A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  “The carpenter home?” Mr. Biswas asked.

  The woman called, “Georgie!” For a fat woman her voice was surprisingly thin.

  Mr. Maclean appeared above the half-door at the side of the house. He looked at Mr. Biswas suspiciously.

  The woman walked to the far end of the yard, scattering corn and clucking loudly, calling the poultry to feed.

  Mr. Biswas didn’t know how to begin. He couldn’t just say, “I want to build a house.” He didn’t have all the necessary money and he didn’t want to deceive Mr. Maclean or expose himself to his scorn. He said shyly, “I have a little business I want to talk to you about.”

  Mr. Maclean pushed open the lower half of the door and came down the concrete steps. He was middle-aged, tall and thin; he looked as eager and uncertain as his board. His profession was a frustrating one. The county abounded in work he had not been allowed to finish: exposed and rotting house-frames, houses that had begun with concrete and dressed wood and ended with mud walls and tree branches. Evidence of his compensating activities lay about the yard. In an open shed at the back a half-finished wheel stood amid shavings. Here and there Mr. Biswas saw goat droppings.

  “What sort of business?” Mr. Maclean asked. He reached up and pulled a window open. It rattled and glittered; it was hung on the inside with strings of tin cups.

  “Is about a house.”

  “Oh. Repairs?”

  “Not exactly. It ain’t build yet. As a matter of fact-”

  “Georgie!” Mrs. Maclean shouted. “Come and see what that damn mongoose do again.”

  Mr. Maclean went to the back of the house. Mr. Biswas heard him mumbling evenly. “Damn nuisance,” he said, coming back, striking his trousers with a switch. “So, you want me to build a house for you?”

  Mr. Biswas mistook his wariness for sarcasm and said defensively, “Is not a mansion.”

  “That is a blessing. Too much people putting up mansion these days. You ever had a close look at the County Road?” He paused. “Upstairs house?”

  Mr. Biswas nodded. “Upstairs house. Small thing. But neat. I don’t want too much to make me happy,” he ran on, made uneasy by Mr. Maclean. “I don’t see any point in pretending that you have more money than you really have.”

  “Naturally,” Mr. Maclean said. With the switch he flicked some fowl droppings from the yard into the thick dust under the floor of his own house. Then he drew two equal and adjacent squares on the ground. “You want two bedrooms.”

  “And a drawingroom.”

  Mr. Maclean added another square of the same size. To this he added half a square and said, “And a gallery.”

  “That’s it. Nothing too fancy for me. Small and neat.”

  “You want a door from the gallery to the front bedroom. A wood door. And you want another door to the drawing-room. With coloured glass panes.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “One side of the gallery you want board up. For the front you would like some fancy rails. You want a nice concrete step with a banister in front.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “For the front bedroom you want glass windows, and if you get the money you going to paint them white. The back windows could be pure board. And you want a plain wood staircase at the back, with no banister or anything like that. The kitchen you going to build yourself, somewhere in the yard.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s a nice little house you have there. A lot of people would like it. It going to cost you about two hundred and fifty, three hundred dollars. Labour, you know-” He looked at Mr. Biswas and slowly rubbed a bare foot over the drawing on the ground. “I don’t know. I busy these days.” He pointed to the unfinished wheel in the shed.

  A hen cackled, proclaiming an egg.

  “Georgie! Is the Leghorn.”

  There was a tremendous squawking and flapping among the poultry.

  Mr. Maclean said, “Is a lucky thing. Otherwise she was going straight in the pot.”

  “We not bound and “bliged to build the whole thing right away,” Mr. Biswas said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.”

  “So they say. But Rome get build. Anyway, as soon as I get some time I going to come and we could look at the site. You have a site?”

  “Yes, yes, man. Have a site.”

  “Well, in about two-three days then.”

  He came early that afternoon, in hat, shoes and an ironed shirt, and they went to look at the site.

  “Is a real little bower,” Mr. Biswas said.

  “Is a sloping site!” Mr. Maclean said in surprise and almost with pleasure. “You really have to have high pillars.”

