A House for Mr. Biswas (67 page)

When people stared from the road the children didn’t know whether to smile, frown or look away; those who were near the straps held on to them. Never, as from the windows of that Buick, did North Trinidad look so beautiful. They noted, as though they had never seen it before from a bus, how the landscape changed, from marsh just outside Port of Spain, to straggling suburb, to hilly country, to country village, to country town, to rice fields and sugarcane fields, with the Northern Range always on their left. They drove along the smooth new American highway, were checked on entering and leaving the American army post by soldiers with helmets and rifles. Then they drove along a winding road overarched by cool trees to Arima, which welcomed careful drivers; and on to Valencia, where the road ran straight for miles, with untouched bush on either side.

They were, Anand reflected, driving with hampers – laden hampers – to the sea. The English composition had come true.

Mr Biswas was worried about Shama. Sitting plumply next to Miss Logie on the front seat, her elaborate georgette veil over her hair, Shama was showing herself self-possessed and even garrulous. She was throwing off opinions about the new constitution, federation, immigration, India, the future of Hinduism, the education of women. Mr Biswas listened to the flow with surprise and acute anxiety. He had never imagined that Shama was so well-informed and had such violent prejudices; and he suffered whenever she made a grammatical mistake.

They stopped at Balandra, and walked to the dangerous part of the bay where the waves were five feet high and a sign warned against bathing. Never had water seemed so blue; never had sand shone so golden; never had bay curved so beautifully, waves broken so neatly. It was a perfect world, the curve of the coconut trees repeated in the curve of the
bay, the curl of the waves, the arc of the horizon. Already they could taste the salt on their lips. The fresh wind blew; the trousers of Mr Biswas and the chauffeur sausaged out; the women and girls held down their skirts.

They bathed where it was safe.

(And later Anand pointed out to Mr Biswas that in spite of what she had said Miss Logie had brought her bathing suit.)

They opened the hampers and ate on the dry sand in the dangerous shade of coconut trees (‘Over a million coconuts will fall on the East Coast today,’ had been the hollow bright opening of a feature he had written for the
Sentinel
on the copra industry).

Then they drove to Sans Souci, through narrow, ill-tended roads darkened by bush on both sides. Small villages surprised them here and there, lost and lonely. And now the sea was always with them. Unseen, it thundered continuously. The wind never ceased to rage through the trees; above the swaying bush, the dancing plumes of green, the sky was high and open. From time to time they had glimpses of the sea: so near, so unending, so alive, so impersonal. What would happen if, by some accident, they should drive off the road into it?

In a dream that night this accident was to happen, and Kamla was to wake gratefully, yet to find herself in a new dread, for she had forgotten the room where they had all gone to sleep, in the large bare house at the top of the hill, impenetrably black all round, with the sea beating a little distance away and the coconut trees groaning in the perpetual wind.

They had arrived in the late afternoon and had not had much time to explore. Miss Logie, the chauffeur and the Buick had gone back; and finding themselves alone, in a large house, on holiday, they had all grown shy with one another. Night brought an additional uneasiness. In the strange, musty, blank-walled drawingroom they sat around an oil lamp, the contents of the hamper gone stale and unappetizing, the cream cheese, bought from the Dairies the day before, already gone bad. The house was large enough for them to have had one room each; but the noise, the loneliness, the unknown surrounding blackness had kept them all in one room.

Wind and sea welcomed them in the morning. Light showed them where they were. The wind and the sea raged all night, but now they were both fresh, heralds of the new day. The children walked about the shining wet grass on the top of the hill; the sea, glimpsed through the tormented coconut trees, lay below them; their hands and faces became sticky with salt.

Their shyness slowly wore away. They went to deserted beaches, where lay the partly buried wrecks of strange trees brought across the sea. Beyond the wavering tidewrack the dimpled sand was pitted with the holes of sand crabs, small, nervous creatures the colour of sand. They made excursions to the places with French names: Blanchisseuse, Matelot; and to Toco and Salybia Bay. They picked almonds, sucked them, crushed the seeds; in land so wild and remote it was inconceivable that anything was owned by anyone. From trees that bordered the road they picked bright red cashew nuts, sucked the fruit and took the nuts to the house and roasted them. The days were long. Once they came upon a group of fishermen who were talking a French patois; once they met a group of well-dressed, noisy Indian youths, one of whom asked Myna what Savi’s name was, and Mr Biswas saw that as a father he now had fresh responsibilities. In the evenings, with the noise of sea and wind, comforting now, around them, they played cards: they had found four packs in the house.

