A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  Every afternoon they had seen an elderly Indian rocking contentedly in the verandah of the house next door. He had a square, heavy-lidded face that was almost Chinese; he always looked impassive and sleepy. Yet when Mr. Biswas, pursuing his policy of getting on good terms with the neighbours, greeted him, the man brightened at once, sat forward in his rockingchair and said, “You have been doing a lot of repairs.”

  Mr. Biswas took the man’s words as an invitation to his verandah. His house was new and well-built; the walls were solid, the floor even and firm, the woodwork everywhere neat and finished. There was no fence; and a shed of rusted corrugated iron and grey-black boards abutted at the back of the house.

  “Nice house you have here,” Mr. Biswas said.

  “With the help of God and the boys we manage to build it. Still have to put up a fence and build a kitchen, as you see. But that could wait for the time being. You had to do a lot of repairs.”

  “A few things here and there. Sorry about the septic tank.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry about that. I did expect it to happen even before. He build it himself.”

  “Who? The man?”

  “And not only that. He build the whole house himself. Working on Saturday and Sunday and in the afternoons. It was like a hobby with him. If he employ a carpenter I didn’t see it. And I better warn you. He do all the wiring too. The man was a joke, man. I don’t know how the City Council pass a house like that. The man used to bring all sort of tree-trunk and tree-branch to use as rafters and beams.”

  He was an old man, pleased that after a lifetime, with the help of his sons, he had built a solid, well-made house. The past lay in the shed at the back of his house, in the ruinous wooden houses still in the street. He spoke only out of a sense of achievement, without malice.

  “A strong little house, though,” Mr. Biswas said, looking at it from the old man’s verandah. And he saw how the old man’s breadfruit tree framed the house to advantage, how elegant the lattice work looked through the bleeding-heart vine, its lack of finish unimportant at this distance. But he noticed how pronounced the crack was that spread from the brick wall in the verandah. And it was only then that he noticed how many of the celotex panels had fallen from the eaves; and even as he looked bats flew in and out. “Strong little house. That is the main thing.”

  The old man continued to talk, no hint of argument in his voice. “And those pillars at the four corners. Anybody else woulda make them of concrete. You know what he make them of? Just those clay bricks. Hollow inside.”

  Mr. Biswas could not hide his alarm and the old man smiled benevolently, pleased to see his information having such an effect.

  “The man was a joke, man,” he went on. “As I say, it was like a hobby to him. Picking up window frames here and there, from the American base and where not. Picking up a door here and another one there and bringing them here. A real disgrace. I don’t know how the City Council pass the place.”

  “I don’t suppose,” Mr. Biswas said, “that the City Council woulda pass it if it wasn’t strong.”

  The old man paid no attention. “A spec’lator, that’s what he was. A real spec”lator. This ain’t the first house he built like this, you know. He build two-three in Belmont, one in Woodbrook, this one, and right now he building one in Morvant. Building it and living in it at the same time.” The old man rocked and chuckled. “But he get stick with this one.”

  “He live in it a long time,” Mr. Biswas said.

  “Couldn’t get anybody to buy it. Is a good little site, mark you. But he was asking too much. Four five.”

  “Four five!”

  “If you please. And look. Look at that little house down the road.” He pointed to a new neat bungalow, which Mr. Biswas, with his newly acquired eye for carpentry, had recognized as of good design and workmanship. “Small, but very nice. That sell this year for four five.”

  A Tuttle boy, the writer, came unexpectedly to the house one afternoon, talked of this and that and then, casually, as if delivering a message he had forgotten, said that his parents were going to call that evening, because Mrs. Tuttle wanted to ask Shama’s advice about something.

