A House for Mr. Biswas

1. “Amazing Scenes”

To the city of Port of Spain, where with one short break he was to spend the rest of his life, and where at Sikkim Street he was to die fifteen years later, Mr. Biswas came by accident. When he left Hanuman House and his wife and four children, the last of whom he had not seen, his main concern was to find a place to pass the night. It was still early morning. The sun was rising directly above the High Street in a dazzling haze, against which everyone was silhouetted, outlined in gold, and attached to shadows so elongated that movements appeared uncoordinated and awkward. The buildings on either side were in damp shadow.

At the road junction Mr. Biswas had still not decided where to go. Most of the traffic moved north: tarpaulin-covered lorries, taxis, buses. The buses slowed down to pass Mr. Biswas, and the conductors, hanging out from the footboard, shouted to him to come aboard. North lay Ajodha and Tara, and his mother. South lay his brothers. None of them could refuse to take him in. But to none of them did he want to go: it was too easy to picture himself among them. Then he remembered that north, too, lay Port of Spain and Ramchand, his brother-in-law. And it was while he was trying to decide whether Ramchand’s invitation could be considered genuine that a bus, its engine partially unbonneted, its capless radiator steaming, came to a stop inches away with a squeal of brakes and a racking of its tin and wood body, and the conductor, a young man, almost a boy, bent down and seized Mr. Biswas’s cardboard suitcase, saying imperiously, impatiently, “Port of Spain, man, Port of Spain”.

As a conductor of Ajodha’s buses Mr. Biswas had seized the suitcases of many wayfarers, and he knew that in these circumstances a conductor had to be aggressive to combat any possible annoyance. But now, finding himself suddenly separated from his suitcase and hearing the impatience in the conductor’s voice, he was cowed, and nodded. “Up, up, man,” the conductor said, and Mr. Biswas climbed into the vehicle while the conductor stowed away his suitcase.

Whenever the bus stopped to release a passenger or kidnap another, Mr. Biswas wondered whether it was too late to get off and make his way south. But the decision had been made, and he was without energy to go back on it; besides, he could get at his suitcase only with the cooperation of the conductor. He fixed his eyes on a house, as small and as neat as a doll’s house, on the distant hills of the Northern Range; and as the bus moved north, he allowed himself to be puzzled that the house didn’t grow any bigger, and to wonder, as a child might, whether the bus would eventually come to that house.

It was the crop season. In the sugarcane fields, already in parts laid low, cutters and loaders were at work, knee-deep in trash. Along the tracks between fields mudstained, grey-black buffaloes languidly pulled carts carrying high, bristling loads of sugarcane. But soon the land changed and the air was less sticky. Sugarcane gave way to rice-fields, the muddy colour of their water lost in the flawless reflections of the blue sky; there were more trees; and instead of mud huts there were wooden houses, small and old, but finished, painted and jalousied, with fretwork, frequently broken, along the eaves, above doors and windows and around fern-smothered verandahs. The plain fell behind, the mountains grew nearer; but the doll’s house remained as small as ever and when the bus turned into the Eastern Main Road Mr. Biswas lost sight of it. The road was strung with many wires and looked important; the bus moved westwards through thickening traffic and increasing noise, past one huddled red and ochre settlement after another, until the hills rose directly from the road on the right, and from the left came a smell of swamp and sea, which presently appeared, level, grey and hazy, and they were in Port of Spain, where the stale salt smell of the sea mixed with the sharp sweet smells of cocoa and sugar from the warehouses.

He had feared the moment of arrival and wished that the bus would go on and never stop, but when he got down into the yard next to the railway station his uncertainty at once fell away, and he felt free and excited. It was a day of freedom such as he had had only once before, when one of Ajodha’s relations had died and the rumshop had been closed and everybody had gone away. He drank a coconut from a cart in Marine Square. How wonderful to be able to do that in the middle of the morning! He walked on crowded pavements beside the slow, continuous motor traffic, noted the size and number of the stores and cafйs and restaurants, the trams, the high standard of the shop signs, the huge cinemas, closed after the pleasures of last night (which he had spent dully at Arwacas), but with posters, still wet with paste, promising fresh gaieties for that afternoon and evening. He comprehended the city whole; he did not isolate the individual, see the man behind the desk or counter, behind the pushcart or the steering-wheel of the bus; he saw only the activity, felt the call to the senses, and knew that below it all there was an excitement, which was hidden, but waiting to be grasped.

