A House for Mr. Biswas (43 page)

‘Sort?’

‘Black, white, green?’

‘White. Blueish when I saw it, really. I thought, though, that we didn’t mention race, except for Chinese.’

‘Listen to the man. If I ran across a black baby on the rubbish dump at Banbury, do you think I would just say a baby?’

And the headlines the next day read:

‘Just one other thing,’ Mr Burnett said. ‘Lay off babies for a while.’

The job was urgent: the paper had to be printed every evening; by early morning it had to be in every part of the island. This was not the false urgency of writing signs for shops at Christmas or looking after crops. And even after a dozen years Mr Biswas never lost the thrill, which he then felt for the first time, at seeing what he had written the day before appear in print, in the newspaper delivered free.

‘You haven’t given me a real shock yet,’ Mr Burnett said.

And Mr Biswas wanted to shock Mr Burnett. It seemed unlikely that he would ever do so, for in his fourth week he was made shipping reporter, taking the place of a man who had been killed at the docks by a crane load of flour accidentally falling from a great height. It was the tourist season and the harbour was full of ships from America and Europe. Mr Biswas went aboard German ships, was given excellent lighters, saw photographs of Adolf Hitler, and was bewildered by the Heil Hitler salutes.

Excitement!

The ships sailed away with their scorched tourists, distinguished by their tropical clothes, after only a few hours. But they had come from places with famous names. And in the
Sentinel
office news from those places spilled out continually on to spools of paper. Outside was the hot sun, the horse-dunged streets, the choked slums, the rooms where he lived with Ramchand and Dehuti; and, beyond that, the level acres of sugarcane, the sunken ricelands, the repetitive labour of his brothers, the short roads leading from known settlement to known settlement, the Tulsi establishment, the old men who gathered every evening in the arcade of Hanuman House and would travel no more. But within the walls of the office every part of the world was near.

He went aboard American ships on the South American tourist route, interviewed businessmen, had difficulty in understanding the American accent, saw the galleys and marvelled at the quantity and quality of the food thrown away. He copied down passenger lists, was invited by a ship’s cook to join a smuggling ring that dealt in camera flash-bulbs, declined and was unable to write the story because it would have incriminated his late predecessor.

He interviewed an English novelist, a man about his own age, but still young, and shining with success. Mr Biswas was impressed. The novelist’s name was unknown to him and to the readers of the
Sentinel,
but Mr Biswas had thought of all writers as dead and associated the production of books not only with distant lands, but with distant ages. He visualized headlines –
FAMOUS NOVELIST SAYS PORT OF SPAIN WORLD’S THIRD WICKEDEST
CITY
– and fed the novelist with leading questions. But the novelist considered Mr Biswas’s inquiries to have a sinister political motive, and made slow statements about the island’s famed beauty and his desire to see as much of it as possible.

I want to see that frighten anybody, Mr Biswas thought.

(Years later Mr Biswas came across the travel-book the novelist had written about the region. He saw himself described as an ‘incompetent, aggrieved and fanatical young reporter, who distastefully noted my guarded replies in a laborious longhand’.)

Then a ship called on the way to Brazil.

Within twenty-four hours Mr Biswas was notorious, the
Sentinel,
reviled on every hand, momentarily increased its circulation, and Mr Burnett was jubilant.

He said, ‘You have even chilled me.’

The story, the leading one on page three, read:

Somewhere in America in a neat little red-roofed cottage four children ask their mother every day, ‘Mummy, when is Daddy coming home?’

Less than a year ago Daddy – George Elmer Edman, the celebrated traveller and explorer – left home to explore the Amazon.

Well, I have news for you, kiddies.

Daddy is on his way home.

Yesterday he passed through Trinidad. In a coffin.

Mr Biswas was taken on the staff of the
Sentinel
at a salary of fifteen dollars a fortnight.

‘The first thing you must do,’ Mr Burnett said, ‘is to get out and get yourself a suit. I can’t have my best reporter running about in those clothes.’