  “High on one side, low on the other. It could practically be a style. And then I was thinking about a little path down to the road here. Steps. In the ground itself. Garden on both sides. Roses. Exora. Oleanders. Bougainvillaea and poinsettia. And some Queen of Flowers. And a neat little bamboo bridge to the road.”

  “It sound nice.”

  “I was thinking. About the house. It would be nice to have concrete pillars. Not naked though. I don’t think that does look nice. Plastered and smooth.”

  “I know what you mean. You think you could give me about a hundred and fifty dollars just to start off with?”

  Mr. Biswas hesitated.

  “You mustn’t think I want to meddle in your private affairs. I just wanting to know how much you want to spend right away.”

  Mr. Biswas walked away from Mr. Maclean, among the bushes on the damp site, the weeds and the nettles. “About a hundred,” he said. “But at the end of the month I could give you a little bit more.”

  “A hundred.”

  “All right?”

  “Yes, is all right. For a start.”

  They went through the weeds and over the leaf-choked gutter to the narrow gravelly road.

  “Every month we build a little,” Mr. Biswas said. “Little by little.”

  “Yes, little by little.” Mr. Maclean wasn’t animated, but some of his wariness had gone; he even sounded encouraging. “I will have to get some labour. Helluva thing these days, getting good labour.” He spoke the word with relish.

  And the word pleased Mr. Biswas too. “Yes, you must get labour,” he said, suppressing his astonishment that there were people who depended on Mr. Maclean for a living.

  “But you better get a few more cents quick.” Mr. Maclean said, almost friendly now. “Otherwise you wouldn’t get any concrete pillars.”

  “Must have concrete pillars.”

  “Then all the house you going to build will be a row of concrete pillars with nothing on top of them.”

  They walked on.

  “A row of coal barrels,” Mr. Biswas said.

  Mr. Maclean didn’t intrude.

  “Just send me a coal barrel. Yes, you old bitch. Just a coal barrel.”

  He decided to borrow the money from Ajodha. He didn’t want to ask Seth or Mrs. Tulsi. And he couldn’t ask Misir: their relationship had cooled since he had borrowed from him to pay Mungroo and Seebaran and Mahmoud. And yet he was unwilling to go to Ajodha. He walked out of the barrackyard but before he reached the main road decided to let the matter rest until the following Sunday. He walked back to his room and put on his bicycle clips, thinking he would spend the afternoon at Hanuman House instead. But he knew so clearly what he would find there that he took off his bicycle clips. Eventually it was the room that drove him out. He caught two buses and was at Pagotes in the late afternoon.

  He entered Tara’s yard through the wide side gate of unpainted corrugated iron and went down the gravelled way to the garage and the cowpen. Nothing in this part of the yard seemed to have changed since he had first seen it. The plum tree was as desolate as ever; it bore fruit regularly but its grey branches were almost bare and looked dry and stiff and brittle. He no longer wondered what would be done with the heap of scrap metal, and he had given up the hope, which he had had as a boy, of seeing the rusting body of a motorcar reanimated and driven away
. The mound of manured grass changed in size but remained where it always had been. For despite the cost and the trouble, and the multiplication of his business interests, Ajodha still kept two or three cows in his yard. They were his pets; he spent most of his free time in the cowpen, which he could never finish improving.

  From the cowpen came the hiss of milk in a bucket and the mumble of conversation. It was Sunday; Ajodha would certainly be in the cowpen. Mr. Biswas didn’t look. He hurried to the back verandah, hoping to see Tara first and to catch her alone.

  She was alone, except for the servant girl. She greeted him so warmly that he at once felt ashamed of his mission. His resolve to speak directly came to nothing, for when he asked how she was she replied at length and, instead of asking for money, he had to give sympathy. Indeed, she didn’t look well. Her breathing had grown worse and she couldn’t move about easily; her body had broadened and become slack; her hair had thinned; her eyes had lost their brightness.

  The servant girl brought him a cup of tea and Tara followed the girl back to the kitchen.

  The top shelves of the bookcase were still packed with the disintegrating volumes of The Book of Comprehensive Knowledge, for which Ajodha had not paid. The lower shelves contained magazines, motor manufacturers’ catalogues and illustrated trilingual souvenir booklets of Indian films. The religious pictures on the walls were crowded out by calendars from the distributors of American and English motor vehicles, and an enormous framed photograph of an Indian actress.