It wasn’t until four, when stores and offices closed and the cinemas opened, that he thought of making his way to the address Ramchand had given. This was in the Woodbrook area and Mr. Biswas, enchanted by the name, was disappointed to find an unfenced lot with two old unpainted wooden houses and many makeshift sheds. It was too late to turn back, to make another decision, another journey; and after making inquiries of a Negro woman who was fanning a coal-pot in one shed, he picked his way past bleaching stones, a slimy open gutter and a low open gutter and a low clothes-wire, to the back, where he saw Dehuti fanning a coal-pot in another shed, one wall of which was the corrugated iron fence of the sewer trace.

His disappointment was matched by their surprise when, after the exclamations of greeting, he made it clear that he intended to spend some time with them. But when he announced that he had left Shama, they were welcoming again, their solicitude touched not only with excitement but also with pleasure that in a time of trouble he had come to them.

“You stay here and rest as long as you want,” Ramchand said. “Look, you have a gramophone. You just stay here and play music to yourself.”

And Dehuti even dropped the sullenness with which she always greeted Mr. Biswas, a sullenness which, no longer defensive, held no meaning and was only an attitude fixed by habit, simplifying relationships.

Presently Dehuti’s younger son came back from school and Dehuti said sternly, “Take out your books and let me hear what you learn at school today.”

The boy didn’t hesitate. He took out Captain Cutteridge’s Reader, Standard Four, and read an account of an escape from a German prison camp in 1917.

Mr. Biswas congratulated the boy, Dehuti and Ramchand.

“He is a good little reader,” Ramchand said.

“And what is the meaning of ‘distribute’?” Dehuti asked, still stern.

“Share out,” the boy said.

“I didn’t know that at his age,” Mr. Biswas said to Ramchand.

“And bring out your copy book and show me what you do in arithmetic today.”

The boy took the book out to her and Dehuti said, “It look passable. But I don’t know anything about arithmetic. Take it to your uncle, let him see.”

Mr. Biswas didn’t know anything about arithmetic either, but he saw the approving red ticks and again congratulated the boy, Dehuti and Ramchand.

“This education is a helluva thing,” Ramchand said. “Any little child could pick up. And yet the blasted thing does turn out so damn important later on.”

Dehuti and Ramchand lived in two rooms. One of these Mr. Biswas shared with the boy. And though from the outside the unpainted house with its rusting roof and weatherbeaten, broken boards looked about to fall down, the wood inside had kept some of its colour, and the rooms were clean and well kept. The furniture, including the hatrack with the diamond shaped glass, was brilliantly polished. The area between the kitchen shed and the back room was roofed and partly walled; so that the open yard could be forgotten, and there was room and even privacy.

But at night gruff, intimate whispers came through the partitions, reminding Mr. Biswas that he lived in a crowded city. The other tenants were all Negroes. Mr. Biswas had never lived close to people of this race before, and their proximity added to the strangeness, the adventure of being in the city. They differed from country Negroes in accent, dress and manner. Their food had strange meaty smells, and their lives appeared less organized. Women ruled men. Children were disregarded and fed, it seemed, at random; punishments were frequent and brutal, without any of the ritual that accompanied floggings at Hanuman House. Yet the children all had fine physiques, disfigured only by projecting navels, which were invariably uncovered; for the city children wore trousers and exposed their tops, unlike country children, who wore vests and exposed their bottoms. And unlike country children, who were timid, the city children were half beggars, half bullies.

The organization of the city fascinated Mr. Biswas: the street lamps going on at the same time, the streets swept in the middle of the night, the rubbish collected by the scavenging carts early in the morning; the furtive, macabre sounds of the nightsoil removers; the newsboys, really men; the bread van, the milk that came, not from cows, but in rum bottles stopped with brown paper. Mr. Biswas was impressed when Dehuti and Ramchand spoke proprietorially of streets and shops, talking with the ease of people who knew their way about the baffling city. Even about Ramchand’s going out to work every morning there was something knowing, brave and enviable.

And with Mr. Biswas Ramchand was indeed the knowledgeable townsman. He took Mr. Biswas to the Botanical Gardens and the Rock Gardens and Government House. They went up Chancellor Hill and looked down at the ships in the harbour. For Mr. Biswas this was a moment of deep romance. He had seen the sea, but didn’t know that Port of Spain was really a port, at which ocean liners called from all parts of the world.

Mr. Biswas was amused by Ramchand’s city manners and allowed himself to be patronized by him. Ramchand had in any case always managed to do that, even when he had just stopped being a yard boy at Tara’s. Ostracized from the community into which he was born, he had shown the futility of its sanctions. He had simply gone outside it. He had acquired a loudness and heartiness which was alien and which he did not always carry off easily. He spoke English most of the time, but with a rural Indian accent which made his attempts to keep up with the ever-changing Port of Spain slang absurd. And Mr. Biswas suffered when, as sometimes happened, Ramchand was rebuffed; when, for instance, partly to impress Mr. Biswas, he overdid the heartiness in his relations with the Negroes in the yard and was met with cold surprise.

