A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [273]
‘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 means, to self-improvement. The encouragement and guidance of the department were not needed. And when the department was attacked, no one, not even those who had enjoyed its ‘leadership’ courses, knew how to defend it. And Miss Logie, like Mr Burnett, left.
Mr Biswas slipped from his low eminence as a civil servant and returned to the Sentinel. The car was now his own; but he was getting less than those who had stayed with the paper. He had paid five hundred dollars of the debt; now he could hardly pay the interest. He wanted to sell the car, and an Englishman came to the house one day to look it over. Shama was exceedingly rude, and the Englishman, finding himself in the centre of a family quarrel, withdrew. Mr Biswas gave in. Shama had never reproached him for the house, and he had begun to credit her with great powers of judgement. Again and again she said she was not worried, that