A House for Mr. Biswas Read online

  A House for Mr. Biswas

  Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  "Naipaul has constructed a marvelous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power." – Newsweek – Review

  A gripping masterpiece, hailed as one of the 20th century's finest novels

  A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is V.S. Naipaul's unforgettable third novel. Born the "wrong way" and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, Mr Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. He marries into the domineering Tulsi family, on whom he becomes indignantly dependent, but rebels and takes on a succession of occupations in an arduous struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. Heartrending and darkly comic, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS masterfully evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad.

  Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  A House for Mr. Biswas

  Prologue

  Ten weeks before he died, Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St. James, Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and convalesced at home for even longer. When the doctor advised him to take a complete rest the Trinidad Sentinel had no choice. It gave Mr. Biswas three months’ notice and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every morning with a free copy of the paper.

  Mr. Biswas was forty-six, and had four children. He had no money. His wife Shama had no money. On the house in Sikkim Street Mr. Biswas owed, and had been owing for four years, three thousand dollars. The interest on this, at eight per cent, came to twenty dollars a month; the ground rent was ten dollars. Two children were at school. The two older children, on whom Mr. Biswas might have depended, were both abroad on scholarships.

  It gave Mr. Biswas some satisfaction that in the circumstances Shama did not run straight off to her mother to beg for help. Ten years before that would have been her first thought. Now she tried to comfort Mr. Biswas, and devised plans on her own.

  “Potatoes,” she said. “We can start selling potatoes. The price around here is eight cents a pound. If we buy at five and sell at seven-”

  “Trust the Tulsi bad blood,” Mr. Biswas said. “I know that the pack of you Tulsis are financial geniuses. But have a good look around and count the number of people selling potatoes. Better to sell the old car.”

  “No. Not the car. Don’t worry. We’ll manage.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Biswas said irritably. “We’ll manage.”

  No more was heard of the potatoes, and Mr. Biswas never threatened again to sell the car. He didn’t now care to do anything against his wife’s wishes. He had grown to accept her judgement and to respect her optimism. He trusted her. Since they had moved to the house Shama had learned a new loyalty, to him and to their children; away from her mother and sisters, she was able to express this without shame, and to Mr. Biswas this was a triumph almost as big as the acquiring of his own house.

  He thought of the house as his own, though for years it had been irretrievably mortgaged. And during these months of illness and despair he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night, to hear no noises except those of his family, to wander freely from room to room and about his yard, instead of being condemned, as before, to retire the moment he got home to the crowded room in one or the other of Mrs. Tulsi’s houses, crowded with Shama’s sisters, their husbands, their children. As a boy he had moved from one house of strangers to another; and since his marriage he felt he had lived nowhere but in the houses of the Tulsis, at Hanuman House in Arwacas, in the decaying wooden house at Shorthills, in the clumsy concrete house in Port of Spain. And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should have been responsible for this seemed to him, in these last months, stupendous.

  The house could be seen from two or three streets away and was known all over St. James. It was like a huge and squat sentry-box: tall, square, two-storeyed, with a pyramidal roof of corrugated iron. It had been designed and built by a solicitor’s clerk who built houses in his spare time. The solicitor’s clerk had many contacts. He bought land which the City Council had announced was not for sale; he persuaded estate owners to split whole lots into half-lots; he bought lots of barely reclaimed swamp land near Mucurapo and got permission to build on them. On whole lots or three-quarter-lots he built one-storey houses, twenty feet by twenty-six, which could pass unnoticed; on half-lots he built two-storey houses, twenty feet by thirteen, which were distinctive. All his houses were assembled mainly from frames from the dismantled American Army camps at Docksite, Pompeii Savannah and Fort Read. The frames did not always match, but they enabled the solicitor’s clerk to pursue his hobby with little professional help.

  On the ground floor of Mr. Biswas’s two-storey house the solicitor’s clerk had put a tiny kitchen in one corner; the remaining L-shaped space, unbroken, served as drawingroom and diningroom. Between the kitchen and the diningroom there was a doorway but no door. Upstairs, just above the kitchen, the clerk had constructed a concrete room which contained a toilet bowl, a wash-basin and a shower; because of the shower this room was perpetually wet. The remaining L-shaped space was broken up into a bedroom, a verandah, a bedroom. Because the house faced west and had no protection from the sun, in the afternoon only two rooms were comfortably habitable: the kitchen downstairs and the wet bathroom-and-lavatory upstairs.

  In his original design the solicitor’s clerk seemed to have forgotten the need for a staircase to link both floors, and what he had provided had the appearance of an afterthought. Doorways had been punched in the eastern wall and a rough wooden staircase-heavy planks on an uneven frame with one warped unpainted banister, the whole covered with a sloping roof of corrugated iron-hung precariously at the back of the house, in striking contrast with the white-pointed brickwork of the front, the white woodwork and the frosted glass of doors and windows.

