A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [265]
But at last they could leave the Tulsi house. A lorry was hired – more expense – and all the furniture packed into it. And it was astonishing how the furniture, to which they had grown accustomed, suddenly, exposed on the tray of the lorry in the street, became unfamiliar and shabby and shameful. About to be moved for the last time: the gatherings of a lifetime: the kitchen safe (encrusted with varnish, layer after layer of it, and paint of various colours, the wire-netting broken and clogged), the yellow kitchen table, the hatrack with the futile glass and broken hooks, the rockingchair, the fourposter (dismantled and unnoticeable), Shama’s dressingtable (standing against the cab, without its mirror, with all the drawers taken out, showing the unstained, unpolished wood inside, still, after all these years, so raw, so new), the bookcase and desk, Théophile’s bookcase, the Slumberking (a pink, intimate rose on the headrest), the glass cabinet (rescued from Mrs Tulsi’s drawingroom), the destitute’s diningtable (on its back, its legs roped around, loaded with drawers and boxes), the typewriter (still a brilliant yellow, on which Mr Biswas was going to write articles for the English and American Press, on which he had written his articles for the Ideal School, the letter to the doctor): the gatherings of a lifetime for so long scattered and even unnoticed, now all together on the tray of the lorry. Shama and Anand rode with the lorry. Mr Biswas drove the girls; they carried dresses which would have been damaged by packing.
They could only unpack that evening. A rough meal was prepared in the kitchen and they ate in the chaotic diningroom. They said little. Only Shama moved and spoke without constraint. The beds were mounted upstairs. Anand slept in the verandah. He could feel the floor curving below him towards the offending brick wall. He placed his hand on the wall, as if that might give him some idea of its weight. At every footstep, particularly Shama’s, he could feel the floor shake. When he closed his eyes he experienced a spinning, swaying sensation. Hurriedly he opened them again to reassure himself that the floor had not sunk further, that the house still stood.
Every afternoon they had seen an elderly Indian rocking contentedly in the verandah of the house next door. He had a square, heavy-lidded face that was almost Chinese; he always looked impassive and sleepy. Yet when Mr Biswas, pursuing his policy of getting on good terms with the neighbours, greeted him, the man brightened at once, sat forward in his rockingchair and said, ‘You have been doing a lot of repairs.’
Mr Biswas took the man’s words as an invitation to his verandah. His house was new and well-built; the walls were solid, the floor even and firm, the woodwork everywhere neat and finished. There was no fence; and a shed of rusted corrugated iron and grey-black boards abutted at the back of the house.
‘Nice house you have here,’ Mr Biswas said.
‘With the help of God and the boys we manage to build it. Still have to put up a fence and build a kitchen, as you see. But that could wait for the time being. You had to do a lot of repairs.’
‘A few things here and there. Sorry about the septic tank.’
‘You don’t have to be sorry about that. I did expect it to happen even before. He build it himself.’
‘Who? The man?’
‘And not only that. He build the whole house himself. Working on Saturday and Sunday and in the afternoons. It was like a hobby with him. If he employ a carpenter I didn’t see it. And I better warn you. He do all the wiring too. The man was a joke, man. I don’t know how the City Council pass a house like that. The man used to bring all sort of tree-trunk and tree-branch to use as rafters and beams.’
He was an old man, pleased that after a lifetime, with the help of his sons, he had built a solid, well-made house. The past lay in the shed at the back of his house, in the ruinous wooden houses still in the street. He spoke only out