Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Disarmed, he was without words. Beside the three men he felt his frailty, his baggy linen suit beside Seth’s tight khaki clothes and the labourers’ working rags. The cuffs of his jacket bore the imprints of dirty fingers; his wrist burned where it had been held.

Seth said, “You see. You make your children frighten like hell.” And to the loaders, “All right, all right.”

The unloading continued.

“Rose trees?” Seth said. “They did just look like black sage bush to me.”

“Yes,” Mr. Biswas said. “Yes! I know they just look like bush to you. Tough!” he added. “Tough!” As he turned he stumbled against the bed of bleaching stones.

“Oops!” Seth said.

“Tough!” Mr. Biswas repeated, walking away.

Shama followed him.

Heads were withdrawn from the fence on either side. Curtains dropped back into place.

“Thug!” Mr. Biswas said, going up the steps.

“Eh, eh,” Seth said, smiling at the children. “Helluva temper, man. But my lorries can’t sleep in the road.”

From the verandah Mr. Biswas, unseen, said, “This is not the end of this. The old lady will have something to say about this, I guarantee you. And Shekhar.”

Seth laughed. “The old hen and the big god, eh?” He looked up at the verandah and said in Hindi, “Too many people have the idea that everything belongs to the Tulsis. How do you think this house was bought?”

Mr. Biswas appeared at the banister of the verandah.

Anand looked away.

“You will be hearing from my solicitor,” Mr. Biswas said. “And those two rakshas you have with you. They too.” He disappeared again.

The labourers, unaware of their identification with Hindu mythological forces of evil, unloaded.

Seth winked at the children. “Your father is a damn funny sort of man. Behaving as though he own the place. Let me tell you that when you children born your father couldn’t feed you. Ask him. And see the gratitude I get? Everybody defying me these days. Or you don’t know?”

“Savi! Myna! Kamla! Anand!” Shama called.

“You know what your father was doing when I pick him up and marry him to your mother? You know? He tell you? He wasn’t even catching crab. He was just catching flies.”

“Savi! Anand!”

They hesitated, afraid of Seth, afraid of the house and Mr. Biswas.

“Today, look! White suit, collar and tie. And me. Still in the same dirty clothes you see me with since you born. Gratitude, eh? But I will tell you children that if I leave them today, all of them-your father, mother and all-all of them start catching crab tomorrow, I guarantee you.”

From somewhere in the house Mr. Biswas’s voice came, raised, indistinct, heated.

Seth moved to the lorry.

“Eh, Ewart?” he said gently to one of the loaders. “They was nice roses, eh?”

Ewart smiled, his tongue over his top lip, and made sounds which committed him in no way.

Seth jerked his chin toward the house, still the source of angry, indistinct words. He smiled. Then he stopped smiling and said, “We mustn’t pay any mind to these damn jackasses.”

The children moved to the foot of the back steps, where they were hidden from Seth and the loaders.

Mr. Biswas’s mutterings died away.

Suddenly an obscenity cracked out from the house. The children were quite still. There was silence, even from the lorry. Anand could have wept. Then the corrugated iron sheets jangled again.

A series of resonant crashes came from the kitchen.

“Cut down the rose trees,” Mr. Biswas was shouting. “Cut them down. Break up everything else.”

The children, now below the house, heard his footsteps on the floor above as he went from room to room, pulling things down.

Anand walked under the house to the front, past Mr. Biswas’s abandoned bicycle. The fence cast a shadow over the pavement and part of the road. Anand leaned against the fence and envied the calm of the other houses in the street, the group of boys and young men, the cricket players, the night chatterers, around the lamp-post.

Fresh noises came from the yard. It was not Mr. Biswas pulling things down, but Seth and Ewart and Ewart’s colleague putting up a shed for Seth’s lorries at the side of the house, over Mr. Biswas’s garden.

On the road the shadows of houses and trees quickly lengthened, were distorted, became unrecognizable and finally dissolved into darkness.

Mr. Biswas came down the front steps.

“Come with me for a walk.”

Anand would have liked to go, if only because he didn’t want to hurt by refusing. But he wanted more to inspect the damage and comfort Shama.

The damage was slight. Mr. Biswas had ordered his destruction with economy. The mirror of Shama’s dressingtable had been unhinged and thrown on the bed, where it lay intact, reflecting the ceiling. The books had been knocked about a good deal; Selections from Sankamcharya had suffered especially. Mrs. Tulsi’s marble topped tables had all been overturned; the marble tops, crashing, must have been responsible for some of the more frightening noises. Many of the brass vases had been dented, and two potted palms had lost their pots without in any way losing their shape. The hatrack was in a semi-recumbent position against the half-wall of the front verandah, but it had been thrown there gently: a few hooks had snapped, but the glass was whole. In the kitchen no glass or china had been thrown, only noisy things like pots and pans and enamel plates.

When Mr. Biswas returned his mood had changed.

“Shama, how did those marble tops break?” he asked, mimicking Mrs. Tulsi. Then he acted himself. “Break, Mai? What break? Oh, marble top. Yes, Mai. It really break. It look as if it break. Now I wonder how that happened.” He examined the broken hooks of the hatrack. “Didn’t know metal was such a funny thing. Come and look, Savi. Is not smooth inside, you know. Is more like packed sand.” As for the re-diffusion set, which he had kicked from room to room and disembowelled, he said, “I wanted to do that for a long time. The company always saying that they replace sets free.”

When the engineers saw the battered box and asked what had happened, he said, “I feel we listen to it too hard.” They left a brand-new set in exchange, of the latest design.

Every night Seth’s lorries rested in the shed at the side of the house. Mr. Biswas had never thought of Tulsi property as belonging to any particular person. Everything, the land at Green Vale, the shop at The Chase, belonged simply to the House. But the lorries were Seth’s.

Despite the solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. Only the death of Pundit Tulsi had prevented them from going back to India; and ever since they had talked, though less often than the old men who gathered in the arcade every evening, of moving on, to India, Demerara, Surinam. Mr. Biswas didn’t take such talk seriously. The old men would never see India again. And he could not imagine the Tulsis anywhere else except at Arwacas. Separate from their house, and lands, they would be separate from the labourers, tenants and friends who respected them for their piety and the memory of Pundit Tulsi; their Hindu status would be worthless and, as had happened during their descent on the house in Port of Spain, they would be only exotic.

But when Shama went hurrying to Arwacas to give her news of Seth’s blasphemies, she found Hanuman House in commotion. The Tulsis had decided to move on. The clay-brick house was to be abandoned, and everyone was full of talk of the new estate at Shorthills, to the northeast of Port of Spain, among the mountains of the Northern Range.