A House for Mr. Biswas (10 page)

‘You are going to be a great man,’ Ramchand said. ‘A great man. Reading like that at your age. Used to hear you
reading those things to Ajodha. Never known a healthier man in all my life. But one day he is going to fall really sick, let him watch out. He’s just asking for it. I feel sorry for him, to tell you the truth. I feel sorry for all these rich fellows.’ It turned out that Ramchand felt sorry for many other people as well. ‘Pratap now. He’s got himself into a mess because of these donkeys he keeps on buying, heaven knows why. The last two died. Did you hear about it?’ Mr Biswas hadn’t, and Ramchand told of the bloody end of the donkeys; one had speared itself on a bamboo stake. He also spoke of Prasad and his search for a wife; with tolerant amusement he mentioned Bhandat and his mistress. He became increasingly avuncular; it was clear he thought his own condition perfect, and this perfection delighted him. ‘Not finished with these decorations,’ he said, pointing to the walls. ‘Getting some more of those Sunday school pictures. Jesus and Mary. Eh, Dehuti?’ Laughingly he flung the matchstick he had been chewing at the baby.

Dehuti closed her eyes in annoyance, puffed out her pimply cheeks a little more and turned her face away. The matchstick fell harmlessly on the baby.

‘Making some improvements too,’ Ramchand said. ‘Come.’

This time Dehuti did not suck her teeth. They went to the back and Mr Biswas saw another room being added to the hut. Trimmed tree-branches had been buried in the earth; the rafters, of lesser boughs, were in place; between the uprights the bamboo had been plaited; the earth floor was raised but not yet packed. ‘Extra room,’ Ramchand said. ‘When it is finished you can come and stay with us.’

Mr Biswas’s depression deepened.

They went on a tour of the small hut, Ramchand pointing out the refinements he had added: shelves set in the mud walls, tables, chairs. Back in the verandah Ramchand pointed to the hatrack. There were eight hooks on it symmetrically arranged about a diamond-shaped glass. ‘That is the only thing here I didn’t make myself. Dehuti set her heart on it.’ He slumped down on the floor again and flung the little ball of earth he had been rolling between his fingers at the baby.

Dehuti closed her eyes and pouted. ‘Me? I didn’t want it. I wish you would stop running round giving people the idea that I have modern ambitions.’

He laughed uneasily and scratched his bare leg; the nails left white marks.

‘I have no hat to hang on a hatrack,’ Dehuti said. ‘I don’t want a mirror to show me my ugly face.’

Ramchand scratched and winked at Mr Biswas. ‘Ugly face? Ugly face?’

Dehuti said, ‘I don’t stand up in front of the hatrack combing my hair for hours. My hair is not pretty and curly enough.’

Ramchand accepted the compliment with a smile.

In the verandah, black and yellow in the light of the oil lamp, they sat down on low benches to eat. But although he was hungry, and although he knew that both Dehuti and Ramchand had much affection for him, Mr Biswas found that his belly was beginning to rise and hurt, and he couldn’t eat. Their happiness, which he couldn’t share, had upset him. And it pained him more then to see Ramchand’s jumpy enthusiasm replaced by uncertainty. Dehuti’s sullen expression never changed; it was for just such a rebuff that she had been prepared.

He left soon after, promising to come back and see them one day, knowing that he wouldn’t, that the links between Dehuti and himself, never strong, had been broken, that from her too he had become separate. The desire to keep on looking for a job had left him. He supposed he had always known he would fall back on Tara for help. She liked him; Ajodha liked him. Perhaps he would apologize, and they would put him in the garage.

Then Alec reappeared in Pagotes, and there was no sign of engine grease on him. His hands and arms and face were spotted and streaked with paint of various colours, as were his long khaki trousers and white shirt, where each stain was rimmed with oil. When, at the end of a long, idle and uncertain week, Mr Biswas saw him, Alec had a small tin of paint in one hand and a small brush in the other; he was standing
on a ladder against a café in the Main Road and painting a sign, of which he had already achieved
THE HUMMING BIRD CA.

Mr Biswas was full of admiration.

‘You like it, eh?’ Alec came down the ladder, pulled out a large paint-spotted cloth from his back pocket and wiped his hands. ‘Got to shadow them. In two colours. Blue across, green down.’

