House for Mister Biswas Part 23

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 compet.i.tion 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 want to be a pauper.' to be a pauper.'

'O G.o.d! 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 n.o.body 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 bra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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? 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! right! Go ahead and buy it and put it on your old house. I don't care what it look like now.' 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 embarra.s.sed.

'I was doing a job in Swampland,' Mr Maclean said. 'I was just pa.s.sing 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 pujas we always use pitchpine.' To burn the offerings in a quick, scented flame. 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 Sus.h.i.+la 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 b.u.mps and dents he could attribute to Sus.h.i.+la'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 gra.s.s, 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-cla.s.s 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-gra.s.s 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.

The cedar floorboards came, rough and bristly, and impregnated the site with their smell. When Mr Maclean planed them they seemed to acquire a richer colour. He fitted them together as neatly as he had said, nailing them down with headless nails and filling in the holes at the top with wax mixed with sawdust which dried hard and could scarcely be distinguished from the wood. The back bedroom was floored, and part of the drawingroom, so that, with care, it was possible to walk straight up to the bedroom.

Then Mr Maclean said, 'When you get more materials you must let me know.'

He had worked for a fortnight for eight dollars.

Perhaps he didn't pay seven dollars for the cedar, Mr Biswas thought. Only five or six.

The house now became a playground for the children of the barracks. They climbed and they jumped; many took serious falls but, being barrack children, came to little harm. They nailed nails into the c.r.a.paud pillars and the cedar floor; they bent nails for no purpose; they flattened them to make knives. They left small muddy footprints on the floor and on the crossbars of the frame; the mud dried and the floor became dusty. The children drove out the poultry and Mr Biswas tried to drive out the children.

'You blasted little b.i.t.c.hes! Let me catch one of you and see if I don't cut his foot off.'

As the sugarcane grew taller the dispossessed labourers grew surlier, and Mr Biswas began to receive threats, delivered as friendly warnings.

Seth, who had often spoken of the treachery and danger-ousness of the labourers, now only said, 'Don't let them frighten you.'

But Mr Biswas knew of the many killings in Indian districts, so well planned that few reached the courts. He knew of the feuds between villages and between families, conducted with courage, ingenuity and loyalty by those same labourers who, as wage-earners, were obsequious and negligible.

He decided to take precautions. He slept with a cutla.s.s and a poui poui stick, one of his father's, at the side of his bed. And from Mrs Seeung, the Chinese cafe-owner at Arwacas, he got a puppy, a hairy brown and white thing of indeterminate breed. The first night at the barracks the puppy whined at being left outside, scratched at the door, fell off the step and whined until he was taken in. When Mr Biswas woke up next morning he found the puppy in bed beside him, lying quite still, its eyes open. At Mr Biswas's first gesture, which was one of surprise, the puppy jumped to the floor. stick, one of his father's, at the side of his bed. And from Mrs Seeung, the Chinese cafe-owner at Arwacas, he got a puppy, a hairy brown and white thing of indeterminate breed. The first night at the barracks the puppy whined at being left outside, scratched at the door, fell off the step and whined until he was taken in. When Mr Biswas woke up next morning he found the puppy in bed beside him, lying quite still, its eyes open. At Mr Biswas's first gesture, which was one of surprise, the puppy jumped to the floor.

He called the puppy Tarzan, to prepare it for its duties. But Tarzan turned out to be friendly and inquisitive, and a terror only to the poultry. 'The hens stop laying because of your dog,' the poultry owners complained, and it looked true enough, for Tarzan often had pieces of feather stuck in the corners of his mouth, and he was continually bringing trophies of feathers to the room. Then one day Tarzan ate an egg and immediately developed a taste for eggs. The hens laid their eggs in bush, in places which they thought were secret. Tarzan soon got to know these places as well as the owners of the hens and he often came back to the barracks with his mouth yellow and sticky with egg. The owners of the hens took their revenge. One afternoon Mr Biswas found Tarzan's muzzle smeared with fowl droppings, and Tarzan in great misery at this novel and continuing discomfort.

The placards in Mr Biswas's room increased. He worked more slowly on them now, using black and red estate ink and pencils of many colours. He filled the blank s.p.a.ce with difficult decorations and his letters became intricate and ornamented.

Thinking it would help him if he read novels, he bought a number of the cheap Reader's Library editions. The covers were dark purple with gold lettering and decorations. In the stall at Arwacas they had looked attractive, but in his room he could scarcely bear to touch them. The gilt stuck to his fingers and the covers reminded him of funeral palls and of those undertakers' horses that were draped with the colours of death every day.

The sun shone and the rain fell. The roof didn't leak. But the asphalt began to melt and hung limply down: a legion of slim, black, growing snakes. Occasionally they fell, and, falling, curled and died.

Late one night, when he had put out the oil lamp and was in bed, he heard footsteps outside his room.

He lay still, listening. Then he jumped out of bed, grabbed his stick and deliberately knocked against the kitchen safe and table and Shama's dressingtable. He stood at the side of the door and violently pushed out the top half, his body protected by the lower half.