At the end of a fortnight Ramchand said, “Don’t worry about getting a job yet. You suffering from brain fag, and you got to have lots of rest.”

He spoke without irony, but Mr. Biswas, now practically without money, had begun to feel burdened by his freedom. He was no longer content to walk about the city. He wanted to be part of it, to be one of those who stood at the black and yellow busstops in the morning, one of those he saw behind the windows of offices, one of those to whom the evenings and week-ends brought relaxation. He thought of taking up sign-writing again. But how was he to go about it? Could he simply put up a sign in front of the house and wait?

Ramchand said, “Why you don’t try to get a job in the Mad House? Good pay, free uniform, and a damn good canteen. Everything there five and six cents cheaper. Ask Dehuti.”

“Yes,” she said, “Everything there much cheaper.”

Mr. Biswas saw himself in the uniform, walking alone through long rooms of howling maniacs.

“Well, why the hell not?” he said. “Is something to do.”

Ramchand looked slightly offended. He mentioned difficulties; and though he had contacts and influence, he was not sure that it would create a good impression if he made use of them. “That is the only thing that keeping me back,” he said. “The impression.”

Then one day Mr. Biswas was surprised by the spasms of fear. They were weak and intermittent, but they persisted, and reminded him to look at his hands. The nails were all bitten down.

His freedom was over.

And as a last act of this freedom he decided to go to the specialist the Arwacas doctor had recommended. The specialist’s office was at the northern end of St. Vincent Street, not far from the Savannah. House and grounds suggested whiteness and order. The fence pillars were freshly whitewashed; the brass plaque glittered; the lawn was trimmed; not a piece of earth was out of place on the flower-beds; and on the drive the light-grey gravel, free from impurities, reflected the sunlight.

He went through a white-walled verandah and found himself in a high white room. A Chinese receptionist in a stiff white uniform sat at a desk on which calendar, diary, inkwells, ledgers and lamp were neatly disposed. A fan whirred in one corner. A number of people reclined on low luxurious chairs, reading magazines or talking in whispers. They didn’t look sick: there was not a bandage or an oiled face among them, no smell of bay rum or ammonia. This was far removed from Mrs. Tulsi’s Rose Room; and it was hard to believe that in the same city Ramchand and Dehuti lived in two rooms of a crumbling house. Mr. Biswas began to feel that he had come on false pretences; there was nothing wrong with him.

“You have an appointment?” The receptionist spoke with the nasal, elided Chinese highness, and Mr. Biswas detected hostility in her manner.

Fish-face, he commented mentally.

The receptionist started.

Mr. Biswas realized with horror that he had whispered the word; he had not lost the Green Vale habit of speaking his thoughts aloud. “Appointment?” he said. “I have a letter.” He took out the small brown envelope which the Arwacas doctor had given him. It was creased, dirty, fuzzy along the edges, the corners curled.

The receptionist deftly slit the envelope open with a tortoiseshell knife. As she read the letter Mr. Biswas felt exposed, and more of a fraud than ever. The blunder he had made worried him. He determined to be cautious. He clenched his teeth and tried to imagine whether “fish-face”, heard in a whisper, couldn’t be mistaken for something quite different, something even complimentary.

Fish-face.

The receptionist looked up.

Mr. Biswas smiled.

“You want to make an appointment, or you prefer to wait?” The receptionist was cold.

Mr. Biswas decided to wait. He sat on a sofa, sank right into it, fell back and sank further, his knees rising high. He didn’t know what to do with his eyes. It was too late to get a magazine. He counted the people in the room. Eight. He had a long time to wait. They probably all had appointments; they were all correctly ill.

A short limping man came in noisily, spoke loudly to the receptionist, stumped over to the sofa, sank into it, breathing hard, and stretched out a short straight leg.

At least there was something wrong with him. Mr. Biswas eyed the leg and wondered how the man was going to get up again.

The surgery door opened, a man was heard but not seen, a woman came out, and someone else went in.

A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers.

Mr. Biswas felt the lame man’s eyes on him.

He thought about money. He had three dollars. A country doctor charged a dollar; but illness was clearly more expensive in this room.

The lame man breathed heavily.

Money was too worrying to think about, Bell’s Standard Elocutionist too dangerous. His mind wandered and settled on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which he had read at Ramchand’s. He smiled at the memory of Huckleberry Finn, whose trousers “bagged low and contained nothing”, nigger Jim who had seen ghosts and told stories.

He chuckled.

