Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Anand, following the example of those Samuel Smiles heroes who had in youth concealed the brilliance of their later years, did what he could to avoid school. He pretended to be ill; he played truant, forged excuses, was found out and flogged; he destroyed his shoes. He abandoned private lessons one afternoon, telling the teacher that he was wanted at home for a Hindu prayer ceremony which could take place only at half past three that afternoon, and telling his parents that the teacher’s mother had died and the teacher had gone to the funeral. Mr. Biswas, anxious to remain in the teacher’s favour, cycled to the school the next day to offer his condolences. Anand was called a young scamp (the teacher sank in his estimation for using a word that sounded so slangy), flogged and left behind the blackboard. At home Mr. Biswas said, “Those private lessons are costing me money, you know.” “Pranks” were permitted only in English Composition.

Most of his male cousins had undergone the brahminical initiation, and though Anand shared Mr. Biswas’s distaste for religious ritual, he was immediately attracted by this ceremony. His cousins had had their heads shaved, they were invested with the sacred thread, told the secret verses, given little bundles and sent off to Benares to study. This last was only a piece of play-acting. The attraction of the ceremony lay in the shaving of the head: no boy with a shaved head could go to a predominantly Christian school. Anand began a strong campaign for initiation. But he knew Mr. Biswas’s prejudices and worked subtly. He told Mr. Biswas one evening that he was unable to offer up the usual prayers with sincerity, since the words had become meaningless. He needed an original prayer, so that he could think of each word. He wanted Mr. Biswas to write this prayer for him, though he made it clear that, unlike Mr. Biswas, he wanted no east-west compromise: he wanted a specifically Hindu prayer. The prayer was written. And Anand got Shama to bring a coloured print of the goddess Lakshmi from Hanuman House. He hung the print on the wall above his table and objected when lights were turned on in the evening before he had said his prayer to Lakshmi. Shama was delighted at this example of blood triumphing over environment; and Mr. Biswas, despite his Aryan aversion to Sanatanist, Tulsi-like idol worship, could not hide the honour he felt at being asked to write Anand’s prayer. After some time Anand complained that the whole procedure was improper, a mockery, and would continue to be so until he had been initiated.

Shama was thrilled.

But Mr. Biswas said, “Wait till the long holidays.”

And so, during the long holidays, when Savi and Myna and Kamla were making their round of holiday visits, including a fortnight at a beach house Ajodha had rented, Anand, shaved and thoroughly brahmin, but ashamed of showing his bald head, stayed in Port of Spain and Mr. Biswas gave him portions of Macdougall’s Grammar to learn and listened to him recite his geography and English notes. The evening worship of Lakshmi stopped.

Towards the end of that year a letter came to Mr. Biswas from Chicago. The stamp was cancelled: REPORT OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POSTMASTER. Though the envelope was long the letter was short, a third of the paper being taken up by the florid, raised red and black letterhead of a newspaper. The letter was from Mr. Burnett.

Dear Mohun, As you can see, I have left my little circus and am back in the old business. As a matter of fact I didn’t leave the circus. It left me. Perhaps fire in Trinidad is different. But when that boy from St. James was given one small American fire to walk through, he just ran. Away. My guess is that he is somewhere on Ellis Island, with nobody to claim him. The snake-charmer was all right until his snake bit him. We gave him a good funeral. I hunted high and low to get a Hindu priest to say the last few words, but no luck. I was going to do the job myself, but I couldn’t dress the part, not being able to tie the headpiece or the tailpiece. Now and then I see a copy of the Sentinel . Why don’t you give America a try?

Though the letter was a joke and nothing in it was to be taken seriously, Mr. Biswas was moved that Mr. Burnett had written at all. He immediately began to reply, and went on for pages, writing detailed denigrations of the new members of the staff. He thought he was being light and detached, but when at lunchtime he re-read what he had written he saw how bitter he appeared, how much he had revealed of himself. He tore the letter up. From time to time, until he died, he thought of writing. But he never wrote. And Mr. Burnett never wrote again.

The school term ended and the children, forgetting the disappointment of the previous year, talked excitedly of going to Hanuman House for Christmas. Shama spent hours in the back verandah sewing clothes on an old hand machine which, mysteriously, was hers, how or since when no one knew. The broken wooden handle was swathed in red cotton and looked as though it had bled profusely from a deep wound; the chest, waist, rump and hind quarters of the animal-like machine, and its wooden stall, were black with oil and smelled of oil; and it was a wonder that cloth emerged clean and unmangled from the clanking, champing and chattering which Shama called forth from the creature by the touch of a finger on its bloody bandaged tail. The back verandah smelled of machine oil and new cloth and became dangerous with pins on the floor and pins between floorboards. Anand marvelled at the delight of his sisters in the tedious operations, and marvelled at their ability to put on dresses bristling with pins and not be pricked. Shama made him two shirts with long tails, the fashion among the boys at school (even exhibition pupils have their unscholarly moments) being for billowing shirts, barely tucked into the trousers.

But none of the clothes Shama made then were worn at Hanuman House.

One afternoon Mr. Biswas came back from the Sentinel and as soon as he pushed his cycle through the front gate he saw that the rose garden at the side of the house had been destroyed and the ground levelled, red earth mingling with the black. The plants were in a bundle against the corrugated iron fence. The stems, hard and stained and blighted on the outside, yet showed white and wet and full of promise where they had been cleanly gashed; their illformed leaves had not begun to quail; they still looked alive.

He threw his bicycle against the concrete steps.

“Shama!”

He walked briskly, his footsteps resounding, through the drawingroom to the back verandah. The floor was littered with scraps of cloth and tangles of thread.

“Shama!”

She came out of the kitchen, her face taut. Her eyes sought to still his voice.

He took in the table and the sewingmachine, the scraps of cloth, the thread, the pins, the kitchen safe, the rails, the banister. Below, in the yard, standing in a group against the fence, he saw the children. They were looking up at him. Then he saw the back of a lorry, a pile of old corrugated iron sheets, a heap of new scantlings, two Negro labourers with dusty heads, faces and backs. And Seth. Rough and managerial in his khaki uniform and heavy bruised bluchers, the ivory cigarette holder held down in one shirt pocket by the buttoned flap.

He saw it clearly. For what seemed a long time he contemplated it. Then he was running down the back steps; Seth looked up, surprised; the labourers, stooping on the lorry, looked up; and he was fumbling among the scantlings. He tried to take one up, had misjudged its size, abandoned it, Shama saying from the verandah, “No, no,” picked up a large stained wet stone from the bleaching-bed and “Who tell you you could come and cut down my rose trees? Who?” Scraping the words out of his throat so that they didn’t seem to come from where he stood, but from someone just behind him. A labourer jumped down from the lorry, there was surprise and even dread in Seth’s eyes. “Pa!” one girl cried, and he hoisted his arm, Shama saying “Man, man.” His wrist was seized, roughly, by large hot gritty fingers. The stone fell to the ground.