A House for Mr. Biswas (78 page)

Mr Biswas came home after six weeks. Again he lived downstairs. Everyone was now adjusted to his condition and no preparations had been made to welcome him as before. The distemper was still new; the curtains remained unchanged. He had stopped smoking altogether; his appetite returned and he fancied he had made a significant discovery. He wrote Anand warning him against cigarettes and continued to talk about the garden and the growth of his shade tree, which they all called his ‘shade’. His face grew puffier, even gross; it grew darker; and he began to put on weight. Waiting for Savi, waiting for Anand, waiting for the end of the five years, he became more and more irritable.

Then the
Sentinel
sacked him. It gave him three months’ notice. And now Mr Biswas needed his son’s interest and anger. In all the world there was no one else to whom he could complain. And at last, forgetting Anand’s own pain, he wrote on the yellow typewriter a hysterical, complaining, despairing letter, with not a mention of the shade or the roses or the orchids or the anthurium lilies.

When, after three weeks, he had received no reply from Anand, he wrote to the Colonial Office. This elicited a brief letter from Anand. Anand said he wanted to come home. At once the debt, the heart, the sack, the five years became less important. He was prepared to take on a further debt to get Anand home. But the plan fell through; Anand changed his mind. And Mr Biswas never complained again. In his letters he once again became the comforter. The time for his last paypacket from the
Sentinel
drew near, and not far behind that the end of the five years.

And right at the end everything seemed to grow bright. Savi returned and Mr Biswas welcomed her as though she were herself and Anand combined. Savi got a job, at a bigger salary than Mr Biswas could ever have got; and events organized themselves so neatly that Savi began to work as soon as Mr Biswas ceased to be paid. Mr Biswas wrote to Anand: ‘How can you not believe in God after this?’ It was a letter
full of delights. He was enjoying Savi’s company; she had learned to drive and they went on little excursions; it was wonderful how intelligent she had grown. He had got a Butterfly orchid. The shade was flowering again; wasn’t it strange that a tree which grew so quickly could produce flowers with such a sweet scent?

One of the first stories Mr Biswas had written for the
Sentinel
had been about a dead explorer. The
Sentinel
was then a boisterous paper and he had written a grotesque story, which he had often later regretted. He had tried to lessen his guilt by thinking that the explorer’s relations were unlikely to read the
Sentinel.
He had also said that when his own death was reported he would like the headline to be
ROVING REPORTER PASSES ON
. But the
Sentinel
had changed, and the headline he got was
JOURNALIST DIES SUDDENLY
. No other paper carried the news. An announcement came over twice on rediffusion sets all over the island. But that was paid for.

Her sisters did not fail Shama. They all came. For them it was an occasion of reunion, no longer so frequent, for they had all moved to their own houses, some in the town, some in the country.

Downstairs the doors of the house were open. The door that couldn’t open had been made to, and its hinges dislocated. The furniture was pushed to the walls. All that day and evening well-dressed mourners, men, women and children, passed through the house. The polished floor became scratched and dusty; the staircase shivered continually; the top floor resounded with the steady shuffle. And the house did not fall.

The cremation, one of the few permitted by the Health Department, was conducted on the banks of a muddy stream and attracted spectators of various races. Afterwards the sisters returned to their respective homes and Shama and the children went back in the Prefect to the empty house.

A BEND IN THE RIVER

In this novel V. S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-72202-5

THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL

The story of a writer’s singular journey—from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another—this is perhaps Naipaul’s most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.

Fiction/Literature/0-394-75760-2

GUERRILLAS

Set on a troubled Caribbean island—where Asians, Africans, Americans, and former British colonials coexist in a state of suppressed hysteria—
Guerrillas
is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man arrives with his mistress, an Englishwoman inflamed by fantasies of native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions. Together with a mulatto leader of the “revolution,” they act out a gripping drama of death, sexual violence, and spiritual impotence.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73174-1

IN A FREE STATE

This grouping of two short stories and a short novel within a prologue and an epilogue from Naipaul’s travel journals is, as Nadine Gordimer wrote in
The New York Times Book Review,
“not a collection of occasional pieces but an entity … part of the achievement that … will show [Naipaul] to have been a great writer.” Winner of the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary award, it is held together by its pervading concern with the themes of exile, freedom, and prejudice.

Fiction/Literature/0-394-72205-1

A WAY IN THE WORLD

Spanning continents and centuries,
A Way in the World
tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh fruitlessly seeking El Dorado in the New World; the nineteenth-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who in his quest to liberate South America becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded—and eventually martyred—in East Africa.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-76166-7

VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).