A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [268]
The lot next door was practically empty. At the far end it contained only a neat two-roomed building, the office of a friendly society; so that Mr Biswas had no neighbours on one side. Mr Biswas did not like the clerk’s concentration. But he decided to keep cool.
‘You happy in Mucurapo?’ he asked. ‘Eh, but what I saying? Is Morvant, not so?’
‘The old queen don’t care for the area. Damp, you know.’
‘And the mosquitoes. I can imagine. I hear that is bad for the heart.’
‘Still,’ the clerk said. ‘We got to keep on trying.’
‘You sell the Morvant house yet?’
‘Not yet. But I have a lot of offers.’
‘And you thinking of building here again.’
‘Want to put up a lil house like yours. Two-storey.’
‘You not putting up any damn two-storey house here, you old jerry-building tout!’
The clerk stopped pacing and came to the fence, scarlet and green with a bougainvillaea Mr Biswas had planted. Over the bougainvillaea he wagged a long finger in Mr Biswas’s face and said, ‘Mind your mouth! Mind your mouth! You say enough to spend a nice lil time in jail. Mind your mouth! It look like you don’t know the law.’
‘The City Council not going to pass this one. I pay rates and I have my rights.’
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You just mind your mouth, you hear.’
When the solicitor’s clerk left, Mr Biswas walked about the yard, trying to imagine the effect in the street of two tall boxes side by side. He walked and looked and pondered and gauged. Then, before the sun went down, he called out, ‘Shama! Shama! Bring a ruler or your tape measure.’
She brought a ruler and Mr Biswas began measuring the width of his lot foot by foot, starting from the half-empty lot and working towards the house of the old Indian, who had observed everything, rocking, his Chinese face wrinkled with smiles.
‘He come to build another one, eh?’ he called out, when Mr Biswas was near enough. ‘That don’t surprise me at all.’
‘He going to build it over my dead body,’ Mr Biswas called back, measuring.
The old man rocked, greatly amused.
‘Aha!’ Mr Biswas said, when he got to the end of the lot. ‘Aha! I always suspected.’ He stooped and started to measure back to the half-empty lot, while the old man rocked and chuckled.
‘Shama!’ Mr Biswas said, running to the kitchen. ‘Where you have the deed for the house?’
‘In the bureau.’
She went up to get it. She brought it down and Mr Biswas read.
‘Aha! The old tout! Shama, we going to get a bigger yard.’
By accident or design the fence the solicitor’s clerk had put up was a full twelve feet inside the boundary indicated in the deed.
‘I always thought,’ Shama said, ‘that we didn’t have a fifty-foot frontage.’
‘Frontage, eh?’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Nice word, Shama. But you’re picking up a lot of nice words in your old age, you know.’
And the solicitor’s clerk appeared in the street no more.
‘So you catch him then,’ the old man said. ‘But you must say this for him. He was a sharp fellow.’
‘Didn’t fool me,’ Mr Biswas said.
In the extra space Mr Biswas planted a laburnum tree. It grew rapidly. It gave the house a romantic aspect, softened the tall graceless lines, and provided some shelter from the afternoon sun. Its flowers were sweet, and in the still hot evenings their smell filled the house.
Epilogue
BEFORE THE end of the year Owad left Port of Spain. After his marriage to Dorothy’s cousin, the Presbyterian violinist, he left the Colonial Hospital and moved to San Fernando, where he set up in private practice. And at the end of the year the Community Welfare Department was abolished. It was not because of Shekhar’s party; that had disintegrated even before, when all four of its candidates were defeated in the colony’s first general election, encouraging Shekhar (‘The Poor Man’s Friend’, according to his posters) to withdraw from public life and concentrate on his cinemas. The department was abolished because it had grown archaic. Thirty, twenty or even ten years before, there would have been people to support it. But the war, the American bases, an awareness of America had given everyone the urge, and many the