A House for Mr. Biswas

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  “Don’t touch me!” Rabidat bawled.

  Mr. Biswas jumped. Ajodha whipped away his hand.

  “Don’t touch me!” Tears sprang to Rabidat’s small eyes. He closed them tightly, as if in great pain, lifted one foot high and brought it down with all his strength on the floor. “You didn’t make me. If you want to touch children, make them. What you want me to do with the food you feed me? What?”

  Tara got up and passed her hand on Rabidat’s back. “All right, all right, Rabidat. It is time for you to go to the theatre.” One of his duties was to go to the cinema twice a day to check the takings.

  Breathing hard, almost grunting, and chewing up his words into incomprehensible sounds, he went up the two steps that led from the back verandah to the main section of the house.

  Ajodha pulled the rockingchair towards him, sat on it and began to rock briskly.

  Tara smiled at Mr. Biswas. “I don’t know what to do with them, Mohun.”

  “Gratitude!” Ajodha said.

  “Tell us about your house, Mohun,” Tara said.

  “You take them out of a barrackroom and this is what you get.”

  “House?” Mr. Biswas said. “Oh, is nothing really. A small little thing. Is for the children sake that I really building it.”

  “We want to build over this house,” Tara said. “But the trouble! The moment you want to put up anything good, so many forms, so many people’s permission. When we built this house we had nothing like that. But I don’t imagine you have that worry.”

  “O no,” Mr. Biswas said. “No worry about that at all.”

  With those light, precise motions on which he prided himself, Ajodha jumped out of his chair and went through the half-door into the yard.

  “Those two,” Tara said. “Always quarrelling. But they don’t mean anything. Tomorrow they will be like father and son.”

  They heard Ajodha in the cowpen abusing the absent cowman.

  Jagdat, Rabidat’s elder brother, came in and asked in his cheerful way, “Something eating your husband, Aunt?” and chuckled.

  Whenever Mr. Biswas saw Jagdat he felt that Jagdat had just come from a funeral. Not only was his manner breezy; there was also his dress, which had never varied for many years: black shoes, black socks, dark blue serge trousers with a black leather belt, white shirt cuffs turned up above the wrist, and a gaudy tie: so that it seemed he had come back from a funeral, taken off his coat, undone his cuffs, replaced his black tie, and was generally making up for an afternoon of solemnity. His eyes were as small as Rabidat’s, but livelier; his face was squarer; he laughed more often, showing rabbitlike teeth. With a hairy ringed hand he slapped Mr. Biswas hard on the back, saying, “The old Mohun, man!”

  “The old Jagdat,” Mr. Biswas said.

  “Mohun is building a house,” Tara said.

  “Has he come to invite us to the housewarming? We only see you at Christmas, man. You don’t eat the rest of the year? Or is because of all the money you making?” And Jagdat roared with laughter.

  Ajodha came back from the cowpen and he and Mr. Biswas and Jagdat ate in the verandah. Tara ate by herself in the kitchen. Ajodha was silent and sullen, Jagdat subdued. The food was good but Mr. Biswas ate without pleasure.

  He had hoped that after the meal he would get Tara alone. But Ajodha remained rocking in the verandah and after a little Mr. Biswas thought the time had come to leave. The girl had finished washing up in the kitchen, and the night silence made it seem later than it was.

  Tara said he should take back some fruit for the children.

  “Vitamin C,” Ajodha said, in his irritable voice. “Give him lots of vitamin C, Tara.”

  She obediently filled a bag with oranges.

  Then Ajodha went inside.

  As soon as he had gone Tara put some avocado pears into the bag, large purple-skinned ones such as, at Hanuman House, were set aside for Mrs. Tulsi and the god. “They will get ripe soon,” she said. “The children will like them.”

  He didn’t want to explain where the children lived and where he lived. But he was glad he hadn’t asked her for money.

  “I am sorry your uncle was in such a temper,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean anything. The boys are being a little difficult. They want money from him all the time and you can’t blame him for getting angry sometimes. They are spreading all sorts of stories about him, too. He doesn’t say anything. But he knows.”

