boxes of thread and shirts on hangers and brand-new oil lamps and hammers and saws and clothes-pegs and everything else, the wreckage of a turbulent flood which appeared to have forced the doors of the shops open and left deposits of dry goods on tables and on the ground outside. The owners remained in their shops, lost in the gloom and wedged between dry goods. The assistants stood outside with pencils behind their ears or pencils tapping bill-pads with the funereally-coloured carbon paper peeping out from under the first sheet. Grocers’ shops, smelling damply of oil, sugar and salted fish. Vegetable stalls, damp but fresh, and smelling of earth. Grocers’ wives and children stood oily and confident behind counters. The women behind the vegetable stalls were old and correct with thin mournful faces; or they were young and plump with challenging and quarrelsome stares; with a big-eyed child or two hanging about behind the purple sweet potatoes to which dirt still clung; and babies in the background lying in condensed milk boxes. And all the time donkey-carts, horse-carts and ox-carts rumbled and jangled in the roadway, the heavy iron-rimmed wheels grating over gravel and sand and wobbling over the bumpy road. Continually long whips with knotted ends whistled and cracked, arousing brief enthusiasm in the animals. The men drivers sat on their carts; the boy drivers stood, shouting and whistling at their animals and their rivals; half a dozen races were always in progress.

Mr. Biswas returned to the back trace, his resolution shaken. “I am not going to take any job at all,” he told Bipti.

“Why don’t you go and make it up with Tara?”

“I don’t want to see Tara. I am going to kill myself

“That would be the best thing for you. And for me.”