Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Then came the news that Mrs. Tulsi had decided to send Owad abroad to study, to become a doctor.

Mr. Biswas was overwhelmed. More and more students were going abroad; but they were items of news, remote. He had never thought that anyone so close to him could escape so easily. Concealing his sadness and envy, he made a show of enthusiasm and offered advice about shipping lines. And at Arwacas some of Mrs. Tulsi’s retainers defected. Forgetting that they were in Trinidad, that they had crossed the black water from India and had thereby lost all caste, they said they could have nothing more to do with a woman who was proposing to send her son across the black water.

“Water on a duck’s back,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “The number of times that mother of yours has made herself outcast!”

There was talk about the suitability and adequacy of the food Owad would get in England.

“Every morning in England, you know,” Mr. Biswas said, “the scavengers go around picking up the corpses. And you know why? The food there is not cooked by orthodox Roman Catholic Hindus.”

“Suppose Uncle Owad want more,” Anand said. “You think they will give it to him?”

“Hear the boy,” Mr. Biswas said, squeezing Anand’s thin arms. “Let me tell you, eh, boy, that you and Savi come out of the monkey house as going concerns only because of the little Ovaltine you drink.”

“No wonder the others can hold Anand and beat his little tail,” Shama said.

“Your family are tough ,” Mr. Biswas said. He spat the word out and made it an insult. “Tough ,” he repeated.

“Well, I could say one thing. None of us have calves swinging like hammocks.”

“Of course not. Your calves are tough . Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother’s bad blood flowing in your veins you could wake up one morning and find yourself hairy like a monkey.”

Then, after a trip to Hanuman House, Shama reported that the decision to send Owad abroad had reduced Shekhar, the elder god, married man though he was, to tears.

“Send him some rope and soft candle,” Mr. Biswas said.

“He never did want to get married,” Shama said.

“Never did want to get married! Never see anybody skip off so smart to check mother-in-law’s money.”

“He wanted to go to Cambridge.”

“Cambridge !” Mr. Biswas exclaimed, startled by the word, starded to hear it coming so easily from Shama. “Cambridge, eh? Well, why the hell he didn’t go? Why the hell the whole pack of you didn’t go to Cambridge? Frighten of the bad food?”

“Seth was against it.” Shama’s tone was injured and conspiratorial.

Mr. Biswas paused. “Well, you don’t say. You don’t say!”

“I glad it please somebody.”

She could give no more information, and at last said impatiently, “You getting like a woman.”

She clearly felt that an injustice had been done. And he knew the Tulsis too well to be surprised that the sisters, who never questioned their own neglected education, cat-in-bag marriage and precarious position, should yet feel concerned that Shekhar, whose marriage was happy and whose business was nourishing, had not had all that he might.

Shekhar was coming to spend a week-end in Port of Spain. His family would not be with him and old Mrs. Tulsi would be in Arwacas: the brothers were to be boys together for one last week-end. Mr. Biswas waited for Shekhar with interest. He came early on Friday evening. The taxi hooted; Shama switched on the lights in the verandah and the porch; Shekhar ran up the front steps in his white linen suit and breezed through the house on his leather-heeled shoes, charging it with excitement, depositing on the diningtable a bottle of wine, a tin of peanuts, a packet of biscuits, two copies of Life and a paper-backed volume of Halevy’s History of the English People . Shama greeted him with sadness, Mr. Biswas with a solemnity which he hoped could be mistaken for sympathy. Shekhar responded with geniality: the absent geniality of the businessman sparing time from his business, the family man away from his family.

Owad’s expensive new suitcases were in the back verandah and Mr. Biswas was painting Owad’s name on them.

“Sort of thing to make you feel you want to go away,” Mr. Biswas said.

Shekhar wasn’t drawn. After the wine and peanuts and biscuits had been shared he showed himself almost paternally preoccupied with the arrangements for Owad’s journey, and in spite of Mr. Biswas’s coaxings never once mentioned Cambridge.

“You and your mouth,” Mr. Biswas told Shama.

She had no time for argument. She felt honoured at having to entertain her two brothers at once, on such an important occasion, and was determined to do it well. She had prepared all week for the week-end, and shortly after breakfast that morning had begun to cook.

From time to time Mr. Biswas went into the kitchen and whispered, “Who paying for all this? The old she-fox or you? Not me, you hear. Nobody sending me to Cambridge. Next week, when I eating dry ice, nobody sending me food by parcel post from Hanuman House, you hear.”

It was a Hanuman House festival in miniature, and to the children almost like a game of makebelieve. They had the freedom of the kitchen and nibbled and tasted whenever they could. Shekhar bought sweets for them and on Sunday sent them to the one-thirty children’s show at the Roxy. And Mr. Biswas got on so well with the brothers that he was invaded by the holiday feeling that they were all men together, and he thought himself privileged to be host to the two sons of the family, one of whom was going abroad to become a doctor. He attempted genuinely to contribute to the enthusiasm, talking again about shipping lines and ships as though he had travelled in them all; he hinted at the write-up he was going to give Owad and flattered him by asking him to refuse to see reporters from the other newspapers; he spoke deprecatingly about Anand’s achievements and obtained compliments from Shekhar.

Sunday brought the Sunday Sentinel and Mr. Biswas’s scandalous feature, “I Am Trinidad’s Most Evil Man”, one of a series of interviews with Trinidad’s richest, poorest, tallest, fattest, thinnest, fastest, strongest men; which was following a series on men with unusual callings: thief, beggar, night-soil remover, mosquito-killer, undertaker, birth-certificate searcher, lunatic-asylum warden; which had followed a series on one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed men; which had come about when, after an M. Biswas interview with a man who had been shot years before in the neck and had to cover up the hole in order to speak, the Sentinel office had been crowded with men with interesting mutilations, offering to sell their story.

Mr. Biswas’s article was hilariously received by Owad and Shekhar, particularly as the most evil man was a wellknown Arwacas character. He had committed one murder under great provocation and after his acquittal had developed into a genial bore. The title of the interview promised for the following week, with Trinidad’s maddest man, aroused further laughter.

After breakfast all the men-and this included Anand-went for a bathe at the harbour extension at Docksite. The dredging was incomplete, but the sea-wall had been built and in the early morning parts of the sea provided safe, clean bathing, though at every footstep the mud rose, clouding the water. The reclaimed land, raised to the level of the sea-wall, was not as yet real land, only crusted mud, sharp along the cracks which patterned it like a coral fan.

The sun was not out and the high, stationary clouds were touched with red. Ships were blurred in the distance; the level sea was like dark glass. Anand was left at the edge of the water, near the wall, and the men went ahead, their voices and splashings carrying far in the stillness. All at once the sun came out, the water blazed, and sounds were subdued.