A House for Mr. Biswas (9 page)

He awoke to find Bhandat standing over his mattress on the floor. Above red eyes Bhandat’s lids were swollen, the way they became after he had been drinking. Mr Biswas had not expected anyone to return before evening; he had lost a whole day’s freedom.

‘Come on. Stop pretending. Where have you put it?’ The bumps on Bhandat’s top lip were quivering with anger.

‘Put what?’

‘Oh yes. Smart man. So you don’t know?’ And Bhandat pulled Mr Biswas off the mattress, grabbed him by the back of his trousers and lifted him to his toes. With this hold, widely known in Lal’s school as the policeman’s hold, Bhandat led Mr Biswas to the next room. No one else was there; Bhandat’s wife and children had not come back from the funeral. A shirt hung on the back of a chair over a pair of neatly folded trousers. On the seat of the chair there were coins, keys and a number of crumpled dollar-notes.

‘Last night I had twenty-six dollars in notes. This morning I have twenty-five. Eh?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t even know when you came in. I was sleeping all the time.’

‘Sleeping. Yes, sleeping like the snake. With both eyes open. Big eyes and long tongue. Tongue wagging all the time to Tara and Ajodha. Do you think that has done you any good? You expect them to give you a pound and a crown for that?’ He was shouting now, and pulling out his leather belt through the loops of his trousers. ‘Eh? You will tell them you stole my dollar?’ He raised his arm and brought the belt down on Mr Biswas’s head. Whenever the buckle struck a bone it made a sharp sound.

Suddenly Mr Biswas howled. ‘O God! O God! My eye! My eye!’

Bhandat stopped.

Mr Biswas had been cut on the cheek-bone and the blood had run below his eye.

‘Get out, you nasty tale-carrying lout. Get out of here at once before I peel the skin off your back.’ The bumps on Bhandat’s lip were trembling again and his arm, when he raised it, was quivering.

The sun had not risen and the back trace was still and empty when Mr Biswas roused Bipti.

‘Mohun! What has happened?’

‘I fell down. Don’t
ask
me.’

‘Come, tell me. What’s the matter?’

‘Why do you keep on sending me to stay with other people?’

‘Who beat you?’ She pressed a finger under the cut on the cheek-bone and he winced. ‘Bhandat beat you?’ She undid his
shirt and saw the weals on his back. ‘He beat you? He beat you?’

She made him lie face down on the bed in her room, and, for the first time since he was a baby, rubbed his body down with oil. She gave him a cup of hot milk sweetened with brown sugar.

‘I am never going back there,’ Mr Biswas said.

Instead of giving the consolation he expected, Bipti said, as though arguing with him, ‘Where will you go then?’

He became impatient. ‘You have never done a thing for me. You are a pauper.’

He had meant to hurt her, but she was not hurt. ‘It is my fate. I have had no luck with my children. And with you, Mohun, I have the least luck of all. Everything Sitaram said about you was true.’

‘I have heard you and everybody else talking a lot about this Sitaram. What exactly did he say?’

‘That you were going to be a spendthrift and a liar and that you were going to be lecherous.’

‘Oh yes. Spendthrift with two dollars a month. Two whole dollars. Two hundred cents. Very heavy if you put that in a bag. And lecherous?’

‘Leading a bad life. With women. But you are too small.’

‘Bhandat’s children are more lecherous than me. And with their mother too.’

‘Mohun!’ Then Bipti said, ‘I don’t know what Tara is going to say.’

‘Again! Why do you keep on caring what Tara says? I don’t want you to go and see Tara. I don’t want anything from her. And Ajodha can keep that body of his. Let Bhandat’s boys read to him. I am finished with that.’

But Bipti went to see Tara, and that afternoon Tara, still in her mourning clothes and her jewellery, fresh from her funeral duties and her struggles with the funeral photographer, came to the back trace.

‘Poor Mohun,’ Tara said. ‘He’s shameless, that Bhandat.’

‘I am sure he stole the money himself,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘He’s got a lot of practice. He steals all the time. And I can always tell when he is stealing. He spins the coin.’

‘Mohun!’ Bipti said.

‘He’s the lecher, spendthrift and liar. Not me.’

‘Mohun!’

‘And I know all about that other woman. His sons know about her too. They boast about it. He quarrels with his wife and beats her. I am not going back to that shop if he comes and asks me on bended knee.’

‘I can’t see Bhandat doing that,’ Tara said. ‘But he is sorry. The dollar wasn’t missing. It was at the bottom of his trouser pocket and he didn’t notice it.’

