A House for Mr. Biswas (58 page)

The house, pouring out a stream of scholars every morning and receiving a returning stream in the afternoon, soon attracted the attention of the street. And whether it was this, or whether a sanitary inspector had indeed made a threat, news came from Shorthills that Mrs Tulsi had decided to do something. There was talk of flooring and walling the space below the house, talk of partitions and rooms, of lattice work above brick walls. The outer pillars were linked by a half-wall of hollow clay bricks, partly plastered, never painted; there was no sign of lattice work. Instead, to screen the house, the wire fence was pulled down and replaced by a tall brick wall; and this was plastered, this was painted; and the people in the street could only make surmises about the arrangements for
the feeding and lodging of the childish multitude who, in the afternoons and evenings and early mornings, buzzed like a school.

The children were divided into residents and boarders, and subdivided into family groups. Clashes were frequent. The boarders also brought quarrels from Shorthills and settled them in Port of Spain. And all evening, above the buzzing, there were sounds of flogging (Basdai had flogging powers over her boarders as well), and Basdai cried, ‘Read! Learn! Learn! Read!’

And every morning, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, his tie carefully knotted, Mr Biswas left this hell and cycled to the spacious, well-lit, well-ventilated office of the
Sentinel.

Now when he said to Shama: ‘Hole! That’s what your family has got me in. This hole!’ his words had an unpleasant relevance. For whereas before he had spoken of his house in the country and his mother-in-law’s estate, now he kept his address as secret as an animal keeps its hole. And his hole was not a haven. His indigestion returned, virulently; and he saw his children increasingly riddled with nervous afflictions. Savi suffered from a skin rash, and Anand suddenly developed asthma, which laid him in bed for three days at a time, choking, having his chest scorched and peeled by the futile applications of a medicated wadding.

Still the boarders came. The education frenzy had spread to Mrs Tulsi’s friends and retainers at Arwacas. They all wanted their children to go to Port of Spain schools, and Mrs Tulsi, fulfilling a duty that had been imposed in a different age, had to take them in. And Basdai boarded them. The floggings and the rows increased. The cries of ‘Read! Learn!’ increased; and every morning, not long after the babbling children had streamed through the narrow gateway between the high walls, Mr Biswas emerged, neatly dressed, and cycled to the
Sentinel.

Despite his duties and despite the fear of the sack, which he had never quite lost, even during the adventure at Shorthills, the office now became the haven to which he escaped every morning; and like Mr Burnett’s news editor, he dreaded leaving it. It was only at midday, when the readers
and learners were at school and W. C. Tuttle and Govind were at work, that he found the house bearable. He gave himself a longer midday break and stayed later in the office in the afternoons.

Then once more Shama started to bring out her account books, and once more she showed how impossible it was for them to live on what he earned. Self-disgust led to anger, shouts, tears, something to add to the concentrated hubbub of the evening, the nerve-torn helplessness. In daylight, in a
Sentinel
motorcar and with a
Sentinel
photographer, he drove through the open plain to call on Indian farmers to get material for his feature on Prospects for This Year’s Rice Crop. They, illiterate, not knowing to what he would return that evening, treated him as an incredibly superior being. And these same men who, like his brothers, had started on the estates and saved and bought land of their own, were building mansions; they were sending their sons to America and Canada to become doctors and dentists. There was money in the island. It showed in the suits of Govind, who drove the Americans in his taxi; in the possessions of W. C. Tuttle, who hired out his lorry to them; in the new cars; the new buildings. And from this money, despite Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, despite Samuel Smiles, Mr Biswas found himself barred.

It was now that he began to speak to his children of his childhood. He told them of the hut, the men digging in the garden at night; he told them of the oil that was later found on the land. What fortune might have been theirs, if only his father had not died, if only he had stuck to the land like his brothers, if he had not gone to Pagotes, not become a sign-writer, not gone to Hanuman House, not married! If only so many things had not happened!

He blamed his father; he blamed his mother; he blamed the Tulsis; he blamed Shama. Blame succeeded blame confusedly in his mind; but more and more he blamed the
Sentinel,
and hinted savagely to Shama, almost as if she were on the board of the paper, that he was going to keep his eye open for another job, and that if the worst came to the worst he would get a job as a labourer with the Americans.

