Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Then Mr. Biswas visited his eldest brother Pratap. And there he had a surprise. He found that his mother had been living with Pratap for some weeks. For long Mr. Biswas had considered Bipti useless, depressing and obstinate; he wondered how Pratap had managed to communicate with her and persuade her to leave the hut in the back trace at Pagotes. But she had come and she had changed. She was active and lucid; she was a lively and important part of Pratap’s household. Mr. Biswas felt reproached and anxious. His luck had been too sudden, his purchase on the world too slight. When he got back late that evening to the Sentinel office he sat down at a desk, his own (his towel in the bottom drawer), and with memories coming from he knew not where, he wrote:

Scarlet Pimpernel Spends Night in a Tree

Anguish of Six-Hour Vigil

Oink! Oink!

The frogs croaked all around me. Nothing but that and the sound of the rain on trees in the black night.

I was dripping wet. My motorcycle had broken down miles from anywhere. It was midnight and I was alone.

The report then described a sleepless night, encounters with snakes and bats, the two cars that passed in the night, heedless of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s cries, the rescue early in the morning by peasants who recognized the Scarlet Pimpernel and claimed their prize.

It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas went to Arwacas. He got there in the middle of the morning but did not go to Hanuman House until after four, when he knew the store would be closed, the children back from school and the sisters in the hall and kitchen. His return was as magnificent as he had wished. He was still climbing up the steps from the courtyard when he was greeted by shouts, scampering and laughter.

“You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize!”

He went around, dropping Sentinel dollar-tokens into eager hands.

“Send this in with the coupon from the Sentinel . Your money will come the day after tomorrow.”

Savi and Anand at once took possession of him.

Shama, emerging from the black kitchen, said, “Anand, you will get your father’s suit dirty.”

It was as though he had never left. Neither Shama nor the children nor the hall carried any mark of his absence.

Shama dusted a bench at the table and asked whether he had eaten. He didn’t reply, but sat where she had dusted. The children asked questions continually, and it was easy not to pay attention to Shama as she brought the food out.

“Uncle Mohun, Uncle Mohun. You really spend a night up a tree?”

“What do you think, Jai?”

“Ma say you make it up. And I don’t see how you could climb up a tree.”

“I can’t tell you how often I fall down.”

It was better than he had imagined to be back in the sooty green hall with the shelflike loft, the long pitchpine table, the unrelated pieces of furniture, the photographs of Pundit Tulsi, the kitchen safe with the Japanese coffee-set.

“Uncle Mohun, that man did really chase you with a cutlass when you try to give a coupon to his wife?”

“Yes.”

“Why you didn’t give him one too?”

“Go away. You children getting too smart for me.”

He ate and washed his hands and gargled. Shama urged him to be careful of his tie and jacket: as though they were not new to her, as though she had a wifely interest even in clothes she had not known from the start.

He went up the stairs, past the landing with the broken piano. In the verandah he saw Hari, the holy man, and Hari’s wife. They barely greeted him. They both seemed untouched by his new fame or his new suit. Hari, in his pundit’s clothes, looked jaundiced and unwell as always; his wife’s solemnity was tinged with worry and fatigue. Mr. Biswas had often surprised them in similar quiet domestic scenes, withdrawn from the life about them.

He felt he was intruding, and hurried past the door with the coloured glass panes into the Book Room, which smelled mustily of old paper and worm-eaten wood. His books were there with traces of their soaking: bleached covers, stained and crinkled pages. Anand came into the room. His hair was long on his big head; he was in his “home-clothes”. Mr. Biswas held Anand to his leg and Anand rubbed against it. He asked Anand about school and got shy, unintelligible replies. They had little to talk about.

“Exactly when they did start seeing my name in the papers?” Mr. Biswas asked.

Anand smiled, raised one foot off the floor, and mumbled.

“Who see it first?”

Anand shook his head.

“And what they say, eh? Not the children, but the big people.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? But what about the photo? Coming out every day. What they say when they see that ?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Only Auntie Chinta say you look like a crook.”

“Who is the pretty baby? Tell me, who is the pretty baby?”

It was Sharna, corning into the room and wandering about it with a baby in her arms.

Mr. Biswas had not seen his fourth child. And now he was embarrassed to look.

Shama came closer but did not raise her eyes. “Who is that man?” she said to the baby. “Do you know that man?”

Mr. Biswas did not respond. He felt suffocated, sickened by the picture of mother and child as by the whole furtive domestic scene in this room above the hall: father, mother, children.

“And who is this?” Shama had taken the baby to Anand. “This is brother.” Anand tickled her chin and the baby gurgled.

“Yes, this is brother. Oh, isn’t she a pretty baby?”

He noticed that Shama had grown a little plumper.

He relented. He took a step towards Shama and immediately she held up the baby to him.

“Her name is Kamla,” Shama said in Hindi, her eyes still on the baby.

“Nice name,” he said in English. “Who give it?”

“The pundit.”

“This one register too, I suppose?”

“But you were here when she was born-” And Shama stopped, as though she had ventured on to dangerous ground.

Mr. Biswas took the baby.

“Give her back to me,” Shama said after a short time. “She might get your clothes dirty.”

The reconciliation was soon complete, and on terms that made Mr. Biswas feel he had won a victory. It was arranged for him to meet Mrs. Tulsi in Port of Spain. She pretended not to know that he had ever left Shama and Hanuman House; he had come to Port of Spain to see the doctor, hadn’t he? Mr. Biswas said he had. She was glad he was better; Pundit Tulsi always used to say that good health was worth any fortune. She never asked about his job, though she said that she expected much from Mr. Biswas and always had; which was why she had been so ready to agree when he came that afternoon to ask for Shama’s hand.

Mrs. Tulsi proposed that Mr. Biswas should move his family to Port of Spain and live with her son and herself. Unless, of course, Mr. Biswas was thinking of buying a house of his own; she was only a mother and had no control over Shama’s fate. If they came, however, they would have the run of the house, except for those rooms used by Owad and herself. In return they would pay eight dollars a month, Shama would cook, do all the housework and collect the rents from her other two houses: a difficult business: not worth the trouble to get an outsider to do it and she was too old to do it herself.

The offer was stupendous: a house, no less. It was the climax of his current good fortune, which must now, he felt, surely end. To delay acceptance, to cover up his nervousness, he talked about the difficulty of collecting rents. Mrs. Tulsi talked about Pundit Tulsi and he listened with solemn sympathy.

They were in the front verandah. Ferns in baskets hung from the eaves, softening the light, cooling the air. Mr. Biswas reclined on his morris chair. It was an experience, so new he could not yet savour it, to find himself turned all at once from a visitor into a dweller, in a house that was solid and finished and painted and elegant all over, with a level, gapless floor, straight concrete walls, panelled doors with locks, a complete roof, a ceiling varnished in the drawingroom, painted elsewhere. Finishing details, which up to a few minutes before he had taken for granted, he now noted, one by one, as for the first time. Nothing had to be added, nothing was makeshift; there were no surprises of mud walls or tree-branches, no secret ways of doing anything; everything worked as it was meant to.