Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“But a comrade stood beside him while his life blood ebbed away .”

Anand’s voice quavered with emotion. Hari stared at the floor. His wife fixed her large eyes on a spot somewhere above Anand’s shoulder. Anand had not expected such a full and immediate response. He increased the pathos in his voice, spoke more slowly and exaggerated his gestures. With both hands on his left breast he acted out the last words of the dying legionnaire.

“Tell her the last night of my life , for ere this moon be risen,

“My body will be out of pain , my soul be out of prison.”

Hari’s wife burst out crying. Hari put his hand on hers. In this way they listened to the end; and Anand, after being given a six-cents piece, left them shaken.

Less than a week later Hari died. It was only then that Anand learned that Hari had known for some time that he was going to die soon. W. C. Tuttle, ferociously brahminical in an embroidered silk jacket, did the last rites. The house went into mourning for Hari; no one used sugar or salt. He was one of those men who, by a negativeness that amounts to charity, are thought of kindly by everyone. He had taken part in no disputes; his goodness, like his scholarship, was a family tradition. Everyone had been used to seeing Hari as the officiating pundit at religious ceremonies; everyone had been used to receiving the consecrated foods from him every morning. Hari, in dhoti, his forehead marked with sandalwood paste; Hari doing morning and evening puja ; Hari with his religious texts on the elaborately carved bookrest: these had been fixed sights in the Tulsi house. There had been no one to take Seth’s place. There was no one to take Hari’s.

The duty of the puja was shared by many of the men and boys. Sometimes even Anand had to do it. Untutored in the prayers, he could only go through the motions of the ritual. He washed the images, placed fresh flowers on the shrine, diverted himself by trying to stick the stem of a flower in the crook of a god’s arm or between the god’s chin and chest. He put fresh sandalwood paste on the foreheads of the gods, on the smooth black and rose and yellow pebbles, and on his own forehead; lit the camphor, circled the flame about the shrine with his right hand while with his left he tried to ring the bell; blew at the conch shell, emitting a sound like that of a heavy wardrobe scraping on a wooden floor; then, his cheeks aching from the effort of blowing the conch shell, he hurried out to eat, first making the round of the house to offer the milk and tulsi leaves which, unbelievably, he had consecrated. When he dressed for school he brushed the caked sandalwood marks from his forehead.

About a fortnight after Hari died news came from Arwacas of another death. Anand was working at the table in the room on the upper floor one evening, and Mr. Biswas was reading in bed, when the door was thrown open and Savi ran in and said, “Great Aunt Padma is dead!”

Mr. Biswas closed his eyes and put his hand on his heart.

Anand screamed, “Savi!”

She stood still, her eyes shining.

From downstairs a deep-drawn lamentation burst out and spread through the house, rising, falling, relayed from one sister to the other and back again, like the barking of dogs at night.

Sharma’s death had done little more than upset routine. Hari’s had saddened. Padma’s terrified. She was Mrs. Tulsi’s sister: death had come closer to them all. She had known them all their lives; she had died away from them. The sisters said these things over and over as they embraced each other and embraced their children. The house shook with footsteps, shrieks, wails and the crying of frightened children. Mrs. Tulsi was reported to be out of her mind; there were rumours that she too was dying. The children stuck pins into lamp wicks and murmured incantations to keep off fresh disaster. They heard Mrs. Tulsi clamouring to be taken to the body of her sister. The cry was taken up by some of the sisters, and despite the hour and despite the quarrel with Seth, preparations were made and the lorry and sports car set off for Arwacas, and only men and children were left in the house.

The women returned the following afternoon, with more than their grief. For most of them it had been their first visit to Arwacas since the move, their first glimpse of Seth. They had not spoken to him, but the truce had enabled them to inspect the property which Seth, still vigorously pursuing the quarrel, had bought on the High Street not far from Hanuman House, a first step, they had been told, to his buying over of Hanuman House itself. It was a grocery and it was large enough and new enough and well enough stocked to alarm the sisters. But there could be no talk of Seth just then.

Padma appeared in many dreams that night. In the morning every dream was recounted and it was agreed that Padma’s spirit had come to the house in Shorthills, which she had never visited while she lived. This was confirmed by the experience of one sister. In the middle of the night she had heard footsteps in the road. She recognized them as Padma’s. There was silence as Padma had crossed the gully, footsteps again as Padma came up the sandy drive and up the concrete steps. Padma had then made a tour of the house, sat down on the back steps and wept. Many people saw Padma after that. Much attention was given to the story of one of the Tuttle children. In broad daylight he had seen a woman in white walking from the graveyard towards the house. He caught up with her and said, “Aunt.” She turned. It wasn’t an aunt. It was Padma; she was crying. Before he could speak she pulled her veil over her face, and he had run. When he looked back he saw no one.

Yet it was some time before the sisters realized that Padma appeared so often because she had a message. They then decided that anyone who saw her should ask what her message was. The messages varied. At first Padma merely asked after certain people and said she wished she were alive and with them; sometimes she also said she had died of a broken heart. But Padma’s later messages, when whispered from sister to sister, from child to child, caused consternation. She said Seth had driven her to take poison; she said Seth had poisoned her; she said Seth had beaten her to death and bribed the doctor not to have a post mortem.

“Don’t tell Mai,” the sisters said.

Anger overrode their grief. Every sister cursed Seth and vowed never to speak to him again.

Mrs. Tulsi kept to the room with the closed windows. Sushila and Miss Blackie made brandy poultices for her eyelids, as before, and massaged her head with bay rum. But in the box-board temple at the end of the ruined, overgrown garden there was no Hari to say prayers for her and the house. Bells were rung and gongs were struck, but the luck, the virtue had gone out of the family.

And two of the sheep died. The canal at the side of the drive was at last completely silted over and the rain, which ran down the hillside in torrents after the briefest shower, flooded the flat land. The gully, no longer supported by the roots, began to be eaten away. The old man’s beard was deprived of a footing; its thin tangled roots hung over the banks like a threadbare carpet. The gully bed, washed clean of black soil and the plants that grew on it, showed sandy, then pebbly, then rocky. It could no longer be forded by the car, and the car stayed on the road. The sisters were puzzled by the erosion, which seemed to them sudden; but they accepted it as part of their new fate.

Govind stopped looking after the cows. He bought a secondhand motorcar and operated it as a taxi in Port of Spain. W. C. Tuttle opened a quarry on the estate. His enterprise aroused envy. He had been the first to sell estate trees; now that there were few trees to sell he was selling the very earth. Mr. Biswas continued to transport his plunder of oranges and avocado pears in the saddlebag of his bicycle.