Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

The cafй, close to newspaper offices, government offices and the courts, was frequented by newspapermen and civil servants; by people who came in for a drink before their cases were called and then disappeared, sometimes for months; by solicitors’ clerks and by junior clerks who spent days of tedium tracing titles at the polished desks in the outer room of the Registrar-General’s Department.

It was a title-tracer who said, “If Billy was still here I woulda tell you to go and see Billy. All-you remember Billy?

“Billy used to promise them that he wasn’t only going to get them a house, but that he was going to move them free into the bargain. Everybody rushing to get this free move-you know black people-and paying Billy deposit. When he pick up a good few deposit Billy decide it was time to put a end to this stupidness and to make tracks for the States.

“But listen. The day before he leave, Billy plan leak out. But Billy get to know that the plan leak out. So the next day, Billy ship waiting in the harbour, Billy hire a lorry, put on his khaki working-clothes and went around to all the people he take money from. Everybody so surprise they forgetting they vex. All of them telling Billy how they call police and they saying, ‘But, Billy, we hear that you was leaving today.’ And Billy saying, ‘I don’t know where you get the niggergram from. I not leaving. You leaving. I come to move you. You got everything pack?’ None of them had anything pack, and Billy start getting into one big temper, saying how they make him waste his time, and he was mad not to move them at all. And they calm him down by saying if he pass back in the afternoon they would have everything pack and ready to move. So Billy leave and the people pack and wait for Billy. They still waiting.”

The laughter broke, but Mr. Biswas could take no part in it. Outside it had grown dark. There was a blue instant of lightning, a crack and roll of thunder. The thought of driving to his area with the windows closed was not appealing. He had drunk many lagers and they had steadily reduced him to silence and stillness. He did not want to go to the country; he did not want to stay in the cafй. But the rain, which had begun to fall in heavy drops that blotted on the pavement and presently had it wet and running, encouraged him to stay, silent and unlistening on a tall stool, drinking lager, staring at the crude bright murals, surrendering to the gloom.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see a very tall, thin coloured man. He had occasionally seen this man about St. Vincent Street and knew him to be a solicitor’s clerk. In the past year or two they had been nodding to one another but they had never spoken.

“Is true?” the man asked.

Mr. Biswas noted the man’s size, the concern in his voice and in his young-old face. “Yes, man.”

“You really got notice?”

Mr. Biswas responded to this sympathy by pursing his lips, looking down at his glass and nodding.

“Hell of a thing. How long?”

“Notice. A month, I suppose.”

“Hell of a thing. Married? Children?”

“Four.”

“God! You try the government? You in the Service now, not so? And ain’t they have some sort of housing loans scheme?”

“Only for established people.”

“You can’t get a good place to rent for all the tea in China,” the man said. He edged his way around Mr. Biswas, cutting him off from the talkers, some of whom were beginning to eat, at the bar, at tables. “Much easier to buy a house really. In the long run. What you drinking? Lager? Two lagers, miss. A hell of a thing, man.”

The lagers came.

“I know,” the man said. “I was in the same position not so long ago. I only had my mother. But even that was hell, I could tell you. Is like being sick.”

“Sick?”

“When you sick you forget what it is to be well. And when you well you don’t really know what it is to be sick. Is the same with not having a place to go back to every afternoon.”

Lights were turned on in the cafй. People stood silently in every doorway, looking out at the rain. From the dark street came the hiss of wet tyres and the beat of the rain, drowning the scrape of knives and forks on plates, the chatter.

“I don’t know,” the man said. “But look. What you doing now?”

“I got to go to the country. But with all this rain-”

“You know what? You better come and have some lunch with me. No, not here.” He looked around the cafй, and in his look Mr. Biswas saw the chatterers rebuked for their callousness.

They went outside and hurried through the rain, brushing against people who stood close to walls. They turned into a side street and entered the grimy green hall of a Chinese restaurant. The coconut-fibre mat was damp and black, the floor wet. They went up bare steps and the solicitor’s clerk seemed to be continually meeting people he knew. To all of them he said, patting Mr. Biswas on the shoulder, “Hell of a thing here, man. The man got notice. And he got nowhere to go.” People looked at Mr. Biswas, made sympathetic sounds, and Mr. Biswas, muddled by the lager, the strange faces and the unexpected interest, became very tragic.

They went to a celotex-partitioned cubicle and the solicitor’s clerk ordered food.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But look. My position is this. I living with my mother in a two-storey house in St. James. But she a lil old now, you know-”

“My mother dead,” Mr. Biswas said, finding himself, to his surprise, eating. “Blasted doctor didn’t want to give a death certificate. Write him a letter, though. A long one-”

“Hell of a thing, man. But the position is this. The old queen have a lil heart trouble. Can’t climb steps and that sort of thing. It does strain the heart, you know.” The solicitor’s clerk put his hand on his chest and his shoulders see-sawed. “And right at this moment I have a offer of a house in Mucurapo which would suit the old lady right down to the ground. Trouble is, I can’t buy it unless somebody buy mine.”

“And you want me buy yours.”

“In a sort of way. I could help you and you could help me. And the old queen.”

“Upstairs house, you say.”

“All modern conveniences and full and immediate vacant possession.”

“I wish I had that sort of money, old man.”

“Wait until you see it.”

And before the meal was over Mr. Biswas had agreed to go to see the house. He knew what he was doing. He knew that he had no more than eight hundred dollars and was only wasting the clerk’s time and his own. But courtesy demanded no less.

“You would be doing me a favour,” the solicitor’s clerk said. “And you would be doing the old queen a favour.”

So in the pouring rain, the windscreen wiper occasionally sticking, they drove down St. Vincent Street and around Marine Square and along Wrightson Road-settled by secure people-and across Woodbrook to the Western Main Road, past the vast grounds and the saman-lined drive of the Police Barracks, and turned into Sikkim Street.

It was still raining when the car stopped outside the house. The fence, half concrete, with lead pipes running between square concrete pillars, was covered with the vines of the Morning Glory spattered with small red flowers drooping in the rain. The height of the house, the cream and grey walls, the white frames of doors and windows, the red brick sections with white pointing: all these things Mr. Biswas took in at once, and knew that the house was not for him.

When, racing into the house out of the rain, he met the old queen, not as old as the solicitor’s clerk had made out, he was overwhelmed by her courtesy. Continually, with his suit and tie and shining shoes and Prefect car, he felt he was deceiving the public. Here, in this house in Sikkim Street, so desirable, so inaccessible, deception was especially painful. He tried to respond to the old queen’s civility with equal civility; he tried not to think of his crowded room, his eight hundred dollars. Slowly and carefully, aware now of the lager, he sipped tea and smoked a cigarette. Hesitantly, fearing a frank appraisal would be rude, he took in the distempered walls, the washed celotex ceiling with strips of wood painted chocolate and looking brand-new, frosted-glass windows and frosted-glass doors with white woodwork, white lattice work, a polished floor, a polished morris suite. And when the solicitor’s clerk, frank and trusting, ignorant of the eight hundred dollars, insisted that Mr. Biswas should see the rooms upstairs, Mr. Biswas went round quickly, seeing a bathroom with a toilet bowl and-luxury!-a porcelain wash-basin, two bedrooms with green walls, a verandah, so cool without the sun, the Morning Glory on the fence below, his Prefect in the road, and just for a moment he thought of the house as his own, and the thought was so heady he rejected it at once and hurried downstairs.