Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“I don’t want to know,” Mr. Biswas said. “I just don’t want to know. How about getting the house un-bless? You think Hari could manage that?”

She had a theory. “The people feeling shame. They owe too much. It used to happen in the store at home.”

“You know what I think it is? Is my face. I don’t think I have the face of a shopkeeper. I have the sort efface of a man who does give credit but can’t get it.” He got a mirror and studied his face. “That nose, with that ugly lump on top of it. Those Chinese eyes. Look, girl, suppose-I mean, just supposing you see me for the first time. Look at me and try to imagine that.”

She looked.

“All right. Close your eyes. Now open them. First time you see me. You just see me. What you would say I was?”

She couldn’t say.

“That is the whole blasted trouble,” he said. “I don’t look like anything at all. Shopkeeper, lawyer, doctor, labourer, overseer-I don’t look like any of them.”

The Samuel Smiles depression fell on him.

Shama was a puzzle. Within the girl who had served in the Tulsi Store and romped up and down the staircase of Hanuman House, the wit, the prankster, there were other Shamas, fully grown, it seemed, just waiting to be released: the wife, the housekeeper, and now the mother. With Mr. Biswas she continued to be brisk, uncomplaining and almost unaware of her pregnancy. But when she was visited by her sisters, who made it plain that the pregnancy was their business, Tulsi business, and had little to do with Mr. Biswas, a change came over her. She did not cease to be uncomplaining; but she also became someone who not so much suffered as endured. She fanned herself and spat often, which she never did when she was alone; but pregnant women were supposed to behave in this way. It was not that she was trying to impress the sisters and get their sympathy; she was anxious not to disappoint them or let herself down. And when her feet began to swell, Mr. Biswas wanted to say, “Well, you are complete and normal now. Everything is going as it should. You are just like your sisters.” For there was no doubt that this was what Shama expected from life: to be taken through every stage, to fulfil every function, to have her share of the established emotions: joy at a birth or marriage, distress during illness and hardship, grief at a death. Life, to be full, had to be this established pattern of sensation. Grief and joy, both equally awaited, were one. For Shama and her sisters and women like them, ambition, if the word could be used, was a series of negatives: not to be unmarried, not to be childless, not to be an undutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow.

Secretly, with the help of her sisters, the baby clothes were made. A number of Mr. Biswas’s floursacks disappeared; later they turned up as diapers. And the time came for Shama to go to Hanuman House. Sushila and Chinta came to fetch her; the pretence was still maintained that Mr. Biswas didn’t know why.

Then he discovered that Shama had made preparations for him as well. His clothes had been washed and darned; and he was moved, though not surprised, to find on the kitchen shelf little squares of shop-paper on which, in her Mission-school script that always deteriorated after the first two or three lines, Shama had pencilled recipes for the simplest meals, writing with a disregard for grammar and punctuation which he thought touching. How quaint, too, to find phrases he had only heard her speak committed to paper in this handwriting! In her instructions for the boiling of rice, for example, she told him to “throw in just a little pinch of salt”-he could see her bunching her long fingers-and to use “the blue enamel pot without the handle”. How often, crouched before the chulha fire, she had said to him, “Just hand me the blue pot without the handle.”

During the idle hours in the shop he had begun to choose names, mostly male ones: he never thought anything else likely. He wrote them on shop-paper, rolled them on his tongue, and tried them out on customers.

“Krishnadhar Haripratap Gokulnath Damodar Biswas. What do you think of that for a name? K. H. G. D. Biswas. Or what about Krishnadhar Gokul nath Haripratap Damodar Biswas. K. G. H. D.”

“You are not leaving much room for the pundit to give the child a name.”

“No pundit is giving any name to any child of mine.”

And on the back endpaper of the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare , a work of fatiguing illegibility, he wrote the names in large letters, as though his succession had already been settled. He would have used Bell’s Standard Elocutionist , still his favourite reading, if it had not suffered so much from the kick he had given it in the long room at Hanuman House; the covers hung loose and the endpapers had been torn, exposing the khaki-coloured boards. He had bought the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare for the sake of Julius Caesar , parts of which he had declaimed at Lai’s school. Every other play defeated him; the volume remained virtually unread and now, as a repository of the family records, proved to be a mistake. The endpaper blotted atrociously.

And the baby was a girl. But it was born at the correct time; it was born without difficulty; it was healthy; and Shama was absolutely well. He expected no less from her. He closed the shop and cycled to Hanuman House, and found that his daughter had already been named.

“Look at Savi,” Shama said.

“Savi?”

They were in Mrs. Tulsi’s room, the Rose Room, where all the sisters spent their confinements.

“It is a nice name,” Shama said.

Nice name; when all the way from The Chase he had been working on names, and had decided on Sarojini Lakshmi Kamala Devi.

“Seth and Hari chose it.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” Jerking his chin towards the baby, he asked in English, “They had it register?”

On the marble topped table next to the bed there was a sheet of paper under a brass plate. She handed that to him.

“Well! I glad she register. You know the government and nobody else did want to believe that I was even born. People had to swear and sign all sort of paper.”

“All of we was register,” Shama said.

“All of all-you would be register.” He looked at the certificate. “Savi? But I don’t see the name here at all. I only see Basso.”

She widened her eyes. “Shh!”

“I not going to let anybody call my child Basso.”

“Shh!”

He understood. Basso was the real name of the baby, Savi the calling name. The real name of a person could be used to damage that person, whereas the calling name had no validity and was only a convenience. He was relieved he wouldn’t have to call his daughter Basso. Still, what a name!

“Hari make that one up, eh? The holy ghost.”

“And Seth.”

“Trust the pundit and the big thug.”

“Man, what you doing?”

He was scribbling hard on the birth certificate.

“Look.” At the top of the certificate he had written: Real calling name : Lakshmi. Signed by Mohun Biswas, fathe r . Below that was the date.

They both felt that a government document, which should have remained inviolate, had been challenged.

He enjoyed her alarm, and looked at her closely for the first time since he had come. Her long hair was loose and spread about her pillow. To look at him she had to press her chin into her neck.

“You got a double chin,” he said. She didn’t reply.

Suddenly he jumped up. “What the hell is this?”

“Show me.”

He showed her the certificate. “Look. Occupation of father. Labourer. Labourer! Me! Where your family get all this bad blood, girl?”

“I didn’t see that.”