Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Forgetting that in his strictness, and as part of her training, he had ordered Shama to file all his papers, he thought that these stories were as secret at home as his marriage and four children were at the office. And one Friday, when he found Shama puzzling over her accounts and had scoffed as usual, she said, “Leave me alone, Mr. John Lubbard.”

That was one of the names of his thirty-three-year-old hero.

“Go and take Sybil to the pictures.”

That was from another story. He had got the name from a novel by Warwick Deeping.

“Leave Ratni alone.”

That was the Hindi name he had given to the mother of four in another story. Ratni walked heavily, “as though perpetually pregnant”; her arms filled the sleeves of her bodice and seemed about to burst them; she sucked in her breath through her teeth while she worked at her accounts, the only reading and writing she did.

Mr. Biswas recalled with horror and shame the descriptions of the small tender breasts of his barren heroines.

Shama sucked her teeth loudly.

If she had laughed he would have hit her. But she never looked at him, only at her account books.

He ran to his room, undressed, got his own cigarettes and matches, took down Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and got into bed.

It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas, painting the kitchen safe and the green table with a tin of yellow paint, yielded to an impulse and painted the typewriter-case and parts of the typewriter as well.

For long the typewriter remained unused, until Anand and Savi began learning to type on it.

But still, in the office, whenever he had cleaned his typewriter or changed the ribbon and wished to test the machine, the sentence he always wrote was: At the age of thirty-three , when he was already the father of four children…

So used to thinking of the house as his own, and in his new confidence, he made a garden. He planted rose-bushes at the side of the house, and at the front dug a pond for water-lilies, which spread prodigiously. He acquired more possessions, the most massive of which was a combined bookcase and desk, of such weight and sturdiness that three men were required to put it into place in his bedroom, where it stayed until they all moved from Port of Spain to Shorthills. Mice nested in the bookcase, protected and nourished by the mass of paper with which the bookcase was stuffed: newspapers (Mr. Biswas insisted that all the newspapers for a month should be kept, and there were quarrels when a particular issue could not be found); every typewritten letter Mr. Biswas had received, from the Sentinel , the Ideal School, people anxious or grateful for publicity; the rejected articles on the seasons, the unfinished Escape stories (at first shamefully glanced at, though later Mr. Biswas read them and regretted he had not taken up short story writing seriously).

Encouraged by Shama, he took an increasing interest in his personal appearance. In his silk suit and tie he had never ceased to surprise her by his elegance and respectability; and whenever she bought him anything, a shirt, cufflinks, a tiepin, he said, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! One of these days.” Sometimes, while he was dressing, he would make an inventory of all the things he was wearing and think, with wonder, that he was then worth one hundred and fifty dollars. Once on the bicycle, he was worth about one hundred and eighty. And so he rode to his reporter’s job and its curious status: welcomed, even fawned upon, by the greatest in the land, fed as well as anybody and sometimes even better, yet always, finally, rejected.

“A hell of a thing today,” he told Shama. “As we were leaving Government House H.E. asked me, ‘Which is your car?’ I don’t know. I suppose reporters in England must be rich like hell.”

But Shama was impressed. At Hanuman House she started dropping names, and Padma, Seth’s wife, traced a tenuous and intricate family relationship between Seth and the man who had driven the Prince of Wales during his visit to Trinidad.

On herself Shama spent little. Unable to buy the best and, like all the Tulsi sisters, having only contempt for the second-rate in cloth and jewellery, she bought nothing at all and made do with the gifts of cloth she received every Christmas from Mrs. Tulsi. Her bodices became patched on the breasts and under the arms; and the more Mr. Biswas complained the more she patched. But though her indifference to clothes seemed at times almost like inverted pride, she did not wholly lose her concern for appearances. At Hanuman House a wedding invitation to Mrs. Tulsi was meant for her daughters as well; and one large gift, invariably part of the Tulsi Store stock, went from the House. But now Shama got invitations in her own right and during the Hindu wedding season she borrowed deeply from the rent money, committing herself to almost inextricable entanglement with her accounts, to buy presents, usually water-sets.

“Forget it this time,” Mr. Biswas said. “They must be so used by now to seeing you with a water-set in your hand that I am sure they would believe that you did carry one.”

“I know what I am doing,” Shama said. “My children are going to be married one day too.”

“And when they give back all the water-sets poor Savi wouldn’t be able to walk, for all the glasses and jugs. If they remember, that is. At least leave it for a few more years.”

But weddings and funerals had become important to Shama. From weddings she returned tired, heavy-lidded and hoarse after the night-long singing, to find a house in confusion: Savi in tears, the kitchen in disorder, Mr. Biswas complaining about his indigestion. Pleased at the wedding, the gift that did not disgrace her, the singing, the return home, Shama would say, “Well, as the saying goes, you never miss the water till the well runs dry.”

And for the following day or two, when she held Mr. Biswas and the children absolutely in her power, she would be very gloomy; and it was at these times that she said, “I tell you, if it wasn’t for the children-”

And Mr. Biswas would sing, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl!”

As important as weddings and funerals were to Shama, holiday visits became to the children. They went first of all to Hanuman House. But with every succeeding visit they felt more like strangers. Alliances were harder to take up again. There were new jokes, new games, new stories, new subjects of conversation. Too much had to be explained, and Anand and Savi and Myna often ended by remaining together. As soon as they went back to Port of Spain this unity disappeared. Savi returned to bullying Myna; Anand defended Myna; Savi beat Anand; Anand hit back; and Savi complained.

“What!” Mr. Biswas said. “Hitting your sister! Shama, you see the sort of effect one little trip to the monkey house does have on your children?”

It was a two-fold attack, for the children preferred visiting Mr. Biswas’s relations. These relations had come as a revelation. Not only were they an untapped source of generosity; Savi and Anand had also felt up to then that Mr. Biswas, like all the fathers at Hanuman House, had come from nothing, and the only people who had a proper family were the Tulsis. It was pleasant and novel, too, for Savi and Anand and Myna to find themselves flattered and cajoled and bribed. At Hanuman House they were three children among many; at Ajodha’s there were no other children. And Ajodha was rich, as they could tell by the house he was building. He offered them money and was absurdly delighted that they should know its value sufficiently well to take it. Anand got an extra six cents for reading That Body of Yours ; it would have been worth it for the praise alone. They were feted at Pratap’s; Bipti was embarrassingly devoted and their cousins were shy and admiring and kind. At Prasad’s they were again the only children and lived in a mud hut, which they thought quaint: it was like a large doll’s house. Prasad didn’t give money, but a thick red exercise book, a Shirley Temple fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman’s ink. And so, with this encouragement to milk and prunes, the profitable round of holiday visits ended.