‘Labourer!’ Shama said. ‘With those hammocks you have for muscles, I would like to see how long you would last.’

Which either made him angry, or reduced him to an absurd puckishness. Then, lying on the Slumberking in vest and pants, as was his wont when he indulged in speculations about the future, he would lift up one leg and prod the slack calf with a finger, or make it swing, as he had done when they were newly married, in the long room at Hanuman House. These were the times (for the children were not excluded from this talk about money) when Mr Biswas delivered insincere homilies on the honest manner of his livelihood, and told his children that he had nothing to leave them but good education and a sound training.

It was at one of these sessions that Anand told how at school boys were being challenged to say what their fathers did. This, a new school game, had spread even to the exhibition class. The most assiduous challengers came from the most harassed and insecure strata, and their aggressive manner suggested that they were neither harassed nor insecure themselves. Anand, who had read in an American newspaper that ‘journalist’ was a pompous word, had said that his father was a reporter; which, though not grand, was unimpeachable. Vidiadhar, Govind’s son, had said that his father worked for the Americans. ‘That is what all of them are saying these days,’ Anand said. ‘Why didn’t Vidiadhar say that his father was a taxi-driver?’

Mr Biswas didn’t smile. Govind had six suits, Govind was making money, Govind would soon have his own house. Vidiadhar would be sent abroad to get a profession. And what awaited Anand? A job in the customs, a clerkship in the civil service: intrigue, humiliation, dependence.

Anand felt his joke going bad. And a few days later, when a new quiz was going round the school – what did the boys call their parents? – Anand, wishing only to debase himself, lied and said, ‘Bap and Mai,’ and was duly derided; while Vidiadhar, shrewd despite his short stay at the school, unhesitatingly said, ‘Mummy and Daddy.’ For these boys, who called their parents Ma and Pa, who all came from homes where the sudden flow of American dollars had unleashed
ambition, push and uncertainty, these boys had begun to take their English compositions very seriously: their Daddies worked in offices, and at week-ends Daddy and Mummy took them in cars to the seaside, with laden hampers.

Mr Biswas knew that for all his talk he would never leave the
Sentinel
to go to work for the Americans as labourer, clerk or taxi-driver. He lacked the taxi-driver’s personality, the labourer’s muscles; and he was frightened of throwing up his job: the Americans would not be in the island forever. But as a gesture of protest against the
Sentinel,
he enrolled all his children in the Tinymites League of the
Guardian,
the rival paper; and in the
Junior Guardian,
for years thereafter, Mr Biswas’s children were greeted on their birthdays. The pleasure he got from this was enhanced when W. C. Tuttle, imitating, enrolled his children among the Tinymites as well.

The
Sentinel
had its revenge. A small but steady decline in circulation hinted to the directors that there might be something wrong with their policy that conditions in the colony could not be better; they began to admit that readers might occasionally want views instead of news, and that news was not necessarily bright if right. For not only was the
Guardian
winning over
Sentinel
readers, the
Guardian
was also getting people who had never read newspapers. So the
Sentinel
started the Deserving Destitutes Fund, the name suggesting that there was not a necessary inconsistency between the fund and the leaders which spoke of the unemployed as the unemployable. The Deserving Destitutes Fund was an answer to the
Guardians
Neediest Cases Fund; but while the Neediest Cases Fund was a Christmas affair, the Deserving Destitutes Fund was to be permanent.

Mr Biswas was appointed investigator. It was his duty to read the applications from destitutes, reject the undeserving, visit the others to see how deserving or desperate they were, and then, if the circumstances warranted it, to write harrowing accounts of their plight, harrowing enough to encourage contributions for the fund. He had to find one deserving destitute a day.

‘Deserving Destitute number one,’ he told Shama. ‘M. Biswas. Occupation: investigator of Deserving Destitutes.’

