Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

At school one day Anand asked the boy who shared his desk, “Your father and mother does quarrel?”

“What about?”

“Oh, about anything. About food, for instance.”

“Nah. But suppose he ask her to go to town and buy something. And suppose she don’t buy it. Boy!”

One evening, after a quarrel had flared up and died without being concluded, Anand went to Mr. Biswas’s room and said, “I have a story to tell you.”

Something in his manner warned Mr. Biswas. He put down his book, settled a pillow against the head of the bed and smiled.

“Once upon a time there was a man-” Anand’s voice broke.

“Yes?” Mr. Biswas said, in a mocking friendly voice, still smiling, scraping his lower lip with his teeth.

“Once upon a time there was a man who-” His voice broke again, his father’s smile confused him, he forgot what he had planned to say and abandoning grammar, added quickly, “Who, whatever you do for him, wasn’t satisfied.”

Mr. Biswas burst out laughing, and Anand ran out of the room, trembling with rage and humiliation, to the kitchen, where Shama comforted him.

For many days Anand didn’t speak to Mr. Biswas and, in secret revenge, didn’t drink milk at the Dairies, but iced coffee. Mr. Biswas was effusive towards Savi and Myna and Kamla, and relaxed with Shama. The atmosphere in the house was less heavy and Shama, now Anand’s defender, took much pleasure in urging Anand to speak to his father.

“Leave him, leave him,” Mr. Biswas said. “Leave the storyteller.”

Anand became steadily more morose. When he came home after private lessons one afternoon he refused to eat or talk. He went to his room, lay down on the bed and, despite Shama’s coaxings, stayed there.

Mr. Biswas came in and presently walked into the room, saying in his rallying voice, “Well, well. What happen to our Hans Andersen?”

“Eat some prunes, son,” Shama said, taking out the little brown paper-bag from the table drawer.

Mr. Biswas saw the distress on Anand’s face and his manner changed. “What’s the matter?”

Anand said, “The boys laugh at me.”

“He who laughs last laughs best,” Shama said.

“Lawrence say that his father is your boss.”

There was silence.

Mr. Biswas sat on the bed and said, “Lawrence is the night editor. Nothing to do with me.”

“He say they have you like an office boy in the office.”

“You know I write features.”

“And he say that when you go to his father house you have to go to the back door.”

Mr. Biswas stood up. His linen suit was crumpled, the jacket pulled out of shape by the notebooks in the pockets, the tops of which were dirty and a little frayed.

“You never went to his father house?”

“Why should he go to Lawrence’s house?” Shama said.

“And you never went to the back door?”

Mr. Biswas walked to the window. It was dark; his back was to them.

“Let me put on the light,” Shama said briskly. Her footsteps were heavy. The light went on. Anand covered his face with his arm. “Is that all that’s been upsetting you?” Shama asked. “Your father has nothing to do with Lawrence. You heard what he said. “

Mr. Biswas went out of the room.

Shama said, “You shouldn’t have told him that, you know, son.”

For the rest of that evening Shama walked and talked and did everything as noisily as she could.

The next morning, with his books and lunch parcel in his bag and the six cents for milk in his pocket, Anand was kissing Shama in the back verandah when Mr. Biswas came to him and said, “I don’t depend on them for a job. You know that. We could go back any time to Hanuman House. All of us. You know that.”

On Saturday he took the children on a surprise visit to Ajodha’s. Tara and Ajodha were as delighted as the children, and the visit lasted till Sunday. There was much to look at in the new house. It was a grand two-storeyed concrete house built and decorated and furnished in the modern manner. The concrete blocks looked like rough-hewn stone; there was no dust-collecting fretwork hanging from the eaves; doors and windows were varnished, not painted, and closed and opened in interesting ways; chairs were upholstered and vast, not small and cane-bottomed; floors were stained and polished; the lavatory flushes were chainless. In the drawing-room they studied Tara’s photographs of the dead; they saw Raghu in his flower-strewn coffin surrounded by his thin, big-eyed children. The kitchen was enormous and abounded in modern contrivances; Tara, old, slow and oldfashioned, seemed out of place in it. When they were tired of the house they wandered about the yard, which had not changed. They talked to the cowman and the gardener, examined the various people who called, and played among the abandoned frames of motor vehicles. After lunch on Saturday they went to the cinema, and on Sunday Ajodha arranged an excursion.

The following week-end they went again, and the weekend after that; and soon this week-end visit was established. They travelled up on Saturday morning, since that was the only time it was reasonably easy to get a bus out of Port of Spain. As soon as they got on the bus in the George Street station Mr. Biswas changed, dropping his week-day moroseness and becoming gay and even impish. The mood lasted until Sunday evening; then they were all silent as they got nearer the city, the house, Shama, Monday morning. For a day or two afterwards the house in Port of Spain seemed dark and clumsy.

Shama went on only one of these visits, and that she almost ruined. The old, unspoken antagonism between the families still existed and she was not eager to go. There had been a minor quarrel just before they went through the gate, and Shama was sullen when she stepped into Tara’s house. Then, either from pride, or because she was made uneasy by the grandeur of the house, or because she was unable to make the effort, she remained sullen throughout the week-end. She said afterwards that she had known all along that Ajodha and Tara did not care for her; and she never went again.

She was often alone in Port of Spain. The children were not anxious to go with her to Hanuman House, and as dissension there increased she went less often herself, regretting the old warmth, fearing to be involved in new quarrels. She had hardly moved outside her own family and did not know how to get on with strangers. She was shy of people of another race, religion or way of life. Her shyness had got her a reputation for hardness among the tenants, and she had done little to get to know the woman who lived in Owad’s old room. But now, alone at the week-ends, she felt the need of company and sought out the woman, who not only responded, but showed herself exceedingly curious. And Shama took down her account books and explained.

So the house became Shama’s, the place where she stayed, the place to which Mr. Biswas and the children returned with sadness after the week-end.

And during the week Anand’s life was a misery. While Mr. Biswas struggled with features on the splendid work of the Chacachacare Leper Settlement (with a photograph of lepers at prayer) and the Young Offenders’ Detention Institution (with a photograph of young offenders at prayer), Anand wrote down and learned by heart copious notes on geography and English. Textbooks were discarded; only the notes of the teacher mattered; any deviation was instantly and severely punished; and there was not a day when some boy was not flogged and put to stand behind the blackboard. For this was the exhibition class, where no learning mattered except that which led to good examination results; and the teacher knew his job. At home Mr. Biswas read Anand Self-Help and on his birthday gave him Duty , adding as a pure frivolity a school edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare . Childhood, as a time of gaiety and irresponsibility, was for these exhibition pupils only one of the myths of English Composition. Only in compositions did they give delirious shouts of joy and their spirits overflowed into song; only there did they indulge in what the composition notes called “schoolboy’s pranks”.