  Mr. Biswas went to say good-bye to Ajodha. His room was in darkness, the door was open, and Ajodha was lying on his pillowless bed with all his clothes on. Mr. Biswas knocked lightly and there was no reply. The ledges on the walls were littered with papers. The room had only four pieces of furniture: the bed, a chair, a low chest of drawers and a black iron chest, the top of which was also covered with papers and magazines. Mr. Biswas was about to go away when he heard Ajodha say gently, “I am not asleep, Mohun. But these days I always rest after eating. You mustn’t mind if I don’t talk or get up.”

  On the way to the Main Road to get a bus Mr. Biswas was hailed by someone. It was Jagdat. He put his hand on Mr. Biswas’s shoulder and conspiratorially offered a cigarette. Ajodha forbade smoking and for Jagdat a cigarette was still an excitement.

  Jagdat said breezily, “You come to squeeze something out of the old man, eh?”

  “What? Me? I just come to see the old people, man.”

  “That wasn’t what the old man tell me.”

  Jagdat waited, then clapped Mr. Biswas on the back.

  “But I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “The old Mohun, man. Trying out the old diplomatic tactic, eh. The old tic-tac-toe.”

  “I wasn’t trying out anything.”

  “No, no. You mustn’t think I look down on you for trying. What else you think I doing every day? But the old man sharp, boy. He could smell a thing like that before you even start thinking about it. So what, eh? You still building this house for the children sake?”

  “You build one for yours?”

  There was a sudden abatement of Jagdat’s high spirits. He stopped, half turned, as though about to go back, and raising his voice, said angrily, “So they spreading stories about me, eh? To you?” He bawled, “O God! I going to go back and knock out all their false teeth. Mohun! You hearing me?”

  The melodramatic flair seemed to run through the family. Mr. Biswas said, “They didn’t tell me anything. But don’t forget that I know you since you was a boy. And if is still the old Jagdat I imagine you have enough outside children now to make up your own little school.”

  Jagdat, still in the attitude of return, relaxed. They walked on.

  “Just four or five,” Jagdat said.

  “How you mean, four or five?”

  “Well, four.” Some ofjagdat’s bounce had gone and when, after some time, he spoke again, it was in an elegiac voice. “Boy, I went to see my father last week. The man living in a small concrete room in Henry Street in a ramshackle old house full of creole people. And, and”-his voice was rising again-“that son of a bitch”-he was screaming-“that son of a bitch not doing a damn thing to help him.”

  In lighted windows curtains were raised. Mr. Biswas plucked at Jagdat’s sleeve.

  Jagdat dropped his voice to one of melancholy piety. “You remember the old man, Mohun?”

  Mr. Biswas remembered Bhandat well.

  “His face,” Jagdat said, “come small small.” He half-closed his small eyes and bunched the fingers of one hand raised in a gesture so delicate it might have been made by a pundit at a religious ceremony. “O yes,” he went on, “Ajodha always ready to give you vitamin A and vitamin B. But when it come to any real sort of help, don’t go to him. Look. He employ a gardener one time. Old man, wearing rags, thin, sick, practically starving. Indian like you and me. Thirty cents a day. Thirty cents! Still, poor man can’t do better, in all the hot sun the old man working. Doing his little weeding and hoeing. About three o”clock, sun hot like blazes, sweating, back aching as if it want to bre
ak, he ask for a cup of tea. Well, they give him a cup of tea. But at the end of the day they dock six cents off his pay.”

  Mr. Biswas said, “You think they going to send me a bill for the food they give me?”

  “Laugh if you want. But that is the way they treat poor people. My consolation is that they can’t bribe God. God is good, boy.”

  They were in the Main Road, not far from the shop where Mr. Biswas had served under Bhandat. The shop was now owned by a Chinese and a large signboard proclaimed the fact.

  The moment came to separate from Jagdat. But Mr. Biswas was unwilling to leave him, to be alone, to get on the bus to go back through the night to Green Vale.

  Jagdat said, “The first boy bright like hell, you know.”

  It was some seconds before Mr. Biswas realized that Jagdat was talking about one of his celebrated illegitimate children. He saw anxiety in Jagdat’s broad face, in the bright jumping little eyes.

  “I glad,” Mr. Biswas said. “Now you could get him to read That Body of Yours to you.”

  Jagdat laughed. “The same old Mohun.”

