Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

It was only to Shama that Mr. Biswas spoke about the changes. At the office the subject was never mentioned. Mr. Burnett’s favourites avoided one another and, fearing intrigue, mixed with no one else. Apart from the posters there had been no directive, but they had all, so far as their new duties permitted o writing, changed their styles. They wrote longer paragraphs of complete sentences with bigger words.

Presently the directives came, in a booklet called Rules for Reporters ; and it was in keeping with the aloof severity of the new authorities that the booklets should have appeared on every desk one morning without explanation, with only the name of the reporter, preceded by a “Mr”, in the top right-hand corner.

“He must have got up early this morning,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama.

The booklet contained rules about language, dress, behaviour, and at the bottom of every page there was a slogan. On the front cover was printed “THE RIGHTEST NEWS IS THE BRIGHTEST NEWS”, the inverted commas suggesting that the statement was historical, witty and wise. The back cover said: REPORT NOT DISTORT.

“Report not distort,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “That is all the son of a bitch doing now, you know, and drawing a fat salary for it too. Making up those slogans. Rules for Reporters. Rules !”

A few days later he came home and said, “Guess what? Editor peeing in a special place now, you know. ‘Excuse me. But I must go and pee-alone.’ Everybody peeing in the same place for years. What happen? He taking a course of Dodd’s Kidney Pills and peeing blue or something?”

In Shama’s accounts Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder appeared more often, always written out in full.

“Just watch and see,” Mr. Biswas said. “Everybody going to leave. People not going to put up with this sort of treatment, I tell you.”

“When you leaving?” Shama asked.

And worse was to come.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose they just want to frighten me. I will henceforward-henceforward: you hear the sort of words that son of a bitch using-I will henceforward spend my afternoons at the cemeteries of Port of Spain. Just hand me that yellow book. Rules for Reporters! Let me see. Anything about funerals? By God! They damn well have it in! ‘The Sentinel reporter should be soberly dressed on these occasions, that is, in a dark suit.’ Dark suit! The man must think I haven’t got a wife and four children. He must think he paying me a fortune every fortnight. ‘Neither by his demeanour nor by his dress should the reporter offend the mourners, since this will certainly lose the paper much goodwill. The Sentinel reporter should remember that he represents the Sentinel . He should encourage trust. It cannot be stressed too often that the reporter should get every name right. A name incorrectly spelt is offensive. All orders and decorations should be mentioned, but the reporter should use his discretion in making inquiries about these. To be ignorant of an individual’s decorations is almost certain to offend him. To ask an OBE whether he is an MBE is equally likely to offend. Far better, in this hypothetical case, to make inquiries on the assumption that the individual is a CBE. After the immediate family, the names of all mourners should be set out in alphabetical order.’

“God! God ! Isn’t this just the sort of arseness to make you go and dance on the grave afterwards? You know, I could turn the funeral column into a bright little feature. Yesterday’s Undertakings. By Gravedigger. Just next to Today’s Arrangements. Or set it next to Invalids. Heading: Going Going, Gone. How about this? Photo of weeping widow at graveside. Later, photo of widow hearing about will and laughing. Caption: ‘Smiling, Mrs. X? We thought so. Where there’s a will there is a way.’ Two photos side by side.”

In the meantime he bought a dark serge suit on credit. And while Anand walked beside the wall of Lapeyrouse Cemetery on his way to the Dairies in the afternoon, Mr. Biswas was often inside the cemetery, moving solemnly among the tombstones and making discreet inquiries about names and decorations. He came home tired, complaining of headaches, his stomach rising.

“A capitalist rag,” he began to say. “Just another capitalist rag.”

Anand remarked that his name no longer appeared in it.

“Glad like hell,” Mr. Biswas said.

And on four Saturdays in succession he was sent to unimportant cricket matches, just to get the scores. The game of cricket meant nothing to him, but he was made to understand that the assignment was part of his retraining and he cycled from fourth-class match to fourth-class match, copying symbols and scores he did not understand, enjoying only the brief esteem of surprised and thrilled players under trees. Most of the matches finished at half past five and it was impossible to be at all the grounds at the same time. It sometimes happened that when he got to a ground there was no one there. Then secretaries had to be hunted out and there was more cycling. In this way those Saturday afternoons and evenings were ruined, and often Sunday as well, for many of the scores he had gathered were not printed.

He began to echo phrases from the prospectus of the Ideal School of Journalism. “I can make a living by my pen,” he said. “Let them go ahead. Just let them push me too far.” At this period one-man magazines, nearly all run by Indians, were continually springing up. “Start my own magazine,” Mr. Biswas said. “Go around like Bissessar, selling them myself. He tell me he does sell his paper like hot cakes. Like hot cakes, man!”

He abandoned his own regime of strictness at home and instead spoke so long of various members of the Sentinel staff that Shama and the children got to feel that they knew them well. From time to time he indulged in a tiny rebellion.

“Anand, on your way to school stop at the cafй and telephone the Sentinel . Tell them I don’t feel like coming to work today.”

“Why you don’t telephone them yourself? You know I don’t like telephoning.”

“We can’t always do what we like, boy.”

“And you want me to say that you just don’t feel like going out to work today.”

“Tell them I’m sick. Cold, headache, fever. You know.”

When Anand left, Mr. Biswas would say, “Let them sack me. Let them sack me like hell. Think I care? I want them to sack me.”

“Yes,” Shama said. “You want them to sack you.”

But he was careful to space out these days.

He made himself unpopular among the boys and young men of the street who played cricket on the pavement in the afternoons and chattered under the lamp-post at night. He shouted at them from his window and, because of his suit, his job, the house he lived in, his connexion with Owad, his influence with the police, they were cowed. Sometimes he ostentatiously went to the cafй and telephoned the local police sergeant, whom he had known well in happier days. And he rejoiced in the glares and the mutterings of the players when, soberly dressed, unlikely to offend mourners, he cycled out to his funerals in the afternoon.

He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear with the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times was for him almost like an act of sacrifice. He shared his discovery with Anand; and though he abstracted some of the pleasure of Dickens by making Anand write out and learn the meanings of difficult words, he did this not out of his strictness or as part of Anand’s training. He said, “I don’t want you to be like me.”