A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [116]
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