A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul Page A

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 birthcertificate 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.
    Tara’s husband, Ajodha, was a thin man with a thin, petulant face which could express benignity rather than warmth, and Mr Biswas was not comfortable with him. Ajodha could read but thought it more dignified to be read to, and Mr Biswas was sometimes called to the house to read, for a penny, a newspaper column of which Ajodha was particularly fond. This was a syndicated American column called
That Body of Yours
which dealt every day with a different danger to the human body. Ajodha listened with gravity, concern, alarm. It puzzled Mr Biswas that he should subject himself to this torment, and it amazed him that the writer, Dr Samuel S. Pitkin, could keep the column going with such regularity. But the doctor never flagged; twenty years later the column was still going, Ajodha had not lost his taste for it, and occasionally Mr Biswas’s son read it to him, for six cents.
    So, whenever Mr Biswas was in Tara’s house, it was as a Brahmin or a reader, with a status distinct from Dehuti’s, and he had little opportunity of speaking to her.
    Bipti had a specific worry about her children: neither Pratap nor Prasad nor Dehuti was married. She had no plans for Mr Biswas, since he was still young and she assumed that the education he was receiving was provision and protection enough. But Tara thought otherwise. And just when Mr Biswas was beginning to do stocks and shares, transactions as unreal to Lal as they were to him, and was learning ‘Bingen on the Rhine’ from
Bell’s Standard Elocutionist
for the visit of the school inspector, he was taken out of school by Tara and told that he was going to be made a pundit.
    It was only when his possessions were being bundled that he discovered he still had the school’s copy of the
Standard Elocutionist.
It was too late to return it, and he never did.Wherever he went the book went with him, and ended in the blacksmith-built bookcase in the house at Sikkim Street.
    For eight months, in a bare, spacious, unpainted wooden house smelling of blue soap and incense, its floors white and smooth from constant scrubbing, its cleanliness and sanctity maintained by regulations awkward to everyone except himself, Pundit Jairam taught Mr Biswas Hindi, introduced him to the more important scriptures and instructed him in various ceremonies. Morning and evening, under the pundit’s eye, Mr Biswas did the
puja
for the pundit’s household.
    Jairam’s children had all been married and he lived alone with his wife, a crushed, hard-working woman whose only duty now was to look after Jairam and his house. She didn’t complain. Among Hindus Jairam was respected for his knowledge. He also held scandalous views which, while being dismissed as contentious, had nevertheless brought him much popularity. He believed in God, fervently, but claimed it was not necessary for a Hindu to do so. He attacked the custom some families had of putting up a flag after a religious ceremony; but his own front garden was a veritable grove of bamboo poles with red and white pennants in varying stages of decay. He ate no meat but spoke against vegetarianism: when Lord Rama went hunting, did they think it was just for the sport?
    He was also working on a