A House for Mr Biswas

Prologue

Ten weeks before he died, Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St.
James, Port of Spain, was sacked. He had been ill for some time. In less than a
year he had spent more than nine weeks at the Colonial Hospital and
convalesced at home for even longer. When the doctor advised him to take a
complete rest the Trinidad Sentinel had no choice. It gave Mr. Biswas three
months’ notice and continued, up to the time of his death, to supply him every
morning with a free copy of the paper. Mr. Biswas was forty-six, and had four
children. He had no money. His wife Shama had no money. On the house in
Sikkim Street Mr. Biswas owed, and had been owing for four years, three
thousand dollars. The interest on this, at eight per cent, came to twenty dollars a
month; the ground rent was ten dollars. Two children were at school. The two
older children, on whom Mr. Biswas might have depended, were both abroad on
scholarships.

It gave Mr. Biswas some satisfaction that in the circumstances Shama did not
run straight off to her mother to beg for help. Ten years before that would have
been her first thought. Now she tried to comfort Mr. Biswas, and devised plans
on her own. “Potatoes,” she said. “We can start selling potatoes. The price
around here is eight cents a pound. If we buy at five and sell at seven—” “Trust
the Tulsi bad blood,” Mr. Biswas said. “I know that the pack of you Tulsis are
financial geniuses. But have a good look around and count the number of people
selling potatoes. Better to sell the old car.” “No. Not the car. Don’t worry. We’ll
manage.” “Yes,” Mr. Biswas said irritably. “We’ll manage.” No more was heard of
the potatoes, and Mr. Biswas never threatened again to sell the car. He didn’t
now care to do anything against his wife’s wishes. He had grown to accept her
judgement and to respect her optimism. He trusted her. Since they had moved
to the house Shama had learned a new loyalty, to him and to their children;
away from her mother and sisters, she was able to express this without shame,
and to Mr. Biswas this was a triumph almost as big as the acquiring of his own
house.

He thought of the house as his own, though for years it had been irretrievably
mortgaged. And during these months of illness and despair he was struck again
and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in
through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors
and windows every night, to hear no noises except those of his family, to wander
freely from room to room and about his yard, instead of being condemned, as
before, to retire the moment he got home to the crowded room in one or the
other of Mrs. Tulsi’s houses, crowded with Shama’s sisters, their husbands, their
children.

As a boy he had moved from one house of strangers to another; and since his
marriage he felt he had lived nowhere but in the houses of the Tulsis, at

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Hanuman House in Arwacas, in the decaying wooden house at Shorthills, in the
clumsy concrete house in Port of Spain. And now at the end he found himself in
his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he
should have been responsible for this seemed to him, in these last months,
stupendous. The house could be seen from two or three streets away and was
known all over St. James. It was like a huge and squat sentry-box: tall, square,
two-storeyed, with a pyramidal roof of corrugated iron.

It had been designed and built by a solicitor’s clerk who built houses in his spare
time. The solicitor’s clerk had many contacts. He bought land which the City
Council had announced was not for sale; he persuaded estate owners to split
whole lots into half-lots; he bought lots of barely reclaimed swamp land near
Mucurapo and got permission to build on them. On whole lots or three-quarter-
lots he built one-storey houses, twenty feet by twenty-six, which could pass
unnoticed; on half-lots he built two-storey houses, twenty feet by thirteen, which
were distinctive. All his houses were assembled mainly from frames from the
dismantled American Army camps at Docksite, Pompeii Savannah and Fort Read.
The frames did not always match, but they enabled the solicitor’s clerk to pursue
his hobby with little professional help. On the ground floor of Mr. Biswas’s two-
storey house the solicitor’s clerk had put a tiny kitchen in one corner; the
remaining L-shaped space, unbroken, served as drawingroom and diningroom.
Between the kitchen and the diningroom there was a doorway but no door.
Upstairs, just above the kitchen, the clerk had constructed a concrete room
which contained a toilet bowl, a wash-basin and a shower; because of the shower
this room was perpetually wet. The remaining L-shaped space was broken up
into a bedroom, a verandah, a bedroom. Because the house faced west and had
no protection from the sun, in the afternoon only two rooms were comfortably
habitable: the kitchen downstairs and the wet bathroom-and-lavatory upstairs.
In his original design the solicitor’s clerk seemed to have forgotten the need for a
staircase to link both floors, and what he had provided had the appearance of an
afterthought. Doorways had been punched in the eastern wall and a rough
wooden staircase—heavy planks on an uneven frame with one warped unpainted
banister, the whole covered with a sloping roof of corrugated iron—hung
precariously at the back of the house, in striking contrast with the white-pointed
brickwork of the front, the white woodwork and the frosted glass of doors and
windows.

