Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“Shama sister,” Mr. Biswas heard her say in a breaking voice, “I want you to ask your husband to stop provoking me. Otherwise I will just have to tell him ”-her husband, Govind-“and you know what happened when he had a little falling-out with your husband.”

“All right, Chinta sister, I will tell him.”

Shama came out and said, with annoyance, “Man, stop provoking C. You know she can’t take jokes.”

“Jokes? What jokes? Crab-catching is no joke, you hear.”

Chinta had her revenge a few days later.

Mr. Biswas arrived at Hanuman House when the evening meal was over and the children were sitting about the hall in groups of three or four, reading primers or pretending to read. One of the economies of the house was that as many children as possible shared a book; and the children were talking among themselves and trying to hide the fact by holding their hands over their mouths and turning pages regularly. When Mr. Biswas came they looked at him with amusement and expectancy.

Chinta smiled. “You have come to see your son, brother-in-law?”

A rustle of turning pages coincided with many muffled titters.

Savi left a group around a book and came to Mr. Biswas. She looked unhappy. “Anand upstairs.” When they were halfway up she whispered, “He kneeling down.”

In the hall Chinta was singing.

“Kneeling down? What for?”

“He mess up himself at school today and had to leave.”

They went through the Book Room to the long room, which he and Shama had occupied after their marriage. The lotus decorations on the wall were as faded as before; the Demerara window through which he had gargled was propped open with a section of a broomstick.

Anand was kneeling in a corner with his face to the wall.

“He kneeling down since this afternoon,” Savi said.

Mr. Biswas didn’t feel this was true. Anand had been left to himself, and was now kneeling upright, without a sign of fatigue, as though he had just begun.

“Stop kneeling,” Mr. Biswas said.

He was surprised at Anand’s outraged and querulous reply. “They tell me to kneel down and I going to kneel down.”

It was the first time he had seen Anand in a temper. He looked at the boy’s narrow shoulder blades below the thin cotton shirt; the slender neck, the large head; the thin eczema-stained legs in small, loose trousers; the blackened soles-shoes were to be worn only outside the house-and the big toes.

“He was frightened,” Savi said.

“To do what?”

“Frightened to ask Teacher permission to leave the room. And when he leave the room he was frightened again. Frightened to use the school we.”

“Is a nasty , stinkin g place ,” Anand burst out, getting off his knees and turning to face them.

“It really is,” Savi said. “And then-well-”

Anand cried.

“He went back to the classroom and Teacher ask him to leave.”

Anand looked down at the floor, sniffing and running his fingers along the grooves between the floorboards.

“Well, just then school was over and everybody walk behind Anand. Everybody was laughing.”

“And when I come home Ma beat me,” Anand said. He wasn’t complaining. He was angry. “Ma beat me. She beat me.” Repeated, the words lost their anger and became pleas for sympathy.

Mr. Biswas became the buffoon. He told about his own misadventure at Pundit Jairam’s, caricaturing himself, and ridiculing Anand’s shame.

Anand didn’t look up or smile. But he had ceased to cry. He said, “I don’t want to go back to that school.”

“You want to come with me?”

Anand didn’t reply.

They all went down to the hall.

Mr. Biswas said, “Look, Shama, don’t make this boy kneel down again, you hear.”

Sushila, the widow, said, “When we were small Mai used to make us kneel on graters for a thing like that.”

“Well, I don’t want my children to grow up like you, that is all.”

Sushila, childless, husbandless and now without the protection of Mrs. Tulsi, swept upstairs, complaining that advantage was being taken of her situation.

Chinta said, “You are taking your son home with you, brother-in-law?”

Shama, noting Mr. Biswas’s serene mood, said sternly, “Anand not going anywhere. He got to stay here and go to school.”

“Why?” Chinta asked. “Brother-in-law could teach him. I sure he know the ABC.”

“A for apple, B for bat, C for crab,” Mr. Biswas said.

Anand followed Mr. Biswas outside and seemed unwilling to let him leave. He said nothing; he simply hung around the bicycle, occasionally rubbing up against it. Mr. Biswas was irritated by his shyness, but he was again touched by the boy’s fragility and the carefully ragged “home clothes” which Anand, like the other children, wore the minute he came from school. Anand’s washed-out khaki shorts were spectacularly patched, had slits but no pockets and a gaping empty fob. His shirt was darned and frayed and the collar was chewed; from the crooked stitches, the irregular cut, the weak and absurd decoration on the pocket Mr. Biswas could tell that the shirt had been made by Shama.

He asked, “You want to come with me?”

Anand only smiled and looked down and spun the bicycle pedal with his big toe.

It would soon be dark. Mr. Biswas had no lamp (every bicycle lamp and every bicycle pump he bought was promptly stolen) and he could never contrive, as some cyclists did, less to light their way than to appease the police, to ride with a lighted candle in an open paper-bag in one hand.

He cycled down the High Street. Just past the shop with the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign, he looked back. Anand was still under the arcade, next to one of the thick white pillars with the lotus-shaped base; standing and staring like that other boy Mr. Biswas had seen outside a low hut at dusk.

When he got to Green Vale it was dark. Under the trees it was night. The sounds from the barracks were assertive and isolated one from the other: snatches of talk, the sound of frying, a shout, the cry of a child: sounds thrown up at the starlit sky from a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world. The dead trees ringed the barracks, a wall of flawless black.

He locked himself in his room.

That week he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. Unless he started his house now he never would. His children would stay at Hanuman House, he would remain in the barrack-room, and nothing would arrest his descent into the void. Every night he wound himself up to a panic at his inaction, every morning he reaffirmed his decision, and on Saturday he spoke to Seth about a site.

“Rent you land?” Seth said. “Rent? Look, man, there is the land. Why don’t you just choose a site and build? Don’t talk to me about renting.”

The site Mr. Biswas had in mind was about two hundred yards from the barracks, screened from it by the trees and separated from it by a shallow damp depression which ran with muddy water after rain. Trees also screened the road. But when he thought of the land as the site of his house, the trees did not seem unfriendly; and he liked to think of the spot as a “bower”, a word that had come to him from Wordsworth by way of the Royal Reader .

On Sunday morning, after he had had some cocoa, shop bread and red butter, he went to see the builder. The builder lived in a crumbling wooden house in a small Negro settlement not far from Arwacas. Just over the gutter a badly-written notice board announced that George Maclean was a carpenter and cabinet-maker; this announcement was choked by much subsidiary information scattered all over the board in small and wavering letters; Mr. Maclean was also a blacksmith and a painter; he made tin cups and he soldered; he sold fresh eggs; he had a ram for service; and all his prices were keen.