  Rapidly, they made ready. The floor was polished and walking on it was forbidden. Curtains were rearranged, and the morris suite and the glass cabinet and the bookcase pushed into new positions. The curtains masked the staircase; the bookcase and the glass cabinet hid part of the lattice work, which was also draped with curtains. The door that couldn’t close was left wide open and curtains hung over the doorway. The door that couldn’t open was left shut; and a curtain hung over that. The windows that couldn’t close were left open and curtains hung over them as well. And when the Tuttles came they were greeted by an enclosed, shining, softly-lit house, the morris chairs and the small palm in the brass pot reflecting on the polished floor. Shama seated them on the morris chairs, left them to marvel in silence for a minute or so, and, as cosily as the old queen herself, made tea in the kitchen and offered that and biscuits.

  And the Tuttles were taken in! Shama could tell from the hardening of Mrs. Tuttle’s expression into one of outrage and self-pity, from the nervous little chuckles of W. C. Tuttle who sat with a mixture of Eastern and Western elegance on his morris chair, rubbing one hand over the ankle that rested on his left knee, twirling the long hairs in his nose with the other hand.

  Mrs. Tuttle said to Myna, who had amputated the torchbearer’s torchbearing arm, “Hello, Myna girl. You forget your aunt these days. I don’t suppose you want to come round to my old house after this.”

  Myna smiled, as though Mrs. Tuttle had hit on an embarrassing truth.

  Mrs. Tuttle said to Shama in Hindi, “Well, it is old. But it is full of room.” She pressed her elbows to her side to show the constriction she felt in Shama’s house. “And we didn’t want to get into debt or anything like that.”

  W. C. Tuttle played with the hairs in his nose and smiled.

  “I don’t want anything bigger,” Shama said. “This is just right for me. Something small and nice.”

  “Yes,” W. C. Tuttle said. “Something nice and small.”

  And they had a moment of panic when he jumped up from his chair and, going to the wall with the lattice work, began measuring it by extending his fingers, gathering them up again and extending them once more. But it was only the length of the wall, not the quality of the work, that interested him. He measured, gave a little laugh and said, “Twelve by twenty.”

  “Fifteen by twenty-five,” Shama said.

  “Nice and small,” W. C. Tuttle said. “That, to me, is the beauty of it.”

  And Shama had another uneasy moment when W. C. Tuttle asked to be shown upstairs. But it was night. They had enclosed the staircase with lattice work from banister to roof, with strips of wood from banister to steps, and it had all been painted. A weak bulb lit up the landing, threw the yard into darkness, and the effect of cosiness was maintained.

  And how quickly they forgot the inconveniences of the house and saw it with the eyes of the visitors! What could not be hidden, by bookcase, glass cabinet or curtains, they accommodated themselves to. They mended the fence and made a new gate. They put up a garage. They bought rose trees and planted a garden. They began to grow orchids and Mr. Biswas had the exciting idea of attaching them to dead coconut trunks buried in the ground. At the side of the house, in the shade of the breadfruit tree, they had a bed of anthurium lilies. To keep the lilies cool they surrounded them with damp, rotting immortelle wood which they got from Shorthills. And it was on a visit to Shorthills that they saw the concrete pillars rising out of tall bush on the hill where Mr. Biswas had once built a house.

  Soon it seemed to the children that they had never lived anywhere but in the tall square house in Sikkim Street. From now their lives would be ordered, their memories coherent. The mind, while it is sound, is merciful. And rapidly the memories of Hanuman House, The Chase, Green Vale, Shorthills, the Tulsi house in Port of Spain would become
jumbled, blurred; events would be telescoped, many forgotten. Occasionally a nerve of memory would be touched-a puddle reflecting the blue sky after rain, a pack of thumbed cards, the fumbling with a shoelace, the smell of a new car, the sound of a stiff wind through trees, the smells and colours of a toyshop, the taste of milk and prunes-and a fragment of forgotten experience would be dislodged, isolated, puzzling. In a northern land, in a time of new separations and yearnings, in a library grown suddenly dark, the hailstones beating against the windows, the marbled endpaper of a dusty leather-bound book would disturb: and it would be the hot noisy week before Christinas in the Tulsi Store: the marbled patterns of oldfashioned balloons powdered with a rubbery dust in a shallow white box that was not to be touched. So later, and very slowly, in securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past.

