A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [269]
Mr Biswas slipped from his low eminence as a civil servant and returned to the Sentinel. The car was now his own; but he was getting less than those who had stayed with the paper. He had paid five hundred dollars of the debt; now he could hardly pay the interest. He wanted to sell the car, and an Englishman came to the house one day to look it over. Shama was exceedingly rude, and the Englishman, finding himself in the centre of a family quarrel, withdrew. Mr Biswas gave in. Shama had never reproached him for the house, and he had begun to credit her with great powers of judgement. Again and again she said she was not worried, that the debt would settle itself; and though Mr Biswas felt that her words were hollow, he did get comfort from them.
But the debt remained. At nights, with a clear view of the sky through the slightly crooked window frames on the top floor, he felt the time flying by, the five years shrinking to four, to three, bringing disaster closer, devouring his life. In the morning the sun struck through the lattice work on the landing and below the bar-room door into his bedroom, and calmness returned. The children would see about the debt.
But the debt remained. Four thousand dollars. Like a buffer at the end of a track, frustrating energy and ambition. Beyond the Sentinel there was nothing. And though he had at first found the newspaper office stimulating, with its urgency, the daily miracle of seeing what he had written in the afternoon transformed into solid print read by thousands the next morning, his enthusiasm, unsupported by ambition, faded. His work became painstaking and laboured: the zest went out of his articles as it had gone out of himself He grew dull and querulous and ugly. Living had always been a preparation, a waiting. And so the years had passed; and now there was nothing to wait for.
Except the children. Suddenly the world opened for them. Savi got a scholarship and went abroad. Two years later Anand got a scholarship and went to England. The prospects of repaying the debt receded. But Mr Biswas felt he could wait; at the end of five years he could make other arrangements.
He missed Anand and worried about him. Anand’s letters, at first rare, became more and more frequent. They were gloomy, self-pitying; then they were tinged with a hysteria which Mr Biswas immediately understood. He wrote Anand long humorous letters; he wrote about the garden; he gave religious advice; at great expense he sent by air mail a book called Outwitting Our Nerves by two American women psychologists. Anand’s letters grew rare again. There was nothing Mr Biswas could do but wait. Wait for Anand. Wait for Savi. Wait for the five years to come to an end. Wait. Wait.
They sent a message to Shama one afternoon and she packed Mr Biswas’s pyjamas and hurried to the Colonial Hospital. He had collapsed in the Sentinel office. It was not the stomach which was at fault, the stomach which he had so often said he would like to cut out of himself and have a good look at, to see exactly what was playing the fool. It was the heart, about which he had never complained.
He spent a month in hospital. When he came home he found that Shama and Kamla and Myna had distempered the walls downstairs. The floor had been freshly stained and polished. The garden was blooming. He was moved. He wrote to Anand that he hadn’t realized until then what a nice little house it was. But writing to Anand was like taking a blind man to see a view.
Forbidden to climb staircases, Mr Biswas lived downstairs; and this was a recurring humiliation, for the lavatory was upstairs. The afternoon sun made it hard to be downstairs all day; even when Shama put up an awning over the windows the glare remained and the heat was stifling. Knowing his heart was unreliable, he was afraid. He feared for