‘But that will spoil it, man.’

Alec spat out a cigarette that had burned down to his lips and gone dead. ‘It will look like a little carnival when I finish. But that is the way they want it.’ He jerked his head contemptuously towards the proprietor of the Humming Bird Café who was leaning on his counter and looking at them suspiciously. The shelves at his back were half filled with bottles of aerated water. Flies buzzed about him, attracted by the sweat on his neck and those parts of his body exposed by his vest; flies with different tastes had settled on the coarse sugar on the rock cakes in his showcase.

To Alec Mr Biswas explained his problem, and they talked for a while. Then they went into the tiny café and Alec bought two bottles of aerated water.

Alec said to the proprietor, ‘This is my assistant.’

The proprietor looked at Mr Biswas. ‘How he so small?’

‘Young firm,’ Alec said. ‘Give youth a chance.’

‘He could paint humming birds?’

‘He want a lot of humming birds in the sign,’ Alec explained to Mr Biswas. ‘Hanging about and behind the lettering.’

‘Like the Keskidee Café,’ the proprietor said. ‘You see the sign he got?’ He pointed obliquely across the road to another refreshment shack, and Mr Biswas saw the sign. The letters were blocked in three colours and shadowed in three other colours. Keskidee birds stood on the K, perched on the D, hung from the C; on EE two keskidees billed.

Mr Biswas couldn’t draw.

Alec said, ‘ ’Course he could paint humming birds, if you really want them. The only thing is, it would look a little foliow-fashion.’

‘And too besides, it oldfashion,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘I glad you say that,’ Alec said. ‘Was what I been trying to tell him. The modern thing is to have lots of words. All the shops in Port of Spain have signs with nothing but words. Tell him.’

‘What sort of words?’ the proprietor said.

‘Sweet drinks, cakes and ice,’ Mr Biswas said.

The proprietor shook his head.

‘Beware of the dog,’ Alec said.

‘I ain’t got a dog.’

‘Fresh fruits daily,’ Alec went on. ‘Stick no bills by order.’

The proprietor shook his head.

‘Trespassers will be prosecuted. Overseas visitors welcomed. If you don’t see what you require please ask. Our assistants will be pleased to help you with your inquiries.’

The proprietor was thinking.

‘No hands wanted,’ Alec said. ‘Come in and look around.’ The proprietor became alert. ‘Is exactly what I have to fight in this place.’

‘Idlers keep out,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘By order,’ the proprietor said.

‘Idlers keep out by order. A good sign,’ Alec said. ‘This boy will do it for you in two twos.’

So Mr Biswas became a sign-writer and wondered why he had never thought of using this gift before. With Alec’s help he worked on the café sign and to his delight and amazement it came out well enough to satisfy the proprietor. He had been used to designing letters with pen and pencil and was afraid that he would not be able to control a brush with paint. But he found that the brush, though flattening out disconcertingly at first, could be made to respond to the gentlest pressure; strokes were cleaner, curves truer. ‘Just turn the brush slowly in your fingers when you come to the curve,’ Alec said; and curves held fewer problems after that. After
IDLERS KEEP OUT BY ORDER
he did more signs with Alec; his hand became surer, his strokes bolder, his feeling for letters finer. He thought R and S the most beautiful of Roman letters; no letter could express so many moods as R, without losing its beauty; and what could compare with the swing and
rhythm of S? With a brush, large letters were easier than small, and he felt much satisfaction after he and Alec had covered long stretches of palings with signs for Pluko, which was good for the hair in various ways, and Anchor Cigarettes. There was some worry about the cigarette packet; they would have preferred to draw it closed, but the contractors wanted it open, condemning Mr Biswas and Alec to draw not only the packet, but the silver foil, crumpled, and eight cigarettes, all marked
ANCHOR
, pulled out to varying lengths.

After a time he started to go again to Tara’s. She bore him no ill-will but he was disappointed to find that Ajodha no longer required him to read
That Body of Yours.
One of Bhandat’s sons now did that. Two things had happened in the rumshop. Bhandat’s wife had died in childbirth, and Bhandat had left his sons and gone to live with his mistress in Port of Spain. The boys were taken in by Tara, who added Bhandat’s name to those never mentioned by her again. For years afterwards no one knew where or how Bhandat lived, though there were rumours that he lived in a slum in the city centre, surrounded by all sorts of quarrelling and disreputable people.

