Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

The Tulsi Store was disappointing. The faзade that promised such an amplitude of space concealed a building which was trapezoid in plan and not deep. There were no windows and light came only from the two narrow doors at the front and the single door at the back, which opened on to a covered courtyard. The walls, of uneven thickness, curved here and jutted there, and the shop abounded in awkward, empty, cobwebbed corners. Awkward, too, were the thick ugly columns, whose number dismayed Mr. Biswas because he had undertaken, among other things, to paint signs on all of them.

He began by decorating the top of the back wall with an enormous sign. This he illustrated meaninglessly with a drawing of Punch, who appeared incongruously gay and roguish in the austere shop where goods were stored rather than displayed and the assistants were grave and unenthusiastic.

These assistants, he had learned with surprise, were all members of the House. He could not therefore let his eyes rove as freely as usual among the unmarried girls. So, as circumspectly as he could, he studied them while he worked, and decided that the most attractive was a girl of about sixteen, whom the others called Shama. She was of medium height, slender but firm, with fine features, and though he disliked her voice, he was enchanted by her smile. So enchanted, that after a few days he would very much have liked to do the low and possibly dangerous thing of talking to her. The presence of her sisters and brothers-in-law deterred him, as well as the unpredictable and forbidding appearances of Seth, dressed more like a plantation overseer than a store manager. Still, he stared at her with growing frankness. When she found him out he looked away, became very busy with his brushes and shaped his lips as though he were whistling softly. In fact he couldn’t whistle; all he did was to expel air almost soundlessly through the lecherous gap in his top teeth.

When she had responded to his stares a few times he felt that a certain communion had been established between them; and, meeting Alec in Pagotes, where Alec was working in Ajodha’s garage once again, as a mechanic and a painter of buses and signs, Mr. Biswas said, “I got a girl in Arwacas.”

Alec was congratulatory. “Like I did say, these things come when you least expect them. What you was fussing so for?”

And a few days later Bhandat’s eldest boy said, “Mohun, I hear you got a girl at long last, man.” He was patronizing; it was well known that he was having an affair with a woman of another race by whom he had already had a child; he was proud both of the child and its illegitimacy.

The news of the girl at Arwacas spread and Mr. Biswas enjoyed some glory at Pagotes until Bhandat’s younger son, a prognathous, contemptuous boy, said, “I feel you lying like hell, you know.”

When Mr. Biswas went to Hanuman House the next day he had a note in his pocket, which he intended to give to Shama. She was busy all morning, but just before noon, when the store closed for lunch, there was a lull and her counter was free. He came down the ladder, whistling in his way. Unnecessarily, he began stacking and restacking his paint tins. Then, preoccupied and frowning, he walked about the store, looking for tins that were not there. He passed Shama’s counter and, without looking at her, placed the note under a bolt of cloth. The note was crumpled and slightly dirty and looked ineffectual. But she saw it. She looked away and smiled. It was not a smile of complicity or pleasure; it was a smile that told Mr. Biswas he had made a fool of himself. He felt exceedingly foolish, and wondered whether he shouldn’t take back his note and abandon Shama at once.

While he hesitated a fat Negro woman went to Shama’s counter and asked for flesh-coloured stockings, which were then enjoying some vogue in rural Trinidad.

Shama, still smiling, took down a box and held up a pair of black cotton stockings.

“Eh !” The woman’s gasp could be heard throughout the shop. “You playing with me? How the hell all-you get so fresh and conceited?” She began to curse. “Playing with me!” She pulled boxes and bolts of cloth off the counter and hurled them to the floor and every time something crashed she shouted, “Playing with me!” One of the Tulsi sons-in-law ran up to pacify her. She cuffed him back. “Where the old lady?” she called, and screamed, “Mai! Mai!” as though in great pain.

Shama had ceased to smile. Fright was plain on her face. Mr. Biswas had no desire to comfort her. She looked so much like a child now that he only became more ashamed of the note. The bolt of cloth which concealed it had been thrown to the ground, and the note was exposed, caught at the end of the brass yardstick that was screwed to the counter.

He moved towards the counter, but was driven back by the woman’s fat flailing arms.

Then silence fell on the shop. The woman’s arms became still. Through the back doorway, to the right of the counter, Mrs. Tulsi appeared. She was as laden as Tara with jewellery; she lacked Tara’s sprightliness but was statelier; her face, though not plump, was slack, as if unexercised.

Mr. Biswas moved back to his tins and brushes.

“Yes, ma’am, I want to see you .” The woman was breathless with anger. “I want to see you . I want you to beat that child, ma’am. I want you to beat that conceited, rude child of yours.”

“All right, miss. All right.” Mrs. Tulsi pressed her thin lips together repeatedly. “Tell me what happened.” She spoke English in a slow, precise way which surprised Mr. Biswas and filled him with apprehension. She was now behind the counter and her fingers which, like her face, were creased rather than wrinkled, rubbed along the brass yardstick. From time to time, while she listened, she pressed the corner of her veil over her moving lips.

Mr. Biswas, now busily cleaning brushes, wiping them dry, and putting soap in the bristle to keep it supple, was sure that Mrs. Tulsi was listening with only half a mind, that her eyes had been caught by the note: I love you and I want to talk to you .

Mrs. Tulsi spoke some abuse to Shama in Hindi, the obscenity of which startled Mr. Biswas. The woman looked pacified. Mrs. Tulsi promised to look further into the matter and gave the woman a pair of flesh-coloured stockings free. The woman began to retell her story. Mrs. Tulsi, treating the matter as closed, repeated that she was giving the stockings free. The woman went on unhurriedly to the end of the story. Then she walked slowly out of the shop, muttering, exaggeratedly swinging her large hips.

The note was in Mrs. Tulsi’s hand. She held it just above the counter, far from her eyes, and read it, patting her lips with her veil.

“Shama, that was a shameless thing to do.”

“I wasn’t thinking, Mai,” Shama said, and burst into tears, like a girl about to be flogged.

Mr. Biswas’s disenchantment was complete.

Mrs. Tulsi, holding her veil to her chin, nodded absently, still looking at the note.

Mr. Biswas slunk out of the store. He went to Mrs. Seeung’s, a large cafй in the High Street, and ordered a sardine roll and a bottle of aerated water. The sardines were dry, the onion offended him, and the bread had a crust that cut the inside of his lips. He drew comfort only from the thought that he had not signed the note and could deny writing it.

When he went back to the store he was determined to pretend that nothing had happened, determined never to look at Shama again. Carefully he prepared his brushes and set to work. He was relieved that no one showed an interest in him; and more relieved to find that Shama was not in the store that afternoon. With a light heart he outlined Punch’s dog on the irregular surface of the whitewashed column. Below the dog he ruled lines and sketched BARGAINS! BARGAINS! He painted the dog red, the first BARGAINS! black, the second blue. Moving a rung or two down the ladder he ruled more lines, and between these lines he detailed some of the bargains the Tulsi Store offered, in letters which he “cut out”, painting a section of the column red, leaving the letters cut out in the whitewash. Along the top and bottom of the red strip he left small circles of whitewash; these he gashed with one red stroke, to give the impression that a huge red plaque had been screwed on to the pillar; it was one of Alec’s devices. The work absorbed him all afternoon. Shama never appeared in the store, and for minutes he forgot about the morning’s happenings.