A House for Mr. Biswas (40 page)

‘All right, I think.’ Mr Biswas spoke with something like his humorous high-pitched voice.

‘You thinking of going back to Green Vale?’

To his own surprise, Mr Biswas found himself behaving in the old way. With an expression of mock-horror he said, ‘Who? Me?’

‘I glad you feel that way. As a matter of fact you can’t go back.’

‘Look at me. I crying.’

‘Guess what happen.’

‘All the cane burn down.’

‘Wrong. Only your house.’

‘Burn down? You mean it insuranburn.’

‘No, no. Not insuranburn. It burn fair and square. Green Vale people. Wicked like hell, man, those people.’

Seth saw that Mr Biswas was crying and looked away. But Seth misunderstood.

An immense relief had come upon Mr Biswas. The anxiety, the fear, the anguish which had kept his mind humming and his body taut now ebbed away. He could feel it ebbing; it was a physical sensation; it left him weak and very weary. And he
felt an enormous gratitude to Seth. He wanted to embrace him, to promise eternal friendship, to make some vow.

‘You mean,’ he said at last, ‘that after all that rain they burn it down?’ And he burst out sobbing.

That night Shama gave birth to her fourth child, another girl.

Mr Biswas’s books had been placed among those in the Book Room. Somewhere among them was the
Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare.
No entry was made on its endpaper of this new birth.

The thin, short-winded and repetitive cry of the baby hardly made itself heard outside the Rose Room. The midwife no longer squatted in the hall and smoked. She was busy. She washed, she cleaned, she watched and ruled. After nine days she was paid and dismissed. The sisters told Anand and Savi, ‘You have a new sister. Somebody else to get a share of your father’s property.’ And they told Anand, ‘You are lucky. You are still the only boy. But wait. One day you will get a brother, and he will cut off your nose.’

Mr Biswas mixed and drank Sanatogen, drank table-spoonfuls of Ferrol and, in the evenings, glasses of Ovaltine. One day he remembered his fingernails. When he looked he saw they were whole, unbitten. There were still the periods of darkness, the spasms of panic; but now he knew they were not real and because he knew this he overcame them. He remained in the Blue Room, feeling secure to be only a part of Hanuman House, an organism that possessed a life, strength and power to comfort which was quite separate from the individuals who composed it.

‘Savi, what you drinking?’

‘Ovaltine.’

‘Anand, what you drinking?’

‘Ovaltine.’

‘It nice?’

‘Very nice.’

‘Ma, Savi and Anand drinking Ovaltine. Their pappa give it to them.’

‘Well, let me tell you, eh, boy, your father is not a millionaire to give
you
Ovaltine. You hear?’

And the next day:

‘Jai, what you drinking?’

‘Ovaltine, like you.’

‘Vidiadhar, you drinking Ovaltine too?’

‘No.
We
drinking Milo. We like it better.’

Mr Biswas came out from the Blue Room to the drawingroom with the thronelike chairs and the statuary. He felt safe and even a little adventurous. He went through to the wooden house. In the verandah Hari was reading. Instinctively Mr Biswas took a step back. Then he remembered there was no need. The two men looked at one another and looked away again.

Leaning on the verandah half-wall, with his back to Hari, Mr Biswas thought about Hari’s position in the family. Hari spent all his free time reading. He used this reading for nothing; he disliked disputation of any sort. No one was able to check his knowledge of Sanskrit and his scholarship had to be taken on trust. Yet he was respected inside the family and outside it. How did Hari get to that position? Mr Biswas wondered. Where did he start?

What would happen if he, Mr Biswas, made a sudden appearance in the hall in dhoti and beads and sacred thread? Let his top-knot grow again, as it had grown at Pundit Jairam’s. Would Hanuman House care to have two sick scholars? But he couldn’t see himself as a holy man for long. Sooner or later someone was bound to surprise him, in dhoti, top-knot, sacred thread and caste-marks, reading
The Manxman
or
The Atom.

