Ratna Raman: No House for Shama Biswas
I am by far the most attractive woman character in Naipaul's undeniably powerful semi-autobiographical tome, A House for Mr Biswas. This man created me, not from something as substantial as a rib, but from the tips of his fingers with black ink, and exorcised me into the printed life forever. So here I am, "Shama Biswas, Naipaul's mother in a fictionalised autobiography!" Think of it, without me, he wouldn't be around at all, literally and factually! There are fleeting glimpses of me in the book, which is really Mohun Biswas's story. I need perhaps to put both my story and that of Naipaul nee Anand in perspective.
My correspondence, with Myrtle in London, for instance? I wrote letters to her vetted by our principal. Myrtle replied to them. Her last letter expressed shock that I was getting married at 16. She was all set to train as a nurse and work in the Royal London Hospital. I was too mortified to ever write again. Myrtle's life choices were inconceivable in my growing years at Trinidad.
My marriage to Mohun Biswas brought me four children whom I raised mostly without him. Parenting is an arduous task, and more so if you have an erratic, solipsistic spouse as Mohun Biswas was. The children and I relied entirely on the support and goodwill of my siblings and my natal home which, at that point, was at Hanuman House. Only after we moved to Port of Spain and Mohun bought the house on Sikkim Street, did we live together in the manner of modern nuclear families. Till then we shared space with relatives in Mai's town house.
When I met Miss Logie, Head of the Community Welfare Department at Port of Spain, so competent and in control of her life, I wondered how I would have fared in a similar situation. After all, I wrote a good hand, helped out at the store, had a head for figures, and was an efficient rent collector. Pip did well for himself with much less to go by in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. So did Mohun Biswas, the painter of signs in Trinidad.
Mai ran an efficient household that thrived on women's labour. We ran the shop and the house, fed and raised children, supervised their school work, helped out with endless chores, washed and cooked and sewed and darned, celebrated birthdays and festivals, administered to the ill and the ailing, and lived a community life amid familial generations.
These last outposts of matrilineal living were quickly erased by the prevailing patriarchal modes that Naipaul recorded. I think now that perhaps as a young boy he never understood them. Maybe that is why he could never endorse them or feel strongly about them in fiction or in life... Read more: http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2011/11/4205
