A House for Mr. Biswas (34 page)

‘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, unshining 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 and 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 bottle.

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.

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.