A House for Mr. Biswas (33 page)

‘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. ‘Married 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 drawingroom. 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?’

‘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 house-warming? 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 of Jagdat’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 break, 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 T 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 surfer 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.