Another discovery, in a cupboard full of tinned food, was Cerebos Salt. They had never seen salt in tins. The shop salt they knew was coarse and damp; this was fine and dry, and ran as easily as the drawing on the tin showed.

They forgot the house in Port of Spain and spread themselves about the house on the hill. It seemed there was no one in the world but themselves, nothing alive but themselves and the sea and the wind. They had been told that on a clear day they could see Tobago; but that never happened.

And then the Buick came for them.

As they drove back to Port of Spain the new shy pleasure they had found in being alone was forgotten. They were preparing for the two rooms, the city pavements, the badly
concreted floor under the house, the noise, the quarrels. On the way out they had feared arrival, a casting off into the unknown; now they dreaded returning to what they knew. But they spoke of other things. Shama spoke about the evening meal, remembered she had nothing. The car stopped at a shop in the Eastern Main Road and they enjoyed a brief distinction as the occupants of a chauffeur-driven car.

There was no reception for them in Port of Spain. It was evening. The readers and learners were reading and learning. Everything was as they had left it: the weak light bulbs, the long tables, the chanting of some readers as they attempted to learn lessons by heart. Only, the house seemed lower, darker, suffocating. At first they were ignored. But presently the questioning began, the prying to see whether any disaster had befallen, for the sadness with which they had returned had already made them irritable and short-tempered.

Did the wilderness really exist? Was the house still at the top of the hill? Was the wind still making the coconut trees groan? Did the sea beat on those empty beaches? Was it at that moment of night bringing to shore those black berries, branches and strands of seaweed from miles and thoughtless miles away?

They fell asleep with the roar of wind and sea in their heads. In the morning they woke to the humming house.

Mr Biswas did not immediately superintend lines of peasants making baskets. No one sang for him. And he encouraged no one to build better huts or to take up cottage industries. He began to survey an area, and went from house to house filling in questionnaires prepared by Miss Logie. Most of the people he interviewed were flattered. Some were puzzled: ‘Who send you? Government? Think they really care?’ Some were more than puzzled: ‘You mean they paying you for this? Just to find out how we does live. But I could tell them for nothing, man.’ Mr Biswas hinted that there was more to the survey than they thought; pressed, he had to bluff. It was like interviewing destitutes; only there was no money for anyone except himself at the end. And he was doing well. In addition to his salary he could claim subsistence
and travel allowances; and on many evenings he had to lay aside his books and work out his claims. He filled in a form, submitted it, and after a few days got a voucher. He took the voucher to the Treasury and exchanged it with a man behind a zoo-like cage for another voucher which was limp with handling and ticked, initialled, signed and stamped in various colours. This he exchanged at another cage, this time for real money. It took time, but these trips to the Treasury made him feel that he was at last getting at the wealth of the colony.

He found that the extra money could be spent in any of a number of new ways, and he did not save as much as he had hoped. Savi had to be sent to a better school; their food had to be improved; something had to be done about Anand’s asthma. And he decided, and Shama agreed, that it was time he got himself some new suits, to go with his new job.

Apart from the serge suit in which he had gone to funerals, he had never had a proper suit, only cheap things of silk and linen; and he ordered his new suits with love. He discovered he was a dandy. He fussed about the quality and tone of the cloth, the cut of the suits. He enjoyed fittings: the baked smell of the white-tacked cloth, the tailor’s continual reverential destruction of his own work. When the first suit was ready he decided to wear it right away. It pricked his calves unpleasantly; it had a new smell; and when he looked down at himself the cascade of brown appeared grotesque and alarming. But the mirror reassured him, and he felt the need to show off the suit without delay. There was an inter-colonial cricket match at the Oval. He did not understand the game, but he knew that there was always a crowd at these matches, that shops and schools closed for them.

