Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“You got to get your furniture out first,” Seth said.

“My bureau!” Shama exclaimed, and put her hand to her own mouth, as though astonished that, when she had left Mr. Biswas, she had forgotten to take that piece of furniture with her.

“You know,” Seth said, “the best thing would be for you to do the insuranburning.”

“No, Uncle,” Shama said. “Don’t start putting ideas in his head.”

“Don’t worry with the child,” Mr. Biswas said. “You just tell me.”

Seth sat on the bed again. “Well, look,” he said, and his voice was amused and avuncular. “You had this trouble with Mungroo. You go to the police station and lay your life on Mungroo head.”

“Lay my what on Mungroo head?”

“Tell them about the row. Tell them that Mungroo threatening to kill you. And the moment anything happen to you, the first person they would pick up would be Mungroo.”

“You mean the first person they would pick up would be me. But let me get this straight. When I dead, like a cockroach, lying on my back with my four foot throw up straight and stiff and high in the air, you want me to walk to the police station and say, ‘I did tell all-you so.’ “

Mrs. Tulsi, still chuckling over her own joke, the first she had managed in English, made Mr. Biswas’s an excuse to burst out laughing again.

“Well, you lay your life on Mungroo head,” Seth said. “You go back to The Chase and stay quiet. You let one week pass, two weeks, even three. Then you make your little preparations. You let Shama collect her bureau. On Thursday, half-day, you drop pitch-oil all over the shop-not where you sleeping-and in the night-time you set a match to it. You give it a little time-not too much-and then you run outside and start bawling for Mungroo.”

“You mean,” Mr. Biswas said, “that this is why all those motorcars burning up every day in this place? And all those houses?”

Whenever afterwards Mr. Biswas thought of Green Vale he thought of the trees. They were tall and straight, and so hung with long, drooping leaves that their trunks were hidden and appeared to be branchless. Half the leaves were dead; the others, at the top, were a dead green. It was as if all the trees had, at the same moment, been blighted in luxuriance, and death was spreading at the same pace from all the roots. But death was forever held in check. The tonguelike leaves of dead green turned slowly to the brightest yellow, became brown and thin as if scorched, curled downwards over the other dead leaves and did not fall. And new leaves came, as sharp as daggers; but there was no freshness to them; they came into the world old, without a shine, and only grew longer before they too died.

It was hard to imagine that beyond the trees on every side lay the clear plain. Green Vale was damp and shadowed and close. The trees darkened the road and their rotting leaves choked the grass gutters. The trees surrounded the barracks.

As soon as he saw the barracks Mr. Biswas decided that the time had come for him to build his own house, by whatever means. The barracks gave one room to one family, and sheltered twelve families in one long room divided into twelve. This long room was built of wood and stood on low concrete pillars. The whitewash on the walls had turned to dust, leaving stains like those left on stones by bleaching clothes; and these stains were mildewed and sweated and freckled with grey and green and black. The corrugated iron roof projected on one side to make a long gallery, divided by rough partitions into twelve kitchen spaces, so open that when it rained hard twelve cooks had to take twelve coal-pots to twelve rooms. The ten middle rooms each had a front door and a back window. The rooms at the end had a front door, a back window, and a side window. Mr. Biswas, as a driver, was given an end room. The back window had been nailed shut by the previous tenant and plastered over with newspaper. Its position could only be guessed at, since newspaper covered the walls from top to bottom. This had obviously been the work of a literate. No sheet was placed upside down, and Mr. Biswas found himself continuously exposed to the journalism of his time, its bounce and excitement bottled and made quaint in these old newspapers.

Into this room they moved all their furniture: the kitchen safe, the green kitchen table, the hatrack, the iron fourposter, a rockingchair Mr. Biswas had bought in the last days at The Chase, and the dressingtable which, during Shama’s long absences at Hanuman House, had come to stand for Shama.

Only one small drawer of the dressingtable was Mr. Biswas’s. The others were alien and if by some chance he opened one he felt he was intruding. It was during the move to Green Vale that he discovered that, in addition to the finer clothes of Shama and the children, those drawers contained Shama’s marriage certificate and the birth certificates of her children; a Bible and Bible pictures she had got from her mission school and kept, not for their religious content, but as reminders of past excellence; and a packet of letters from a pen-pal in Northumberland, the result of one of the headmaster’s schemes. Mr. Biswas yearned after the outside world; he read novels that took him there; he never suspected that Shama, of all persons, had been in contact with this world.

“You didn’t by any chance keep the letters you did write back?”

“Headteacher used to read them and post them.”

“I woulda like to read your letters.”

So Mr. Biswas became a driver, or sub-overseer, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month, which was twice as much as the labourers got. As he had told Seth, he knew nothing about estate work. He had been surrounded by sugarcane all his life; he knew that the tall fields shot up grey-blue, arrow-like flowers just when shop signs were bursting into green and red gaiety, with holly and berries and Santa Claus and snow-capped letters; he knew the “crop-over” harvest festival; but he didn’t know about burning or weeding or hoeing or trenching; he didn’t know when new cuttings had to be put in or mounds of trash built around new plants. He got instructions from Seth, who came to Green Vale every Saturday to inspect, and pay the labourers, which he did from the kitchen space outside Mr. Biswas’s room, using the green kitchen table, and having Mr. Biswas sit beside him to read out the number of tasks each labourer had worked.

Mr. Biswas didn’t know the admiration and respect his father Raghu had had for drivers. But he could feel the awe the labourers had for the blue and green moneybags with serrated edges and small circular holes for the money to breathe, and he took some pleasure in handling these bags casually, as though they were a bother. It sometimes occurred to him that, perhaps at that very moment, his brothers were standing in similar slow submissive queues on other estates.

On Saturdays, then, he enjoyed power. But on the other days it was different. True, he went out early every morning with his long bamboo rod and measured out the labourers’ tasks. But the labourers knew he was unused to the job and was there simply as a watchman and Seth’s representative. They could fool him and they did, fearing more a single rebuke of Seth’s on Saturday than a week of shy remonstrance from Mr. Biswas. Mr. Biswas was ashamed to complain to Seth. He bought a topee; it was too big for his head, which was rather small, and he adjusted the topee so badly that it fell down to his ears. For some time after that, whenever the labourers saw Mr. Biswas they pulled their hats over their eyes, tilted their heads backwards and looked in his direction. Two or three of the young and impudent even talked to him in this way. He thought he ought to ride a horse, as Seth did; and he was beginning to feel sympathy for those overseers of legend who rode on horseback and lashed labourers on either side. Then, being the buffoon with Seth one Saturday, he mounted Seth’s horse, was thrown after a few yards, and said, “I didn’t want to go where he was going.”