When he looked up he intercepted an exchange of glances between the receptionist and the lame man. He would have left right then, but he was too deeply wedged in his chair; if he attempted to rise he would create a disturbance and draw attention to himself. He became aware of his clothes: the washed-out khaki trousers with the frayed turn-ups, the washed-out blue shirt with the cuffs given one awkward fold backwards (no shirt size fitted him absolutely: collars were too tight or sleeves too long), the little brown hat resting in the valley formed by his thighs and belly. And he had only three dollars.

You know, I am not a sick man at all.

The lame man cleared his throat noisily, very noisily for a small man, and agitated his stiff leg.

Mr. Biswas watched it.

Suddenly he had levered himself up from the sofa, rocking the lame man violently, and was walking towards the receptionist. Concentrating on his English, he said, “I have changed my mind. I am feeling much better, thank you.” And, putting on his hat, he went towards the door.

“What about your letter?” the receptionist asked, surprised into her Trinidad accent.

“Keep it,” Mr. Biswas said. “File it. Burn it. Sell it.”

He went through the tiled verandah, crossed the black afternoon shadow on the drive, emerged into the sun, noted a bed of suffering zinnias as he moved briskly down the dazzling gravel to St. Vincent Street. The wind from the Savannah was like a blessing. His mind was hot. And now he saw the city as made up of individuals, each of whom had his place in it. The large buildings around the Savannah were white and blank and silent in the heat.

He came to the War Memorial Park, sat on a bench in the shade of a tree and studied the statue of a belligerent soldier. Shadows were black and well-defined and encouraged repose and languor. His stomach was hurting.

His freedom was over, and it had been false. The past could not be ignored; it was never counterfeit; he carried it within himself. If there was a place for him, it was one that had already been hollowed out by time, by everything he had lived through, however imperfect, makeshift and cheating.

He welcomed the stomach pains. They had not occurred for months and it seemed to him that they marked the return of the wholeness of his mind, the restoration of the world; they indicated how far he had lifted himself from the abyss of the past months, and reminded him of the anguish against which everything now had to be measured.

Reluctantly, for it was a pleasure just to sit and let the wind play about his face and neck and down his shirt, he left the park and walked south, away from the Savannah. The quiet, withdrawn houses disappeared; pavements grew narrower and higher and more crowded; there were shops and cafйs and buses, cars, trams and bicycles, horns and bells and shouts. He crossed Park Street and continued towards the sea. In the distance, above the roofs at the end of the street, he saw the tops of masts of sloops and schooners at St. Vincent Jetty.

He passed the courts and came to the Red House, bulky in red sandstone. Part of the asphalt forecourt was marked off in white and lettered RESERVED FOR JUDGES. He went up the central steps and found himself under a high dome. He saw many green notice-boards and an unplaying fountain. The basin of the fountain was wet, and held many dead leaves and empty cigarette packets.

It was busy under the dome, with messengers in khaki uniforms and clerks in well-ironed clothes carrying buff or green folders, and with people continually passing between St. Vincent Street and Woodford Square, where the professional beggars lounged about the bandstand and on benches, so confident of their appearance that they disdained to beg, spending most of their time patching the rags they wore like a uniform, garments thick and shaggy and richly variegated, small rag sewn on to small rag, labours of love. Even about the beggars there was an air of establishment. Woodford Square, cool under the trees and attractively dappled with light, was theirs; they cooked, ate and slept there, disturbed only by occasional political gatherings. They worried no one, and since they all had excellent physiques, and one or two were reputed to be millionaires, no one worried them.

On the green notice-boards, which also served to screen the offices on either side, there were government notices. Mr. Biswas was reading these when he heard someone call out. He turned to see an elderly Negro, respectably dressed, waving to him with a one-armed pair of spectacles.

“You want a certificate?” The Negro’s lips snapped ferociously shut between words.

“Certificate?”

“Birth, marriage, death.” The Negro adjusted his mutilated spectacles low over his nose and from a shirt pocket stuffed with paper and pencils he pulled out a sheet of paper and let his pencil circle impatiently above it.

“I don’t want any certificate.”

The pencil stopped playing. “I can’t understand it.” The Negro put away paper and pencil, sat down on a long, shiny bench, took off his spectacles, thrust the scratched, white end of the remaining arm into his mouth, and shook his legs. “Nobody wanting certificates these days. If you ask me, the trouble is that nowadays it just have too damn many searchers. When I sit down on this bench in 1919 I was the onliest searcher. Today every Tom, Dick or Harry running up and down this place”-he jerked his chin towards the fountain-“calling themself searchers.” His lips snapped ferociously. “You sure you don’t want a certificate? You never know when these things could be useful. I get lots of certificates for Indians, you know. In fact, I prefer getting certificates for Indians. And I could get it for you this afternoon self. I know one of the clerks inside there.” He waved to the office at his back and Mr. Biswas saw a high, polished brown counter and pale green walls, lit, on this bright afternoon, by electric light.

