A Red House for Mr Biswas

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

TO MARK the enigma of departure, I offer this affectionate parody, peopling our Red House with the tragicomic characters of Miguel Street. The words italicised below are mine; Sir Vidia’s prose in plain type, as untouched as it is untouchable, is taken direct from Miguel Street.

Chapter 1. Braggart

Every
Friday when he got up the
Red House steps,
Chat would sit on the banister and shout across, “What happening there,
Braggart?” Braggart would mumble softly, “What happening there,
Chat? It was something of a mystery why he was called
Braggart but I suspect it was
Chat who gave him the name.

I know it was Manning-Manning that called him, “The Rottweiler.” I don’t know if you remember
the Tobago private housing project, Land Date. That was the year
Braggart’s fame spread like fire and hundreds of young
PNM wannabes began adopting the hardboiled
Braggartian attitude and started
cussing everybody who could sail a ferry between two small islands.

It is still something of a miracle to me that
Braggart was quite the most popular man in the house. And so every
Friday, Chat would shout, “What happening there,
Braggart?” But one day, when
Chat shouted, there was no reply.
Braggart had vanished.
MPs could open their mouths without being bitten and presidents of the republic could develop national crime policies without being snarled at.

When
Chat and everybody else had nearly forgotten
Braggart, he returned. His mouth was twisted a little like a
former UNC AG and his accent was getting slightly American
like Pentecostal pastors revealing their barely-concealed fear of catching something from the LGBT.

In appearance, you must know, Chat recalled
Alfred E Neuman, the fella with the impish grin on the cover of the old Mad magazines, and he had done his best to strengthen the resemblance. The relationship between these men changed.
Braggart, determined to become the next prime minister, became an imitation Pentecostal.
Chat became
finance minister of no forex. And the exchange became this: “
Braggart!” “Shaddup,
Chat!”

Chapter 4. His Chosen Calling

No boy in the street particularly wished to be a
minister. But if you asked any boy, he would say, “
I going be leader of my own political party.”

There was certainly a glamour to
your own party symbol. The
political leaders were aristocrats. They worked
once every five years and had the rest of their
lives free.

Bas, who was a
political leader, was admired by most of the boys. He told us great stories.
Bas came from a
high Hindu caste and his skill was a sort of family skill, passing from father to
daughter, apparently. He said, very earnestly, “I think I going be
prime minister, you hear?”

If
Ralph Maraj or
Kamaluddhin Mohammed had said something like that, we would all have laughed. But we recognised that
Bas was different, that
Bas had
skulls. One day,
after the NAR came to power, ANR landed a powerful cuff on Bas’s jaw, sending him sprawling out of the minister of external affairs work and back into Opposition. Bas didn’t cry. And shortly after, I would see
ANR laughing with
Bas and
Bas used to say to me, “I know what you thinking. You wondering how me and he get so friendly so quick.
Is becaw politics have a morality of its own.”

Chapter 5. Manning-Manning

From the NAR cut tail in 1986, everybody said Manning-Manning was mad. He didn’t look mad –
at least not until he built private churches – but he did have some curious habits.

One day I met
Manning-Manning at the
Red House corner. “Boy, where you going?”
Manning-Manning asked. “I going to write a
column based on VS Naipaul’s Miguel Street,” I said, “
full of tragic clowns like yourself.”

Manning-Manning took out a long stick of chalk from his back pocket –
the election date did not fall out – and drew a very big S in outline and filled it in, and then
a one and the O. But then he started making several O’s, each smaller than the last, until he was writing in cursive, O after flowing O. In the afternoon, he had gone round the block. He said, “So the little man
write a column he thought would put me in school today?” I said, “Yes.”

Then he drew
a straight line through the S, making it $1,OOO,OOO,OOO. “That is how much State money I going to spend,” he said. “You finish your work. I finish mine.
Let us see whether it more important in Trinidad to write the truth or a cheque.”

BC Pires became BC Pires because of VS Naipaul. A different version of this column appeared in the Trinidad & Tobago Review in 2007, when the UWI honoured Sir Vidia