A House for Mr. Biswas (6 page)

But they agreed on a plausible date, Lal completed his roll-book record, and Bipti went to consult Tara.

Tara took Bipti to a solicitor whose office was a tiny wooden shed standing lopsided on eight unfashioned logs. The distemper on its walls had turned to dust. A sign, obviously painted by the man himself, said that F. Z. Ghany was a solicitor, conveyancer and a commissioner of oaths. He didn’t look like all that, sitting on a broken kitchen chair at the door of his shed, bending forward, picking his teeth with a matchstick, his tie hanging perpendicular. Large dusty books were piled on the dusty floor, and on the kitchen table at his back there was a sheet of green blotting-paper, also dusty, on which there was a highly decorated metal contraption which looked like a toy version of the merry-go-round Mr Biswas had seen in the playground at St Joseph on the way to Pagotes. From this toy merry-go-round hung two rubber stamps, and directly below them there was a purple-stained tin. F. Z. Ghany carried the rest of his office equipment in his shirt pocket; it was stiff with pens, pencils, sheets of paper and envelopes. He needed to be able to carry his equipment about; he opened the Pagotes office only on market day, Wednesday; he had other offices, open on other market days, at Tunapuna, Arima, St Joseph and Tacarigua. ‘Just give me three or four dog-case or cuss-case every day,’ he used to say, ‘and I all right, you hear.’

Seeing the group of three walking Indians file across the plank over the gutter, F. Z. Ghany got up, spat out the matchstick and greeted them with good-humoured scorn.
‘Maharajin, maharajin,
and little boy.’ He made most of his money from Hindus but, as a Muslim, distrusted them.

They climbed the two steps into his office. It became full. Ghany liked it that way; it attracted customers. He took the chair behind the table, sat on it, and left his clients standing.

Tara began to explain about Mr Biswas. She grew prolix, encouraged by the quizzical look on Ghany’s heavy dissipated face.

During one of Tara’s pauses Bipti said, ‘Buth suttificate.’

‘Oh!’ Ghany said, his manner changing. ‘Certificate of buth.’ It was a familiar problem. He looked legal and said, ‘Affidavit. When did the buth take place?’

Bipti told Tara in Hindi, ‘I can’t really say. But Pundit Sitaram should know. He cast Mohun’s horoscope the day after he was born.’

‘I don’t know what you see in that man, Bipti. He doesn’t
know
anything.’

Ghany could follow their conversation. He disliked the way Indian women had of using Hindi as a secret language in public places, and asked impatiently, ‘Date of buth?’

‘Eighth of June,’ Bipti said to Tara. ‘It
must
be that.’

‘All right,’ Ghany said. ‘Eighth of June. Who to tell you no?’ Smiling, he put a hand to the drawer of his table and pulled it this way and that before it came out. He took out a sheet of foolscap, tore it in half, put back one half into the drawer, pushed the drawer this way and that to close it, put the half-sheet on the dusty blotting-paper, stamped his name on it and prepared to write. ‘Name of boy?’

‘Mohun,’ Tara said.

Mr Biswas became shy. He passed his tongue above his upper lip and tried to make it touch the knobby tip of his nose.

‘Surname?’ Ghany asked.

‘Biswas,’ Tara said.

‘Nice Hindu name.’ He asked more questions, and wrote. When he was finished, Bipti made her mark and Tara, with great deliberation and much dancing of the pen above the paper, signed her name. F, Z. Ghany struggled with the drawer once more, took out the other half-sheet, stamped his name on it, wrote, and then had everybody sign again.

Mr Biswas was now leaning forward against one of the dusty walls, his feet pushed far back. He was spitting carefully, trying to let his spittle hang down to the floor without breaking.

F. Z. Ghany hung up his name stamp and took down the date stamp. He turned some ratchets, banged hard on the almost dry purple pad and banged hard on the paper. Two lengths of rubber fell apart. ‘Blasted thing bust,’ he said, and examined it without annoyance. He explained, ‘You could print the year all right, because you move that only once a year. But the dates and the months, man, you spinning them round all the time.’ He took up the length of rubber and looked at them thoughtfully. ‘Here, give them to the boy. Play with them.’ He wrote the date with one of his pens and said, ‘All right, leave everything to me now. Expensive business, affidavits. Stamps and thing, you know. Ten dollars in all.’