It was the fashion at the time for men to appear on sporting occasions with a round tin of fifty English cigarettes and a plain box of matches held in one hand, the forefinger pressing the matchbox to the top of the tin. Mr Biswas had the matches; he used half a day’s subsistence allowance to buy the cigarettes. Not wishing to derange the hang of his jacket, he cycled to the Oval with the tin in his hand.

As he came along Tragarete Road he heard faint scattered applause. It was just before lunch, too early for the crowds; it
would have been better after tea. Nevertheless he cycled round to the stands side of the Oval, leaned his bicycle against the peeling corrugated iron fence, chained it, removed the clips from his carefully folded trousers, shook down the trousers, smoothed out the pleats, straightened the prickly jacket over his shoulders. There was no queue. He paid a dollar for his ticket and, holding his tin of cigarettes and box of matches, walked up the stairs to the stand. It was less than a quarter full. Most of the people were at the front. He spied an empty seat in the middle of one of the few packed rows.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, and started on a slow progress down the row, people rising before him, people rising in the row behind, people settling down again in his wake, and ‘Excuse me,’ he kept on saying, quite urbane, unaware of the disturbance. At last he came to his seat, dusted it with a handkerchief, stooping slightly in response to a request from someone behind. While he unbuttoned his jacket a burst of applause came from all. Absently casting a glance at the cricket field, Mr Biswas applauded. He sat down, hitched up his trousers, crossed his legs, operated the cutter on the lid of the cigarette tin, extracted a cigarette and lit it. There was a tremendous burst of applause. Everyone in the stand stood up. Chairs scraped backwards, some overturned. Mr Biswas rose and clapped with the others. What crowd there was had advanced on to the field; the cricketers were racing away, flitting blobs of white. The stumps had disappeared; the umpires, separated by the crowd, were walking sedately to the pavilion. The match was over. Mr Biswas did not inspect the pitch. He went outside, unlocked his bicycle and cycled home, holding the tin of cigarettes in his hand.

His one suit, hanging out to sun on Shama’s line in the backyard, did not make much of a showing against Govind’s five threepiece suits on Chinta’s line, which had to be supported by two pronged poles. But it was a beginning.

The interviews completed, it was Mr Biswas’s duty to analyze the information he had gathered. And here he floundered. He had investigated two hundred households; but after every classification he could never, on adding, get two hundred,
and then he had to go through all the questionnaires again. He was dealing with a society that had no rules and patterns, and classifications were a chaotic business. He covered many sheets with long, snakelike addition sums, and the Slumberking was spread with his questionnaires. He pressed Shama and the children into service, damned them for their incompetence, dismissed them, and worked late into the night, squatting on a chair before the diningtable. The table was too high; sitting on pillows had proved unsatisfactory; so he squatted. Sometimes he threatened to cut down the legs of the diningtable by half and cursed the destitute who had made it.

‘This blasted thing is getting me sick,’ he shouted, whenever Shama and Anand tried to get him to go to bed. ‘Getting me sick, I tell you.
Sick.
I don’t know why the hell I didn’t stay with my little destitutes.’

‘Everywhere you go, is the same,’ Shama said.

He did not tell her of his deeper fears. Already the department was under attack. Citizen, Taxpayer, Pro Bono Publico and others had written to the newspapers to ask exactly what the department was doing and to protest against the waste of taxpayers’ money. The party of Southern businessmen to which Shekhar belonged had started a campaign for the abolition of the department: a distinguishing cause, long sought, for no party had a programme, though all had the same objective: to make everyone in the colony rich and equal.

This was Mr Biswas’s first experience of public attack, and it did not console him that such letters had always been written, that the government in all its departments was being continually criticized by all the island’s parties. He dreaded opening the newspapers. Pro Bono Publico had been particularly nasty: he had written the same letter to all three papers, and there was a whole fortnight between the letter’s first appearance and its last. Nor did it console Mr Biswas that no one else appeared to be worried. Shama considered the government unshakable; but she was Shama. Miss Logie could always go back to where she came from. The other officers had been seconded from various government departments
and they could go back to where they came from. He could only go back to the
Sentinel
and fifty dollars a month less.