‘He was too drunk, if you ask me.’ Then the humiliation hurt afresh and he began to cry. ‘You see, Ma. I have no father to look after me and people can treat me how they want.’

Tara became coaxing.

Mr Biswas, enjoying the coaxing and his misery, still spoke angrily. ‘Dehuti was quite right to run away from you. I am sure you treated her badly.’

By mentioning Dehuti’s name he had gone too far. Tara at once stiffened and, without saying more, left, her long skirt billowing about her, the silver bracelets on her arm clanking.

Bipti ran out after her to the yard. ‘You mustn’t mind the boy, Tara. He is young.’

‘I don’t mind, Bipti.’

‘Oh Mohun,’ Bipti said, when she came back to the room, ‘you will reduce us all to pauperdom. You will see me spending the rest of my days in the Poor House.’

‘I am going to get a job on my own. And I am going to get my own house too. I am finished with this.’ He waved his aching arm about the mud walls and the low, sooty thatch.

On Monday morning he set about looking for a job. How did one look for a job? He supposed that one looked. He walked up and down the Main Road, looking.

He passed a tailor and tried to picture himself cutting khaki cloth, tacking, and operating a sewingmachine. He passed a barber and tried to picture himself stropping a razor; his mind wandered off to devise elaborate protections for his left thumb. But he didn’t like the tailor he saw, a fat man sulkily sewing in a dingy shop; and as for barbers, he had never liked
those who cut his own hair; he thought too how it would disgust Pundit Jairam to learn that his former pupil had taken up barbering, a profession immemorially low. He walked on.

He had no wish to enter any of the shops he saw and ask for a job. So he imposed difficult conditions on himself. He tried, for example, to walk a certain distance in twenty paces, and interpreted failure as a bad sign. For a moment he was perversely tempted by an undertaker’s, a plain corrugated iron shed that made no concession to grief, smelling of new wood, fish-glue and french polish, with coffins lying on the floor among sawdust, shavings and unfashioned planks. Cheap coffins and raw wood stood in rows against one wall; expensive polished coffins rested on shelves; there were unfinished coffins around a work-bench and pieces of coffin everywhere else; in one corner there was a tottering stack of cheap toy coffins for babies. Mr Biswas had often seen babies’ funerals; one in particular he remembered, where the coffin was carried under the arm of a man who rode slowly on a bicycle. ‘Get a job there,’ he thought, ‘and help to bury Bhandat.’ He passed dry goods shops – strange name: dry goods – and the rickety little rooms bulged with dry goods, things like pans and plates and bolts of cloth and cards of bright pins and boxes of thread and shirts on hangers and brand-new oil lamps and hammers and saws and clothes-pegs and everything else, the wreckage of a turbulent flood which appeared to have forced the doors of the shops open and left deposits of dry goods on tables and on the ground outside. The owners remained in their shops, lost in the gloom and wedged between dry goods. The assistants stood outside with pencils behind their ears or pencils tapping bill-pads with the funereally-coloured carbon paper peeping out from under the first sheet. Grocers’ shops, smelling damply of oil, sugar and salted fish. Vegetable stalls, damp but fresh, and smelling of earth. Grocers’ wives and children stood oily and confident behind counters. The women behind the vegetable stalls were old and correct with thin mournful faces; or they were young and plump with challenging and quarrelsome stares; with a big-eyed child or two hanging about behind the purple sweet potatoes to which dirt still clung; and babies in the
background lying in condensed milk boxes. And all the time donkey-carts, horse-carts and ox-carts rumbled and jangled in the roadway, the heavy iron-rimmed wheels grating over gravel and sand and wobbling over the bumpy road. Continually long whips with knotted ends whistled and cracked, arousing brief enthusiasm in the animals. The men drivers sat on their carts; the boy drivers stood, shouting and whistling at their animals and their rivals; half a dozen races were always in progress.

Mr Biswas returned to the back trace, his resolution shaken. ‘I am not going to take any job at all,’ he told Bipti.

‘Why don’t you go and make it up with Tara?’

‘I don’t want to see Tara. I am going to kill myself.’

‘That would be the best thing for you. And for me.’

‘Good.
Good.
I don’t want any food.’ And in a great rage he left the hut.

Anger gave him energy, and he determined to walk until he was tired. On the Main Road he took the other direction now and went past the office of F. Z. Ghany, dingier but still intact, closed because it wasn’t market day; past the same array of shops, it seemed, the same owners, the same goods, the same assistants; and it all filled him with the same depression.