For this house Mr. Biswas had paid five thousand five hundred dollars. Mr. Biswas
had built two houses of his own and spent much time looking at houses. Yet he
was inexperienced. The houses he had built had been crude wooden things in the
country, not much better than huts. And during his search for a house he had
always assumed new and modern concrete houses, bright with paint, to be
beyond him; and he had looked at few. So when he was faced with one which
was accessible, with a solid, respectable, modern front, he was immediately
dazzled. He had never visited the house when the afternoon sun was on it. He
had first gone one afternoon when it was raining, and the next time, when he

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had taken the children, it was evening. Of course there were houses to be bought
for two thousand and three thousand dollars, on a whole lot, in rising parts of the
city. But these houses were old and decaying, with no fences and no
conveniences of any sort. Often on one lot there was a conglomeration of two or
three miserable houses, with every room of every house let to a separate family
who couldn’t legally be got out. What a change from those backyards, overrun
with chickens and children, to the drawing-room of the solicitor’s clerk who,
coatless, tieless and in slippers, looked relaxed and comfortable in his morris
chair, while the heavy red curtains, reflecting on the polished floor, made the
scene as cosy and rich as something in an advertisement! What a change from
the Tulsi house! The solicitor’s clerk lived in every house he built. While he lived
in the house in Sikkim Street he was building another a discreet distance away,
at Morvant. He had never married, and lived with his widowed mother, a
gracious woman who gave Mr. Biswas tea and cakes which she had baked
herself. Between mother and son there was much affection, and this touched Mr.
Biswas, whose own mother, neglected by himself, had died five years before in
great poverty. “I can’t tell you how sad it make me to leave this house,” the
solicitor’s clerk said, and Mr. Biswas noted that though the man spoke dialect he
was obviously educated and used dialect and an exaggerated accent only to
express frankness and cordiality. “Really for my mother’s sake, man. That is the
onliest reason why I have to move. The old queen can’t manage the steps.” He
nodded towards the back of the house, where the staircase was masked by
heavy red curtains. “Heart, you see. Could pass away any day.” Shama had
disapproved from the first and never gone to see the house. When Mr. Biswas
asked her, “Well, what you think?” Shama said, “Think? Me? Since when you
start thinking that I could think anything? If I am not good enough to go and see
your house, I don’t see how I could be good enough to say what I think.” “Ah!”
Mr. Biswas said. “Swelling up. Vexed. I bet you would be saying something
different if it was your mother who was spending some of her dirty money to buy
this house.” Shama sighed. “Eh? You could only be happy if we just keep on
living with your mother and the rest of your big, happy family. Eh?” “I don’t think
anything. You have the money, you want to buy house, and I don’t have to think
anything.”

The very day the house was bought they began to see flaws in it. The staircase
was dangerous; the upper floor sagged; there was no back door; most of the
windows didn’t close; one door could not open; the celotex panels under the
eaves had fallen out and left gaps between which bats could enter the attic. They
discussed these things as calmly as they could and took care not to express their
disappointment openly. And it was astonishing how quickly this disappointment
had faded, how quickly they had accommodated themselves to every peculiarity
and awkwardness of the house. And once that had happened their eyes ceased
to be critical, and the house became simply their house. When Mr. Biswas came
back from the hospital for the first time, he found that the house had been
prepared for him. The small garden had been made tidy, the downstairs walls
distempered. The Prefect motorcar was in the garage, driven there weeks before

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from the Sentinel office by a friend. The hospital had been a void. He had
stepped from that into a welcoming world, a new, ready-made world.

He could not quite believe that he had made that world. He could not see why he
should have a place in it. And everything by which he was surrounded was
examined and rediscovered, with pleasure, surprise, disbelief. Every relationship,
every possession. The kitchen safe...the typewriter. That had been acquired
when, at the age of thirty-three, he had decided to become rich by writing for
American and English magazines; a brief, happy, hopeful period...The
bookcase...And the diningtable: bought cheaply from a Deserving Destitute who
had got some money from the Sentinel’s Deserving Destitutes Fund and wished
to show his gratitude to Mr. Biswas. And the Slumberking bed, where he could no
longer sleep because it was upstairs and he had been forbidden to climb steps.
And the glass cabinet: bought to please Shama, still dainty, and still practically
empty. And the morris suite: the last acquisition, it had belonged to the
solicitor’s clerk and had been left by him as a gift. And in the garage outside, the
Prefect.

But bigger than them all was the house, his house. How terrible it would have
been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the
squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama
and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even
attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as
one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.