It was Ramchand who brought about the reconciliation between Mr Biswas and the Tulsis; or rather, since the Tulsis had few thoughts on the subject, made it possible for Mr Biswas to recover his family without indignity. Ramchand’s task was easy. Mr Biswas’s name appeared almost every day in the
Sentinel,
so that it seemed he had suddenly become famous and rich. Mr Biswas, believing himself that this was very nearly so, felt disposed to be charitable.

He was at that time touring the island as the Scarlet Pimpernel, in the hope of having people come up to him and say, ‘You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the
Sentinel
prize.’ Every day his photograph appeared in the
Sentinel
together with his report on the previous day’s journey and his itinerary for the day.
The photograph was half a column wide and there was no room for his ears; he was frowning, in an unsuccessful attempt to look menacing; his mouth was slightly open and he stared at the camera out of the corners of his eyes, which were shadowed by the low-pulled brim of his hat. As a circulation raiser the Scarlet Pimpernel was a failure. The photograph concealed too much; and he was too well dressed for ordinary people to accost him in a sentence of such length and correctness. The prizes went unclaimed for days and the Scarlet Pimpernel reports became increasingly fantastic. Mr Biswas visited his brother Prasad and readers of the
Sentinel
learned next morning that a peasant in a remote village had rushed up to the Scarlet Pimpernel and said, ‘You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the
Sentinel
prize.’ The peasant was then reported as saying that he read the
Sentinel
every day, since no other paper presented the news so fully, so amusingly, and with such balance.

Then Mr Biswas visited his eldest brother Pratap. And there he had a surprise. He found that his mother had been living with Pratap for some weeks. For long Mr Biswas had considered Bipti useless, depressing and obstinate; he wondered how Pratap had managed to communicate with her and persuade her to leave the hut in the back trace at Pagotes. But she had come and she had changed. She was active and lucid; she was a lively and important part of Pratap’s household. Mr Biswas felt reproached and anxious. His luck had been too sudden, his purchase on the world too slight. When he got back late that evening to the
Sentinel
office he sat down at a desk, his own (his towel in the bottom drawer), and with memories coming from he knew not where, he wrote:

Oink! Oink!

The frogs croaked all around me. Nothing but that and the sound of the rain on trees in the black night.

I was dripping wet. My motorcycle had broken down miles from anywhere. It was midnight and I was alone.

The report then described a sleepless night, encounters with snakes and bats, the two cars that passed in the night, heedless of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s cries, the rescue early in the morning by peasants who recognized the Scarlet Pimpernel and claimed their prize.

It was not long after this that Mr Biswas went to Arwacas. He got there in the middle of the morning but did not go to Hanuman House until after four, when he knew the store would be closed, the children back from school and the sisters in the hall and kitchen. His return was as magnificent as he had wished. He was still climbing up the steps from the courtyard when he was greeted by shouts, scampering and laughter.

‘You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the
Sentinel
prize!’

He went around, dropping
Sentinel
dollar-tokens into eager hands.

‘Send this in with the coupon from the
Sentinel.
Your money will come the day after tomorrow.’

Savi and Anand at once took possession of him.

Shama, emerging from the black kitchen, said, ‘Anand, you will get your father’s suit dirty.’

It was as though he had never left. Neither Shama nor the children nor the hall carried any mark of his absence.

Shama dusted a bench at the table and asked whether he had eaten. He didn’t reply, but sat where she had dusted. The children asked questions continually, and it was easy not to pay attention to Shama as she brought the food out.

‘Uncle Mohun, Uncle Mohun. You really spend a night up a tree?’

‘What do you think, Jai?’

‘Ma say you make it up. And I don’t see how
you
could climb up a tree.’

‘I can’t tell you how often I fall down.’

It was better than he had imagined to be back in the sooty green hall with the shelflike loft, the long pitchpine table, the unrelated pieces of furniture, the photographs of Pundit Tulsi, the kitchen safe with the Japanese coffee-set.

‘Uncle Mohun, that man did really chase you with a cutlass when you try to give a coupon to his wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why you didn’t give him one too?’