  Though Mr. Biswas had mentally devised many tortures to which he was going to put the solicitor’s clerk, he took care to avoid the cafй with the gay murals. And it was with surprise and embarrassment that he came back one afternoon, less than five months after he had moved, to find the solicitor’s clerk, a cigarette hanging from his lips, pacing with some method about the lot next to his house.

  The clerk was unabashed. “How, man? How the wife? And the children? Still getting on all right with their studies?”

  Instead of replying, what he felt, “Stop asking about my children and their studies, you nasty old crooked communist tout!” Mr. Biswas said that they were all well and asked, “How the old queen?”

  “Half and half. The old heart still playing the fool.”

  The lot next door was practically empty. At the far end it contained only a neat two-roomed building, the office of a friendly society; so that Mr. Biswas had no neighbours on one side. Mr. Biswas did not like the clerk’s concentration. But he decided to keep cool.

  “You happy in Mucurapo?” he asked. “Eh, but what I saying? Is Morvant, not so?”

  “The old queen don’t care for the area. Damp, you know.”

  “And the mosquitoes. I can imagine. I hear that is bad for the heart.”

  “Still,” the clerk said. “We got to keep on trying.”

  “You sell the Morvant house yet?”

  “Not yet. But I have a lot of offers.”

  “And you thinking of building here again.”

  “Want to put up a lil house like yours. Two-storey.”

  “You not putting up any damn two-storey house here, you old jerry-building tout!”

  The clerk stopped pacing and came to the fence, scarlet and green with a bougainvillaea Mr. Biswas had planted. Over the bougainvillaea he wagged a long finger in Mr. Biswas’s face and said, “Mind your mouth! Mind your mouth! You say enough to spend a nice lil time in jail. Mind your mouth! It look like you don’t know the law.”

  “The City Council not going to pass this one. I pay rates and I have my rights.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You just mind your mouth, you hear.”

  When the solicitor’s clerk left, Mr. Biswas walked about the yard, trying to imagine the effect in the street of two tall boxes side by side. He walked and looked and pondered and gauged. Then, before the sun went down, he called out, “Shama! Shama! Bring a ruler or your tape measure.”

  She brought a ruler and Mr. Biswas began measuring the width of his lot foot by foot, starting from the half-empty lot and working towards the house of the old Indian, who had observed everything, rocking, his Chinese face wrinkled with smiles.

  “He come to build another one, eh?” he called out, when Mr. Biswas was near enough. “That don’t surprise me at all.”

  “He going to build it over my dead body,” Mr. Biswas called back, measuring.

  The old man rocked, greatly amused.

  “Aha!” Mr. Biswas said, when he got to the end of the lot. “Aha! I always suspected.” He stooped and started to measure back to the half-empty lot, while the old man rocked and chuckled.

  “Shama!” Mr. Biswas said, running to the kitchen. “Where you have the deed for the house?”

  “In the bureau.”

  She went up to get it. She brought it down and Mr. Biswas read.

  “Aha! The old tout! Shama, we going to get a bigger yard.”

  By accident or design the fence the solicitor’s clerk had put up was a full twelve feet inside the boundary indicated in the deed.

  “I always thought,” Shama said, “that we didn’t have a fifty-foot frontage.”

  “Frontage, eh?” Mr. Biswas said. “Nice word, Shama. But you’re picking up a lot of nice words in your old age, you know.”

  And the solicitor’s clerk appeared in the street no more.

  “So you catch him then,” the old man said. “But you must say this for him. He was a sharp fellow.”

  “Didn’t fool me,” Mr. Biswas said.

  In the extra space Mr. Biswas planted a laburnum tree. It grew rapidly. It gave the house a romantic aspect, softened the tall graceless lines, and provided some shelter from the afternoon sun. Its flowers were sweet, and in the still hot evenings their smell filled the house.