“Helluva job,” the Negro said. “No Christmas and Easter for me, you know. At times like that nobody want any certificate at all. And every day, whether I search for ten or two or no certificates, that damn clerk inside there got to get his twenty cigarettes.”

Mr. Biswas began to move away.

“Still, if you know anybody who want a certificate-birth, death, marriage, marriage in extremis -send them to me. I come here every morning at eight o”clock sharp. The name is Pastor.”

Mr. Biswas left Pastor, overwhelmed by the thought that in the office behind the green notice-board records were kept of every birth and death. And they had nearly missed him! He went down the steps into St. Vincent Street and continued south towards the masts. Even Pastor, for all his grumbling, had found his place. What had driven him on a day in 1919 to take a seat outside the Registrar-General’s Department and wait for illiterates wanting certificates?

He had thought himself back into the mood he had known at Green Vale, when he couldn’t bear to look at the newspapers on the wall. And now he perceived that the starts of apprehension he felt at the sight of every person in the street did not come from fear at all; only from regret, envy, despair.

And, thinking of the newspapers on the barrackroom wall, he was confronted with the newspaper offices: the Guardian, the Gazette, the Mirror, the Sentinel, facing each other across the street. Machinery rattled like distant trains; through open windows came the warm smell of oil, ink and paper. The Sentinel was the paper for which Misir, the Aryan, was a cent-a-line country correspondent. All the stories Mr. Biswas had got by heart from the newspapers in the barrackroom returned to him. Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday when… Passers-by stopped and stared yesterday when…

He turned down a lane, pushed open a door on the right, and then another. The noise of machinery was louder. An important, urgent noise, but it did not intimidate him. He said to the man behind the high caged desk, “I want to see the editor.”

Amazing scenes were witnessed in St. Vincent Street yesterday when Mohun Biswas, 31…

“You got an appointment?”

… assaulted a receptionist.

“No,” Mr. Biswas said irritably.

In an interview with our reporter… In an interview with our special correspondent late last night Mr. Biswas said…

“The editor is busy. You better go and see Mr. Woodward.”

“You just tell the editor I come all the way from the country to see him.”

Amazing scenes were witnessed in St. Vincent Street yesterday when Biswas, 31, unemployed, of no fixed address, assaulted a receptionist at the offices of the TRINIDAD SENTINEL. People ducked behind desks as Biswas, father of four, walked into the building with guns blazing, shot the editor and four reporters dead, and then set fire to the building. Passers-by stopped and stared as the flames rose high, fanned by a strong breeze. Several tons of paper were destroyed and the building itself gutted. In an exclusive interview with our special correspondent late last night Mr. Biswas said…

“This way,” the receptionist said, climbing down from his desk, and led Mr. Biswas into a large room which belied the urgent sounds of typewriters and machinery. Many typewriters were idle, many desks untenanted. A group of men in shirtsleeves stood around a green water-cooler in one corner; other groups of two or three were seated on desks; one man was spinning a swivel-chair with his foot. There was a row of frosted-glass cubicles along one wall, and the receptionist, going ahead of Mr. Biswas, knocked on one of these, pushed the door open, allowed Mr. Biswas to enter, and closed the door.

A small fat man, pink and oiled from the heat, half rose from behind a desk littered with paper. Slabs of lead, edged with type, served as paperweights. And Mr. Biswas was thrilled to see the proof of an article, headlined and displayed. It was a glimpse of a secret; isolated on the large white sheet, the article had an eminence tomorrow’s readers would never see. Mr. Biswas’s excitement increased. And he liked the man he saw before him.

“And what is your story?” the editor asked, sitting down.

“I don’t have a story. I want a job.”

Mr. Biswas saw almost with delight that he had embarrassed the editor; and he pitied him for not having the decision to throw him out. The editor went pinker and looked down at the proof. He was unhappy in the heat and seemed to be melting. His cheeks flowed into his neck; his neck bulged over his collar; his round shoulders drooped; his belly hung over his waistband; and he was damp all over. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Have you worked on a paper before?”

Mr. Biswas thought about the articles he had promised to write, but hadn’t, for Misir’s paper, which had never appeared. “Once or twice,” he said.

The editor looked at the door, as though for help. “Do you mean once? Or do you mean twice?”

“I have read a lot.” Mr. Biswas said, getting out of dangerous ground.

The editor played with a slab of lead.

“Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Jacob Boehme, Mark Twain. Hall Caine, Mark Twain,” Mr. Biswas repeated. “Samuel Smiles.”

The editor looked up.

“Marcus Aurelius.”

The editor smiled.

“Epictetus.”

The editor continued to smile, and Mr. Biswas smiled back, to let the editor know that he knew he was sounding absurd.

