Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

And how quickly they forgot the inconveniences of the house and saw it with the eyes of the visitors! What could not be hidden, by bookcase, glass cabinet or curtains, they accommodated themselves to. They mended the fence and made a new gate. They put up a garage. They bought rose trees and planted a garden. They began to grow orchids and Mr. Biswas had the exciting idea of attaching them to dead coconut trunks buried in the ground. At the side of the house, in the shade of the breadfruit tree, they had a bed of anthurium lilies. To keep the lilies cool they surrounded them with damp, rotting immortelle wood which they got from Shorthills. And it was on a visit to Shorthills that they saw the concrete pillars rising out of tall bush on the hill where Mr. Biswas had once built a house.

Soon it seemed to the children that they had never lived anywhere but in the tall square house in Sikkim Street. From now their lives would be ordered, their memories coherent. The mind, while it is sound, is merciful. And rapidly the memories of Hanuman House, The Chase, Green Vale, Shorthills, the Tulsi house in Port of Spain would become jumbled, blurred; events would be telescoped, many forgotten. Occasionally a nerve of memory would be touched-a puddle reflecting the blue sky after rain, a pack of thumbed cards, the fumbling with a shoelace, the smell of a new car, the sound of a stiff wind through trees, the smells and colours of a toyshop, the taste of milk and prunes-and a fragment of forgotten experience would be dislodged, isolated, puzzling. In a northern land, in a time of new separations and yearnings, in a library grown suddenly dark, the hailstones beating against the windows, the marbled endpaper of a dusty leather-bound book would disturb: and it would be the hot noisy week before Christinas in the Tulsi Store: the marbled patterns of oldfashioned balloons powdered with a rubbery dust in a shallow white box that was not to be touched. So later, and very slowly, in securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past.

Though Mr. Biswas had mentally devised many tortures to which he was going to put the solicitor’s clerk, he took care to avoid the cafй with the gay murals. And it was with surprise and embarrassment that he came back one afternoon, less than five months after he had moved, to find the solicitor’s clerk, a cigarette hanging from his lips, pacing with some method about the lot next to his house.

The clerk was unabashed. “How, man? How the wife? And the children? Still getting on all right with their studies?”

Instead of replying, what he felt, “Stop asking about my children and their studies, you nasty old crooked communist tout!” Mr. Biswas said that they were all well and asked, “How the old queen?”

“Half and half. The old heart still playing the fool.”

The lot next door was practically empty. At the far end it contained only a neat two-roomed building, the office of a friendly society; so that Mr. Biswas had no neighbours on one side. Mr. Biswas did not like the clerk’s concentration. But he decided to keep cool.

“You happy in Mucurapo?” he asked. “Eh, but what I saying? Is Morvant, not so?”

“The old queen don’t care for the area. Damp, you know.”

“And the mosquitoes. I can imagine. I hear that is bad for the heart.”

“Still,” the clerk said. “We got to keep on trying.”

“You sell the Morvant house yet?”

“Not yet. But I have a lot of offers.”

“And you thinking of building here again.”

“Want to put up a lil house like yours. Two-storey.”

“You not putting up any damn two-storey house here, you old jerry-building tout!”

The clerk stopped pacing and came to the fence, scarlet and green with a bougainvillaea Mr. Biswas had planted. Over the bougainvillaea he wagged a long finger in Mr. Biswas’s face and said, “Mind your mouth! Mind your mouth! You say enough to spend a nice lil time in jail. Mind your mouth! It look like you don’t know the law.”

“The City Council not going to pass this one. I pay rates and I have my rights.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You just mind your mouth, you hear.”

When the solicitor’s clerk left, Mr. Biswas walked about the yard, trying to imagine the effect in the street of two tall boxes side by side. He walked and looked and pondered and gauged. Then, before the sun went down, he called out, “Shama! Shama! Bring a ruler or your tape measure.”

She brought a ruler and Mr. Biswas began measuring the width of his lot foot by foot, starting from the half-empty lot and working towards the house of the old Indian, who had observed everything, rocking, his Chinese face wrinkled with smiles.

“He come to build another one, eh?” he called out, when Mr. Biswas was near enough. “That don’t surprise me at all.”

“He going to build it over my dead body,” Mr. Biswas called back, measuring.

The old man rocked, greatly amused.

“Aha!” Mr. Biswas said, when he got to the end of the lot. “Aha! I always suspected.” He stooped and started to measure back to the half-empty lot, while the old man rocked and chuckled.

“Shama!” Mr. Biswas said, running to the kitchen. “Where you have the deed for the house?”

“In the bureau.”

She went up to get it. She brought it down and Mr. Biswas read.

“Aha! The old tout! Shama, we going to get a bigger yard.”

By accident or design the fence the solicitor’s clerk had put up was a full twelve feet inside the boundary indicated in the deed.

“I always thought,” Shama said, “that we didn’t have a fifty-foot frontage.”

“Frontage, eh?” Mr. Biswas said. “Nice word, Shama. But you’re picking up a lot of nice words in your old age, you know.”

And the solicitor’s clerk appeared in the street no more.

“So you catch him then,” the old man said. “But you must say this for him. He was a sharp fellow.”

“Didn’t fool me,” Mr. Biswas said.

In the extra space Mr. Biswas planted a laburnum tree. It grew rapidly. It gave the house a romantic aspect, softened the tall graceless lines, and provided some shelter from the afternoon sun. Its flowers were sweet, and in the still hot evenings their smell filled the house.

Before the end of the year Owad left Port of Spain. After his marriage to Dorothy’s cousin, the Presbyterian violinist, he left the Colonial Hospital and moved to San Fernando, where he set up in private practice. And at the end of the year the Community Welfare Department was abolished. It was not because of Shekhar’s party; that had disintegrated even before, when all four of its candidates were defeated in the colony’s first general election, encouraging Shekhar (“The Poor Man’s Friend”, according to his posters) to withdraw from public life and concentrate on his cinemas. The department was abolished because it had grown archaic. Thirty, twenty or even ten years before, there would have been people to support it. But the war, the American bases, an awareness of America had given everyone the urge, and many the means, to self-improvement. The encouragement and guidance of the department were not needed. And when the department was attacked, no one, not even those who had enjoyed its “leadership” courses, knew how to defend it. And Miss Logie, like Mr. Burnett, left.

Mr. Biswas slipped from his low eminence as a civil servant and returned to the Sentinel . The car was now his own; but he was getting less than those who had stayed with the paper. He had paid five hundred dollars of the debt; now he could hardly pay the interest. He wanted to sell the car, and an Englishman came to the house one day to look it over. Shama was exceedingly rude, and the Englishman, finding himself in the centre of a family quarrel, withdrew. Mr. Biswas gave in. Shama had never reproached him for the house, and he had begun to credit her with great powers of judgement. Again and again she said she was not worried, that the debt would settle itself; and though Mr. Biswas felt that her words were hollow, he did get comfort from them.