Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

The boy, no longer crying, was at last released. He sought comfort from an aunt, who calmed her baby, calmed the boy, said to the baby, “Come, kiss him. His mother has beaten him really badly today”; then to the boy, “Come, look how you are making him cry.” The whimpering boy kissed the crying baby and slowly the noise subsided.

“Good!” Sumati said, tears in her eyes. “Good! Everyone is satisfied now. And I suppose the soda water bottles have been made whole again. Nobody is losing eight cents a bottle now.”

“I didn’t ask anybody to beat their child, you hear,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Nobody asked,” Sumati said, to no one in particular. “I am just saying that everybody is now satisfied.”

She went to the tent and sat down in the section set aside for women and girls. The boy sat among the men.

The road was now lined with villagers and a few outsiders as well. They had not been attracted by the flogging, though that had encouraged the children of the village to gather a little earlier than might have been expected. They came for the food that would be distributed after the ceremony. Among these expectant uninvited guests Mr. Biswas noticed two of the village shopkeepers.

The cooking was being done, under the superintendence of Sushila, over an open fire-hole in the yard. Sisters stirred enormous black cauldrons brought for the occasion from Hanuman House. They sweated and complained but they were happy. Though there was no need for it, some had stayed awake all the previous night, peeling potatoes, cleaning rice, cutting vegetables, singing, drinking coffee. They had prepared bin after bin of rice, bucket upon bucket of lentils and vegetables, vats of tea and coffee, volumes of chapattis.

Mr. Biswas had given up trying to work out the cost. “Just going to leave me a damn pauper,” he said. He walked along the hibiscus hedge, plucked leaves, chewed them and spat them out.

“You have a nice little property here, Mohun.”

It was Mrs. Tulsi, looking tired after her rest on the cast iron fourposter. She had used the English word “property”; it had an acquisitive, self-satisfied flavour; he would have preferred it if she had said “shop” or “place”.

“Nice?” he said, not sure whether she was being satirical or not.

“Very nice little property.”

“Walls falling down in the shop.”

“They wouldn’t fall.”

“Roof leaking in the bedroom.”

“It doesn’t rain all the time.”

“And I don’t sleep all the time either. Want a new kitchen.”

“The kitchen looks all right to me.”

“And who does eat all the time, eh? We could do with a extra room.”

“What’s the matter? You want a Hanuman House right away?”

“I don’t want a Hanuman House at all.”

“Look,” Mrs. Tulsi said. They were in the gallery now. “You don’t want an extra room at all. You could just hang some sugarsacks on these posts during the night, and you have your extra room.”

He looked at her. She was in earnest.

“Take them away in the morning,” she said, “and you have your gallery again.”

“Sugarsack, eh?”

“Just six or seven. You wouldn’t need any more.”

I would like to bury you in one, Mr. Biswas thought. He said, “You going to send me some of these sugarsacks?”

“You’re a shopkeeper,” she said. “You have more than me.”

“Don’t worry. I was just joking. Just send me a coal barrel. You could get a whole family in a coal barrel. You didn’t know that?”

She was too surprised to speak.

“I don’t know why they still building houses,” Mr. Biswas said. “Nobody don’t want a house these days. They just want a coal barrel. One coal barrel for one person. Whenever a baby born just get another coal barrel. You wouldn’t see any houses anywhere then. Just a yard with five or six coal barrels standing up in two or three rows.”

Mrs. Tulsi patted her lips with her veil, turned away and stepped into the yard. Faintly she called, “Sushila.”

“And you could get Hari to bless the barrels right in Hanuman House,” Mr. Biswas said. “No need to bring him all the way to The Chase.”

Sushila came and, giving Mr. Biswas a hard stare, offered her arm to Mrs. Tulsi. “What has happened, Mai?”

In the shop a baby woke and screamed and drowned Mrs. Tulsi’s words.

Sushila led Mrs. Tulsi to the tent.

Mr. Biswas went to the bedroom. The window was closed and the room was dark, but enough light came in to make everything distinct: his clothes on the wall, the bed rumpled from Mrs. Tulsi’s rest. Violating his fastidiousness, he lay down on the bed. The musty smell of old thatch was mingled with the smell of Mrs. Tulsi’s medicaments: bay rum, soft candles, Canadian Healing Oil, ammonia. He didn’t feel a small man, but the clothes which hung so despairingly from the nail on the mud wall were definitely the clothes of a small man, comic, make-believe clothes.

He wondered what Samuel Smiles would have thought of him.

But perhaps he could change. Leave. Leave Shama, forget the Tulsis, forget everybody. But go where? And do what? What could he do? Apart from becoming a bus-conductor, working as a labourer on the sugar-estates or on the roads, owning a shop. Would Samuel Smiles have seen more than that?

He was in a state between waking and sleeping when there was a rattling on the door: no ordinary rattling: this was rattling with a purpose: he recognized Shama’s hand. He shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He heard the hook lift and fall. She came into the room and even on the earth floor her footsteps were heavy, meant to be noticed. He felt her standing at the side of the fourposter, looking down at him. He stiffened; his breathing changed.

“Well, you make me really proud of you today,” Shama said.

And, really, it wasn’t what he was expecting at all. He had grown so used to her devotion at The Chase that he expected her to take his side, if only in private. All the softness went out of him.

Shama sighed.

He got up. “The house done bless?”

She flung back her long hair, still damp and straight, and he could see the sandalwood marks on her forehead: so strange on a woman. They made her look terrifyingly holy and unfamiliar.

“What you waiting for? Get out and make sure it properly bless.”

She was surprised by his vehemence and, without sighing or speaking, left the room.

He heard her making excuses for him.

“He has a headache.”

He recognized the tone as the one used by friendly sisters to discuss the infirmities of their husbands. It was Shama’s plea to a sister to exchange intimacies, to show support.

He hated Shama for it, yet found himself anxiously waiting for someone to reply, to discuss his illness sympathetically, headache though it was.

But no one even said, “Give him an aspirin.”

Still, he was pleased that Shama had tried.

The house-blessing seriously depleted Mr. Biswas’s resources; and after the ceremony, affairs in the shop began to go less well. One of the shopkeepers Mr. Biswas had fed sold his establishment. Another man moved in; his business prospered. It was the pattern of trade in The Chase.

“Well, one thing sure,” Mr. Biswas said. “The house bless. You think everybody was just waiting for all that free food to stop coming here?”

“You give too much credit,” Shama said. “You must get those people to pay you.”

“You want me to go and beat them?”

And when she took out the Shorthand Reporter’s Notebook, he said, “What you want to bust your brains adding up accounts for? I could tell you straight off. Ought oughts are ought.”

She worked out the expenses of the house-blessing and added up the outstanding credit.