“You read those people just for pleasure, eh?”

Mr. Biswas recognized the cruel intent of the question, but he didn’t mind. “No,” he said. “Just for the encouragement.” All his excitement died.

There was a pause. The editor looked at the proof. Through the frosted glass Mr. Biswas saw figures passing in the newsroom. He became aware of the noise again: the traffic in the street, the regular rattle of machinery, the intermittent chatter of typewriters, occasional laughter.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“You have come from the country, you are thirty-one, you have never written, and you want to be a reporter. What do you do?”

Mr. Biswas thought of estate-driver, exalted it to overseer, rejected it, rejected shopkeeper, rejected unemployed. He said, “Sign-painter.”

The editor rose. “I have just the job for you.”

He led Mr. Biswas out of the office, through the newsroom (the group around the water-cooler had broken up), past a machine unrolling sheets of typewritten paper, into a partially dismantled room where carpenters were at work, through more rooms, and then into a yard. Down the lane at one end Mr. Biswas could see the street he had left a few minutes before.

The editor walked about the yard, pointing. “Here and here,” he said. “And here.”

Mr. Biswas was given paint and a brush, and he spent the rest of the afternoon writing signs: No Admittance to Wheeled Vehicles, No Entry, Watch out for Vans, No Hands Wanted.

Around him machinery clattered and hummed; the carpenters beat rhythms on the nails as they drove them in.

Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday when…

“Tcha!” he exclaimed angrily.

Amazing scenes were witnessed yesterday when Mohun Biswas, 31, a sign-painter, set to work on the offices of the TRINIDAD SENTINEL. Passers-by stopped and stared as Biswas, father of four, covered the walls with obscene phrases. Women hid their faces in their hands, screamed and fainted. A traffic jam was created in St. Vincent Street and police, under Superintendent Grieves, were called in to restore order. Interviewed by our special correspondent late last night, Biswas said…

“Didn’t even know who Marcus Aurelius was, the crab-catching son of a bitch.”

… interviewed late last night, Biswas… Mr. Biswas said, “The ordinary man cannot be expected to know the meaning of ‘No Admittance’.”

“What, still here?”

It was the editor. He was less pink, less oiled, and his clothes were dry. He was smoking a short fat cigar; it repeated and emphasized his shape.

The yard was in shadow; the light was going. Machinery clattered more assertively: a series of separate noises; the carpenters’ rhythms had ceased. In the street traffic had subsided, footsteps resounded; the passing of a motor, the trilling of a bicycle bell could be heard from afar.

“But that is good,” the editor said. “Very good indeed.”

You sound surprised, you little chunk of lard. “I got the letters from a magazine.” You think you are the only one laughing, eh?

“I could eat the Gill Sans R,” the editor said. “You know, I don’t really see why you should want to give up your job.”

“Not enough money.”

“Not much in this either.”

Mr. Biswas pointed to a sign. “No wonder you are doing your best to keep people out.”

“Oh. No Hands Wanted.”

“A nice little sign,” Mr. Biswas said.

The editor smiled and then was convulsed with laughter.

And Mr. Biswas, the clown again, laughed too.

“That was for carpenters and labourers,” the editor said. “Come tomorrow, if you are serious. We’ll give you a month’s trial. But no pay.”

A chance encounter had led him to sign-writing. Sign-writing had taken him to Hanuman House and the Tulsis. Sign-writing found him a place on the Sentinel. And neither for the Tulsi Store signs nor for those at the Sentinel was he paid.

He worked with enthusiasm. His reading had given him an extravagant vocabulary but Mr. Burnett, the editor, was patient. He gave Mr. Biswas copies of London papers, and Mr. Biswas studied their style until he could turn out presentable imitations. It was not long before he developed a feeling for the shape and scandalizing qualities of every story. To this he added something of his own. And it was part of his sudden good fortune that he was working for the Sentinel and not for the Guardian or the Gazette. For the facetiousness that came to him as soon as he put pen to paper, and the fantasy he had hitherto dissipated in quarrels with Shama and in invective against the Tulsis, were just the things Mr. Burnett wanted.

“Let them get their news from the other papers,” he said. “That is exactly what they are doing at the moment anyway. The only way we can get readers is by shocking them. Get them angry. Frighten them. You just give me one good fright, and the job is yours.”

Next day Mr. Biswas turned in a story.

Mr. Burnett said, “You made this one up?”

Mr. Biswas nodded.

“Pity.”

The story was headlined:

Four Children Roasted in Hut Blaze

Mother, Helpless, Watches

“I liked the last paragraph,” Mr. Burnett said.

