Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“No, no. You mustn’t think I look down on you for trying. What else you think I doing every day? But the old man sharp, boy. He could smell a thing like that before you even start thinking about it. So what, eh? You still building this house for the children sake?”

“You build one for yours?”

There was a sudden abatement of Jagdat’s high spirits. He stopped, half turned, as though about to go back, and raising his voice, said angrily, “So they spreading stories about me, eh? To you?” He bawled, “O God ! I going to go back and knock out all their false teeth. Mohun ! You hearing me?”

The melodramatic flair seemed to run through the family. Mr. Biswas said, “They didn’t tell me anything. But don’t forget that I know you since you was a boy. And if is still the old Jagdat I imagine you have enough outside children now to make up your own little school.”

Jagdat, still in the attitude of return, relaxed. They walked on.

“Just four or five,” Jagdat said.

“How you mean, four or five?”

“Well, four.” Some ofjagdat’s bounce had gone and when, after some time, he spoke again, it was in an elegiac voice. “Boy, I went to see my father last week. The man living in a small concrete room in Henry Street in a ramshackle old house full of creole people. And, and”-his voice was rising again-“that son of a bitch”-he was screaming-“that son of a bitch not doing a damn thing to help him.”

In lighted windows curtains were raised. Mr. Biswas plucked at Jagdat’s sleeve.

Jagdat dropped his voice to one of melancholy piety. “You remember the old man, Mohun?”

Mr. Biswas remembered Bhandat well.

“His face,” Jagdat said, “come small small.” He half-closed his small eyes and bunched the fingers of one hand raised in a gesture so delicate it might have been made by a pundit at a religious ceremony. “O yes,” he went on, “Ajodha always ready to give you vitamin A and vitamin B. But when it come to any real sort of help, don’t go to him. Look. He employ a gardener one time. Old man, wearing rags, thin, sick, practically starving. Indian like you and me. Thirty cents a day. Thirty cents! Still, poor man can’t do better, in all the hot sun the old man working. Doing his little weeding and hoeing. About three o”clock, sun hot like blazes, sweating, back aching as if it want to break, he ask for a cup of tea. Well, they give him a cup of tea. But at the end of the day they dock six cents off his pay.”

Mr. Biswas said, “You think they going to send me a bill for the food they give me?”

“Laugh if you want. But that is the way they treat poor people. My consolation is that they can’t bribe God. God is good, boy.”

They were in the Main Road, not far from the shop where Mr. Biswas had served under Bhandat. The shop was now owned by a Chinese and a large signboard proclaimed the fact.

The moment came to separate from Jagdat. But Mr. Biswas was unwilling to leave him, to be alone, to get on the bus to go back through the night to Green Vale.

Jagdat said, “The first boy bright like hell, you know.”

It was some seconds before Mr. Biswas realized that Jagdat was talking about one of his celebrated illegitimate children. He saw anxiety in Jagdat’s broad face, in the bright jumping little eyes.

“I glad,” Mr. Biswas said. “Now you could get him to read That Body of Yours to you.”

Jagdat laughed. “The same old Mohun.”

There was no need to ask where Jagdat was going. He was going to his family. He too, then, lived a divided life.

“She does work in a office,” Jagdat said, anxious again.

Mr. Biswas was impressed.

“Spanish,” Jagdat said.

Mr. Biswas knew this was a euphemism for a red-skinned Negro. “Too hot for me, man.”

“But faithful,” Jagdat said.

Knocked about on the wooden seat of the rackety rickety dim-lit bus, going past silent fields and past houses which were lightless and dead or bright and private, Mr. Biswas no longer thought of the afternoon’s mission, but of the night ahead.

Early next morning Mr. Maclean turned up at the barracks and said he had put off other pressing work and was ready to go ahead with Mr. Biswas’s house. He was in his poor but respectable business clothes. His ironed shirt was darned with almost showy neatness; his khaki trousers were clean and sharply creased, but the khaki was old and would not keep the crease for long.

“You decide how much you want to start off with?”

“A hundred,” Mr. Biswas said. “More at the end of the month. No concrete pillars.”

“Is only a sort of fanciness. You watch. I will get you a crapaud that would last a lifetime. Wouldn’t make no difference.”

“Once it neat.”

“Neat and nice,” Mr. Maclean said. “Well, I suppose I better start seeing about materials and labour.”

Materials came that afternoon. The crapaud pillars looked rough; they were not altogether round or altogether straight. But Mr. Biswas was delighted by the new scantlings, and the new nails that came in several wrappings of newspaper. He took up handfuls of nails and let them fall again. The sound pleased him. “Did not know nails was so heavy,” he said.

Mr. Maclean had brought a tool-box which had his initials on the cover and was like a large wooden suitcase. It contained a saw with an old handle and a sharp, oiled blade; several chisels and drills; a spirit-level and a “I square; a plane; a hammer and a mallet; wedges with smooth, fringed heads; a ball of old, white-stained twine; and a lump of chalk. His tools were like his clothes: old but cared-for. He built a rough work-bench out of the materials and assured Mr. Biswas that all the material would be eventually released for the house and would suffer little damage. That was why, he explained in reply to another of Mr. Biswas’s queries, no nail had been driven right in.

The labour also came. The labour was a labourer named Edgar, a muscular, full-blooded Negro whose short khaki trousers were shaggy with patches, and whose vest, brown with dirt, was full of holes that had been distended by his powerful body into ellipses. Edgar cutlassed the site, leaving it a rich wet green.

When Mr. Biswas returned from the fields he found the brushed site marked in white with the plan of the house. Holes for pillars had been indicated and Edgar was digging. Not far off Mr. Maclean had constructed a frame which rested level on stones and answered wonderfully to the design he had drawn in his yard.

“Gallery, drawingroom, bedroom, bedroom,” Mr. Biswas said, hopping over the spars. “Gallery, bedroom, bedroom, drawingroom.”

The air smelled of sawdust. Sawdust had spilled rich red and cream on the grass and had been ground into the damp black earth by Edgar’s bare feet and Mr. Maclean’s old, un-shining working-boots.

Mr. Maclean talked to Mr. Biswas about the difficulties of labour.

“I try to get Sam,” he said. “But he a little too erratic and don’t-care. Edgar, now, does do the work of two men. The only trouble is, you got to keep a eye on him all the time. Look at him.”

Edgar was knee-deep in a hole and regularly throwing up spadefuls of black earth.

“You got to tell him to stop,” Mr. Maclean said. “Otherwise, he dig right through till he come out the other side. Well, boss, how about something to wet the job?” He made a drinking gesture. In the early days he had preferred to drink on the completion of a job; now he got his drink as soon as he could.

Mr. Biswas nodded and Mr. Maclean called, “Edgar!”

Edgar went on digging.

Mr. Maclean tapped his forehead. “You see what I tell you?” He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Edgar looked up and jumped out of his hole. Mr. Maclean asked him to go to the rumshop and buy a nip of rum. Edgar ran to where his belongings were, seized a dusty, squashed aand abbreviated felt hat, pressed it on his head and ran off. Some minutes later he came back, still running, one hand holding a bottle, the other holding down his hat.