Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“Jankie ask for time. Pritam too. But they going to pay, especially as they see the others paying up.”

“Good, good,” Mr. Biswas said. “I could do with their money right now.”

Moti folded the sheet of paper.

“So?” Mr. Biswas said.

Moti put the paper in his pocket.

Mr. Biswas pretended he hadn’t been waiting for anything. “And Mungroo?”

“I glad you ask about him. As a matter of fact, he giving us a little trouble.” Moti took out a long envelope from his trouser pocket and handed it to Mr. Biswas. “This is for you.”

It was a communication, on stiff paper, from the Attorney-General.

Mr. Biswas read with disbelief, annoyance and distress.

“Who is this damn Muslim Mahmoud who stamp his dirty name down here? He is a solicitor and conveyancer too, eh? I thought Seebaran was handling all the work in the Petty Civil.”

“No, no,” Moti said soothingly. “This is Assize Court business.”

“Assize. Assize ! So this is what Seebaran land me up in!”

“Seebaran ain’t land you up in nothing. You land yourself. Read the schedule.”

“O God! Look, look. Mungroo bringing me up for damaging his credit!”

“And he have a good case too. You shouldn’t go around telling people he owe you money. Over and over I hear Seebaran telling clients, ‘Leave everything to me and keep your mouth shut. Keep your mouth shut. Keep your mouth shut and leave everything to me.’ Over and over. But clients don’t listen. I know clients who talk their way straight to the gallows.”

“Seebaran didn’t tell me a damn thing. I ain’t even see the blasted man yet.”

“He want to see you now.”

“Just let me get this straight. Mungroo owe me money. I say so and I damage his credit. So now he can’t go around taking goods on trust and not paying. So he bring me up. Exactly what the hell this is? And what about those slips?”

“They wasn’t signed. I did warn you about that, remember. But you didn’t listen. Clients don’t listen. Is a serious business, man. It got Seebaran worried like anything. I could tell you.”

“Hear you. It got Seebaran worried. What about me?”

“Seebaran don’t think you would have a chance in court. He say it would be better to settle outside.”

“You mean shell out. All right. Pounds, shillings and pence, dollars and cents. Let me hear who have to get how much. This is the way Seebaran handling all the work in the Petty Civil, eh?”

“Seebaran only want to help you out, you know. You could take your case to some K c or the other and pay him a hundred guineas before he ask you to sit down. Nobody stopping you.”

Mr. Biswas listened. He learned with surprise that there had already been friendly discussions between Mungroo’s lawyer, Mahmoud, and Seebaran; so that the case had been raised and virtually settled without his knowing anything about it at all. It appeared that Mungroo was willing, for one hundred dollars, to call off the action. The fees of both lawyers came to a hundred dollars as well, though Seebaran, appreciating Mr. Biswas’s position, had said he would accept only such money as he could recover from Mr. Biswas’s creditors.

“Suppose,” Mr. Biswas said, “that all the others decide to behave like Mungroo. Suppose that every manjack bring me up.”

“Don’t think about it,” Moti said. “You would make yourself sick.”

As soon as he could, Mr. Biswas cycled to Arwacas to ask Shama to come back. He did not tell her what had happened. And it was not from Mrs. Tulsi or Seth that he borrowed the money, but from Misir, who, in addition to his journalistic, literary and religious activities, had set up as a usurer, with a capital of two hundred dollars.

More than half the time that remained to Mr. Biswas in The Chase was spent in paying off this debt.

In all Mr. Biswas lived for six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that at the end they could be comprehended in one glance. But he had aged. The lines which he had encouraged at first, to give him an older look, had come; they were not the decisive lines he had hoped for that would give a commanding air to a frown; they were faint, fussy, disappointing. His cheeks began to fall; his cheek bones, in a proper light, jutted slightly; and he developed a double chin of pure skin which he could pull down so that it hung like the stiff beard on an Egyptian statue. The skin loosened over his arms and legs. His stomach was now perpetually distended; not fat: it was his indigestion, for that affliction had come to stay, and bottles of Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder became as much part of Shama’s purchases as bags of rice or flour.

Though he never ceased to feel that some nobler purpose awaited him, even in this limiting society, he gave up reading Samuel Smiles. That author depressed him acutely. He turned to religion and philosophy. He read the Hindus; he read the Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus which Mrs. Weir had given him; he earned the gratitude and respect of a stall-keeper at Arwacas by buying an old and stained copy of The Supersensual Life ; and he began to dabble in Christianity, acquiring a volume, written mostly in capital letters, called Arise and Walk . As a boy he had liked to read descriptions of bad weather in foreign countries; they made him forget the heat and sudden rain which was all he knew. But now, though his philosophical books gave him solace, he could never lose the feeling that they were irrelevant to his situation. The books had to be put down. The shop awaited; money problems awaited; the road outside was short, and went through flat fields of dull green to small, hot settlements.

And at least once a week he thought of leaving the shop, leaving Shama, leaving the children, and taking that road.

Religion was one thing. Painting was the other. He brought out his brushes and covered the inside of the shop doors and the front of the counter with landscapes. Not of the abandoned field next to the shop, the intricate bush at the back, the huts and trees across the road, or the low blue mountains of the Central Range in the distance. He painted cool, ordered forest scenes, with gracefully curving grass, cultivated trees ringed with friendly serpents, and floors bright with perfect flowers; not the rotting, mosquito-infested jungle he could find within an hour’s walk. He attempted a portrait of Shama. He made her sit on a fat sack of flour-the symbolism pleased him: “Suit your family to a T,” he said-and spent so much time on her clothes and the sack of flour that before he could begin on her face Shama abandoned him and refused to sit any more.

He read innumerable novels, particularly those in the Reader’s Library; and he even tried to write, encouraged by the appearance in a Port of Spain magazine of a puzzling story by Misir. (This was a story of a starving man who was rescued by a benefactor and after some years rose to wealth. One day, driving along the beach, the man heard someone in the sea shouting for help, and recognized his former benefactor in difficulties. He instantly dived into the water, struck his head on a submerged rock and was drowned. The benefactor survived.) But Mr. Biswas could never devise a story, and he lacked Misir’s tragic vision; whatever his mood and however painful his subject, he became irreverent and facetious as soon as he began to write, and all he could manage were distorted and scurrilous descriptions of Moti, Mungroo, Seebaran, Seth and Mrs. Tulsi.

And there were whole weeks when he devoted himself to some absurdity. He grew his nails to an extreme length and held them up to startle customers. He picked and squeezed at his face until his cheeks and forehead were inflamed and the rims of his lips were like welts. When his skin became pitted with little holes, he studied these with interest and found the perfection of their shape pleasing. And once he dabbed healing ointments of various colours on his face and went and stood in the shop doorway, greeting people he knew.