This read: “Sightseers are pouring into the stricken village, and we do not feel we are in a position to divulge its name as yet. ‘In times like this,’ an old man told me last night, ‘we want to be left alone.’ “

Abandoning fiction, Mr. Biswas persevered. And Mr. Burnett continued to give advice.

“I think you’d better go a little easy on the amazing scenes being witnessed. And how about turning your passers-by into ordinary people every now and then? ‘Considerably’ is a big word meaning ‘very’, which is a pointless word any way. And look. ‘Several’ has seven letters. ‘Many’ has only four and oddly enough has exactly the same meaning. I liked your piece on the Bonny Baby Competition. You made me laugh. But you haven’t frightened me yet.”

“Anything funny happen at the Mad House?” Mr. Biswas asked Ramchand that evening.

Ramchand looked annoyed.

And Mr. Biswas gave up the idea of an exposure piece on the Mad House.

On his way to the Sentinel next morning he called at a police station. From there he went to the mortuary, then to the City Council’s stable-yard. When he got to the Sentinel he sat down at a free desk-no desk was yet his-and wrote in pencil:

Last week the Sentinel Bonny Baby Competition was held at Prince’s Building. And late last night the body of a dead male baby was found, neatly wrapped in a brown paper parcel, on the rubbish dump at Cocorite.

I have seen the baby and I am in a position to say that it did not win a prize in our Bonny Baby Competition.

Experts are not yet sure whether the baby was specially taken to the rubbish dump, or simply put out with the rubbish in the usual way.

Hezekiah James, 43, unemployed, who discovered the dead baby, told me…

“Good, good,” Mr. Burnett said. “But heavy. Heavy. Why not ‘I am able’ instead of ‘I am in a position’?”

“I got that from the Daily Express.”

“All right. Let it pass. But promise me that for a whole week you won’t be in a position to do or say anything. It’s going to be hard. But try. What sort of baby?”

“Sort?”

“Black, white, green?”

“White. Blueish when I saw it, really. I thought, though, that we didn’t mention race, except for Chinese.”

“Listen to the man. If I ran across a black baby on the rubbish dump at Banbury, do you think I would just say a baby?”

And the headlines the next day read:

White Baby Found on Rubbish Dump

In Brown Paper Parcel

Did Not Win Bonny Baby Competition

“Just one other thing,” Mr. Burnett said. “Lay off babies for a while.”

The job was urgent: the paper had to be printed every evening; by early morning it had to be in every part of the island. This was not the false urgency of writing signs for shops at Christmas or looking after crops. And even after a dozen years Mr. Biswas never lost the thrill, which he then felt for the first time, at seeing what he had written the day before appear in print, in the newspaper delivered free.

“You haven’t given me a real shock yet,” Mr. Burnett said.

And Mr. Biswas wanted to shock Mr. Burnett. It seemed unlikely that he would ever do so, for in his fourth week he was made shipping reporter, taking the place of a man who had been killed at the docks by a crane load of flour accidentally falling from a great height. It was the tourist season and the harbour was full of ships from America and Europe. Mr. Biswas went aboard German ships, was given excellent lighters, saw photographs of Adolf Hitler, and was bewildered by the Heil Hitler salutes.

Excitement!

The ships sailed away with their scorched tourists, distinguished by their tropical clothes, after only a few hours. But they had come from places with famous names. And in the Sentinel office news from those places spilled out continually on to spools of paper. Outside was the hot sun, the horse-dunged streets, the choked slums, the rooms where he lived with Ramchand and Dehuti; and, beyond that, the level acres of sugarcane, the sunken ricelands, the repetitive labour of his brothers, the short roads leading from known settlement to known settlement, the Tulsi establishment, the old men who gathered every evening in the arcade of Hanuman House and would travel no more. But within the walls of the office every part of the world was near.

He went aboard American ships on the South American tourist route, interviewed businessmen, had difficulty in understanding the American accent, saw the galleys and marvelled at the quantity and quality of the food thrown away. He copied down passenger lists, was invited by a ship’s cook to join a smuggling ring that dealt in camera flash-bulbs, declined and was unable to write the story because it would have incriminated his late predecessor.

He interviewed an English novelist, a man about his own age, but still young, and shining with success. Mr. Biswas was impressed. The novelist’s name was unknown to him and to the readers of the Sentinel, but Mr. Biswas had thought of all writers as dead and associated the production of books not only with distant lands, but with distant ages. He visualized headlines-FAMOUS NOVELIST SAYS PORT OF SPAIN WORLD’S THIRD WICKEDEST CITY-and fed the novelist with leading questions. But the novelist considered Mr. Biswas’s inquiries to have a sinister political motive, and made slow statements about the island’s famed beauty and his desire to see as much of it as possible.

I want to see that frighten anybody, Mr. Biswas thought.

