Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“Leave him, leave him,” Shama said. “All this talk about house was only to spite me.”

“But if I keep my job in Port of Spain I don’t see how I would be able to do anything on the estate,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

He wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to move for Shama’s sake; or whether, without Seth, she needed as many men as possible around her; or whether she wanted no one, by his coolness, to make her question her own enthusiasm. And he agreed to go to Shorthills with her one morning, to have a look at the estate.

He made Anand telephone the Sentinel and went with Mrs. Tulsi to the bus stop. There he suffered some moments of anxiety, for with her long white skirt, her veil, her arms braceleted from wrist to elbow and a thick gold yoke around her neck, Mrs. Tulsi was noticeable in any Port of Spain street, and Mr. Biswas feared he would be spotted by someone from the office. He leaned against the lamp-post, hiding his face.

“Regular bus service,” he said after a time.

“From Shorthills, the buses always leave on the dot.”

“Instead of giving every child a sheep, better to give them a horse. Ride to school. Ride back.”

At last the bus came, empty except for the driver and the conductor. The body had been made locally, a crude jangling box of wood and tin and felt and large naked bolts. Mr. Biswas bumped exaggeratedly up and down on the rough wooden seat. “Just practising,” he said.

The city ended abruptly at the Maraval terminus. The road climbed anl dipped; hills intermittently shut out the view. After half an hour Mr. Biswas pointed to the bush on a roundabout. “Estate?” They went past a puzzling huddle of three crumbling shacks. Two black water barrels stood in the hard yellow yard. “Cricket field?” Mr. Biswas said. “Swimming pool?”

After many curves and climbs the road straightened out and ran steadily down into a widening valley. The hills looked wild, the tops of trees rising one behind the other: a coagulation of greenery. But here and there the faded thatch of a lean-to, warm against the still, dark green, showed that the wilderness had been charted. Houses and huts appeared on either side of the road, widely separated and so hidden by green that, from the bus, Shorthills was only flitting patches of colour: the rust of a roof, the pink or ochre of a wall.

“Next bus to Port of Spain in ten minutes,” the conductor said conversationally. Mr. Biswas got up. Mrs. Tulsi pulled him down. “They like to reverse first.” The bus reversed in a dirt lane and came to rest on the verge, under an avocado pear tree.

The driver and conductor squatted under the tree, smoking. Across the road and next to the lane in which the bus had reversed Mr. Biswas saw an open square of ground, mounds and faded wreaths alone indicating its purpose.

Mr. Biswas waved at the forlorn little cemetery and the dirt lane which, past a few tumbledown houses, disappeared behind bush and apparently led only to more bush and the mountain which rose at the end. “Estate?” he asked.

Mrs. Tulsi smiled. “And on this side.” She waved at the other side of the road.

Beyond a deep gully, whose sides were sheer, whose bed was strewn with boulders, stones and pebbles, perfectly graded, Mr. Biswas saw more bush, more mountains. “A lot of bamboo,” he said. “You could start a paper factory.”

It was easy to see just how far the buses went. Up to the dirt lane the road was smooth, its centre black and dully shining. Past that the road narrowed, was gravelly and dusty, its edges obscured by the untended verge.

“I suppose we go along there,” Mr. Biswas said.

They began walking.

Mrs. Tulsi bent down and tore up a plant from the verge. “Rabbit meat,” she said. “Best food for rabbits. In Arwacas you have to buy it.”

Below the overarching trees the road was in soft shadow. Sunlight spotted the gravel in white blurs, spotted the wet green verges, the dark ridged trunks of trees. It was cool. And then Mr. Biswas began seeing the fruit trees. Avocado pear trees grew at the side of the road as casually as any bush; their fruit, only just out of flower, were tiny but already perfectly shaped, with a shine they would soon lose. The land between the road and the gully widened; the gully grew shallower. Beyond it Mr. Biswas saw the tall immortelles and their red and yellow flowers. And then the untrodden road blazed with the flowers. Mr. Biswas picked one up, put it between his lips, tasted the nectar, blew, and the bird-shaped flower whistled. Even as they stood flowers fell on them. Under the immortelles he saw the cocoa trees, stunted, their branches black and dry, the cocoa pods gleaming with all the colours between yellow and red and crimson and purple, not like things that had grown, but like varnished wax models stuck on to dead branches. Then there were orange trees, heavy with leaf and fruit. And always they walked between two hills. The road narrowed; they heard no sound except that of their feet on the loose gravel. Then, far away, they heard the bus starting on its journey back to bustling, barren, concrete and timber Port of Spain. Impossible that it was less than an hour away!

The gully grew shallower and shallower, and then it was only a depression carpeted with a soft vine of a tender green. Mrs. Tulsi bent down and disturbed it. A vine hung from her fingers; it had a faint smell of mint.

“Old man’s beard,” she said. “In Arwacas they grow it in baskets.”

The house was partly hidden by a large, branching, towering saman tree. Swollen parasite vines veined its branches and massive trunk; wild pines sprouted like coarse hair from every crotch; and it was hung with lianas. Below the tree, beside the gully, there was a short walk lined with orange trees, and around the trunk there was a clump of wild tannia, pale green, four feet tall, nothing but stem and giant heart-shaped leaves, cool with quick beads of dew.

An old signpost stood slightly askew in the gully. The letters were bleached and faint: Christopher Columbus Road . It was fitting. The land, though fruitful from a former cultivation, felt new.

“This used to be the old road,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

And Mr. Biswas found it easy to imagine the other race of Indians moving about this road before the world grew dark for them.

Nothing in Shama’s accounts had prepared him for the view of the house from the gully, at the end of the tree-lined drive. It was a two-storeyed house with a long verandah on the lower floor; it stood far from the road on an escarpment on the hill, above a broad flight of concrete steps, white against the surrounding green.

And everything was as Shama had said. On one side of the drive there was a cricket field; the pitch was red and broken: obviously the village team did not use matting. On the other side, beyond the saman tree, the lianas, the wild tannia, there was a swimming pool, empty, cracked, sandy, plants pushing up through the concrete, but it was easy to see it mended and filled with clear water; and beyond that, on an artificial mound, a cherry tree, its thick branches trimmed level at the bottom above a wrought-iron seat. And in the drive the gri-gri palms, with their white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves; though they were perhaps too old: they had grown so tall they could not be seen whole, and could even be missed.

Then at the far end of the cricket ground Mr. Biswas saw a mule. It looked old and dispirited. Untethered, it remained still, against a camouflage of cocoa-trees.

“Ah!” Mr. Biswas said, breaking the silence. “Horses.”

“That’s not a horse,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

They left the drive and stood among the wild tannia under the saman tree. Mrs. Tulsi held a liana and offered it to Mr. Biswas. While he felt it, she held a thinner liana and pulled it down. “As strong as rope,” she said. “The children could skip with this.”