Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Dehuti closed her eyes and pouted. “Me? I didn’t want it. I wish you would stop running round giving people the idea that I have modern ambitions.”

He laughed uneasily and scratched his bare leg; the nails left white marks.

“I have no hat to hang on a hatrack,” Dehuti said. “I don’t want a mirror to show me my ugly face.”

Ramchand scratched and winked at Mr. Biswas. “Ugly face? Ugly face?”

Dehuti said, “I don’t stand up in front of the hatrack combing my hair for hours. My hair is not pretty and curly enough.”

Ramchand accepted the compliment with a smile.

In the verandah, black and yellow in the light of the oil lamp, they sat down on low benches to eat. But although he was hungry, and although he knew that both Dehuti and Ramchand had much affection for him, Mr. Biswas found that his belly was beginning to rise and hurt, and he couldn’t eat. Their happiness, which he couldn’t share, had upset him. And it pained him more then to see Ramchand’s jumpy enthusiasm replaced by uncertainty. Dehuti’s sullen expression never changed; it was for just such a rebuff that she had been prepared.

He left soon after, promising to come back and see them one day, knowing that he wouldn’t, that the links between Dehuti and himself, never strong, had been broken, that from her too he had become separate. The desire to keep on looking for a job had left him. He supposed he had always known he would fall back on Tara for help. She liked him; Ajodha liked him. Perhaps he would apologize, and they would put him in the garage.

Then Alec reappeared in Pagotes, and there was no sign of engine grease on him. His hands and arms and face were spotted and streaked with paint of various colours, as were his long khaki trousers and white shirt, where each stain was rimmed with oil. When, at the end of a long, idle and uncertain week, Mr. Biswas saw him, Alec had a small tin of paint in one hand and a small brush in the other; he was standing on a ladder against a cafй in the Main Road and painting a sign, of which he had already achieved THE HUMMING BIRD CA.

Mr. Biswas was full of admiration.

“You like it, eh?” Alec came down the ladder, pulled out a large paint-spotted cloth from his back pocket and wiped his hands. “Got to shadow them. In two colours. Blue across, green down.”

“But that will spoil it, man.”

Alec spat out a cigarette that had burned down to his lips and gone dead. “It will look like a little carnival when I finish. But that is the way they want it.” He jerked his head contemptuously towards the proprietor of the Humming Bird Cafй who was leaning on his counter and looking at them suspiciously. The shelves at his back were half filled with bottles of aerated water. Flies buzzed about him, attracted by the sweat on his neck and those parts of his body exposed by his vest; flies with different tastes had settled on the coarse sugar on the rock cakes in his showcase.

To Alec Mr. Biswas explained his problem, and they talked for a while. Then they went into the tiny cafй and Alec bought two bottles of aerated water.

Alec said to the proprietor, “This is my assistant.”

The proprietor looked at Mr. Biswas. “How he so small?”

“Young firm,” Alec said. “Give youth a chance.”

“He could paint humming birds?”

“He want a lot of humming birds in the sign,” Alec explained to Mr. Biswas. “Hanging about and behind the lettering.”

“Like the Keskidee Cafй,” the proprietor said. “You see the sign he got?” He pointed obliquely across the road to another refreshment shack, and Mr. Biswas saw the sign. The letters were blocked in three colours and shadowed in three other colours. Keskidee birds stood on the K, perched on the D, hung from the C; on EE two keskidees billed.

Mr. Biswas couldn’t draw.

Alec said, “‘Course he could paint humming birds, if you really want them. The only thing is, it would look a little follow-fashion.”

“And too besides, it oldfashion,” Mr. Biswas said.

“I glad you say that,” Alec said. “Was what I been trying to tell him. The modern thing is to have lots of words. All the shops in Port of Spain have signs with nothing but words. Tell him.”

“What sort of words?” the proprietor said.

“Sweet drinks, cakes and ice,” Mr. Biswas said.

The proprietor shook his head.

