A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  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.”

  “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.

  The placards in Mr. Biswas’s room increased. He worked more slowly on them now, using black and red estate ink and pencils of many colours. He filled the blank space with difficult decorations and his letters became intricate and ornamented.

  Thinking it would help him if he read novels, he bought a number of the cheap Reader’s Library editions. The covers were dark purple with gold lettering and decorations. In the stall at Arwacas they had looked attractive, but in his room he could scarcely bear to touch them. The gilt stuck to his fingers and the covers reminded him of funeral palls and of those undertakers’ horses that were draped with the colours of death every day.

  The sun shone and the rain fell. The roof didn’t leak. But the asphalt began to melt and hung limply down: a legion of slim, black, growing snakes. Occasionally they fell, and, falling, curled and died.

  Late one night, when he had put out the oil lamp and was in bed, he heard footsteps outside his room.

  He lay still, listening. Then he jumped out of bed, grabbed his stick and deliberately knocked against the kitchen safe and table and Shama’s dressingtable. He stood at the side of the door and violently pushed out the top half, his body protected by the lower half.

  He saw nothing but the night, the still, colourless barrack-yard, the dead trees black against the moonlit sky. Two rooms away a light was burning: someone was out, or a child was ill.

  Then, making a lapping, happy sound, Tarzan was on the step, wagging his tail so hard it struck against the lower half of the door.

  He let him in and stroked him. His coat was damp.

  Tarzan, overjoyed at the attention, stuck his muzzle against Mr. Biswas’s face.

  “Egg!”

  For a second Tarzan hesitated. No threat appearing, he redoubled his tail-wagging, continually shifting his hind legs.

  Mr. Biswas embraced him.

  After that he always slept with his oil lamp on.

  He began to fear that his house might be burned down. He went to bed with an added anxiety; every morning he opened his side window as soon as he got up, looking past the trees for signs of destruction; in the fields he worried about it. But the house always stood: the variegated roof, the frames, the crapaud pillars, the wooden staircase.

  When Shama came he told her of his fears.

  She said, “I don’t think they would worry about it.”

  And he regretted telling her, for when Seth came he said, “So you frighten they burn it down, eh? Don’t worry. They not so idle.”

  Mr. Maclean came twice and went away.

  And every day the rain fell, the sun blazed, the house became greyer, the sawdust, once fresh and aromatic, became part of the earth, the asphalt snakes hanging from the roof grew longer, and many more died, and Mr. Biswas worked more and more elaborate messages of comfort for his walls with a steady, unthinking hand, and a mind in turmoil.

  Then one evening a great calm settled on him, and he made a decision. He had for too long regarded situations as temporary; henceforth he would look upon every stretch of time, however short, as precious. Time would never be dismissed again. No action would merely lead to another; every action was a part of his life which could not be recalled; therefore thought had to be given to every action: the opening of a matchbox, the striking of a match. Slowly, then, as though unused to his limbs, and concentrating hard, he had his evening bath, cooked his meal, ate it, washed up, and settled down in his rockingchair to pass-no, to use, to enjoy, to live-the evening. The house was unimportant. The evening, in this room, was all that mattered.

  And so great was his assurance that he did something he had not done for weeks. He took down the Reader’s Library edition of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He passed his hands over the cover; deliberately he opened the book, broke the spine in a few places, destroying it completely in one place, and, pulling up his legs on to the chair so that he was huddled and cosy, and smacking his lips, which was not one of his habits, he began to read.

  His mind was clear. He had pushed everything apart from the Victor Hugo to the boundaries. He had made a clearing in the bush: that was the picture he gave himself of his mind: for his mind had become quite separate from the rest of himself.

  The image changed. It was no longer a forest, but a billowing black cloud. Unless he was careful the cloud would funnel into his head. He felt it pressing on his head. He didn’t want to look up.

  Surely it was only a trick of the oil lamp, which stood directly in front of him on the table?

  He huddled a little more on the chair and smacked his lips again.

  Then he was so afraid that he almost cried out.

&nbs
p; Why should he be afraid? Of whom? Esmeralda? Quasimodo? The goat? The crowd?

  People. He could hear them next door and all down the barracks. No road was without them, no house. They were in the newspapers on the wall, in the photographs, in the simple drawings in advertisements. They were in the book he was holding. They were in all books. He tried to think of landscapes without people: sand and sand and sand, without the “oses” Lai had spoken about; vast white plateaux, with himself safely alone, a speck in the centre.

  Was he afraid of real people?

  He must experiment. But why? He had spent all his life among people without even thinking that he might be afraid of them. He had faced people across a rumshop counter; he had gone to school; he had walked down crowded main roads on market day.

  Why now? Why so suddenly?

  His whole past became a miracle of calm and courage.

  His fingers were dusted with gilt from the pall-like cover of the book. As he studied them the clearing became overgrown again and the black cloud billowed in. How heavy! How dark!

  He put his feet down and sat still, staring at the lamp, seeing nothing. The darkness filled his head. All his life had been good until now. And he had never known. He had spoiled it all by worry and fear. About a rotting house, the threats of illiterate labourers.

  Now he would never more be able to go among people.

  He surrendered to the darkness.

  When he roused himself he opened the top half of the door. He saw no one. The barracks had gone to sleep. He would have to wait until morning to find out whether he was really afraid.

  In the morning he had a full minute of lucidity. He remembered that something had nagged and exhausted him the previous evening. Then, still in bed, he remembered, and the anguish returned. He got up. The bedsheet looked tormented. The mattress was exposed in places and he could smell the dingy old coconut-fibre. Slowly and carefully, like his actions the night before, his thoughts came, and he framed each thought in a complete sentence. He thought: “The bed is a mess. Therefore I slept badly. I must have been afraid all through the night. Therefore the fear is still with me.”