Bipti fumbled with the knot at the end of her veil and Tara paid.

‘Any more children without certificate of buth?’

‘Three,’ Bipti said.

‘Bring them,’ Ghany said. ‘Bring all of them. Any market day. Next week? Is better to straighten these things right away, you know.’

In this way official notice was taken of Mr Biswas’s existence, and he entered the new world.

The chanting of the children pleased Lal. He believed in thoroughness, discipline and what he delighted to call stick-to-it-iveness, virtues he felt unconverted Hindus particularly lacked.

‘Stop!’ Lal cried, waving his tamarind rod. ‘Biswas, ought twos are how much?’

‘Two.’

‘Come up here. You, Ramguli, ought twos are how much?’

‘Ought.’

‘Come up. That boy with a shirt that looks like one of his mother bodice. How much?’

‘Four.’

‘Come up.’ He held the rod at both ends and bent it back and forth quickly. The sleeves of his jacket fell down past dirty cuffs and thin wrists black with hair. The jacket was brown but had turned saffron where it had been soaked by Lal’s sweat. For all the time he went to school, Mr Biswas never saw Lal wearing any other jacket.

‘Ramguli, go back to your desk. All right, the two of you. All-you decide now how much ought twos is?’

‘Ought,’ they whimpered together.

‘Yes, ought twos are ought. You did tell me two.’ He caught hold of Mr Biswas, pulled his trousers tight across his bottom, and began to apply the tamarind rod, saying as he beat, ‘Ought twos are ought. Ought oughts are ought.
One
twos are two.’

Mr Biswas, released, went crying back to his desk.

‘And now you. Before we talk about anything, tell me where you get that bodice from?’

With its flaming red colour and leg-of-mutton sleeves it was obviously a bodice and had, without comment, been recognized as such by the boys, most of whom wore garments not originally designed for them.

‘Where you get it from?’

‘My sister-in-law.’

‘And you thank her?’

There was no reply.

‘Anyway, when you see your sister-in-law, I want you to give her a message. I want you’ – and here Lal seized the boy and started to use the tamarind rod – ‘I want you to tell her that ought twos don’t make four. I want you to tell her that ought oughts are ought, ought twos are ought, one twos are two, and
two
twos are four.’

Mr Biswas was taught other things. He learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in Hindi from the
King George V Hindi Reader,
and he learned many English poems by heart from the
Royal Reader.
At Lal’s dictation he made copious notes, which he
never seriously believed, about geysers, rift valleys, watersheds, currents, the Gulf Stream, and a number of deserts. He learned about oases, which Lal taught him to pronounce ‘osis’, and ever afterwards an oasis meant for him nothing more than four or five date trees around a narrow pool of fresh water, surrounded for unending miles by white sand and hot sun. He learned about igloos. In arithmetic he got as far as simple interest and learned to turn dollars and cents into pounds, shilling and pence. The history Lal taught he regarded as simply a school subject, a discipline, as unreal as the geography; and it was from the boy in the red bodice that he first heard, with disbelief, about the Great War.

With this boy, whose name was Alec, Mr Biswas became friendly. The colours of Alec’s clothes were a continual surprise, and one day he scandalized the school by peeing blue, a clear, light turquoise. To excited inquiry Alec replied, ‘I don’t know, boy. I suppose is because I is a Portuguese or something.’ And for days he gave solemn demonstrations which filled most boys with disgust at their race.

It was to Mr Biswas that Alec first revealed his secret, and one morning recess, after Alec had given his demonstration, Mr Biswas dramatically unbuttoned and gave his. There was a clamour and Alec was forced to take out the bottle of Dodd’s Kidney Pills. In no time the bottle was empty, except for some half a dozen pills which Alec said he had to keep. The pills, like the red bodice, belonged to his sister-in-law. ‘I don’t know what she going to do when she find out,’ Alec said, and to those boys who still begged, he said, ‘Buy your own. The drugstore full of them.’ And many of them did buy their own, and for a week the school’s urinals ran turquoise; and the druggist attributed the sudden rise in sales to the success of the Dodd’s Kidney Pills Almanac which, in addition to jokes, carried story after story of the rapid cures the pills had effected on Trinidadians, all of whom had written the makers profusely grateful letters of the utmost articulateness, and been photographed.