‘Go away. You children getting too smart for me.’

He ate and washed his hands and gargled. Shama urged him to be careful of his tie and jacket: as though they were not new to her, as though she had a wifely interest even in clothes she had not known from the start.

He went up the stairs, past the landing with the broken piano. In the verandah he saw Hari, the holy man, and Hari’s wife. They barely greeted him. They both seemed untouched by his new fame or his new suit. Hari, in his pundit’s clothes, looked jaundiced and unwell as always; his wife’s solemnity was tinged with worry and fatigue. Mr Biswas had often surprised them in similar quiet domestic scenes, withdrawn from the life about them.

He felt he was intruding, and hurried past the door with the coloured glass panes into the Book Room, which smelled mustily of old paper and worm-eaten wood. His books were there with traces of their soaking: bleached covers, stained and crinkled pages. Anand came into the room. His hair was long on his big head; he was in his ‘home-clothes’. Mr Biswas held Anand to his leg and Anand rubbed against it. He asked Anand about school and got shy, unintelligible replies. They had little to talk about.

‘Exactly when they did start seeing my name in the papers?’ Mr Biswas asked.

Anand smiled, raised one foot off the floor, and mumbled.

‘Who see it first?’

Anand shook his head.

‘And what they say, eh? Not the children, but the big people.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? But what about the photo? Coming out every day. What they say when they see
that?
’

‘Nothing.’ ‘Nothing at all?’

‘Only Auntie Chinta say you look like a crook.’

‘Who is the pretty baby? Tell me,
who
is the pretty baby?’

It was Shama, coming into the room and wandering about it with a baby in her arms.

Mr Biswas had not seen his fourth child. And now he was embarrassed to look.

Shama came closer but did not raise her eyes. ‘Who is that man?’ she said to the baby. ‘Do you
know
that man?’

Mr Biswas did not respond. He felt suffocated, sickened by the picture of mother and child as by the whole furtive domestic scene in this room above the hall: father, mother, children.

‘And who is this?’ Shama had taken the baby to Anand. ‘This is brother.’ Anand tickled her chin and the baby gurgled.

‘Yes, this is brother. Oh, isn’t she a
pretty
baby?’

He noticed that Shama had grown a little plumper.

He relented. He took a step towards Shama and immediately she held up the baby to him.

‘Her name is Kamla,’ Shama said in Hindi, her eyes still on the baby.

‘Nice name,’ he said in English. ‘Who give it?’

‘The pundit.’

‘This one register too, I suppose?’

‘But you were here when she was born –’ And Shama stopped, as though she had ventured on to dangerous ground.

Mr Biswas took the baby.

‘Give her back to me,’ Shama said after a short time. ‘She might get your clothes dirty.’

The reconciliation was soon complete, and on terms that made Mr Biswas feel he had won a victory. It was arranged for him to meet Mrs Tulsi in Port of Spain. She pretended not to know that he had ever left Shama and Hanuman House; he had come to Port of Spain to see the doctor, hadn’t he? Mr Biswas said he had. She was glad he was better; Pundit Tulsi always used to say that good health was worth any fortune. She never asked about his job, though she said that she expected much from Mr Biswas and always had; which was why
she had been so ready to agree when he came that afternoon to ask for Shama’s hand.

Mrs Tulsi proposed that Mr Biswas should move his family to Port of Spain and live with her son and herself. Unless, of course, Mr Biswas was thinking of buying a house of his own; she was only a mother and had no control over Shama’s fate. If they came, however, they would have the run of the house, except for those rooms used by Owad and herself. In return they would pay eight dollars a month, Shama would cook, do all the housework and collect the rents from her other two houses: a difficult business: not worth the trouble to get an outsider to do it and she was too old to do it herself.

The offer was stupendous: a house, no less. It was the climax of his current good fortune, which must now, he felt, surely end. To delay acceptance, to cover up his nervousness, he talked about the difficulty of collecting rents. Mrs Tulsi talked about Pundit Tulsi and he listened with solemn sympathy.