The
Sentinel
could not have chosen a better way of terrifying Mr Biswas, of reviving his dread of the sack, illness or sudden disaster. Day after day he visited the mutilated, the defeated, the futile and the insane living in conditions not far removed from his own: in suffocating rotting wooden kennels, in sheds of box-board, canvas and tin, in dark and sweating concrete caverns. Day after day he visited the eastern sections of the city where the narrow houses pressed their scabbed and blistered façades together and hid the horrors that lay behind them: the constricted, undrained backyards, coated with green slime, in the perpetual shadow of adjacent houses and the tall rubble-stone fences against which additional sheds had been built: yards choked with flimsy cooking sheds, crowded fowl-coops of wire-netting, bleaching stones spread with sour washing: smell upon smell, but none overcoming the stench of cesspits and overloaded septic tanks: horror increased by the litters of children, most of them illegitimate, with navels projecting inches out of their bellies, as though they had been delivered with haste and disgust. Yet occasionally there was the neat room, its major piece of furniture, a table, a chair, polished to brilliance; giving no hint of the squalor it erupted into the yard. Day after day he came upon people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them. But he could only lift his trouser turn-ups, pick his way through mud and slime, investigate, write, move on.

He was treated with respect by most of the
DDS
or Deserving Destees, as, in order to lessen the dread they inspired, he had begun to call them. But sometimes a destitute turned sullen and, suddenly annoyed by Mr Biswas’s probings, refused to divulge the harrowing details Mr Biswas needed for his copy. On these occasions Mr Biswas was accused of being in league with the rich, the laughing, the government. Sometimes he was threatened with violence. Then forgetting shoes and trouser turn-ups, he retreated hastily to the street, pursued by words, his undignified movements followed with idle interest by several dozen people, all destitute, all perhaps deserving.
‘Deserving Destitute Turns Desperate,’ he thought, visualizing the morning’s headline. (Though that would never have done: the
Sentinel
wanted only the harrowing details, the grovelling gratitude.)

His bicycle suffered. First the valve-caps were stolen; then the rubber handlegrips; then the bell; then the saddlebag in which he had transported his plunder from Shorthills; and one day the saddle itself. It was a pre-war Brooks saddle, highly desirable, new ones being unobtainable. Cycling that afternoon from the east end of the city to the west end, continually bobbing up and down, unable to sit, had been fatiguing and, judging by the stares, spectacular.

There were other dangers. He was sometimes accosted by burly Negroes, pictures of health and strength; ‘Indian, give me some money.’ Occasionally exact sums were demanded: ‘Indian, give me a shilling.’ He had been used to such threatening requests from healthy Negroes outside the larger cinemas, but there the bright lights and the watchful police had given him the confidence to refuse. In the east end the lights were not bright and there were few policemen; and, not wishing to antagonize destitutes any more than was necessary, he took the precaution of going on his investigations with coppers distributed about his pockets. These he gave, and later recovered from the
Sentinel
as expenses.

And other dangers. Once, climbing up a short flight of steps and pushing past the obstructing lace curtain in a room of exceptional cleanliness, he found himself confronted by a woman of robust appearance. Her large lips were grotesquely painted; rouge flared on her black cheeks. ‘You from the paper?’ she asked. He nodded. ‘Give me some money,’ she said, as roughly as any man. He gave her a penny. His promptness surprised her. She gazed at the coin with awe, then kissed it. ‘You don’t know what a thing it is, when a man
give
you money.’ His experience on ‘Court Shorts’ enabling him to recognize a piece of the prostitute’s lore, he made perfunctory inquiries and prepared to go. ‘Where my money?’ the woman said. She followed him to the door, shouting, ‘The man – me right here, behind this curtain, and now he don’t want to pay.’ She called the women and
children of the yard and the yards on either side to witness her injury; and Mr Biswas, feeling that his suit, his air of respectability, and the time of day gave some weight to the accusation, hurried guiltily away.

It was some time before he could distinguish the applications of the fraudulent: people who merely wanted the publicity, those who wanted to work off grudges, those who had wanted merely to write, and an astonishing number of well-to-do shopkeepers, clerks and taxi-drivers who wanted money and publicity, and offered to share what money they got with Mr Biswas. Many of his early visits were wasted, and since he had to provide a convincing destitute every morning he had sometimes had to take a mediocre destitute and exaggerate his situation.