A House for Mr. Biswas

by V. S. Naipaul

  He sought out the solicitor’s clerk the next day, paid him a deposit of one hundred dollars, and was shrewd enough to ask for a stamped receipt.

  ‘I going to take this money and pay down right away on the house I want to buy,’ the solicitor’s clerk said. ‘Wait until the old queen hear. She going to be so glad.’

  When Shama heard she burst into tears.

  ‘Ah!’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Swelling up. Vexed. You could only be happy if we just keep on living with your mother and the rest of your big, happy family, eh?’

  ‘I don’t think anything. You have the money, you want to buy house, and I don’t have to think anything.’

  And that was when Shama, leaving the room, encountered Suniti, and Suniti said, ‘I hear that you come like a big-shot. Buying house and thing.’

  ‘Yes, child.’

  ‘Shama!’ Mr Biswas called. ‘Tell that girl to go back and help that worthless husband of hers to look after their goats at Pokima Halt.’

  The goats were an invention of Mr Biswas which never failed to irritate Suniti. ‘Goats,’ she said to the yard, sucking her teeth. ‘Well, some people at least have goats. That is more than I could say for some other people.’

  Mr Biswas had divined only part of Shama’s motives. She knew that the time had come for them to move. But she did not want this to happen after a quarrel and a humiliation. She hoped that the estrangement between her mother and herself would disappear; and she regarded Mr Biswas’s action as rash and provocative.

  He released the tremendous details one by one.

  ‘Five thousand five hundred,’ he said.

  He had his effect.

  ‘O God!’ Shama said. ‘You mad! You mad! You hanging a millstone around my neck.’

  ‘A necklace.’

  Her despair frightened him. But it made him suffer: he mortified himself to inflict pain on her.

  ‘Well, we still paying for the car. And you don’t know how long this job with the government going to last.’

  ‘Your brother hoping it won’t last at all. Tell me, eh. Deep down in your heart you really believe that this job I am doing is nothing, eh? Deep down you really believe that. Eh?’

  ‘If you think so,’ she cried, and went down the steps to the kitchen below the house, to the readers and learners and sisters and married nieces, working and talking in the light of weak, flyblown bulbs. She was surrounded by security; yet disaster was coming upon her and she was quite alone.

  She went back up to the room.

  ‘How you going to get the money?’

  ‘You don’t worry about that.’

  ‘If you start throwing away your money I could always help you. Tomorrow I going to go to de Lima’s and buy that brooch you always talking about.’

  He sniggered.

  As soon as she went out of the room he was seized by panic. He left the house and went for a walk around the Savannah, along the wide, silent, grass-lined streets of St Clair, where open doors revealed softly lit, opulent, undisturbed interiors.

  Having committed himself, he lacked the courage to go back yet found the energy to go ahead. He was encouraged by the gloom of Shama and strengthened by the enthusiasm of the children. He avoided questioning himself; and, dreading the return of Owad, he developed the anxiety that he might not after all be good enough for the house of the solicitor’s clerk and the old queen who baked cakes and served them with such grace.

  It was this anxiety which made him drive on Thursday afternoon to Ajodha’s and tell Tara as soon as he saw her that he had come to borrow four thousand dollars to buy a house. She took it well; she said she was glad that he was at last going to be free of the Tulsis. And when Ajodha came in, fanning himself with his hat, Mr Biswas was equally forthright and Ajodha treated the matter as a petty business transaction. Four thousand five hundred dollars at eight per cent, to be repaid in five years.

  Mr Biswas stayed to have a meal with them, and continued to be blunt and loud and full of bounce. It was only when he drove away that his exhilaration left him and he saw that he had involved himself not only in debt but also in deception. Ajodha did not know that the car had not yet been paid for; Ajodha did not know that he was only an unestablished civil servant. And the loan could not be repaid in five years: the interest alone would come to thirty dollars a month.

  Still there were occasions he could have withdrawn. When, for instance, they went to see the house on Friday evening.

  Anxious to show himself worthy of the house, he insisted that the children should put on their best clothes, and urged Shama to say as little as possible when they got there.

  ‘Leave me behind. Leave me behind,’ Shama said. ‘I have no shame for you and I will shame you in front of your high and mighty house-seller.’

  And all the way she kept it up until, just before they turned into Sikkim Street, Mr Biswas lost his temper and said, ‘Yes. You damn well will shame me. Stay and live with your family and leave me alone. I don’t want you to come in with me.’

  She looked surprised. But there was no time for the quarrel to subside. They were in Sikkim Street. He drove the car past the house, parked it some distance away, called to the children to come with him if they wanted to or stay with their mother and continue living with the Tulsis if they wanted to do that, slammed the door and walked away. The children got out and followed him.

  So that the one glimpse Shama had of the house before it was bought was from the moving Prefect. She saw concrete walls softly coloured in the light of the street lamp, with romantic shadows thrown by the trees next door. And she, who might have noticed the grossness of the staircase, the dangerous curve of the beams, the lack of finish in the lattice work and in all the woodwork, she who might have noticed the absence of a back door, the absence of a hundred small but important touches, sat in the car overcome by anger and dread.

