A House for Mr. Biswas (2 page)

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.

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 there 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?’

‘That’s a shocking sign, of course. The only thing I can advise is to keep him away from trees and water. Particularly water.’

‘Never bath him?’

‘I don’t mean exactly that.’ He raised his right hand, bunched the fingers and, with his head on one side, said slowly, ‘One has to interpret what the book says.’ He tapped the wobbly almanac with his left hand. ‘And when the book says water, I think it means water in its natural form.’

‘Natural form.’

‘Natural form,’ the pundit repeated, but uncertainly. ‘I mean,’ he said quickly, and with some annoyance, ‘keep him away from rivers and ponds. And of course the sea. And another thing,’ He added with satisfaction. ‘He will have an unlucky sneeze.’ He began to pack the long leaves of his almanac. ‘Much of the evil this boy will undoubtedly bring will be mitigated if his father is forbidden to see him for twenty-one days.’

‘That will be easy,’ Bissoondaye said, speaking with emotion for the first time.

‘On the twenty-first day the father
must
see the boy. But not in the flesh.’

‘In a mirror, pundit?’

‘I would consider that ill-advised. Use a brass plate. Scour it well.’

‘Of course.’

‘You must fill this brass plate with coconut oil – which, by the way, you must make yourself from coconuts you have collected with your own hands – and in the reflection on this oil the father must see his son’s face.’ He tied the almanac together and rolled it in the red cotton wrapper which was also spattered with sandalwood paste. ‘I believe that is all.’

‘We forgot one thing, punditji. The name.’

‘I can’t help you completely there. But it seems to me that a perfectly safe prefix would be
Mo.
It is up to you to think of something to add to that.’

‘Oh, punditji, you must help me. I can only think
of hun.’

The pundit was surprised and genuinely pleased. ‘But that is excellent. Excellent.
Mohun.
I couldn’t have chosen better myself. For Mohun, as you know, means the beloved, and was the name given by the milkmaids to Lord Krishna.’ His eyes softened at the thought of the legend and for a moment he appeared to forget Bissoondaye and Mr Biswas.

From the knot at the end of her veil Bissoondaye took out a florin and offered it to the pundit, mumbling her regret that she could not give more. The pundit said that she had done her best and was not to worry. In fact he was pleased; he had expected less.

*

Mr Biswas lost his sixth finger before he was nine days old. It simply came off one night and Bipti had an unpleasant turn when, shaking out the sheets one morning, she saw this tiny finger tumble to the ground. Bissoondaye thought this an excellent sign and buried the finger behind the cowpen at the back of the house, not far from where she had buried Mr Biswas’s navel-string.

In the days that followed Mr Biswas was treated with attention and respect. His brothers and sisters were slapped if they disturbed his sleep, and the flexibility of his limbs was regarded as a matter of importance. Morning and evening he was massaged with coconut oil. All his joints were exercised; his arms and legs were folded diagonally across his red shining body; the big toe of his right foot was made to touch his left shoulder, the big toe of his left foot was made to touch his right shoulder, and both toes were made to touch his nose; finally, all his limbs were bunched together over his belly and then, with a clap and a laugh, released.

Mr Biswas responded well to these exercises, and Bissoondaye became so confident that she decided to have a celebration on the ninth day. She invited people from the village and fed them. The pundit came and was unexpectedly gracious, though his manner suggested that but for his intervention there would have been no celebration at all. Jhagru, the barber, brought his drum, and Selochan did the Shiva dance in the cowpen, his body smeared all over with ash.

There was an unpleasant moment when Raghu, Mr Biswas’s father, appeared. He had walked; his dhoti and jacket were sweated and dusty. ‘Well, this is very nice,’ he said. ‘Celebrating. And where is the father?’

‘Leave this house at once,’ Bissoondaye said, coming out of the kitchen at the side. ‘Father! What sort of father do you call yourself, when you drive your wife away every time she gets heavy-footed?’