Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

The old queen, whose heart had not permitted her to climb the steps, greeted him as though he had returned from a long journey.

He sat in one of the morris chairs and drank more tea and took another cigarette.

Not a word had been said so far about the price. Mr. Biswas kept on fixing it in his mind at something high and impossible which would relieve him of responsibility and regret. He thought of eight thousand, nine thousand. So near the busy Main Road: an ideal site for a shop. And yet so quiet in the rain!

“Not bad for six thousand,” the solicitor’s clerk said.

Mr. Biswas smoked and said nothing.

The old queen came out from the kitchen with a plate of cakes. The solicitor’s clerk insisted that Mr. Biswas should try one. The old queen had made them herself.

Mr. Biswas took a cake. The old queen smiled at him, and he smiled back.

“Well, to be honest. We both want to make a sale in a hurry. So let’s say five five.”

Once Mr. Biswas had read a story by a French writer about a woman who worked for twenty years to pay off a debt on an imitation necklace. He had never been able to understand why it was considered a comic story. Debt was a fearful thing; and with all its it’s and might-have-beens the story came too near the truth: hope followed by blight, the passing of the years, the passing of life itself, and then the revelation of waste: Oh, my poor Matilda! But they were false! Now, sitting in the clerk’s morris chair, Mr. Biswas knew he was close to such a debt, a similar blight, a similar waste: and he was again lying awake at night, hearing the snores of the crowded house, looking through the window at the empty sky swept by silent searchlights.

“Five five and we will throw in this morris suite.” The clerk gave a little laugh. “I always hear that Indians was sharp bargainers, but I never know till now just how sharp they was.”

The old queen smiled as charitably as ever.

“I will have to think about it.”

The old queen smiled.

On the way back Mr. Biswas decided to be aggressive.

“You so anxious to sell your house I don’t understand why you don’t go to an agent.”

“Me? You mean you didn’t hear what those people was saying in the cafй. Those agents are just a bunch of crooks, man.”

He felt he had seen the last of the house. He did not know then that, in the five years of life left to him, that drive along the Western Main Road, through Woodbrook to Wrightson Road and South Quay was to become familiar and even boring.

Alone once more, his depression, his panic returned. But when he got back to the house he assumed an air of confidence and sternness and said loudly to Shama, who was surprised to see him back so soon. “Didn’t go to the country today. Been looking at some properties.”

The headache which had been nagging him, which he had put down to his uneasiness, now defined itself as the alcoholic headache he always had when he drank in the day. He went up to the room, stripped to pants and vest, tried to read Marcus Aurelius, failed, and soon fell asleep, to the astonishment of his children, who wondered how in a crisis which affected them all their father could find time for sleep so early in the afternoon.

He had seen the house like a guest under heavy obligation to his host. If it had not been raining he might have walked around the small yard and seen the absurd shape of the house. He would have seen where the celotex panels on the eaves had fallen away, providing unrestricted entry to the bats of the neighbourhood. He would have seen the staircase that hung at the back, open, with only a banister, and sheltered by unpainted corrugated iron. He would not have been deceived into cosiness by the thick curtain over the back doorway on the lower floor. He would have seen that the house had no back door at all. If he had not had to rush out of the rain he might have noticed the street lamp just outside the house; he would have known that a street lamp, so near the main road, attracted idlers like moths. But he saw none of these things. He had only a picture of a house cosy in the rain, with a polished floor, and an old lady who baked cakes in the kitchen.

If he had not been disturbed he might have queried the clerk’s eagerness more impolitely. But events were too rapid, too neat. A quarrel in the night, the offer of a house with immediate possession the very next afternoon. And before the evening was out the sum of five thousand five hundred dollars had become less inaccessible.

“Somebody come for you,” Shama was saying.

He awoke and was puzzled to find it was evening.

“Another destee?” His fame had survived his resignation from the Sentinel ; destitutes still occasionally sought him out.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

He dressed, his head humming, walked through the house downstairs to the foot of the front steps and surprised the visitor, a respectably dressed Negro of the artisan class, who was waiting for him at the top of the steps.

“Good night,” the Negro said. His accent betrayed him as an illegal immigrant from one of the smaller islands. “Is about the house I come. I want to buy it.”

Everybody wanted to buy or sell houses that day. “I ain’t even pay down for it yet,” Mr. Biswas said.

“The house in Shorthills?”

“Oh, that. That. But I can’t sell that. The land isn’t mine. I don’t even rent it.”

“I know. If I buy the house I would take it away.” He went on to explain. He had bought a lot in Petit Valley. He wanted to build his own house, but building materials were scarce and expensive and he was offering to buy Mr. Biswas’s house, not as a house, but for the materials. He said he was not prepared to haggle. He had studied the building carefully and was prepared to offer four hundred dollars.

And when Mr. Biswas went back to the room with the rumpled beds, the disarrayed furniture, the chaos on Shama’s dressingtable, he had twenty twenty-dollar bills in his pocket.

“You don’t believe in God,” he said to Anand. “But look.”

Between eight hundred dollars and one thousand two hundred dollars there is a great difference. Eight hundred dollars are petty savings. One thousand two hundred dollars stand for real money. The difference between eight hundred and five thousand is immense. The difference between one thousand two hundred and five thousand is negotiable.

A week before Mr. Biswas would have dismissed any thought of buying a house for five thousand dollars. He wanted one at three thousand or three thousand five hundred; he never looked at any above four thousand. And the strange thing now was that, having raised his sights, it did not occur to him to look at other five-thousand-dollar houses.

He sought out the solicitor’s clerk the next day, paid him a deposit of one hundred dollars, and was shrewd enough to ask for a stamped receipt.

“I going to take this money and pay down right away on the house I want to buy,” the solicitor’s clerk said. “Wait until the old queen hear. She going to be so glad.”

When Shama heard she burst into tears.

“Ah!” Mr. Biswas said. “Swelling up. Vexed. You could only be happy if we just keep on living with your mother and the rest of your big, happy family, eh?”

“I don’t think anything. You have the money, you want to buy house, and I don’t have to think anything.”

And that was when Shama, leaving the room, encountered Suniti, and Suniti said, “I hear that you come like a big-shot. Buying house and thing.”

“Yes, child.”

“Shama!” Mr. Biswas called. “Tell that girl to go back and help that worthless husband of hers to look after their goats at Pokima Halt.”

The goats were an invention of Mr. Biswas which never failed to irritate Suniti. “Goats,” she said to the yard, sucking her teeth. “Well, some people at least have goats. That is more than I could say for some other people.”