A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [2]
Mr Biswas had built two houses of his own and spent much time looking at houses. Yet he was inexperienced. The houses he had built had been crude wooden things in the country, not much better than huts. And during his search for a house he had always assumed new and modern concrete houses, bright with paint, to be beyond him; and he had looked at few. So when he was faced with one which was accessible, with a solid, respectable, modern front, he was immediately dazzled. He had never visited the house when the afternoon sun was on it. He had first gone one afternoon when it was raining, and the next time, when he had taken the children, it was evening.
Of course there were houses to be bought for two thousand and three thousand dollars, on a whole lot, in rising parts of the city. But these houses were old and decaying, with no fences and no conveniences of any sort. Often on one lot there was a conglomeration of two or three miserable houses, with every room of every house let to a separate family who couldn’t legally be got out. What a change from those backyards, overrun with chickens and children, to the drawingroom of the solicitor’s clerk who, coatless, tieless and in slippers, looked relaxed and comfortable in his morris chair, while the heavy red curtains, reflecting on the polished floor, made the scene as cosy and rich as something in an advertisement! What a change from the Tulsi house!
The solicitor’s clerk lived in every house he built. While he lived in the house in Sikkim Street he was building another a discreet distance away, at Morvant. He had never married, and lived with his widowed mother, a gracious woman who gave Mr Biswas tea and cakes which she had baked herself. Between mother and son there was much affection, and this touched Mr Biswas, whose own mother, neglected by himself, had died five years before in great poverty.
‘I can’t tell you how sad it make me to leave this house,’ the solicitor’s clerk said, and Mr Biswas noted that though the man spoke dialect he was obviously educated and used dialect and an exaggerated accent only to express frankness and cordiality. ‘Really for my mother’s sake, man. That is the onliest reason why I have to move. The old queen can’t manage the steps.’ He nodded towards the back of the house, where the staircase was masked by heavy red curtains. ‘Heart, you see. Could pass away any day.’
Shama had disapproved from the first and never gone to see the house. When Mr Biswas asked her, ‘Well, what you think?’ Shama said, ‘Think? Me? Since when you start thinking that I could think anything? If I am not good enough to go and see your house, I don’t see how I could be good enough to say what I think.’
‘Ah!’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Swelling up. Vexed. I bet you would be saying something different if it was your mother who was spending some of her dirty money to buy this house.’
Shama sighed.
‘Eh? You could only be happy if we just keep on living with your mother and the rest of your big, happy family. Eh?’
‘I don’t think anything. You have the money, you want to buy house, and I don’t have to think anything.’
The news that Mr Biswas was negotiating for a house of his own had gone around Shama’s family. Suniti, a niece of twenty-seven, married, with two children, and abandoned for long periods by her husband, a handsome idler who looked after the railway buildings at Pokima Halt where trains stopped twice a day, Suniti said to Shama, ‘I hear that you come like a big-shot, Aunt.’ She didn’t hide her amusement. ‘Buying house and thing.’
‘Yes, child,’ Shama said, in her martyr’s way.
The exchange took place on the back steps and reached the ears of Mr Biswas, lying in pants and vest on the Slumberking bed in the room which contained most of the possessions he had gathered after forty-one years. He had carried on a war with Suniti ever since she was a child, but his contempt had never been able to quell her sarcasm. ‘Shama,’ he shouted, ‘tell that girl to go back and help that worthless husband of hers to look after their goats at Pokima Halt.’
The goats were an invention