  Epilogue

  Before the end of the year Owad left Port of Spain. After his marriage to Dorothy’s cousin, the Presbyterian violinist, he left the Colonial Hospital and moved to San Fernando, where he set up in private practice. And at the end of the year the Community Welfare Department was abolished. It was not because of Shekhar’s party; that had disintegrated even before, when all four of its candidates were defeated in the colony’s first general election, encouraging Shekhar (“The Poor Man’s Friend”, according to his posters) to withdraw from public life and concentrate on his cinemas. The department was abolished because it had grown archaic. Thirty, twenty or even ten years before, there would have been people to support it. But the war, the American bases, an awareness of America had given everyone the urge, and many the means, to self-improvement. The encouragement and guidance of the department were not needed. And when the department was attacked, no one, not even those who had enjoyed its “leadership” courses, knew how to defend it. And Miss Logie, like Mr. Burnett, left.

  Mr. Biswas slipped from his low eminence as a civil servant and returned to the Sentinel. The car was now his own; but he was getting less than those who had stayed with the paper. He had paid five hundred dollars of the debt; now he could hardly pay the interest. He wanted to sell the car, and an Englishman came to the house one day to look it over. Shama was exceedingly rude, and the Englishman, finding himself in the centre of a family quarrel, withdrew. Mr. Biswas gave in. Shama had never reproached him for the house, and he had begun to credit her with great powers of judgement. Again and again she said she was not worried, that the debt would settle itself; and though Mr. Biswas felt that her words were hollow, he did get comfort from them.

  But the debt remained. At nights, with a clear view of the sky through the slightly crooked window frames on the top floor, he felt the time flying by, the five years shrinking to four, to three, bringing disaster closer, devouring his life. In the morning the sun struck through the lattice work on the landing and below the bar-room door into his bedroom, and calmness returned. The children would see about the debt.

  But the debt remained. Four thousand dollars. Like a buffer at the end of a track, frustrating energy and ambition. Beyond the Sentinel there was nothing. And though he had at first found the newspaper office stimulating, with its urgency, the daily miracle of seeing what he had written in the afternoon transformed into solid print read by thousands the next morning, his enthusiasm, unsupported by ambition, faded. His work became painstaking and laboured: the zest went out of his articles as it had gone out of himself. He grew dull and querulous and ugly. Living had always been a preparation, a waiting. And so the years had passed; and now there was nothing to wait for.

  Except the children. Suddenly the world opened for them. Savi got a scholarship and went abr
oad. Two years later Anand got a scholarship and went to England. The prospects of repaying the debt receded. But Mr. Biswas felt he could wait; at the end of five years he could make other arrangements.

  He missed Anand and worried about him. Anand’s letters, at first rare, became more and more frequent. They were gloomy, self-pitying; then they were tinged with a hysteria which Mr. Biswas immediately understood. He wrote Anand long humorous letters; he wrote about the garden; he gave religious advice; at great expense he sent by air mail a book called Outwitting Our Nerves by two American women psychologists. Anand’s letters grew rare again. There was nothing Mr. Biswas could do but wait. Wait for Anand. Wait for Savi. Wait for the five years to come to an end. Wait. Wait.

  They sent a message to Shama one afternoon and she packed Mr. Biswas’s pyjamas and hurried to the Colonial Hospital. He had collapsed in the Sentinel office. It was not the stomach which was at fault, the stomach which he had so often said he would like to cut out of himself and have a good look at, to see exactly what was playing the fool. It was the heart, about which he had never complained.

  He spent a month in hospital. When he came home he found that Shama and Kamla and Myna had distempered the walls downstairs. The floor had been freshly stained and polished. The garden was blooming. He was moved. He wrote to Anand that he hadn’t realized until then what a nice little house it was. But writing to Anand was like taking a blind man to see a view.