Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Mrs. Tulsi chewed and said nothing.

Seth said: “I know Ajodha. You want me to go and see him?”

Incomprehension, surprise, then panic, overwhelmed Mr. Biswas. The child,” he said desperately. “What about the child?”

“What about her?” Seth said. “She is a good child. A little bit of reading and writing even.”

“A little bit of reading and writing-” Mr. Biswas echoed, trying to gain time.

Seth, chewing, his right hand working dexterously with roti and beans, made a dismissing gesture with his left hand. “Just a little bit. So much. Nothing to worry about. In two or three years she might even forget.” And he gave a little laugh. He wore false teeth which clacked every time he chewed.

“The child-” Mr. Biswas said.

Mrs. Tulsi stared at him.

“I mean,” said Mr. Biswas, “the child knows?”

“Nothing at all,” Seth said appeasingly.

“I mean,” said Mr. Biswas, “does the child like me?”

Mrs. Tulsi looked as though she couldn’t understand. Chewing, with lingering squelchy sounds, she raised Mr. Biswas’s note with her free hand and said, “What’s the matter? You don’t like the child?”

“Yes,” Mr. Biswas said helplessly. “I like the child.”

“That is the main thing,” Seth said. “We don’t want to force you to do anything. Are we forcing you?”

Mr. Biswas remained silent.

Seth gave another disparaging little laugh and poured tea into his mouth, holding the cup away from his lips, chewing and clacking between pours. “Eh, boy, are we forcing you?”

“No,” Mr. Biswas said. “You are not forcing me.”

“All right, then. What’s upsetting you?”

Mrs. Tulsi smiled at Mr. Biswas. “The poor boy is shy. I know.”

“I am not shy and I am not upset,” Mr. Biswas said, and the aggression in his voice so startled him that he continued softly, “It’s only that-well, it’s only that I have no money to start thinking about getting married.”

Mrs. Tulsi became as stern as he had seen her in the store that morning. “Why did you write this then?” She waved the note.

“Ach! Don’t worry with him,” Seth said. “No money! Ajodha’s family, and no money!”

Mr. Biswas thought it would be useless to explain.

Mrs. Tulsi became calmer. “If your father was worried about money, he wouldn’t have married at all.”

Seth nodded solemnly.

Mr. Biswas was puzzled by her use of the words “your father”. At first he had thought she was speaking to Seth alone, but then he saw that the statement had wider, alarming implications.

Faces of children and women peeped out from the kitchen doorway.

The world was too small, the Tulsi family too large. He felt trapped.

How often, in the years to come, at Hanuman House or in the house at Shorthills or in the house in Port of Spain, living in one room, with some of his children sleeping on the next bed, and Shama, the prankster, the server of black cotton stockings, sleeping downstairs with the other children, how often did Mr. Biswas regret his weakness, his inarticulateness, that evening! How often did he try to make events appear grander, more planned and less absurd than they were!

And the most absurd feature of that evening was to come. When he had left Hanuman House and was cycling back to Pagotes, he actually felt elated! In the large, musty hall with the sooty kitchen at one end, the furniture-choked landing on one side, and the dark, cobwebbed loft on the other, he had been overpowered and frightened by Seth and Mrs. Tulsi and all the Tulsi women and children; they were strange and had appeared too strong; he wanted nothing so much then as to be free of that house. But now the elation he felt was not that of relief. He felt he had been involved in large events. He felt he had achieved status.

His way lay along the County Road and the Eastern Main Road. Both were lined for stretches with houses that were ambitious, incomplete, unpainted, often skeletal, with wooden frames that had grown grey and mildewed while their owners lived in one or two imperfectly enclosed rooms. Through unfinished partitions, patched up with box-boards, tin and canvas, the family clothing could be seen hanging on lengths of string stretched across the inhabited rooms like bunting; no beds were to be seen, only a table and chair perhaps, and many boxes. Twice a day he cycled past these houses, but that evening he saw them as for the first time. From such failure, which until only that morning awaited him, he had by one stroke made himself exempt.

And when that evening Alec asked in his friendly mocking way, “How the girl, man?” Mr. Biswas said happily, “Well, I see the mother.”

Alec was stupefied. “The mother? But what the hell you gone and put yourself in?”

All Mr. Biswas’s dread returned, but he said, “Is all right. I got my eyes open. Good family, you know. Money. Acres and acres of land. No more sign-painting for me.”

Alec didn’t look reassured. “How you manage this so quick?”

“Well, I see this girl, you know. I see this girl and she was looking at me, and I was looking at she. So I give she a little of the old sweet talk and I see that she was liking me too. And, well, to cut a long story short, I ask to see the mother. Rich people, you know. Big house.”

But he was worried, and spent much time that evening wondering whether he should go back to Hanuman House. He began feeling that it was he who had acted, and was unwilling to believe that he had acted foolishly. And, after all, the girl was good-looking. And there would be a handsome dowry. Against this he could set only his fear, and a regret he could explain to no one: he would be losing romance forever, since there could be no romance at Hanuman House.

In the morning everything seemed so ordinary that both his fear and regret became unreal, and he saw no reason why he should behave unusually.

He went back to the Tulsi Store and painted a column.

He was invited to lunch in the hall, off lentils, spinach and a mound of rice on a brass plate. Flies buzzed on fresh food-stains all along the pitchpine table. He disliked the food and disliked eating off brass plates. Mrs. Tulsi, who was not eating herself, sat next to him, stared at his plate, brushed the flies away from it with one hand, and talked.

At one stage she directed his attention to a framed photograph on the wall below the loft. The photograph, blurred at the edges and in many other places, was of a moustached man in turban, jacket and dhoti, with beads around his neck, caste-marks on his forehead and an unfurled umbrella on the crook of his left arm. It was Pundit Tulsi.

“We never had a quarrel,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Suppose I wanted to go to Port of Spain, and he didn’t. You think we’d quarrel about a thing like that? No. We would sit down and talk it over, and he would say, ‘All right, let us go.’ Or I would say, ‘All right, we won’t go.’ That’s the way we were, you know.”

She had grown almost maudlin, and Mr. Biswas was trying to appear solemn while chewing. He chewed slowly and wondered whether he shouldn’t stop altogether; but whenever he stopped eating Mrs. Tulsi stopped talking.

“This house,” Mrs. Tulsi said, blowing her nose, wiping her eyes with her veil and waving a hand in a fatigued way, “this house-he built it with his own hands. Those walls aren’t concrete, you know. Did you know that?”

Mr. Biswas went on eating.

“They looked like concrete to you, didn’t they?”

“Yes, they looked like concrete.”

“It looks like concrete to everybody . But everybody is wrong. Those walls are really made of clay bricks. Clay bricks,” she repeated, staring at Mr. Biswas’s plate and waiting for him to say something.