So Bhandat’s sons moved from the squalor of the rumshop to the comfort of Tara’s house. It was a passage that Mr Biswas had made often himself, and it was no surprise to him that the boys had soon settled in so well that Bhandat was forgotten and it was hard to think of his sons living anywhere else.

Mr Biswas continued to paint signs. It was satisfying work, but it came irregularly. Alec wandered from district to district, sometimes working, sometimes not, and the partnership was spasmodic. There were many weeks when Mr Biswas was out of work and could only read and design letters and practise his drawing. He learned to draw bottles, and in preparation for Christmas drew one Santa Claus after another until he had reduced it to a simple design in red, pink, white and black. Work, when it came, came in a rush. In September most shopkeepers said that they wanted no Christmas-signs
nonsense that year. By December they had changed their minds, and Mr Biswas worked late into the night doing Santa Clauses and holly and berries and snow-capped letters; the finished signs quickly blistered in the blazing sun. Occasionally there were inexplicable rashes of new signs, and a district was thronged for a fortnight or so with sign-writers, for no shopkeeper wished to employ a man who had been used by his rival. Every sign then was required to be more elaborate than the last, and for stretches the Main Road was dazzling with signs that were hard to read. Plainness was required only for the posters for Local Road Board Elections. Mr Biswas did scores of these, many on cotton, which he had to stretch and pin to the mud wall of the verandah in the back trace. The paint leaked through and the wall became a blur of conflicting messages in different colours.

To satisfy the extravagant lettering tastes of his shopkeepers he scanned foreign magazines. From looking at magazines for their letters he began to read them for their stories, and during his long weeks of leisure he read such novels as he could find in the stalls of Pagotes. He read the novels of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli. They introduced him to intoxicating worlds. Descriptions of landscape and weather in particular excited him; they made him despair of finding romance in his own dull green land which the sun scorched every day; he never had much taste for westerns.

He became increasingly impatient at living in the back trace; and although his income, despite Christmas, elections and shopkeepers’ jealousies, was small and uncertain, he would have liked to risk moving. But Bipti, who had always talked of moving, now said she had lived there too long and did not want to be among strangers in her old age. ‘I leave here. One day you will get married, and where shall I be then?’

‘I am never going to get married.’ It was his usual threat, for Bipti had begun to say that she had only to see Mr Biswas married and her life’s work would be complete. Pratap and Prasad were already married, Pratap to a tall, handsome woman who was bearing a child every eighteen months, Prasad to a woman of appalling ugliness who was mercifully barren.

‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ Bipti said. She could still irritate him by taking everything he said seriously.

‘So what? You expect me to bring a wife here?’ He walked about the cluttered room, always smelling now of paint and oil and turpentine, and kicked at the dusty brown piles of his magazines and books on the floor.

He stayed in the back trace and read Samuel Smiles. He had bought one of his books in the belief that it was a novel, and had become an addict. Samuel Smiles was as romantic and satisfying as any novelist, and Mr Biswas saw himself in many Samuel Smiles heroes: he was young, he was poor, and he fancied he was struggling. But there always came a point when resemblance ceased. The heroes had rigid ambitions and lived in countries where ambitions could be pursued and had a meaning. He had no ambition, and in this hot land, apart from opening a shop or buying a motorbus, what could he do? What could he invent? Dutifully, however, he tried. He bought elementary manuals of science and read them; nothing happened; he only became addicted to elementary manuals of science. He bought the seven expensive volumes of
Hawkins’ Electrical Guide,
made rudimentary compasses, buzzers and doorbells, and learned to wind an armature. Beyond that he could not go. Experiments became more complex, and he didn’t know where in Trinidad he could find the equipment mentioned so casually by Hawkins. His interest in electrical matters died, and he contented himself with reading about the Samuel Smiles heroes in their magic land.

And yet there were moments when he could persuade himself that he lived in a land where romance was possible. When, for instance, he had to do a rush job and worked late into the night by the light of a gas lamp, excitement and the light transforming the hut; able then to forget that ordinary morning would come and the sign would hang over a cluttered little shop with its doors open on to a hot dusty road.