  While the children, on their best behaviour, made conversation with the old queen and were pleased by the interest she showed in them and her approval of nearly everything they said. They saw the polished floor, the rich curtains, the celotex ceiling, the morris suite, and they wanted to see little more. They drank tea and ate cakes; while Mr Biswas, not at all displeased by the success of his children, smoked cigarettes and drank whisky with the solicitor’s clerk. When they went upstairs, the solicitor’s clerk went first. It was dark. They did not note the absence of a light on the staircase; the darkness masked the crudity of the construction. Used for so long to the makeshift and the oldfashioned, dazzled by what they had seen, and in the position of guests, they didn’t stop to inquire; and once they had got to the top they were too taken by the bathroom and the green bedrooms and the verandah and the rediffusion set.

  ‘A radio!’ they cried. They had forgotten what it was like to have one.

  ‘I will leave it here if you want it,’ the solicitor’s clerk said, as if offering to pay the rental of the set.

  ‘Well, you like it?’ Mr Biswas asked, when they left.

  There was no doubt that they did. Something so new, so clean, so modern, so polished. They were anxious to win Shama over to it, to get her to see it herself. But in the face of Mr Biswas’s gaiety and triumph Shama was firm. She said she had no intention of shaming Mr Biswas or his children.

  During the week Mrs Tulsi had been ill but placid. With Owad’s return she became maudlin. She spent most of the day in her room, asking for her hair to be soaked in bay rum, and listening for Owad’s footsteps. She sought to win him back by talking about his boyhood and Pundit Tulsi. Abusing no one, raging against no one, the tears flowing from the wells, as it seemed, of her dark glasses, she wove a lengthy tale of injustice, neglect and ingratitude. Her daughters came to listen. They came bowed and penitent and respected their brother’s silence by showing themselves solemn and correct. They spoke Hindi; they did not debase themselves; they all tried to look as though they had offended. But Owad’s mood did not break. He did not relate his adventures in Tobago; and the sisters directed the
ir own silent accusations at Shama. Owad spent more time away from home. He mixed with his medical colleagues, a new caste separate from the society from which it had been released. He went south to Shekhar’s. He played tennis at the India Club. And, almost as suddenly as it had started, talk of the revolution ended.

  7. The House

  THE SOLICITOR’S clerk was as good as his word, and as soon as the transaction was completed he and the old queen hurriedly abandoned the house. On Monday night Mr Biswas made his final decision. On Thursday the house awaited him.

  Late on Thursday afternoon they went in the Prefect to Sikkim Street. The sun came through the open windows on the ground floor and struck the kitchen wall. Woodwork and frosted glass were hot to the touch. The inside of the brick wall was warm. The sun went through the house and laid dazzling stripes on the exposed staircase. Only the kitchen escaped the sun; everywhere else, despite the lattice work and open windows, was airlessness, a concentration of heat and light which hurt their eyes and made them sweat.

  Without curtains, empty except for the morris suite, with the hot floor no longer shining and polished, the sun showing only grit and scratches and dusty footprints, the house seemed smaller than the children remembered and had lost the cosiness they had noted at night, in the soft lights, with thick curtains keeping out the world. Undraped by curtains, the large areas of lattice work left the house open, to the green of the breadfruit tree next door, the bleedingheart vine thick and tendrilled on the rotting fence, the decaying slum house at the back, the noises of the street.

  They discovered the staircase: unhidden by curtains, it was too plain. Mr Biswas discovered the absence of a back door. Shama discovered that two of the wooden pillars supporting the staircase landing were rotten, whittled away towards the bottom and green with damp. They all discovered that the staircase was dangerous. At every step it shook, and at the lightest breeze the sloping corrugated iron sheets rose in the middle and gave snaps which were like metallic sighs.

  Shama did not complain. She only said, ‘It look as though we will have to do a few repairs before we move.’

  In the days that followed they made more discoveries. The landing pillars had rotted because they stood next to a tap which emerged from the back wall of the house. The water from the tap simply ran into the ground. Shama spoke about the possibility of subsidence. Then they discovered that the yard had no drainage of any sort. When it rained the water from the pyramidal roof fell directly to the ground, turned the yard into mud and spattered walls and doors, the bottoms of which appeared to have been sprayed with wet soot.

  They discovered that none of the windows downstairs would close. Some grated on the concrete sill; others had been so warped by the sun that their bolts could no longer make contact with the grooves. They discovered that the front door, elegant with white woodwork and frosted panes and with herringbone lattice work on either side, flew open in a strong wind even when locked and bolted. The other drawingroom door could not open at all: it was pinned to the wall by two floorboards which had risen, pressing against each other, to make a miniature and even mountain range.

  ‘Jerry-builder,’ Mr Biswas said.

  They discovered that nothing was faced and that the lattice work was everywhere uneven, and split in many places by nails which showed their large heads.

  ‘Tout! Crook!’

  They discovered that upstairs no door resembled any other, in shape, structure, colour or hinging. None fitted. One stood six inches off the floor, like the swingdoor of a bar.

  ‘Nazi and blasted communist!’