  Tara came back to the verandah and said that she hoped Mr. Biswas would stay to dinner. He had intended to; apart from everything else, he liked their food. She sat down in Ajodha’s rockingchair and asked after the children. He told her about the one that was coming. She asked about the Tulsis and he replied as briefly as he could. He knew that, though the two houses had little to do with one another, an antagonism existed between them. The Tulsis, who did puja every day and celebrated every Hindu festival, regarded Ajodha as a man who pursued wealth and comfort and modernity and had alienated himself from the faith. Ajodha and Tara simply thought the Tulsis squalid, and had always made it clear that they considered Mr. Biswas’s marriage into that house a calamity. It was doubly embarrassing to Mr. Biswas to discuss the Tulsis with Tara, since despite his concern for his children he found it hard not to agree with her view, particularly when he was in her clean, uncrowded, comfortable house, waiting for a meal he knew would be good.

  The cowman came from the pen, called to the girl in the kitchen and passed her the bucket of milk through the window. Then, at the standpipe in the yard he washed his Wellingtons, took them off, washed his feet and hands and face.

  Mr. Biswas felt more and more reluctant to tell Tara what he had come for.

  Then it was too late. Rabidat, Bhandat’s younger son, came in, and Tara and Mr. Biswas fell silent. As far as Tara and Ajodha were concerned, Rabidat was still a bachelor, though it was generally known that, like his brother Jagdat, he was living with a woman of another race and had some children, no one knew how many, by her. He was wearing sandals and brief khaki shorts; his tailless shirt flapped loose, unbuttoned all the way down, the short sleeves rolled up almost to his armpits. It was as though, unable to hide his prognathous face, he wished to display the rest of himself as well. He had a superb body, well proportioned and well developed and not grossly muscular. He barely nodded to Mr. Biswas and ignored Tara. When he sat sprawling on a chair, two thin folds of skin appeared about his middle; they were almost a disfigurement of his neatness. He sucked his teeth, took a film booklet from the bookcase and flicked through it, breathing loudly, his small eyes intent, his prognathous sneer more pronounced. He threw the booklet back on the bookcase and said, “How is everything, Mohun?” Without waiting for an answer he shouted at the kitchen, “Food, girl!” and clamped his mouth shut.

  “Ooh! The married man!”

  It was Ajodha, back from the cowpen.

  Rabidat rearranged his legs.

  Before Mr. Biswas could reply, Ajodha stopped smiling and spoke to Rabidat about the behaviour of a certain lorry.

  Rabidat shifted in his chair and sucked his teeth, not looking up.

  Ajodha raised his voice querulously.

  Rabidat explained awkwardly, sulkily, insolently. He seemed to be trying to bite the inside of his lower lip, and his voice, though deep, was blurred.

  Abruptly Ajodha lost interest in the lorry and smiled mischievously at Mr. Biswas.

  Tara got up from the rockingchair and Ajodha sat in it, fanning his face and opening a shirt button to reveal a grey-haired chest. “How many children has the married man got now? Seven, eight, a dozen?”

  Rabidat smiled uneasily, got up and went to the kitchen.

  Mr. Biswas thought he would be brave and begin. “Late last night,” he said, “some “larmist bring me a message that my mother was very sick. So I came to see her today and as I was here I thought I would come and see you.”

  The servant girl brought a glass of milk for Ajodha. He received it reverentially, holding the glass as though any pressure might cause it to break. He said, “Bring Mohun some. You know, Mohun, milk is a food in itself, especially when it is fresh like this.”

  The milk was brought and drunk. Mr. Biswas welcomed the pause. The absurd story he hadjust made up didn’t sound convincing, and he hoped he would be allowed to drop it.

  “And how was your mother?” Tara asked. “I heard nothing.”

  “Oh, she. She was all right. It was just some “larmist, that was all.”

