A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [118]
‘Who digging? Look.’ She pointed to Edgar’s mounds of earth. ‘You is the big digger.’
He gave an annoyed little laugh.
For some time they were silent. Then she said, ‘You didn’t even get a pundit or anything before you plant the first pillar.’
‘Look. I get enough good luck the last time Hari come and bless the shop. Remember that.’
‘I not going to live in that house or even step inside it if you don’t get Hari to come and bless it.’
‘If Hari come and bless it, it wouldn’t surprise me if nobody at all even get a chance to live in it.’
But she couldn’t undo the frames and the pillars, and in the end he agreed. She went back to Hanuman House with an urgent message for Hari, and next morning Mr Biswas told Mr Maclean to wait until Hari had done his business.
Hari came early, neither interested nor antagonistic, just constipatedly apathetic. He came in normal clothes, with his pundit’s gear in a small cardboard suitcase. He bathed at one of the barrels behind the barracks, changed into a dhoti in Mr Biswas’s room and went to the site with a brass jar, some mango leaves and other equipment.
Mr Maclean had got Edgar to clean out a hole. In his thin voice Hari whined out the prayers. Whining, he sprinkled water into the hole with a mango leaf and dropped a penny and some other things wrapped in another mango leaf. Throughout the ceremony Mr Maclean stood up reverentially, his hat off.
Then Hari went back to the barracks, changed into trousers and shirt, and was off.
Mr Maclean looked surprised. ‘That is all?’ he asked. ‘No sharing-out of anything – food and thing – as other Indians does do?’
‘When the house finish,’ Mr Biswas said.
Mr Maclean bore his disappointment well. ‘Naturally. I was forgetting.’
Edgar was putting a pillar into the consecrated hole.
Mr Biswas said to Mr Maclean, ‘Is a waste of a good penny, if you ask me.’
At the end of the week the house had begun to take shape. The floor-frame had been put on, and the frames for the walls; the roof was outlined. On Monday the back staircase went up after Mr Maclean’s work-bench had been dismantled for its material.
Then Mr Maclean said, ‘We going to come back when you get some more materials.’
Every day Mr Biswas went to the site and examined the skeleton of the house. The wooden pillars were not as bad as he had feared. From a distance they looked straight and cylindrical, contrasting with the squareness of the rest of the frame, and he decided that this was practically a style.
He had to get floorboards; he wanted pitchpine for that, not the five inch width, which he thought common, but the two and a half inch, which he had seen in some ceilings. He had to get boards for the walls, broad boards, with tongue-and-groove. And he had to get corrugated iron for the roof, new sheets with blue triangles stamped on the silver, so that they looked like sheets of an expensive stone rather than iron.
At the end of the month he set aside fifteen of his twenty-five dollars for the house. This was extravagant; he was eventually left with ten.
At the end of the second month he could add only eight dollars.
Then Seth came up with an offer.
‘The old lady have some galvanize in Ceylon,’ he said. ‘From the old brick-factory.’
The factory had been pulled down while Mr Biswas was living at The Chase.
‘Five dollars,’ Seth said. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.’
Mr Biswas went to Hanuman House.
‘How is the house, brother-in-law?’ Chinta asked.
‘Why you asking? Hari bless it, and you know what does happen when Hari bless something.’
Anand and Savi followed Mr Biswas to the back, where everything was gritty with the chaff from the new rice-mill next door, and the iron sheets were stacked like a very old pack of cards against the fence. The sheets were of varying shapes, bent, warped and richly rusted, with corners curled into vicious-looking hooks, corrugations irregularly flattened out, and nail-holes everywhere,