Vidiadhar Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas

“They have a few holes here and there. A few. Tiny tiny.”

“We could fix those up easy. Mastic cement. Not expensive, boss.”

Mr. Biswas noted the change in Mr. Maclean’s tone.

“Boss, I know you want pitchpine for the floor. I know pitchpine nice. It does look nice and it does smell nice and it easy to keep clean. But you know it does burn easy. Easy, easy.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Mr. Biswas said. “At pujas we always use pitchpine.” To burn the offerings in a quick, scented flame.

“Boss, I got some cedar planks. A man in Swampland offer me a whole pile of cedar for seven dollars. Seven dollars for a hundred and fifty foot of cedar is a real bargain.”

Mr. Biswas hesitated. Of all wood cedar appealed to him least. The colour was pleasing but the smell was acrid and clinging. It was such a soft wood that a fingernail could mark it and splinters could be bitten off with teeth. To be strong it had to be thick; then its thickness made it look ungainly.

“Now, boss, I know they is only rough planks. But you know me. When I finish planing them they would be level level, and when I join them together you wouldn’t be able to slip a sheet of bible-paper between them.”

“Seven dollars. That leave eight for you.” Mr. Biswas meant it was little to pay for laying a floor and putting on a roof.

But Mr. Maclean was offended. “My labour,” he said.

The corrugated iron came that week-end on a lorry that also brought Anand and Savi and Shama.

Anand said, “Aunt Sushila bawl off the men when they was loading the galvanize on the lorry.”

“She tell them to throw them down hard, eh?” Mr. Biswas said. “Is that what she tell them? She did want them to dent them up more, eh? Don’t frighten to tell me.”

“No, no. She say they wasn’t working fast enough.”

Mr. Biswas examined the sheets as they were unloaded, looking for bumps and dents he could attribute to Sushila’s maliciousness. Whenever he saw a crack in the rust he stopped the loaders.

“Look at this. Which one of you was responsible for this? You know, I mad enough to get Mr. Seth to dock your money.” That word “dock”, so official and ominous, he had got from Jagdat.

Stacked on the grass, the sheets made the site look like an abandoned lot. No corrugation of one sheet fitted into the corrugation of any other; the pile rose high and shaky and awkward.

Mr. Maclean said, “I could straighten them out with the hammer. Now, about the rafters, boss.”

Mr. Biswas had forgotten about those.

“Now, boss, you must look at it this way. The rafters don’t show from the outside. Only from the inside. And even then, when you get a ceiling you could hide the rafters. So I think it would be better and it would cost you nothing if you get tree-branches. When you trim them they does make first-class rafters.”

And when Mr. Maclean set to work, he worked alone. Mr. Biswas never saw Edgar again and never asked about him.

Mr. Maclean went to a “‘bandon”, brought back tree-branches and trimmed them into rafters. He cut notches in the rafters wherever they were to rest on the main frame, and nailed them on. They looked solid. He used thinner branches, limber, irregular and recalcitrant, for cross-rafters. They looked shaky and reminded Mr. Biswas of the rafters of a dirt-and-grass hut.

Then the corrugated iron was nailed on. The sheets were dangerous to handle and the rafters shook under Mr. Maclean’s weight and the blows of his hammer. The weeds below and the frame became covered with rust. When Mr. Maclean had packed his tools into his wooden suitcase and gone home for the day, it was a pleasure to Mr. Biswas to stand below the roof and be in shade where only the day before, only that morning, there had been openness.

As the sheets went up, and they were enough to cover all the rooms except the gallery, the house no longer looked so drab and un-begun. Mr. Maclean was right: the sheets did hide the branch-rafters. But every hole in the roof glittered like a star.

Mr. Maclean said, “I did mention a thing called mastic cement. But that was before I did see the galvanize. You would spend as much on mastic cement as on five-six sheets of new galvanize.”

“So what? I just got to sit down in my new house and get wet?”

“Where there’s a will there’s a way, as the people does say. Pitch. You did think about that? A lot of people does use pitch.”

They got the pitch free, from a neglected part of the road where asphalt was laid on, without gravel, in lavish lumps. Mr. Maclean put small stones over the holes in the roof and sealed them down with pitch. He ran sealings of pitch along the edges of the sheets and down the cracks. It was a slow, long job, and when he was finished the roof was curiously patterned in black with many rough lines, straight down, angularly jagged across, and freaked and blobbed and gouted all over with pitch, above the confused red, rust, brown, saffron, grey and silver of the old sheets.

But it worked. When it rained, as it was beginning to do now every afternoon, the ground below the roof remained dry. Poultry from the barrackyard and other places came to shelter and stayed to dig the earth into dust.

The cedar floorboards came, rough and brisdy, and impregnated the site with their smell. When Mr. Maclean planed them they seemed to acquire a richer colour. He fitted them together as neatly as he had said, nailing them down with headless nails and filling in the holes at the top with wax mixed with sawdust which dried hard and could scarcely be distinguished from the wood. The back bedroom was floored, and part of the drawingroom, so that, with care, it was possible to walk straight up to the bedroom.

Then Mr. Maclean said, “When you get more materials you must let me know.”

He had worked for a fortnight for eight dollars.

Perhaps he didn’t pay seven dollars for the cedar, Mr. Biswas thought. Only five or six.

The house now became a playground for the children of the barracks. They climbed and they jumped; many took serious falls but, being barrack children, came to little harm. They nailed nails into the crapaud pillars and the cedar floor; they bent nails for no purpose; they flattened them to make knives. They left small muddy footprints on the floor and on the crossbars of the frame; the mud dried and the floor became dusty. The children drove out the poultry and Mr. Biswas tried to drive out the children.

“You blasted little bitches! Let me catch one of you and see if I don’t cut his foot off.”

As the sugarcane grew taller the dispossessed labourers grew surlier, and Mr. Biswas began to receive threats, delivered as friendly warnings.

Seth, who had often spoken of the treachery and dangerousness of the labourers, now only said, “Don’t let them frighten you.”

But Mr. Biswas knew of the many killings in Indian districts, so well planned that few reached the courts. He knew of the feuds between villages and between families, conducted with courage, ingenuity and loyalty by those same labourers who, as wage-earners, were obsequious and negligible.

He decided to take precautions. He slept with a cutlass and a poui stick, one of his father’s, at the side of his bed. And from Mrs. Seeung, the Chinese cafй-owner at Arwacas, he got a puppy, a hairy brown and white thing of indeterminate breed. The first night at the barracks the puppy whined at being left outside, scratched at the door, fell off the step and whined until he was taken in. When Mr. Biswas woke up next morning he found the puppy in bed beside him, lying quite still, its eyes open. At Mr. Biswas’s first gesture, which was one of surprise, the puppy jumped to the floor.

He called the puppy Tarzan, to prepare it for its duties. But Tarzan turned out to be friendly and inquisitive, and a terror only to the poultry. “The hens stop laying because of your dog,” the poultry owners complained, and it looked true enough, for Tarzan often had pieces of feather stuck in the corners of his mouth, and he was continually bringing trophies of feathers to the room. Then one day Tarzan ate an egg and immediately developed a taste for eggs. The hens laid their eggs in bush, in places which they thought were secret. Tarzan soon got to know these places as well as the owners of the hens and he often came back to the barracks with his mouth yellow and sticky with egg. The owners of the hens took their revenge. One afternoon Mr. Biswas found Tarzan’s muzzle smeared with fowl droppings, and Tarzan in great misery at this novel and continuing discomfort.