Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“Trust Seth. Look. Name of informant: R. N. Seth. Occupation: Estate Manager.”

“I wonder why he do that.”

“Look, the next time you want a informant, eh, just let me know. Calling Lakshmi Basso and Savi. Hello, Lakshmi. Lakshmi, is me, your father, occupation-occupation what, girl? Painter?”

“It make you sound like a house painter.”

“Sign-painter? Shopkeeper? God, not that!” He took the certificate and began scribbling. “Proprietor,” he said, passing the certificate to her.

“But you can’t call yourself a proprietor. The shop belong to Mai.”

“You can’t call me a labourer either.”

“They could bring you up for this.”

“Let them try.”

“You better go now, man.”

The baby was stirring.

“Hello, Lakshmi.”

“Savi.”

“Basso.”

“Shh!”

“Talk about the old thug. The old scorpion, if you ask me. The old Scorpio.”

He left the dark room with its close medicinal smells, its basins and its pile of diapers and came out into the drawing-room where at one end the two tall chairs stood like thrones. He went through the wooden bridge to the verandah of the old upstairs where Hari usually sat reading his unwieldy scriptures. Shyly, he came down the stairs into the hall, anticipating much attention as the father of the newest baby in Hanuman House. No one particularly looked at him. The hall was full of children eating gloomily. Among them he recognized the contortionist and the girl who had been running the house-game at The Chase. He smelled sulphur and saw that the children were not eating food but a yellow powder mixed with what looked like condensed milk.

He asked, “What is that, eh?”

The contortionist grimaced and said, “Sulphur and condensed milk.”

“Food getting expensive, eh?”

“Is for the eggzema,” the house-player said.

She dipped her finger in condensed milk, in sulphur, then put her finger in her mouth. Hurriedly she repeated the action.

Mrs. Tulsi had come out of the black kitchen doorway.

“Sulphur and condensed milk,” Mr. Biswas said.

“To sweeten it,” Mrs. Tulsi said. Again she had forgiven him.

“Sweeten!” the contortionist whispered loudly. “My foot.” Her achievements gave her unusual licence.

“Very good for the eczema.” Mrs. Tulsi sat down next to the contortionist, took up her plate and shook back the sulphur from the rim, over which the contortionist had been steadily spilling sulphur on to the table. “Have you seen your daughter, Mohun?”

“Lakshmi?”

“Lakshmi?”

“Lakshmi. My daughter. That is the name I choose.”

“Shama looks well.” Mrs. Tulsi brushed the spilled sulphur off the table on to her palm and shook the palm over the condensed milk, which the contortionist had so far kept virgin. “I have put her in the Rose Room. My room.”

Mr. Biswas said nothing.

Mrs. Tulsi patted the bench. “Come and sit here, Mohun.”

He sat beside her.

“The Lord gives,” Mrs. Tulsi said abruptly in English.

Concealing his surprise, Mr. Biswas nodded. He knew Mrs. Tulsi’s philosophizing manner. Slowly, and with the utmost solemnity, she made a number of simple, unconnected statements; the effect was one of puzzling profundity.

“Everything comes, bit by bit,” she said. “We must forgive. As your father used to say”-she pointed to the photographs on the wall-“what is for you is for you. What is not for you is not for you.”

Against his will Mr. Biswas found himself listening gravely and nodding in agreement.

Mrs. Tulsi sniffed and pressed her veil to her nose. “A year ago, who would have thought that you would be sitting here, in this hall, with these children, as my son-in-law and a father? Life is full of these surprises. But they are not really surprising. You are responsible for a life now, Mohun.” She began to cry. She put her hand on Mr. Biswas’s shoulder, not to comfort him, but urging him to comfort her. “I let Shama have my room. The Rose Room. I know that you are worried about the future. Don’t tell me. 1 know.” She patted his shoulder.

He was trapped by her mood. He forgot the children eating sulphur and condensed milk, and shook his head as if to admit that he had thought profoundly and with despair of the future.

Having trapped him in the mood, she removed her hand, blew her nose and dried her eyes. “Whatever happens, you keep on living. Whatever happens. Until the Lord sees fit to take you away.” The last sentence was in English; it took him aback, and broke the spell. “As He did with your dear father. But until that time comes, no matter how they starve you or how they treat you, they can never kill you.”

They, Mr. Biswas thought, who are they?

Then Seth stamped into the hall with his muddy bluchers and the children applied themselves with zeal to the sulphur powder.

“Mohun,” Seth said. “See your daughter? You surprise me, man.”

The contortionist giggled. Mrs. Tulsi smiled.

You traitor, Mr. Biswas thought, you old she-fox traitor.

“Well, you are a big man now, Mohun,” Seth said. “Husband and father. Don’t start behaving like a little boy again. The shop gone bust yet?”

“Give it a little time,” Mr. Biswas said, standing up. “After all, is only about four months since Hari bless it.”

The contortionist laughed; for the first time Mr. Biswas felt charitably towards this girl. Encouraged, he added, “You think we could get him to un-bless it?”

There was more laughter.

Seth shouted for his wife and food.

At the mention of food the children looked up longingly.

“No food for none of all-you today,” Seth said. “This will teach you to play in dirt and give yourself eggzema.”

Mrs. Tulsi was at Mr. Biswas’s side. She was solemn again. “It comes bit by bit.” She was whispering now, for sisters were coming out of the kitchen with brass plates and dishes. “You never thought, I expect, that your own first child would be born in a place like this.”

He shook his head.

“Remember, they can’t kill you.”

That “they” again.

“Oh,” Mr. Biswas said. “So it have three in the family now.”

She was warned by his tone.

“Send me a barrel,” he said loudly. “A small coal barrel.”

He came out through the side gate and wheeled his cycle past the arcade, which was already filling up with the evening crowd of old India-born men who came there to smoke and talk. He cycled to Misir’s rickety little wooden house and called at the lighted window.

Misir pushed his head past the lace curtain and said, “Just the man I want to see. Come in.”

Misir said he had packed his wife and children off to his mother-in-law. Mr. Biswas guessed the reason to be a quarrel or a pregnancy.

“Been working like hell without them, too,” Misir said. “Writing stories.”

“For the Sentinel ?”

“Short stories,” Misir said with his old impatience. “Just sit down and listen.”

Misir’s first story was about a man who had been out of work for months and was starving. His five children were starving; his wife was having another baby. It was December and the shops were full of food and toys. On Christmas eve the man got a job. Going home that evening, he was knocked down and killed by a motorcar that didn’t stop.

“Helluva thing,” Mr. Biswas said. “I like the part about the car not stopping.”

Misir smiled, and said fiercely, “But life is like that. Is not a fairy-story. No once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-rajah nonsense. Listen to this one.”

Misir’s second story was about a man who had been out of work for months and was starving. To keep his large family he began selling his possessions, and finally he had nothing left but a two-shilling sweepstake ticket. He didn’t want to sell it, but one of his children fell dangerously ill and needed medicine. He sold the ticket for a shilling and bought medicine. The child died; the ticket he had sold won the sweepstake.