Speculating about this, he reviewed his situation. He was the father of four children, and his position was as it had been when he was seventeen, unmarried and ignorant of the Tulsis. He had no vocation, no reliable means of earning a living. The job at Green Vale was over; he could not rest in the Blue Room forever; soon he would have to make a decision. Yet he felt no anxiety. The second to second agony and despair of those days at Green Vale had given him an experience of unhappiness
against which everything had now to be measured. He was more fortunate than most people. His children would never starve; they would always be sheltered and clothed. It didn’t matter if he were at Green Vale or Arwacas, if he were alive or dead.

His money dwindled: Ovaltine, Ferrol, Sanatogen; the doctor’s fees, the midwife’s, the thaumaturge’s. And there was no more money to come.

One evening Seth said, ‘That tin of Ovaltine could very well be your last, if you don’t decide to do something.’

Decide. What was there to decide?

There was room for him at Hanuman House if he stayed. If he left he would not be missed. He had not claimed his children; they avoided him and were embarrassed when they met him.

But it was only when Seth said, ‘Mai and Owad are coming home this week-end,’ meaning that the Blue Room had to be prepared for Owad, it was only then that Mr Biswas thought of action, unwilling to move to any other part of the house, unwilling to face Mrs Tulsi and the god.

The small brown cardboard suitcase, acquired in exchange for a large number of Anchor Cigarette packets, and decorated on both sides with his monogram, was enough for what he intended to take. He remembered Shama’s taunt: ‘When you came to us you had no more clothes than you could hang up on a nail.’ He still had few clothes; they were all crumpled and dirty. The cork hat he decided to leave; he had always found it absurd, and it belonged to the barracks. He could always send for his books. But he packed his paintbrushes. Through every move they had survived; the soft candle on the bristle of one or two had hardened, cracked and turned to powder.

He wanted to leave early in the morning, to have as much time as possible before it became dark. The crumpled clothes felt loose when he put them on; his trousers sagged; he had grown thinner. He remembered the morning the towel had fallen from him in front of the twelve barrackrooms.

When Savi brought him the cocoa and biscuits and butter he told her, ‘I am going away.’

She didn’t look surprised or disappointed, and didn’t ask where he was going.

He was going out into the world, to test it for its power to frighten. The past was counterfeit, a series of cheating accidents. Real life, and its especial sweetness, awaited; he was still beginning.

He wondered whether he should go to see Shama and the baby. His senses recoiled. As soon as he heard the children leave for school he went downstairs. He was seen, but no one called out to him: the suitcase was not of a significant size.

The High Street was already busy. The market was alive: a high smell of meat and fish, a steady dull roar enlivened by shrieks and the ringing of bells. The haberdashers were coming in, on horse-carts, donkey-carts and ox-carts: ambitious men who set up little boxes and exposed stocks of combs and hairpins and brushes in front of large stores that sold the same things.

The spasms of terror didn’t come. The knots of fear were still in his stomach, but they were so subdued he knew he could ignore them. The world had been restored to him. He looked at the nails of his left hand; they were still whole. He tested them against his palm; they were sharp and cutting.

He walked past the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign; past the rumshop with the vast awning; past the Roman Catholic church; the court house; past the police station, primly ochre-and-red, its lawn and hedges trimmed, the drive lined with large whitewashed stones and palm trees which, whitewashed halfway up their trunks, looked like the legs of Pratap and Prasad when, as boys, they returned from the buffalo-pond.

TO THE
city of Port of Spain, where with one short break he was to spend the rest of his life, and where at Sikkim Street he was to die fifteen years later, Mr Biswas came by accident. When he left Hanuman House and his wife and four children, the last of whom he had not seen, his main concern was to find a place to pass the night. It was still early morning. The sun was rising directly above the High Street in a dazzling haze, against which everyone was silhouetted, outlined in gold, and attached to shadows so elongated that movements appeared uncoordinated and awkward. The buildings on either side were in damp shadow.

At the road junction Mr Biswas had still not decided where to go. Most of the traffic moved north: tarpaulin-covered lorries, taxis, buses. The buses slowed down to pass Mr Biswas, and the conductors, hanging out from the footboard, shouted to him to come aboard. North lay Ajodha and Tara, and his mother. South lay his brothers. None of them could refuse to take him in. But to none of them did he want to go: it was too easy to picture himself among them. Then he remembered that north, too, lay Port of Spain and Ramchand, his brother-in-law. And it was while he was trying to decide whether Ramchand’s invitation could be considered genuine that a bus, its engine partially unbonneted, its capless radiator steaming, came to a stop inches away with a squeal of brakes and a racking of its tin and wood body, and the conductor, a young man, almost a boy, bent down and seized Mr Biswas’s cardboard suitcase, saying imperiously, impatiently, ‘Port of Spain, man, Port of Spain’.

