Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Tarzan was whining outside his door.

One of his paws had been damaged.

“You like eggs too much.”

Then he remembered the dispossessed labourers.

Some nights later he was awakened by barking and shouts.

“Driver! Driver!”

He opened the top half of the door.

“They set fire to Dookinan land,” the watchman said.

He put on his clothes and hurried to the spot, followed by excited labourers.

There was no great danger or damage. Dookinan’s plot was small and was separated from the other fields by a trace and a ditch. Mr. Biswas ordered the boundary canes of the adjoining fields to be cut, and the labourers, though disappointed at the blaze, which from a distance had promised much, worked with zest. The firelight lit up their bodies and kept away the chill.

The tall red and yellow flames shrank; the trash smouldered, red and black, crackled and collapsed, uncovering the red heart of the fire, quickly cooling to black and grey. Glowing scraps rose, twinkling redly, blackened and diminished. At the roots the canes glowed like charcoal; in places it was as if the earth itself had caught fire. The labourers beat the roots and the trash with sticks; ash floated up; smoke turned from grey to white, and thinned.

Only then, when the danger had disappeared, Mr. Biswas realized that for more than an hour he had not questioned himself.

Instantly the questionings, the fear, came.

When the labourers returned to the barracks their chatter lasted a short time, and he was left alone.

But the hour had proved one thing. He was going to get better soon.

It was the first of many disappointments. In time he came to disregard these periods of freedom, just as he no longer expected to wake up one morning and find himself whole again.

At the beginning of the Christmas school holidays, when the sugarcane was in arrow once more and the Christmas shop-signs were going up at Arwacas, Shama sent word by Seth that she was bringing the children to Green Vale for a few days.

Mr. Biswas waited for them with dread. On the day they were to arrive he began to wish for some accident that would prevent their coming. But he knew there would be no accident. If anything was to happen he had to act. He decided that he had to get rid of Anand and Savi and himself, in such a way that the children would never know who had killed them. All morning he was possessed of visions in which he cutlassed, poisoned, strangled, burned, Anand and Savi; so that even before they came his relationship with them had been perverted. About Myna and Shama he didn’t care; he didn’t want to kill them.

They came. At once his designs became insubstantial and absurd. He felt only resignation and a great fatigue. And the deception and especial pain he had wished to avoid began. Even while he allowed himself to be touched and kissed by Anand and Savi he was questioning himself about them, looking for the fear, and wondering whether they had seen the deception and could tell what was going on in his mind.

Of Shama he was not afraid; only envious, for her unthinking assurance. Then almost immediately he began to hate her. Her pregnancy was grotesque; he hated the way she sat down; when she ate he listened for the noises she made; he hated the way she fussed and clucked over the children; he hated it when she puffed and fanned and sweated in her pregnant way; he was nauseated by the frills and embroidery and other ornamentation on her clothes.

Shama, Savi and Myna slept on bedding on the floor. Anand slept with Mr. Biswas on the fourposter. Dreading the boy’s touch, Mr. Biswas built a bank of pillows between Anand and himself.

His fatigue deepened. The next day, Sunday, he scarcely got out of bed. Whereas before he felt he had to be out of the room, now he didn’t wish to leave it. He said he was sick and found it easy to simulate the symptoms of malaria.

When Seth came Mr. Biswas told him, “Is ague, I think.”

After a week his fatigue hadn’t left him. Sitting up in bed he made kites and toy-carts for Anand and built a chest-of-drawers with matchboxes for Savi. The longer he stayed in the room the less he wanted to leave it. He became constipated. Yet from time to time he had to go outside; then he came back hurriedly, anxiously, relaxing only when he was on the bed again.

He continued to observe Shama closely, with suspicion, hatred and nausea. He never spoke to her directly, but through one of the children; and it was some time before Shama realized this.

As he was lying in bed one morning she came and placed her palm, then the back of her hand, on his forehead. The action offended him, flattered him, and made him uneasy. She had been cutting vegetables and he couldn’t bear their smell on her hand.

“No fever,” she said.

She undid his shirt and put her hand, large and dark and foreign, on his pale, soft chest.

He wanted to scream.

He said, “No, I not fat enough yet. You got to put me back and feed me some more. Here, why don’t you just feel my finger?”

She took her hand away. “Something on your mind, man?”

“Something on your mind?” he mimicked. “Something in my mind and you know what it is.” He was violently angry; never before had he been so disgusted by her. Yet he wished her to remain there. Half hoping she would take him seriously, half hoping only to amuse and bewilder her, he said in his quick, high-pitched voice, “Something in my mind all right. Clouds. Lots of little black clouds.”

“What you say?”

“Is a funny thing. You ever notice that when you insult people or tell them the truth they always pretend not to hear you the first time?”

“Is my own fault for meddling in what is not my business. I don’t know why I come here for. If it wasn’t for the children-”

“So all-you send Hari with his little black box, eh? All-you must think I look like a real fool.”

“Black box?”

“You see what I mean? You didn’t hear the first time.”

“Look, I just don’t have the time to stand up here talking to you like this, you hear. I wish you had a real fever. That would stop your mouth.”

He was beginning to enjoy the argument. “I know you want me to get a real fever. I know all-you want to see me dead. And then see the old she-fox crying, the little gods laughing, you crying-dressed up like hell to boot. Nice, eh? I know that is what all-you want.”

“Dress-up and powder-up? Me? On what you give me?”

Abruptly Mr. Biswas went cold with fear.

Seth and the land and the corrugated iron; Hari and the black box; the blessing; and now, since Shama had come, this fatigue.

He was dying.

They were killing him. He would just remain in this room and die.

She was in the kitchen area, cooing to the baby in the hammock.

“Get out!”

Shama looked up.

He jumped out of bed and grabbed the walking-stick. He was cold all over. His heart beat fast and painfully.

Shama climbed up the step to the room.

“Get out! Don’t come inside. Don’t touch me!”

Myna was crying.

“Man,” Shama said.

“Don’t come into this room. Don’t set foot in it again.” He waved the stick. He moved to the window and, looking at her, waving the stick, began to draw the bolt. “Don’t touch me,” he bawled, and there were sobs mixed with his words.

She blocked the door.

But he had thought of the window. He pushed it open. It swung out shakily. Light came into the room and fresh air mingled with the musty smell of old boards and newspapers-he had forgotten how musty they smelled. Beyond the flat barrackyard he saw the trees diat lined the road and screened his house.

Shama walked towards him.

He began screaming and crying. He pressed his palms on the window-sill and tried to hoist himself up, looking back at her, the stick now useless as a weapon of defence since his hands were occupied.