Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

Mr. Maclean opened the bottle, said, “To you and the house, boss,” and drank. He passed the bottle to Edgar, who said, “To you and the house, mister boss,” and drank without wiping the botde.

Mr. Maclean required much space when he worked. Next day he built another frame and left it on the ground beside the frame of the floor. The new frame was of the back wall and Mr. Biswas recognized the back door and the back window. Edgar finished digging the holes and set up three of the crapaud pillars, making them firm with stones taken from a heap left by the Public Works Department some distance away.

One thing puzzled Mr. Biswas. The materials had cost nearly eighty-five dollars. That left fifteen dollars to be divided between Mr. Maclean and Edgar for work which, Mr. Maclean said, would take from eight to ten days. Yet they were both cheerful; though Mr. Maclean had complained, in a whisper, about the cost of labour.

That afternoon, when Mr. Maclean and Edgar left, Shama came.

“What is this I hear from Seth?”

He showed her the frames on the ground, the three erect pillars, the mounds of dirt.

“I suppose you use up every cent you had?”

“Every red cent,” Mr. Biswas said. “Gallery, drawingroom, bedroom, bedroom.”

Her pregnancy was beginning to be prominent. She puffed and fanned. “Is all right for you. But what about me and the children?”

“What you mean? They going to be ashamed because their father building a house?”

“Because their father trying to set himself up in competition with people who have a lot more than him.”

He knew what was upsetting her. He could imagine the whisperings at the monkey house, the puss-puss here, the puss-puss there. He said, “I know you want to spend all the days of your life in that big coal barrel called Hanuman House. But don’t try to keep my children there.”

“Where you going to get the money to finish the house?”

“Don’t you worry your head about that. If you did worry a little bit more and a little bit earlier, by now we might have a house.”

“You just gone and throw away your money. You want to be a pauper.”

“O God! Stop digging and digging at me like this!”

“Who digging? Look.” She pointed to Edgar’s mounds of earth. “You is the big digger.”

He gave an annoyed little laugh.

For some time they were silent. Then she said, “You didn’t even get a pundit or anything before you plant the first pillar.”

“Look. I get enough good luck the last time Hari come and bless the shop. Remember that.”

“I not going to live in that house or even step inside it if you don’t get Hari to come and bless it.”

“If Hari come and bless it, it wouldn’t surprise me if nobody at all even get a chance to live in it.”

But she couldn’t undo the frames and the pillars, and in the end he agreed. She went back to Hanuman House with an urgent message for Hari, and next morning Mr. Biswas told Mr. Maclean to wait until Hari had done his business.

Hari came early, neither interested nor antagonistic, just constipatedly apathetic. He came in normal clothes, with his pundit’s gear in a small cardboard suitcase. He bathed at one of the barrels behind the barracks, changed into a dhoti in Mr. Biswas’s room and went to the site with a brass jar, some mango leaves and other equipment.

Mr. Maclean had got Edgar to clean out a hole. In his thin voice Hari whined out the prayers. Whining, he sprinkled water into the hole with a mango leaf and dropped a penny and some other things wrapped in another mango leaf. Throughout the ceremony Mr. Maclean stood up reverentially, his hat off.

Then Hari went back to the barracks, changed into trousers and shirt, and was off.

Mr. Maclean looked surprised. “That is all?” he asked. “No sharing-out of anything-food and thing-as other Indians does do?”

“When the house finish,” Mr. Biswas said.

Mr. Maclean bore his disappointment well. “Naturally. I was forgetting.”

Edgar was putting a pillar into the consecrated hole.

Mr. Biswas said to Mr. Maclean, “Is a waste of a good penny, if you ask me.”

At the end of the week the house had begun to take shape. The floor-frame had been put on, and the frames for the walls; the roof was outlined. On Monday the back staircase went up after Mr. Maclean’s work-bench had been dismantled for its material.

Then Mr. Maclean said, “We going to come back when you get some more materials.”

Every day Mr. Biswas went to the site and examined the skeleton of the house. The wooden pillars were not as bad as he had feared. From a distance they looked straight and cylindrical, contrasting with the squareness of the rest of the frame, and he decided that this was practically a style.

He had to get floorboards; he wanted pitchpine for that, not the five inch width, which he thought common, but the two and a half inch, which he had seen in some ceilings. He had to get boards for the walls, broad boards, with tongue-and-groove. And he had to get corrugated iron for the roof, new sheets with blue triangles stamped on the silver, so that they looked like sheets of an expensive stone rather than iron.

At the end of the month he set aside fifteen of his twenty-five dollars for the house. This was extravagant; he was eventually left with ten.

At the end of the second month he could add only eight dollars.

Then Seth came up with an offer.

“The old lady have some galvanize in Ceylon,” he said. “From the old brick-factory.”

The factory had been pulled down while Mr. Biswas was living at The Chase.

“Five dollars,” Seth said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

Mr. Biswas went to Hanuman House.

“How is the house, brother-in-law?” Chinta asked.

“Why you asking? Hari bless it, and you know what does happen when Hari bless something.”

Anand and Savi followed Mr. Biswas to the back, where everything was gritty with the chaff from the new rice-mill next door, and the iron sheets were stacked like a very old pack of cards against the fence. The sheets were of varying shapes, bent, warped and richly rusted, with corners curled into vicious-looking hooks, corrugations irregularly flattened out, and nail-holes everywhere, dangerous to the touch.

Anand said, “Pa, you not going to use that ?”

“You will make the house look like a shack,” Savi said.

“You want something to cover your house,” Seth said. “When you are sheltering from the rain you don’t run outside to look at what is sheltering you. Take it for three dollars.”

Mr. Biswas thought again of the price of new corrugated iron, of the exposed frame of his house. “All right,” he said. “Send it.”

Anand, who had been displaying more and more energy since his misadventure at school, said, “All right ! Go ahead and buy it and put it on your old house. I don’t care what it look like now.”

“Another little paddler,” Seth said.

But Mr. Biswas felt as Anand. He too didn’t care what the house looked like now.

When he got back to Green Vale he found Mr. Maclean.

They were both embarrassed.

“I was doing a job in Swampland,” Mr. Maclean said. “I was just passing by here and I thought I would drop in.”

“I was going to come to see you the other day,” Mr. Biswas said. “But you know how it is. I got about eighteen dollars. No, fifteen. I just went to Arwacas to buy some galvanize for the roof

“Just in time too, boss. Otherwise all the money you did spend woulda waste.”

“Not new galvanize, you know. I mean, not brand-brand new.”

“The thing about galvanize is that you could always make it look nice. You go be surprised what a little bit of paint could do.”