A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [63]
To such towns the villagers made arduous and infrequent excursions to obtain dry goods, to make complaints to the police, to appear in court; for The Chase could support neither a dry goods store nor a police station nor even a school. Its two most important public buildings were the two rumshops. And it abounded in small food-shops, one of which was Mr Biswas’s.
Mr Biswas’s shop was a short, narrow room with a rusty galvanized iron roof. The concrete floor, barely higher than the earth, was abraded to a pebbly roughness and encrusted with dirt. The walls leaned and sagged; the concrete plaster had cracked and flaked off in many places, revealing mud, tapia grass and bamboo strips. The walls shook easily, but the tapia grass and bamboo strips had given them an astonishing resilience; so that although for the next six years Mr Biswas never ceased to feel an anxiety when someone leaned on the walls or flung sacks of sugar or flour against them, the walls never fell down, never deteriorated beyond the limberness in which he had found them.
At the back of the shop there were two rooms with un-plastered mud walls and a roof of old, rough thatch that extended over an open gallery at one side. The floor of beaten earth had disintegrated and the chickens of the neighbourhood came there to take dust-baths during the heat of the day.
The kitchen was a derelict makeshift structure in the yard. It had crooked tree branches for uprights, assorted bits of corrugated iron for roof, and almost anything for walls: sections of tin, strips of canvas and bamboo, boards from shop boxes. One wall had a space for a window, but the rectangular shape that had been intended had become a rhomboid. The window itself, ill-fitting lengths of unmatched wood held together by two crossbars split by massive nails that had been hammered back flat and grown rusty, the window itself was rectangular and was unable to fill the rhomboid vacancy. Though it was small and stood in the open, the kitchen was always dark. The window by day and the flambeau or fire by night showed that the walls were black and fluffy with soot, as though a new species of spider had been bred there, with the ability to spin webs as black and furry as its legs. Everything smelled of woodsmoke.
But there was space. Space to the back, right up to a boundary that was lost amid a tangle of tall bush, abandoned land called by the villagers and later by Mr Biswas ‘the ’ban-don’. There was more abandoned land to one side; once a well-tilled field, it was now a pasture for those cows of the village that could feed on its weeds and nettles and razor-sharp grass, wild, scrambling growths.
The Tulsis had bought this unprofitable property on the advice of Seth. He was a member of a Local Road Board and had received information, later proved to be worthless, that a trunk road was to be driven through the very spot on which Mr Biswas’s shop stood.
Mr Biswas moved from Hanuman House with little trouble. He had little to move: his clothes, a few books and magazines, his painting equipment. Shama had much more. She had many clothes; and just before she left, she was given bolts of cloth by Mrs Tulsi straight from the shelves of the Tulsi Store. It was Shama, too, who thought of buying pots and pans and cups and plates; and though she got them at cost price from the Tulsi Store, Mr Biswas was disturbed to see that his savings, sign-writing money accumulated during his stay at Hanuman House, had begun to melt even before he had moved.
Their goods barely filled a donkey-cart, and their arrival at The Chase was noted by a waiting crowd with pity and some hostility. The hostility came from rival shopkeepers. And Mr Biswas, shakily perched on one of Shama’s bundles, with the clang of those cost-price but expensive pans in his ears, was unable to ignore the hostility of Shama herself. She had kept up her martyr’s attitude throughout the journey, silently staring at the road through the piquets of the cart, holding on her lap a box containing a Japanese coffee-set of intricate and fantastic design, part