Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Mr. Biswas moved from Hanuman House with little trouble. He had little to move: his clothes, a few books and magazines, his painting equipment. Shama had much more. She had many clothes; and just before she left, she was given bolts of cloth by Mrs. Tulsi straight from the shelves of the Tulsi Store. It was Shama, too, who thought of buying pots and pans and cups and plates; and though she got them at cost price from the Tulsi Store, Mr. Biswas was disturbed to see that his savings, sign-writing money accumulated during his stay at Hanuman House, had begun to melt even before he had moved.

Their goods barely filled a donkey-cart, and their arrival at The Chase was noted by a waiting crowd with pity and some hostility. The hostility came from rival shopkeepers. And Mr. Biswas, shakily perched on one of Shama’s bundles, with the clang of those cost-price but expensive pans in his ears, was unable to ignore the hostility of Shama herself. She had kept up her martyr’s attitude throughout the journey, silently staring at the road through the piquets of the cart, holding on her lap a box containing a Japanese coffee-set of intricate and fantastic design, part of a consignment the Tulsi Store had not been able to sell after three years, and given by Seth as a belated wedding present. Nor did Mr. Biswas fail to notice that The Chase appeared to be managing quite well without his shop, which had been closed, as he knew, for many months.

“Is the sort of place you could build up,” he said to the carter.

The carter nodded non-committally, looking neither at Mr. Biswas nor at the crowd but straight at his donkey, and aiming a gentle lash at the animal’s eye.

And Shama sighed: the sigh which now told Mr. Biswas that she thought him stupid, boring and shaming.

The cart stopped.

“Whoa!” some boys shouted.

Looking stern, preoccupied and, as he hoped, dangerous, Mr. Biswas became very busy, helping the carter to unload. They carried bundles and boxes through the back rooms smelling of dust to the dark shop, warm in the late afternoon with the smell of coarse brown sugar and stale coconut oil. The white lines of light between the boards of the front door came from a bright, open world; movements inside the shop sounded furtive.

Their possessions, spread out on the counter, didn’t take up much space.

“Only the first load,” Mr. Biswas said to the carter. “Have a pile of other stuff to come.”

The carter said nothing.

“Oh.” Mr. Biswas remembered the carter had to be paid. More money.

The man took the dirty blue dollar-note and left.

“Is the last time he carry anything for me,” Mr. Biswas said. “I could tell him that.”

There was silence in the closed, stuffy shop.

“Is the sort of place you could build up,” Mr. Biswas said.

His eyes became accustomed to the darkness and he looked about him. On a top shelf he saw some tins, apparently abandoned by the previous shopkeeper. About this person Mr. Biswas now began to speculate. There was ambition and despair in these tins: their faded labels had been nibbled by rats and stained by flies; some tins had no labels at all.

He heard the carter shouting at his donkey as the cart turned in the narrow road; villagers gave advice, boys shouted encouragement, a whip repeatedly cracked, hoofbeats sounded awkward and irregular; then, with a jangle of harness, a cracking of the whip and a shout, the cart was off, cheered by the village boys.

Shama started to cry. But this time she didn’t cry silently, with the tears running down from the expressionless eyes. She sobbed like a child, leaning over the box with the Japanese coffee-set on the counter. “You wanted this. You wanted to paddle your own canoe. In all my life I never was so shamed as today. People standing up and laughing. This is what you want to paddle your own canoe with.” She covered her eyes with one hand and waved at the bundles on the counter with the other.

He wanted to comfort her. But he needed comfort himself. How lonely the shop was! And how frightening! He had never thought it would be like this when he found himself in an establishment of his own. It was late afternoon; Hanuman House would be warm and noisy with activity. Here he was afraid to disturb the silence, afraid to open the door of the shop, to step into the light.

And in the end it was Shama who gave him comfort. For presendy she stopped crying, gave a long, decisive blow to her nose and began sweeping, setting up, putting away. He followed her about, watching, offering help, glad to be told to do something and enjoying it when she reproved him for doing it badly.

In his careless retreat the previous tenant had abandoned two articles of furniture to the Tulsis; these had now passed to Mr. Biswas. In one of the back rooms there was a large, canopy-less cast iron fourposter whose black enamel paint was chipped and lacklustre.

“Smell,” Shama said, holding a bedboard to Mr. Biswas’s nose. It had the piercing acrid smell of bedbugs. She doused the boards with kerosene. It wouldn’t kill the bugs, she said. But it would keep them quiet for the time being.

And for years Mr. Biswas was to know, particularly on a Saturday morning, the smell of kerosene and bedbugs. The boards changed; the mattress changed; but the bugs remained, following the fourposter wherever it went, from The Chase to Green Vale to Port of Spain to the house at Shorthills and, finally, to the house in Sikkim Street, where it nearly filled one of the two bedrooms on the upper floor.

The other piece of furniture that came with the shop was a kitchen table, small, low, and so neatly made that it stood, not in the kitchen in the yard, but in a bedroom. It was on this table, after much dusting and washing and wiping, that Shama placed her clothes and bolts of cloth; the parcel with the Japanese coffee-set she put below it, on the earth floor. Mr. Biswas no longer thought the coffee-set, and Shama’s attitude to it, absurd. Feeling grateful to Shama, he felt tender towards her coffee-set. He was not prepared for such a change in himself; but then he was astonished at the change in Shama. Till the last she had protested at leaving Hanuman House, but now she behaved as though she moved into a derelict house every day. Her actions were assertive, wasteful and unnecessarily noisy. They filled shop and house; they banished silence and loneliness.

And, further miracle, she produced a meal from that kitchen in the yard. He could not look on it as simply food. For the first time a meal had been prepared in a house which was his own. He felt abashed; and was glad that Shama did not treat it as an occasion. Only, feeding him at the table in the bedroom, by the light of a brand-new cost-price oil lamp from the Tulsi Store, she didn’t sigh or stare or look weary and impatient as she had done in the lotus-decorated long room at Hanuman House.

In a few weeks the house became cleaner and habitable. The atmosphere of decay and disuse, while not disappearing, was made to retreat and held in check. Nothing could be done about the walls of the shop; no amount of washing could remove the smell of oil and sugar; the lower shelves and the two planks on the concrete floor behind the counter remained black with grease that had dried, and rough with dust that had stuck. They poured disinfectant everywhere, until they were almost choked by its fumes. But as the days passed, their zeal abated. They remembered the previous tenants less and less; and the grime, increasingly familiar, eventually became their own, and therefore supportable. Only slight improvements were made to the kitchen. “It standing up just by the grace of God,” Mr. Biswas said. “Pull out one board, and the whole thing tumble down.” The earth floor of the bedrooms and gallery was mended, packed a little higher and plastered to a smooth, grey dustlessness. The Japanese coffee-set was taken out of its box and displayed on the table, where it appeared to be in peril; but Shama said it would remain there only until a better place was found.