  For this house Mr. Biswas had paid five thousand five hundred dollars.

  Mr. Biswas had built two houses of his own and spent much time looking at houses. Yet he was inexperienced. The houses he had built had been crude wooden things in the country, not much better than huts. And during his search for a house he had always assumed new and modern concrete houses, bright with paint, to be beyond him; and he had looked at few. So when he was faced with one which was accessible, with a solid, respectable, modern front, he was immediately dazzled. He had never visited the house when the afternoon sun was on it. He had first gone one afternoon when it was raining, and the next time, when he had taken the children, it was evening.

  Of course there were houses to be bought for two thousand and three thousand dollars, on a whole lot, in rising parts of the city. But these houses were old and decaying, with no fences and no conveniences of any sort. Often on one lot there was a conglomeration of two or three miserable houses, with every room of every house let to a separate family who couldn’t legally be got out. What a change from those backyards, overrun with chickens and children, to the drawing-room of the solicitor’s clerk who, coatless, tieless and in slippers, looked relaxed and comfortable in his morris chair, while the heavy red curtains, reflecting on the polished floor, made the scene as cosy and rich as something in an advertisement! What a change from the Tulsi h
ouse!

  The solicitor’s clerk lived in every house he built. While he lived in the house in Sikkim Street he was building another a discreet distance away, at Morvant. He had never married, and lived with his widowed mother, a gracious woman who gave Mr. Biswas tea and cakes which she had baked herself. Between mother and son there was much affection, and this touched Mr. Biswas, whose own mother, neglected by himself, had died five years before in great poverty.

  “I can’t tell you how sad it make me to leave this house,” the solicitor’s clerk said, and Mr. Biswas noted that though the man spoke dialect he was obviously educated and used dialect and an exaggerated accent only to express frankness and cordiality. “Really for my mother’s sake, man. That is the onliest reason why I have to move. The old queen can’t manage the steps.” He nodded towards the back of the house, where the staircase was masked by heavy red curtains. “Heart, you see. Could pass away any day.”

  Shama had disapproved from the first and never gone to see the house. When Mr. Biswas asked her, “Well, what you think?” Shama said, “Think? Me? Since when you start thinking that I could think anything? If I am not good enough to go and see your house, I don’t see how I could be good enough to say what I think.”

  “Ah!” Mr. Biswas said. “Swelling up. Vexed. I bet you would be saying something different if it was your mother who was spending some of her dirty money to buy this house.”

  Shama sighed.

  “Eh? You could only be happy if we just keep on living with your mother and the rest of your big, happy family. Eh?”

  “I don’t think anything. You have the money, you want to buy house, and I don’t have to think anything.”

  The news that Mr. Biswas was negotiating for a house of his own had gone around Shama’s family. Suniti, a niece of twenty-seven, married, with two children, and abandoned for long periods by her husband, a handsome idler who looked after the railway buildings at Pokima Halt where trains stopped twice a day, Suniti said to Shama, “I hear that you come like a big-shot, Aunt.” She didn’t hide her amusement. “Buying house and thing.”

  “Yes, child,” Shama said, in her martyr’s way.

  The exchange took place on the back steps and reached the ears of Mr. Biswas, lying in pants and vest on the Slumberking bed in the room which contained most of the possessions he had gathered after forty-one years. He had carried on a war with Suniti ever since she was a child, but his contempt had never been able to quell her sarcasm. “Shama,” he shouted, “tell that girl to go back and help that worthless husband of hers to look after their goats at Pokima Halt.”

  The goats were an invention of Mr. Biswas which never failed to irritate Suniti. “Goats!” she said to the yard, and sucked her teeth. “Well, some people at least have goats. Which is more than I could say for some other people.”

  “Tcha!” Mr. Biswas said softly; and, refusing to be drawn into an argument with Suniti, he turned on his side and continued to read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

  The very day the house was bought they began to see flaws in it. The staircase was dangerous; the upper floor sagged; there was no back door; most of the windows didn’t close; one door could not open; the celotex panels under the eaves had fallen out and left gaps between which bats could enter the attic. They discussed these things as calmly as they could and took care not to express their disappointment openly. And it was astonishing how quickly this disappointment had faded, how quickly they had accommodated themselves to every peculiarity and awkwardness of the house. And once that had happened their eyes ceased to be critical, and the house became simply their house.

  When Mr. Biswas came back from the hospital for the first time, he found that the house had been prepared for him. The small garden had been made tidy, the downstairs walls distempered. The Prefect motorcar was in the garage, driven there weeks before from the Sentinel office by a friend. The hospital had been a void. He had stepped from that into a welcoming world, a new, ready-made world. He could not quite believe that he had made that world. He could not see why he should have a place in it. And everything by which he was surrounded was examined and rediscovered, with pleasure, surprise, disbelief. Every relationship, every possession.

