A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [96]
‘Is you who get me in this. You and your family. Look at me. I look like Seth? You could look at me and say that this is my sort of work?’
He came back from the fields sweated, itching and dusty, bitten by flies and other insects, his skin torn and tender. He welcomed the sweating and the fatigue and the sensation of burning on his face. But he hated the itching, and dried dirt on his fingernails tortured him as acutely as the sound of slate pencils on slates or shovels on concrete.
The barrackyard, with its mud, animal droppings and the quick slime on stale puddles, gave him nausea, especially when he was eating fish or Shama’s pancakes. He took to eating at the green table in the room, hidden from the front door, his back to the side window, and determined not to look up at the black, furry underside of the galvanized iron roof. As he ate he read the newspapers on the wall. The smell of damp and soot, old paper and stale tobacco reminded him of the smell of his father’s box, under the bed which rested on tree-branches buried in the earth floor.
He bathed incessantly. The barracks had no bathroom but at the back there were waterbarrels under the spouts which drained off the water from the roof. However quickly the water was used, there were always larvae of some sort on its surface, jumpy jellylike whiskery things, perfection in their way. Mr Biswas stood in pants and sabots on a length of board next to a barrel and threw water over himself with a calabash dipper. He sang Hindi songs and In the snowy and the blowy while he did so. Afterwards he wrapped a towel around his waist, took off his pants and then, in towel and sabots, made a dash for his room. Since there was no side door to his room, he had to run around to the front, come into full view of all twelve kitchens and all twelve rooms, then bound into his own.
One day the towel dropped off.
‘Is you,’ he told Shama, after a terrible day in the fields. ‘Is you and your family who get me in this.’
Shama, who had herself spent a day of humiliation at the barracks, cooked one of her especially bad meals, dressed Anand, a boy now big enough to talk, and took him to Hanuman House.
On Saturday, after he had paid the labourers, Seth smiled and said, ‘Your wife say to look in the top righthand drawer of her bureau and get her pink bodice, and look in the bottom of the lefthand corner of the middle drawer for the pantaloons for the boy.’
‘Ask my wife, which boy?’
But Mr Biswas explored the alien drawers.
‘I nearly forget,’ Seth said, just before he left. ‘That shop at The Chase. Well, it insuranburn now.’
Seth took out a roll of dollar notes from his trouser pocket and displayed it like a magician. Note by note, he counted the roll into Mr Biswas’s hand. It came to seventy-five dollars, the sum he had mentioned in the Rose Room at Hanuman House.
Mr Biswas was impressed and grateful. He determined to put his money aside, and add to it, until he had enough to build his house.
He had thought deeply about this house, and knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted, in the first place, a real house, made with real materials. He didn’t want mud for walls, earth for floor, tree branches for rafters and grass for roof. He wanted wooden walls, all tongue-and-groove. He wanted a galvanized iron roof and a wooden ceiling. He would walk up concrete steps into a small verandah; through doors with coloured panes into a small drawingroom; from there into a small bedroom, then another small bedroom, then back into the small verandah. The house would stand on tall concrete pillars so that he would get two floors instead of one, and the way would be left open for future development. The kitchen would be a shed in the yard; a neat shed, connected to the house by a covered way. And his house would be painted. The roof would be red, the outside walls ochre with chocolate facings, and the windows white.
His talk about houses made Shama fearful and impatient and had even caused quarrels. So he did not tell her of