Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“Savi!”

No answer.

“Savi! Savi! Oh-Savi-yah! Oh, you there. Why you didn’t answer?”

“But I come.”

“Is not enough. You must come and answer.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“All right, Pa.”

“Good. On that table in the corner you will find cigarettes, matches and a Sentinel notebook. Hand them to me.”

“O God ! That is all you call me for?”

“Yes. That is all. Answer back again, and I make you read out something for me to take down in shorthand.”

Savi ran out of the room.

“Anand! Anand!”

“Yes, Pa.”

“That is better. You are getting a little training now. Sit down there and call out this speech.”

Anand snatched Bell’s Standard Elocutionist and angrily read out some Macaulay.

“You reading too fast.”

“I thought you was writing shorthand.”

“You answering back too! You see what happen to you children, spending all that time at Hanuman House. Just for that, check while I read back.”

“O God !” And Anand stamped, regretting the dying day.

But the checking went on.

Then Mr. Biswas said, “Anand, this is not a punishment. I ask you to do this because I want you to help me.”

He had discovered, with surprise, that this sentence soothed Anand, and he always offered it at the end of these sessions as a consolation.

It was soon established that he did much of his work in bed and was to be expected to call constantly for paper, pencils to be sharpened, matches, cigarettes, ashtrays to be emptied, books to be brought, books to be taken away. It was also established that his sleep was important. He flew into terrible rages when awakened, even at a time he had fixed.

“Savi,” Shama would say, “go and wake your father.”

“Let Anand go.”

“No, the both of you go.”

To Shama, who began to complain of his “strictness”-a word which gave him a curious satisfaction-he said, “It is not strictness. It is training.”

Mrs. Tulsi, approving if a little surprised, told tales of the severe training to which Pundit Tulsi had submitted his children.

And whenever Mrs. Tulsi was away Shama made claims of her own. She was unable to faint like Mrs. Tulsi but she complained of fatigue and liked to be attended by her children. She got Savi and Anand to walk on her and said in Hindi, “God will bless you,” with such feeling that they considered it a sufficient recompense. Soon, and without this recompense, it became the duty of Savi and Anand to walk on Mr. Biswas as well.

Shama herself did not escape training. She had to file all the stories Mr. Biswas wrote. Mr. Biswas said she did this inefficiently. He gave her his pay-packet unopened and when she said that the money was insufficient he accused her of incompetence. And so Shama started on her laborious, futile practice of keeping accounts. Every evening she sat down at the green table in the back verandah and noted every penny she had spent during the day, slowly filling both sides of the pages of a bloated, oilstained Sentinel notebook with her Mission-school script.

“Your little daily puja , eh?” Mr. Biswas said.

“No,” she said. “I only trying to give you a raise.”

Mr. Biswas never asked to see Shama’s accounts, but she did them partly as a reproach to Mr. Biswas and partly because she enjoyed it. Whatever his other qualities, Mr. Burnett didn’t believe in paying generously and while he edited the Sentinel Mr. Biswas’s salary never rose above fifty dollars a month, money which went almost as soon as it came. Shama’s household accounts were complicated by the rents she collected. She spent the rent money on the household and then had to make it up with the household money. The figures nearly always came out wrong. And every other week-end Shama’s accounting reached a pitch of frenzy, and she was to be seen in the back verandah puzzling over the Sentinel notebook, the rent book, the receipt book, doing innumerable little addition and subtraction sums on scraps of paper and occasionally making memoranda. Shama wrote curious memoranda. She wrote as she spoke and once Mr. Biswas came on a note that said, “Old Creole woman from 42 owe six dollars.”

“I always did say that you Tulsis were a pack of financial geniuses,” he said.

She said, “I would like you to know that I used to come first in arithmetic.”

And when Savi and Anand came to her for help with their arithmetic homework she said, “Go to your father. He was the genius in arithmetic.”

“Know more than you anyway,” he said. “Savi, ought twos are how much?”

“Two.”

“You are your mother’s daughter all right. Anand?”

“One.”

“But what happening these days? They are not teaching as they used to when I was a boy.”

He found fault with all the textbooks.

“Readers by Captain Cutteridge! Listen to this. Page sixty-five, lesson nineteen. Some of Our Animal Friends.” He read in a mincing voice:” ‘What should we do without our animal friends? The cow and the goat give us milk and we eat their flesh when they are killed.’ You hear the savage? And listen. ‘Many boys and girls have to tie up their goats before going to school in the morning, and help to milk them in the afternoon.’ Anand, you tie up your goat this morning? Well, you better hurry up. Is nearly milking time. That is the sort of stuff they fulling up the children head with these days. When I was a boy it used to be the Royal Reader and Blackie’s Tropical Reader . Nesfield’s Grammar !” he exclaimed. “I used to use Macdougall’s.” And he sent Anand hunting for the Macdougall’s, a typographical antique, its battered boards hinged with strips of blue tape.

From time to time he called for their exercise books, said he was horrified, and set himself up as their teacher for a few days. He cured Anand of a leaning towards fancy lettering and got him to abridge the convolutions of his C and J and S. With Savi he could do nothing. As a teacher he was exacting and short-tempered, and when Shama went to Hanuman House she was able to tell her sisters with pride, “The children are afraid of him.”

And, partly to have peace on Sundays, and partly because the combination of the word “Sunday” with the word “school” suggested denial and a spoiling of pleasure, he sent Anand and Savi to Sunday school. They loved it. They were given cakes and soft drinks and taught hymns with catchy tunes.

At home one day Anand began singing, “Jesus loves me, yes I know.”

Mrs. Tulsi was offended. “How do you know that Jesus loves you?”

“‘Cause the Bible tells me so,” Anand said, quoting the next line of the hymn.

Mrs. Tulsi took this to mean that, without provocation, Mr. Biswas was resuming his religious war.

“Roman cat, your mother,” he told Shama. “I thought a good Christian hymn would remind her of happy childhood days as a baby Roman kitten.”

But the Sunday school stopped. In its place, and also to counter the influence of Captain Cutteridge, Mr. Biswas began reading novels to his children. Anand responded but Savi was again a disappointment.

“I can’t see Savi ever eating prunes and drinking milk from the Dairies,” Mr. Biswas said. “Let her go on. All I see her doing is fighting to make up accounts like her mother.”

Unmoved by Mr. Biswas’s insults, Shama continued to write up her accounts, continued to wrestle once a fortnight with the rent money, and continued to serve eviction notices. Unknown to her family and almost unknown to herself, Shama had become a creature of terror to Mrs. Tulsi’s tenants. To get the rents she often had to serve eviction notices, particularly on “old creole woman from 42”. It amused Mr. Biswas to read the stern, grammatical injunctions in Shama’s placid handwriting, and he said, “I don’t see how that could frighten anybody.”