  The kitchen safe. That was more than twenty years old. Shortly after his marriage he had bought it, white and new, from the carpenter at Arwacas, the netting unpainted, the wood still odorous; then, and for some time afterwards, sawdust stuck to your hand when you passed it along the shelves. How often he had stained and varnished it! And painted it too. Patches of the netting were clogged, and varnish and paint had made a thick uneven skin on the woodwork. And in what colours he had painted it! Blue and green and even black. In 1938, the week the Pope died and the Sentinel came out with a black border, he had come across a large tin of yellow paint and painted everything yellow, even the typewriter. That had been acquired when, at the age of thirty-three, he had decided to become rich by writing for American and English magazines; a brief, happy, hopeful period. The typewriter had remained idle and yellow, and its colour had long since ceased to startle. And why, except that it had moved everywhere with them and they regarded it as one of their possessions, had they kept the hatrack, its glass now leprous, most of its hooks broken, its woodwork ugly with painting-over? The bookcase had been made at Shorthills by an out-of-work blacksmith who had been employed by the Tulsis as a cabinet-maker; he revealed his skill in his original craft in every bit of wood he had fashioned, every joint he had made, every ornament he had attempted. And the diningtable: bought cheaply from a Deserving Destitute who had got some money from the Sentinel’s Deserving Destitutes Fund and wished to show his gratitude to Mr. Biswas. And the Slumberking bed, where he could no longer sleep because it was upstairs and he had been forbidden to climb steps. And the glass cabinet: bought to please Shama, still dainty, and still practically empty. And the morris suite: the last acquisition, it had belonged to the solicitor’s clerk and had been left by him as a gift. And in the garage outside, the Prefect.

  But bigger than them all was the house, his house.

  How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

  Part One

  1. Pastoral

  Shortly before he was born there had been another quarrel between Mr. Biswas’s mother Bipti and his father Raghu, and Bipti had taken her three children and walked all the way in the hot sun to the village where her mother Bissoondaye lived. There Bipti had cried and told the old story of Raghu’s miserliness: how he kept a check on every cent he gave her, counted every biscuit in the tin, and how he would walk ten miles rather than pay a cart a penny.

  Bipti’s father, futile with asthma, propped himself up on his string bed and said, as he always did on unhappy occasions, “Fate. There is nothing we can do about it.”

  No one paid him any attention. Fate had brought him from India to the sugar-estate, aged him quickly and left him to die in a crumbling mud hut in the swamplands; yet he spoke of Fate often and affectionately, as though, merely by surviving, he had been particularly favoured.

  While the old man talked on, Bissoondaye sent for the midwife, made a meal for Bipti’s children and prepared beds for them. When the midwife came the children were asleep. Some time later they were awakened by the screams of Mr. Biswas and the shrieks of the midwife.

  “What is it?” the old man asked. “Boy or girl?”

  “Boy, boy,” the midwife cried. “But what sort of boy? Six-fingered, and born in the wrong way.”

  The old man groaned and Bissoondaye said, “I knew it. There is no luck for me.”

  At once, though it was night and the way was lonely, she left the hut and walked to the next village, where the
re was a hedge of cactus. She brought back leaves of cactus, cut them into strips and hung a strip over every door, every window, every aperture through which an evil spirit might enter the hut.

  But the midwife said, “Whatever you do, this boy will eat up his own mother and father.”

  The next morning, when in the bright light it seemed that all evil spirits had surely left the earth, the pundit came, a small, thin man with a sharp satirical face and a dismissing manner. Bissoondaye seated him on the string bed, from which the old man had been turned out, and told him what had happened.

  “Hm. Born in the wrong way. At midnight, you said. “

  Bissoondaye had no means of telling the time, but both she and the midwife had assumed that it was midnight, the inauspicious hour.

  Abruptly, as Bissoondaye sat before him with bowed and covered head, the pundit brightened, “Oh, well. It doesn’t matter. There are always ways and means of getting over these unhappy things.” He undid his red bundle and took out his astrological almanac, a sheaf of loose thick leaves, long and narrow, between boards. The leaves were brown with age and their musty smell was mixed with that of the red and ochre sandalwood paste that had been spattered on them. The pundit lifted a leaf, read a little, wet his forefinger on his tongue and lifted another leaf.

  At last he said, “First of all, the features of this unfortunate boy. He will have good teeth but they will be rather wide, and there will be spaces between them. I suppose you know what that means. The boy will be a lecher and a spendthrift. Possibly a liar as well. It is hard to be sure about those gaps between the teeth. They might mean only one of those things or they might mean all three.”

  “What about the six fingers, pundit?”