“Beware of the dog,” Alec said.

“I ain’t got a dog.”

“Fresh fruits daily,” Alec went on. “Stick no bills by order.”

The proprietor shook his head.

“Trespassers will be prosecuted. Overseas visitors welcomed. If you don’t see what you require please ask. Our assistants will be pleased to help you with your inquiries.”

The proprietor was thinking.

“No hands wanted,” Alec said. “Come in and look around.”

The proprietor became alert. “Is exactly what I have to fight in this place.”

“Idlers keep out,” Mr. Biswas said.

“By order,” the proprietor said.

“Idlers keep out by order. A good sign,” Alec said. “This boy will do it for you in two twos.”

So Mr. Biswas became a sign-writer and wondered why he had never thought of using this gift before. With Alec’s help he worked on the cafй sign and to his delight and amazement it came out well enough to satisfy the proprietor. He had been used to designing letters with pen and pencil and was afraid that he would not be able to control a brush with paint. But he found that the brush, though flattening out disconcertingly at first, could be made to respond to the gentlest pressure; strokes were cleaner, curves truer. “Just turn the brush slowly in your fingers when you come to the curve,” Alec said; and curves held fewer problems after that. After IDLERS KEEP OUT BY ORDER he did more signs with Alec; his hand became surer, his strokes bolder, his feeling for letters finer. He thought R and S the most beautiful of Roman letters; no letter could express so many moods as R, without losing its beauty; and what could compare with the swing and rhythm of S? With a brush, large letters were easier than small, and he felt much satisfaction after he and Alec had covered long stretches of palings with signs for Pluko, which was good for the hair in various ways, and Anchor Cigarettes. There was some worry about the cigarette packet; they would have preferred to draw it closed, but the contractors wanted it open, condemning Mr. Biswas and Alec to draw not only the packet, but the silver foil, crumpled, and eight cigarettes, all marked ANCHOR, pulled out to varying lengths.

After a time he started to go again to Tara’s. She bore him no ill-will but he was disappointed to find that Ajodha no longer required him to read That Body of Yours . One of Bhandat’s sons now did that. Two things had happened in the rum-shop. Bhandat’s wife had died in childbirth, and Bhandat had left his sons and gone to live with his mistress in Port of Spain. The boys were taken in by Tara, who added Bhandat’s name to those never mentioned by her again. For years afterwards no one knew where or how Bhandat lived, though there were rumours that he lived in a slum in the city centre, surrounded by all sorts of quarrelling and disreputable people.

So Bhandat’s sons moved from the squalor of the rum-shop to the comfort of Tara’s house. It was a passage that Mr. Biswas had made often himself, and it was no surprise to him that the boys had soon settled in so well that Bhandat was forgotten and it was hard to think of his sons living anywhere else.

Mr. Biswas continued to paint signs. It was satisfying work, but it came irregularly. Alec wandered from district to district, sometimes working, sometimes not, and the partnership was spasmodic. There were many weeks when Mr. Biswas was out of work and could only read and design letters and practise his drawing. He learned to draw bottles, and in preparation for Christmas drew one Santa Claus after another until he had reduced it to a simple design in red, pink, white and black. Work, when it came, came in a rush. In September most shopkeepers said that they wanted no Christmas-signs nonsense that year. By December they had changed their minds, and Mr. Biswas worked late into the night doing Santa Clauses and holly and berries and snow-capped letters; the finished signs quickly blistered in the blazing sun. Occasionally there were inexplicable rashes of new signs, and a district was thronged for a fortnight or so with sign-writers, for no shopkeeper wished to employ a man who had been used by his rival. Every sign then was required to be more elaborate than the last, and for stretches the Main Road was dazzling with signs that were hard to read. Plainness was required only for the posters for Local Road Board Elections. Mr. Biswas did scores of these, many on cotton, which he had to stretch and pin to the mud wall of the verandah in the back trace. The paint leaked through and the wall became a blur of conflicting messages in different colours.