Late in the afternoon, when he was some miles out of Pagotes, a slender young man with shining eyes and a thick shining moustache came up to Mr Biswas and tapped him on the shoulder. He was embarrassed to recognize Ramchand, Tara’s delinquent yard boy, now Dehuti’s husband. He had sometimes seen him at Tara’s, but they had not spoken.

Ramchand, so far from showing embarrassment, behaved as though he had known Mr Biswas well for years. He asked so many questions so quickly that Mr Biswas had time only to nod. ‘How is everything? It is good to see you. And your mother? Well? Nice to hear. And the shop? A funny thing. You know Parakeet and Indian Maiden and The White Cock? I make that rum now. They are the same, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘No future working for Tara, I can tell you. As you know, I am working at this rum place now, and do you know how much I am getting? Come on. Guess.’

‘Ten dollars.’

‘Twelve. With a bonus every Christmas. And rum at the wholesale price into the bargain. Not bad, eh?’

Mr Biswas was impressed.

‘Dehuti talks about you all the time. At one time everybody thought you were drowned, remember?’ Then, as though this knowledge had removed whatever unfamiliarity remained between them, Ramchand added, ‘Why don’t you come and see Dehuti? She was talking about you only last night.’ He paused. ‘And perhaps you could eat something as well.’

Mr Biswas noticed the pause. It reminded him that Ramchand was of a low caste; and though it was absurd in the Main Road to think that of a man earning twelve dollars a month in addition to bonuses and other advantages, Mr Biswas was flattered that Ramchand looked upon him as someone to be flattered and conciliated. He agreed to go to see Dehuti. Ramchand, delighted, talked on, revealing much knowledge of other members of the family. He told Mr Biswas that Ajodha’s finances were not as sound as they appeared, and that Tara was offending too many people. Tara may have vowed never to mention Ramchand’s name again; he appeared anxious to mention hers as often as possible.

Mr Biswas had never questioned the deference shown him when he had gone to Tara’s to be fed as a Brahmin and on his rounds with Pundit Jairam. But he had never taken it seriously; he had thought of it as one of the rules of a game that was only occasionally played. When he got to Ramchand’s he thought it even more of a game. The hut indicated lowness in no way. The mud walls had been freshly whitewashed and decorated with blue and green and red palm-prints (Mr Biswas recognized Ramchand’s broad palm and stubby fingers); the thatch was new and neat; the earth floor was high and had been packed hard; pictures from calendars were stuck on the walls, and in the verandah there was a hatrack. It was altogether less depressing than the crumbling, neglected hut in the back trace.

But it seemed that to Dehuti marriage had brought no joy. She was uneasy at being caught among her household
possessions, and tried to hint that they had nothing to do with her. When Ramchand started to point out some attractive feature of the hut, she sucked her teeth and he desisted. Mr Biswas couldn’t believe that Dehuti had ever spoken about him, as Ramchand had said. She hardly spoke, hardly looked at him. Without expression she brought out an ugly baby from an inner room, asleep, and showed it, suggesting at the same time that she had not brought it out to show it. She looked careworn and sulky, untouched by her husband’s bubbling desire to please. Yet in her unhurried way she did what she could to make Mr Biswas welcome. He understood that she feared rebuff and the reports he might take back, and this made him uncomfortable.

Dehuti, never pretty, was now frankly ugly. Her Chinese eyes looked sleepy, the pupils without a light, the whites smudged. Her cheeks, red with pimples, bulged low and drooped around her mouth. Her lower lip projected, as though squashed out by the weight of her cheeks. She sat on a low bench, the back of her long skirt caught tightly between her calves and the backs of her thighs, the front draped over the knees. Mr Biswas was surprised by her adulthood. It was the way she sat, knees apart, yet so decorously covered; he had associated that only with mature women. He tried to find in the woman the girl he had known. But seeing her growing needlessly impatient while Ramchand, at her instructions, lit the fire and prepared to boil the rice, Mr Biswas felt that this sight of Dehuti had wiped out the old picture. This was a loss; it added to the unhappiness he had begun to feel as soon as he entered the hut.

Ramchand came from the kitchen and sank in the most relaxed way on to the earth floor. He stretched out one short-trousered leg and held his hands around his upright knee. The corrugations of his thick hair glinted with oil. He smiled at Mr Biswas, smiled at the baby, smiled at Dehuti. He asked Mr Biswas to read the writing on the calendar pictures and the Sunday school cards on the walls, and listened in pure pleasure while Mr Biswas did so.