Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Mr. Biswas called, “Morning!”

From the shack in the hard yellow yard a Negro woman came out, a large calabash full of corn in one hand. Her tight cotton dress imperfectly covered her big body and her kinky hair was in curlers and twists of newspaper.

“The carpenter home?” Mr. Biswas asked.

The woman called, “Georgie!” For a fat woman her voice was surprisingly thin.

Mr. Maclean appeared above the half-door at the side of the house. He looked at Mr. Biswas suspiciously.

The woman walked to the far end of the yard, scattering corn and clucking loudly, calling the poultry to feed.

Mr. Biswas didn’t know how to begin. He couldn’t just say, “I want to build a house.” He didn’t have all the necessary money and he didn’t want to deceive Mr. Maclean or expose himself to his scorn. He said shyly, “I have a little business I want to talk to you about.”

Mr. Maclean pushed open the lower half of the door and came down the concrete steps. He was middle-aged, tall and thin; he looked as eager and uncertain as his board. His profession was a frustrating one. The county abounded in work he had not been allowed to finish: exposed and rotting house-frames, houses that had begun with concrete and dressed wood and ended with mud walls and tree branches. Evidence of his compensating activities lay about the yard. In an open shed at the back a half-finished wheel stood amid shavings. Here and there Mr. Biswas saw goat droppings.

“What sort of business?” Mr. Maclean asked. He reached up and pulled a window open. It rattled and glittered; it was hung on the inside with strings of tin cups.

“Is about a house.”

“Oh. Repairs?”

“Not exactly. It ain’t build yet. As a matter of fact-”

“Georgie!” Mrs. Maclean shouted. “Come and see what that damn mongoose do again.”

Mr. Maclean went to the back of the house. Mr. Biswas heard him mumbling evenly. “Damn nuisance,” he said, coming back, striking his trousers with a switch. “So, you want me to build a house for you?”

Mr. Biswas mistook his wariness for sarcasm and said defensively, “Is not a mansion.”

“That is a blessing. Too much people putting up mansion these days. You ever had a close look at the County Road?” He paused. “Upstairs house?”

Mr. Biswas nodded. “Upstairs house. Small thing. But neat. I don’t want too much to make me happy,” he ran on, made uneasy by Mr. Maclean. “I don’t see any point in pretending that you have more money than you really have.”

“Naturally,” Mr. Maclean said. With the switch he flicked some fowl droppings from the yard into the thick dust under the floor of his own house. Then he drew two equal and adjacent squares on the ground. “You want two bedrooms.”

“And a drawingroom.”

Mr. Maclean added another square of the same size. To this he added half a square and said, “And a gallery.”

“That’s it. Nothing too fancy for me. Small and neat.”

“You want a door from the gallery to the front bedroom. A wood door. And you want another door to the drawing-room. With coloured glass panes.”

“Yes, yes.”

“One side of the gallery you want board up. For the front you would like some fancy rails. You want a nice concrete step with a banister in front.”

“Yes, yes.”

“For the front bedroom you want glass windows, and if you get the money you going to paint them white. The back windows could be pure board. And you want a plain wood staircase at the back, with no banister or anything like that. The kitchen you going to build yourself, somewhere in the yard.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s a nice little house you have there. A lot of people would like it. It going to cost you about two hundred and fifty, three hundred dollars. Labour, you know-” He looked at Mr. Biswas and slowly rubbed a bare foot over the drawing on the ground. “I don’t know. I busy these days.” He pointed to the unfinished wheel in the shed.

A hen cackled, proclaiming an egg.

“Georgie! Is the Leghorn.”

There was a tremendous squawking and flapping among the poultry.

Mr. Maclean said, “Is a lucky thing. Otherwise she was going straight in the pot.”

“We not bound and “bliged to build the whole thing right away,” Mr. Biswas said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.”

“So they say. But Rome get build. Anyway, as soon as I get some time I going to come and we could look at the site. You have a site?”

“Yes, yes, man. Have a site.”

“Well, in about two-three days then.”

He came early that afternoon, in hat, shoes and an ironed shirt, and they went to look at the site.

“Is a real little bower,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Is a sloping site!” Mr. Maclean said in surprise and almost with pleasure. “You really have to have high pillars.”

“High on one side, low on the other. It could practically be a style. And then I was thinking about a little path down to the road here. Steps. In the ground itself. Garden on both sides. Roses. Exora. Oleanders. Bougainvillaea and poinsettia. And some Queen of Flowers. And a neat little bamboo bridge to the road.”

“It sound nice.”

“I was thinking. About the house. It would be nice to have concrete pillars. Not naked though. I don’t think that does look nice. Plastered and smooth.”

“I know what you mean. You think you could give me about a hundred and fifty dollars just to start off with?”

Mr. Biswas hesitated.

“You mustn’t think I want to meddle in your private affairs. I just wanting to know how much you want to spend right away.”

Mr. Biswas walked away from Mr. Maclean, among the bushes on the damp site, the weeds and the nettles. “About a hundred,” he said. “But at the end of the month I could give you a little bit more.”

“A hundred.”

“All right?”

“Yes, is all right. For a start.”

They went through the weeds and over the leaf-choked gutter to the narrow gravelly road.

“Every month we build a little,” Mr. Biswas said. “Little by little.”

“Yes, little by little.” Mr. Maclean wasn’t animated, but some of his wariness had gone; he even sounded encouraging. “I will have to get some labour. Helluva thing these days, getting good labour.” He spoke the word with relish.

And the word pleased Mr. Biswas too. “Yes, you must get labour,” he said, suppressing his astonishment that there were people who depended on Mr. Maclean for a living.

“But you better get a few more cents quick.” Mr. Maclean said, almost friendly now. “Otherwise you wouldn’t get any concrete pillars.”

“Must have concrete pillars.”

“Then all the house you going to build will be a row of concrete pillars with nothing on top of them.”

They walked on.

“A row of coal barrels,” Mr. Biswas said.

Mr. Maclean didn’t intrude.

“Just send me a coal barrel. Yes, you old bitch. Just a coal barrel.”

He decided to borrow the money from Ajodha. He didn’t want to ask Seth or Mrs. Tulsi. And he couldn’t ask Misir: their relationship had cooled since he had borrowed from him to pay Mungroo and Seebaran and Mahmoud. And yet he was unwilling to go to Ajodha. He walked out of the barrackyard but before he reached the main road decided to let the matter rest until the following Sunday. He walked back to his room and put on his bicycle clips, thinking he would spend the afternoon at Hanuman House instead. But he knew so clearly what he would find there that he took off his bicycle clips. Eventually it was the room that drove him out. He caught two buses and was at Pagotes in the late afternoon.

He entered Tara’s yard through the wide side gate of unpainted corrugated iron and went down the gravelled way to the garage and the cowpen. Nothing in this part of the yard seemed to have changed since he had first seen it. The plum tree was as desolate as ever; it bore fruit regularly but its grey branches were almost bare and looked dry and stiff and brittle. He no longer wondered what would be done with the heap of scrap metal, and he had given up the hope, which he had had as a boy, of seeing the rusting body of a motorcar reanimated and driven away. The mound of manured grass changed in size but remained where it always had been. For despite the cost and the trouble, and the multiplication of his business interests, Ajodha still kept two or three cows in his yard. They were his pets; he spent most of his free time in the cowpen, which he could never finish improving.