A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [122]
Then, biting his nails one evening, he broke off a piece of a tooth. He took the piece out of his mouth and placed it on his palm. It was yellow and quite dead, quite unimportant: he could hardly recognize it as part of a tooth: if it were dropped on the ground it would never be found: a part of himself that would never grow again. He thought he would keep it. Then he walked to the window and threw it out.
One Saturday Seth said, while they were by the unfinished house, ‘What’s the matter, Mohun? You are the colour of this.’ He placed his large hand on one of the grey uprights.
And Mr Maclean called. Someone he knew had offered him some timber at a bargain price. It would be enough to wall one room.
They went to look at the house. Mr Maclean saw the asphalt hanging from the roof but said nothing about it. The floorboards in the back bedroom had begun to shrink, cracking and cambering. Mr Maclean said, ‘The man did say that the wood was cured. But cedar is a damn funny wood. It does never cure at all.’
The new timber was bought. It was cedar.
‘No tongue-and-groove,’ Mr Maclean said.
Mr Biswas said nothing.
Mr Maclean understood. He had seen this apathy overcome the builders of houses again and again.
The back bedroom was walled. The door to the partially floored drawingroom was built and hung. The door to the non-existent front bedroom was built and nailed into the doorway: ‘To prevent accident,’ Mr Maclean said, ‘in case you want to move in right away.’ Mr Biswas had wanted doors with panels; he got planks of cedar nailed to two cross bars. The window was built in the same fashion and hung; the new black bolts gleamed on the new wood.
‘It coming along nice,’ Mr Maclean said.
Into Mr Biswas’s busy, exhausted mind came the thought: ‘Hari blessed it. Shama made him bless it. They gave the galvanized iron and they blessed it.’
His sleep was broken by dreams. He was in the Tulsi Store. There were crowds everywhere. Two thick black threads were chasing him. As he cycled to Green Vale the threads lengthened. One thread turned pure white; the black thread became thicker and thicker, purple-black and monstrously long. It was a rubbery black snake; it developed a comic face; it found the chase funny and said so to the white thread, now also a snake.
When he passed the house and saw the black snakes hanging from the roof, he touched a crapaud pillar and said, ‘Hari blessed it.’ He remembered the suitcase, the whining prayers, the sprinkling with the mango leaf, the dropping of the penny. ‘Hari blessed it.’
He was on a hill, a bare, brown-green hill. It was hot but the wind was cool and blew his hair. A woman was at the foot of the hill. She was crying and coming to him for help. He felt her pain but didn’t want to be seen. What help could he give? And the woman – Shama, Anand, Savi, his mother – kept coming up the hill. He heard her sobs and wanted to cry to her to go away.
Tarzan was whining outside his door.
One of his paws had been damaged.
‘You like eggs too much.’
Then he remembered the dispossessed labourers.
Some nights later he was awakened by barking and shouts.
‘Driver! Driver!’
He opened the top half of the door.
‘They set fire to Dookinan land,’ the watchman said.
He put on his clothes and hurried to the spot, followed by excited labourers.
There was no great danger or damage. Dookinan’s plot was small and was separated from the other fields by a trace and a ditch. Mr Biswas ordered the boundary canes of the adjoining fields to be cut, and the labourers, though disappointed at the blaze, which from a distance had promised much, worked with zest. The firelight lit up their bodies and kept away the chill.
The tall red and yellow flames shrank; the trash smouldered, red and black, crackled and collapsed, uncovering the red heart of the fire, quickly cooling to black and grey. Glowing scraps rose, twinkling redly, blackened and diminished. At the roots the canes