  The upper floor curved towards the centre and from downstairs they noted a corresponding bend in the two main beams. Shama thought that the floor curved because the inner verandah wall it supported was made of brick.

  ‘We’ll knock it down,’ Shama said, ‘and put a wood partition.’

  ‘Knock it down!’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Be careful you don’t knock down the house. For all we know it is that same wall which is keeping the whole damned thing standing.’

  Anand suggested a pillar rising from the drawingroom downstairs to support the sagging beams.

  Soon they began to keep their discoveries secret. Anand discovered that the square pillars of the front fence, so pretty with Morning Glory, were made of hollow bricks that rested on no foundation. The pillars rocked at the push of a finger. He said nothing, and only suggested that the mason might have a look at the fence when he came.

  The mason came to build a concrete drain around the house and a low sink below the tap at the back. He was a squat Negro with catlike whiskers and he sang continually:

  There was a man called Michael Finnegan

  Who grew whiskers on his chin again.

  His gaiety depressed them all.

  Daily they moved between the hostile Tulsi house and Sikkim Street. They became short-tempered. They took little joy in the morris suite or the rediffusion set.

  ‘ “I will leave the rediffusion set for you.” ’ Mr Biswas said, mimicking the solicitor’s clerk. ‘You old crook. If I don’t see you roasting in hell!’

  The rental of the rediffusion set was two dollars a month. Landrent was ten dollars a month, six dollars more than he paid for his room. Rates, which had always seemed as remote as fog or snow, now had a meaning. Landrent, rediffusion set, rates, interest, repairs, debt: he was discovering commitments almost as fast as he discovered the house.

  Then the painters came, two tall sad Negroes who had been out of work for some time and were glad to get a job at the very low wages Mr Biswas had to borrow to pay them. They came with their ladders and planks and buckets and brushes and when Anand heard them jumping about on the top floor he became anxious and went up to reassure himself that the house was not falling down. The painters did not share Anand’s concern. They continued to jump from plank to floor and he was too ashamed to tell them anything. He stayed to watch. The fresh distemper made the long, ominous crack in the verandah wall clearer and more ominous. While the rediffusion set filled the hot empty house with light music and bright commercials, the painters talked, sometimes of women, but mostly of money. When, from the rediffusion set, a woman sang, as from some near but inaccessible city of velvet, glass and gold where all was bright and secure and even sadness was beautiful:

  They see me night and day time

  Having such a gay time.

  They don’t know what I go through –

  one painter said, ‘That’s me, boy. Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.’ Yet he had never laughed or smiled. And for Anand the songs that came over and over from the rediffusion set into the hollow, distemper-smelling house were forever after tinged with uncertainty, threat and emptiness, and their words acquired a facile symbolism which would survive age and taste: ‘Laughing on the Outside’, ‘To Each His Own’, ‘Till Then’, ‘The Things We Did Last Summer’.

  And more expense was to come. Sewer pipes had not been laid down in this part of the city and the house had a septic tank. Before the painters left, the septic tank became choked. The lavatory bowl filled and bubbled; the yard bubbled; the street smelled. Sanitary engineers had to be called in, and a new septic tank built. By this time the money Mr Biswas had borrowed had run out altogether, and Shama had to borrow two hundred dollars from Basdai, the widow who took in boarders.

  But at last they could leave the Tulsi house. A lorry was hired – more expense – and all the furniture packed into it. And it was astonishing how the furniture, to which they had grown accustomed, suddenly, exposed on the tray of the lorry in the street, became unfamiliar and shabby and shameful. About to be moved for the last time: the gatherings of a lifetime: the kitchen safe (encrusted with varnish, layer after layer of it, and paint of various colours, the wire-netting broken and clogged), the yellow kitchen table, the hatrack with the futile glass and broken hooks, the rockingchair, the fourposter (dismantled and unnoticeable), Shama’s dressingtable (standing against the cab, without its mirror, with all the dra
wers taken out, showing the unstained, unpolished wood inside, still, after all these years, so raw, so new), the bookcase and desk, Théophile’s bookcase, the Slumberking (a pink, intimate rose on the headrest), the glass cabinet (rescued from Mrs Tulsi’s drawingroom), the destitute’s diningtable (on its back, its legs roped around, loaded with drawers and boxes), the typewriter (still a brilliant yellow, on which Mr Biswas was going to write articles for the English and American Press, on which he had written his articles for the Ideal School, the letter to the doctor): the gatherings of a lifetime for so long scattered and even unnoticed, now all together on the tray of the lorry. Shama and Anand rode with the lorry. Mr Biswas drove the girls; they carried dresses which would have been damaged by packing.

  They could only unpack that evening. A rough meal was prepared in the kitchen and they ate in the chaotic diningroom. They said little. Only Shama moved and spoke without constraint. The beds were mounted upstairs. Anand slept in the verandah. He could feel the floor curving below him towards the offending brick wall. He placed his hand on the wall, as if that might give him some idea of its weight. At every footstep, particularly Shama’s, he could feel the floor shake. When he closed his eyes he experienced a spinning, swaying sensation. Hurriedly he opened them again to reassure himself that the floor had not sunk further, that the house still stood.

  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.