As a conductor of Ajodha’s buses Mr Biswas had seized the suitcases of many wayfarers, and he knew that in these circumstances a conductor had to be aggressive to combat any possible annoyance. But now, finding himself suddenly
separated from his suitcase and hearing the impatience in the conductor’s voice, he was cowed, and nodded. ‘Up, up, man,’ the conductor said, and Mr Biswas climbed into the vehicle while the conductor stowed away his suitcase.

Whenever the bus stopped to release a passenger or kidnap another, Mr Biswas wondered whether it was too late to get off and make his way south. But the decision had been made, and he was without energy to go back on it; besides, he could get at his suitcase only with the cooperation of the conductor. He fixed his eyes on a house, as small and as neat as a doll’s house, on the distant hills of the Northern Range; and as the bus moved north, he allowed himself to be puzzled that the house didn’t grow any bigger, and to wonder, as a child might, whether the bus would eventually come to that house.

It was the crop season. In the sugarcane fields, already in parts laid low, cutters and loaders were at work, knee-deep in trash. Along the tracks between fields mudstained, grey-black buffaloes languidly pulled carts carrying high, bristling loads of sugarcane. But soon the land changed and the air was less sticky. Sugarcane gave way to rice-fields, the muddy colour of their water lost in the flawless reflections of the blue sky; there were more trees; and instead of mud huts there were wooden houses, small and old, but finished, painted and jalousied, with fretwork, frequently broken, along the eaves, above doors and windows and around fern-smothered verandahs. The plain fell behind, the mountains grew nearer; but the doll’s house remained as small as ever and when the bus turned into the Eastern Main Road Mr Biswas lost sight of it. The road was strung with many wires and looked important; the bus moved westwards through thickening traffic and increasing noise, past one huddled red and ochre settlement after another, until the hills rose directly from the road on the right, and from the left came a smell of swamp and sea, which presently appeared, level, grey and hazy, and they were in Port of Spain, where the stale salt smell of the sea mixed with the sharp sweet smells of cocoa and sugar from the warehouses.

He had feared the moment of arrival and wished that the bus would go on and never stop, but when he got down into
the yard next to the railway station his uncertainty at once fell away, and he felt free and excited. It was a day of freedom such as he had had only once before, when one of Ajodha’s relations had died and the rumshop had been closed and everybody had gone away. He drank a coconut from a cart in Marine Square. How wonderful to be able to do that in the middle of the morning! He walked on crowded pavements beside the slow, continuous motor traffic, noted the size and number of the stores and cafés and restaurants, the trams, the high standard of the shop signs, the huge cinemas, closed after the pleasures of last night (which he had spent dully at Arwacas), but with posters, still wet with paste, promising fresh gaieties for that afternoon and evening. He comprehended the city whole; he did not isolate the individual, see the man behind the desk or counter, behind the pushcart or the steering-wheel of the bus; he saw only the activity, felt the call to the senses, and knew that below it all there was an excitement, which was hidden, but waiting to be grasped.

It wasn’t until four, when stores and offices closed and the cinemas opened, that he thought of making his way to the address Ramchand had given. This was in the Woodbrook area and Mr Biswas, enchanted by the name, was disappointed to find an unfenced lot with two old unpainted wooden houses and many makeshift sheds. It was too late to turn back, to make another decision, another journey; and after making inquiries of a Negro woman who was fanning a coal-pot in one shed, he picked his way past bleaching stones, a slimy open gutter and a low open gutter and a low clothes-wire, to the back, where he saw Dehuti fanning a coal-pot in another shed, one wall of which was the corrugated iron fence of the sewer trace.

His disappointment was matched by their surprise when, after the exclamations of greeting, he made it clear that he intended to spend some time with them. But when he announced that he had left Shama, they were welcoming again, their solicitude touched not only with excitement but also with pleasure that in a time of trouble he had come to them.