With Alec Mr Biswas laid six-inch nails on the railway track at the back of the Main Road and had them flattened to make knives and bayonets. Together they went to Pagotes
River and smoked their first cigarettes. They tore off their shirt buttons, exchanged them for marbles and with these Alec won more, struggling continually to repair the depredations of Lal, who considered the game low and had forbidden it in the school grounds. They sat at the same desk, talked, were flogged and separated, but always came together again.

And it was through this association that Mr Biswas discovered his gift for lettering. When Alec tired of doing inaccurate erotic drawings he designed letters. Mr Biswas imitated these with pleasure and growing success. During an arithmetic test one day, finding himself with an astronomical number of hours in answer to a problem about cisterns, he wrote
CANCELLED
very neatly across the page and became absorbed in blocking the letters and shadowing them. When the period was over he had done nothing else.

Lal, who had noted Mr Biswas’s industry with approval, flew into a rage. ‘Ah! Sign-painter. Come up.’

He didn’t flog Mr Biswas. He ordered him to write
I AM AN ASS
on the blackboard. Mr Biswas outlined stylish, contemptuous letters, and the class tittered approvingly. Lal, racing about the classroom, waving his tamarind rod for silence, brushed Mr Biswas’s elbow and a stroke was spoilt. Mr Biswas turned this into an additional decoration which pleased him and impressed the class. It was too late for Lal to flog Mr Biswas or order him to clean the blackboard. Angrily he pushed him away, and Mr Biswas went back to his desk, smiling, a hero.

Mr Biswas went to Lal’s school for nearly six years and for all that time he was friendly with Alec. Yet he knew little about Alec’s home life. Alec never spoke about his mother or father and Mr Biswas knew only that he lived with his sister-in-law, the owner of the red bodice, an unphotographed user of Dodd’s Kidney Pills, and, according to Alec, a great beater. Mr Biswas never saw this woman. He never went to Alec’s home and Alec never came to his. There was a tacit agreement between them that they would keep their homes secret.

It would have pained Mr Biswas if anyone from the school saw where he lived, in one room of a mud hut in the back trace. He was not happy there and even after five years considered
it a temporary arrangement. Most of the people in the hut remained strangers, and his relations with Bipti were unsatisfying because she was shy of showing him affection in a house of strangers. More and more, too, she bewailed her Fate; when she did this he felt useless and dispirited and, instead of comforting her, went out to look for Alec. Occasionally she had ineffectual fits of temper, quarrelled with Tara and muttered for days, threatening, whenever there was anyone to hear, that she would leave and get a job with the road-gang, where women were needed to carry stones in baskets on their heads. Continually, when he was with her, Mr Biswas had to struggle against anger and depression.

At Christmas Pratap and Prasad came from Felicity, grown men now, with moustaches; in their best clothes, their pressed khaki trousers, unpolished brown shoes, blue shirts buttoned at the collar, and brown hats, they too were like strangers. Their hands were as hard as their rough, sunburnt faces, and they had little to say. When Pratap, with many self-deprecating sighs, half-laughs and pauses which enabled him to deliver a short sentence in easy instalments without in any way damaging its structure, when Pratap told about the donkey he had bought and the current lengths of tasks, Mr Biswas was not really interested. The buying of a donkey seemed to him an act of pure comedy, and it was hard to believe that the dour Pratap was the frantic boy who had rushed about the room in the hut threatening to kill the men in the garden.

As for Dehuti, he hardly saw her, though she lived close, at Tara’s. He seldom went there except when Tara’s husband, prompted by Tara, held a religious ceremony and needed Brahmins to feed. Then Mr Biswas was treated with honour; stripped of his ragged trousers and shirt, and in a clean dhoti, he became a different person, and he never thought it unseemly that the person who served him so deferentially with food should be his own sister. In Tara’s house he was respected as a Brahmin and pampered; yet as soon as the ceremony was over and he had taken his gift of money and cloth and left, he became once more only a labourer’s child –
father’s occupation: labourer
was the entry in the birth
certificate F. Z. Ghany had sent – living with a penniless mother in one room of a mud hut. And throughout life his position was like that. As one of the Tulsi sons-in-law and as a journalist he found himself among people with money and sometimes with graces; with them his manner was unforcedly easy and he could summon up luxurious instincts; but always, at the end, he returned to his crowded, shabby room.