  Ajodha rocked gently. “What about your job, Mohun? Somehow I never felt you were made for a job in the fields. Eh, Tara?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” Mr. Biswas said briskly, “it was that I wanted to talk to you about. You see, this is a steady job-”

  Ajodha said, “Mohun, I don’t think you are looking well at all. Eh, Tara? Look at his face. And, eh-” He broke off with a giggle and said in English, “Look, look. He getting a punch.” He stabbed at Mr. Biswas’s belly with a long sharp finger, and when Mr. Biswas winced Ajodha gave a little yelping laugh. “Pap,” he said. “Your belly soft like pap. Like a woman. All you young people getting bellies these days.” He winked at Mr. Biswas; then, tilting back his head, he said loudly, “Even Rabidat got a punch.”

  Tara gave a short, chesty laugh.

  Rabidat came out of the kitchen, chewing, his mouth full, and mumbled incomprehensibly.

  Ajodha grimaced, “Take your face back to the kitchen. You know you make me ill when you talk with your mouth full.”

  Rabidat swallowed hurriedly. “Punch?” he said, nibbling at his lower lip. “I got a punch?” He pulled his shirt off his shoulders, drew in his breath and the definitions of his abdominal muscles became sharper. Above his sneering mouth his small eyes glittered.

  Smiling, Ajodha said, “All right, Rabidat. Go back and eat. I was only teasing.” The demonstration had pleased him; he was as proud of Rabidat’s body as of his own. “Good food,” he told Mr. Biswas. “And lots of exercise.” He threw back his shoulders, stuck out his stomach, grabbed Mr. Biswas’s soft hand with his firm, long fingers and said, “Feel that. Come on, feel it.” Mr. Biswas didn’t respond. Ajodha seized one of Mr. Biswas’s fingers and pulled it hard against his stomach. Mr. Biswas felt his finger bend backwards; he wrenched it from Ajodha’s grasp. “There,” Ajodha said. “Hard as steel. You still sleep with a pillow, I imagine?”

  Surreptitiously rubbing his paining finger against its neighbour, Mr. Biswas nodded.

  “I never use a pillow. Nature didn’t intend us to use pillows. Train your children from the start, Mohun. Don’t let them use pillows. Ooh! Four children!” Ajodha gave another little yelp of laughter, jumped out of his chair, walked to the verandah half-wall and shouted irritably to someone outside. He had heard the cowman preparing to leave and was only bidding him good night; that was the voice he always used with his employees. The cowman replied and Ajodha returned to his chair. “Mar
ried man!”

  “Well, as I was saying,” Mr. Biswas said, “this job I have is steady. And I am beginning to build a little house.”

  “O good, Mohun,” Tara said. “Very good.”

  “I don’t know how you managed to live at Hanuman House,” Ajodha said. “How many people live in that place?”

  “About two hundred,” Mr. Biswas said, and they all laughed. “Now, this house is going to be a proper house-”

  “You know what you should do, Mohun?” Ajodha said. “You should take Sanatogen. Not one bottle. Take the full course. You don’t get any benefit unless you take the full course.”

  Tara nodded.

  Rabidat came out of the kitchen again. “What is this I hear about a house, Mohun? You build a house? Where you get all this money from?”

  “He has been saving up,” Ajodha said impatiently. “Not like you. You are going to end up living in a hole in the ground, Rabidat. I don’t know what you do with your money.” It was only indirectly, like this, that Ajodha referred to Rabidat’s outside life.

  “Look. You!” Rabidat said. “I wasn’t born with money, you hear. And I don’t have the scheming mind to make any. My father neither.” He was being provocative, since any mention of his father, like any mention of Mr. Biswas’s sister, was forbidden.

  Ajodha frowned and rocked violently.

  And Mr. Biswas realized that the time to ask had gone for good.

  Ajodha’s look wasn’t the one he assumed so easily, of worry and petulance, which meant nothing, though it filled his employees with dread. It was a look of anger.

  Ignoring Ajodha and smiling at Mr. Biswas, Rabidat asked, “A dirt house?”

  “No, man. Concrete pillars. Two bedrooms and a drawing-room. Galvanized roof and everything.”

  But Rabidat wasn’t listening.

  “Tara!” Ajodha said. “If I didn’t take him out of the gutter, where would he be today? If I didn’t feed him all that food”-rising so swiftly that the rockingchair shot backwards, he went up to Rabidat and held his biceps-“do you think he would have these?”