A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [115]
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.