  There was no need to ask where Jagdat was going. He was going to his family. He too, then, lived a divided life.

  “She does work in a office,” Jagdat said, anxious again.

  Mr. Biswas was impressed.

  “Spanish,” Jagdat said.

  Mr. Biswas knew this was a euphemism for a red-skinned Negro. “Too hot for me, man.”

  “But faithful,” Jagdat said.

  Knocked about on the wooden seat of the rackety rickety dim-lit bus, going past silent fields and past houses which were lightless and dead or bright and private, Mr. Biswas no longer thought of the afternoon’s mission, but of the night ahead.

  Early next morning Mr. Maclean turned up at the barracks and said he had put off other pressing work and was ready to go ahead with Mr. Biswas’s house. He was in his poor but respectable business clothes. His ironed shirt was darned with almost showy neatness; his khaki trousers were clean and sharply creased, but the khaki was old and would not keep the crease for long.

  “You decide how much you want to start off with?”

  “A hundred,” Mr. Biswas said. “More at the end of the month. No concrete pillars.”

  “Is only a sort of fanciness. You watch. I will get you a crapaud that would last a lifetime. Wouldn’t make no difference.”

  “Once it neat.”

  “Neat and nice,” Mr. Maclean said. “Well, I suppose I better start seeing about materials and labour.”

  Materials came that afternoon. The crapaud pillars looked rough; they were not altogether round or altogether straight. But Mr. Biswas was delighted by the new scantlings, and the new nails that came in several wrappings of newspaper. He took up handfuls of nails and let them fall again. The sound pleased him. “Did not know nails was so heavy,” he said.

  Mr. Maclean had brought a tool-box which had his initials on the cover and was like a large wooden suitcase. It contained a saw with an old handle and a sharp, oiled blade; several chisels and drills; a spirit-level and a “I square; a plane; a hammer and a mallet; wedges with smooth, fringed heads; a ball of old, white-stained twine; and a lump of chalk. His tools were like his clothes: old but cared-for. He built a rough work-bench out of the materials and assured Mr. Biswas that all the material would be eventually released for the house and would suffer little damage. That was why, he explained in reply to another of Mr. Biswas’s queries, no nail had been driven right in.

  The labour also came. The labour was a labourer named Edgar, a muscular, full-blooded Negro whose short khaki trousers were shaggy with patches, and whose vest, brown with dirt, was full of holes that had been distended by his powerful body into ellipses. Edgar cutlassed the site, leaving it a rich wet green.

  When Mr. Biswas returned from the fields he found the brushed site marked in white with the plan of the house. Holes for pillars had been indicated and Edgar was digging. Not far off Mr. Maclean had constructed a frame which rested level on stones and answered wonderfully to the design he had drawn in his yard.

  “Gallery, drawingroom, bedroom, bedroom,” Mr. Biswas said, hopping over the spars. “Gallery, bedroom, bedroom, drawingroom.”

  The air smelled of sawdust. Sawdust had spilled rich red and cream on the grass and had been ground into the damp black earth by Edgar’s bare feet and Mr. Maclean’s old, un-shining working-boots.

  Mr. Maclean talked to Mr. Biswas about the difficulties of labour.

  “I try to get Sam,” he said. “But he a little too erratic and don’t-care. Edgar, now, does do the work of two men. The only trouble is, you got to keep a eye on him all the time. Look at him.”

  Edgar was knee-deep in a hole and regularly throwing up spadefuls of black earth.

  “You got to tell him to stop,” Mr. Maclean said. “Otherwise, he dig right through till he come out the other side. Well, boss, how about something to wet the job?” He made a drinking gesture. In the early days he had preferred to drink on the completion of a job; now he got his drink as soon as he could.

  Mr. Biswas nodded and Mr. Maclean called, “Edgar!”

  Edgar went on digging.

  Mr. Maclean tapped his forehead. “You see what I tell you?” He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

  Edgar looked up and jumped out of his hole. Mr. Maclean asked him to go to the rumshop and buy a nip of rum. Edgar ran to where his belongings were, seized a dusty, squashed aand abbreviated felt hat, pressed it on his head and ran off. Some minutes later he came back, still running, one hand holding a bottle, the other holding down his hat.

  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.