(Years later Mr. Biswas came across the travel-book the novelist had written about the region. He saw himself described as an “incompetent, aggrieved and fanatical young reporter, who distastefully noted my guarded replies in a laborious longhand”.)

Then a ship called on the way to Brazil.

Within twenty-four hours Mr. Biswas was notorious, the Sentinel, reviled on every hand, momentarily increased its circulation, and Mr. Burnett was jubilant.

He said, “You have even chilled me.”

The story, the leading one on page three, read:

Daddy Comes Home in a Coffin

U.S. Explorer’s Last Journey

On Ice

by M. Biswas

Somewhere in America in a neat little red-roofed cottage four children ask their mother every day, “Mummy, when is Daddy coming home?”

Less than a year ago Daddy-George Elmer Edrnan, the celebrated traveller and explorer-left home to explore the Amazon.

Well, I have news for you, kiddies.

Daddy is on his way home.

Yesterday he passed through Trinidad. In a coffin.

Mr. Biswas was taken on the staff of the Sentinel at a salary of fifteen dollars a fortnight.

“The first thing you must do,” Mr. Burnett said, “is to get out and get yourself a suit. I can’t have my best reporter running about in those clothes.”

It was Ramchand who brought about the reconciliation between Mr. Biswas and the Tulsis; or rather, since the Tulsis had few thoughts on the subject, made it possible for Mr. Biswas to recover his family without indignity. Ramchand’s task was easy. Mr. Biswas’s name appeared almost every day in the Sentinel, so that it seemed he had suddenly become famous and rich. Mr. Biswas, believing himself that this was very nearly so, felt disposed to be charitable.

He was at that time touring the island as the Scarlet Pimpernel, in the hope of having people come up to him and say, “You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize.” Every day his photograph appeared in the Sentinel together with his report on the previous day’s journey and his itinerary for the day. The photograph was half a column wide and there was no room for his ears; he was frowning, in an unsuccessful attempt to look menacing; his mouth was slightly open and he stared at the camera out of the corners of his eyes, which were shadowed by the low-pulled brim of his hat. As a circulation raiser the Scarlet Pimpernel was a failure. The photograph concealed too much; and he was too well dressed for ordinary people to accost him in a sentence of such length and correctness. The prizes went unclaimed for days and the Scarlet Pimpernel reports became increasingly fantastic. Mr. Biswas visited his brother Prasad and readers of the Sentinel learned next morning that a peasant in a remote village had rushed up to the Scarlet Pimpernel and said, “You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize.” The peasant was then reported as saying that he read the Sentinel every day, since no other paper presented the news so fully, so amusingly, and with such balance.

Then Mr. Biswas visited his eldest brother Pratap. And there he had a surprise. He found that his mother had been living with Pratap for some weeks. For long Mr. Biswas had considered Bipti useless, depressing and obstinate; he wondered how Pratap had managed to communicate with her and persuade her to leave the hut in the back trace at Pagotes. But she had come and she had changed. She was active and lucid; she was a lively and important part of Pratap’s household. Mr. Biswas felt reproached and anxious. His luck had been too sudden, his purchase on the world too slight. When he got back late that evening to the Sentinel office he sat down at a desk, his own (his towel in the bottom drawer), and with memories coming from he knew not where, he wrote:

Scarlet Pimpernel Spends Night in a Tree

Anguish of Six-Hour Vigil

Oink! Oink!

The frogs croaked all around me. Nothing but that and the sound of the rain on trees in the black night.

I was dripping wet. My motorcycle had broken down miles from anywhere. It was midnight and I was alone.

The report then described a sleepless night, encounters with snakes and bats, the two cars that passed in the night, heedless of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s cries, the rescue early in the morning by peasants who recognized the Scarlet Pimpernel and claimed their prize.

It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas went to Arwacas. He got there in the middle of the morning but did not go to Hanuman House until after four, when he knew the store would be closed, the children back from school and the sisters in the hall and kitchen. His return was as magnificent as he had wished. He was still climbing up the steps from the courtyard when he was greeted by shouts, scampering and laughter.

“You are the Scarlet Pimpernel and I claim the Sentinel prize!”

He went around, dropping Sentinel dollar-tokens into eager hands.

“Send this in with the coupon from the Sentinel. Your money will come the day after tomorrow.”

Savi and Anand at once took possession of him.

Shama, emerging from the black kitchen, said, “Anand, you will get your father’s suit dirty.”

It was as though he had never left. Neither Shama nor the children nor the hall carried any mark of his absence.

Shama dusted a bench at the table and asked whether he had eaten. He didn’t reply, but sat where she had dusted. The children asked questions continually, and it was easy not to pay attention to Shama as she brought the food out.

“Uncle Mohun, Uncle Mohun. You really spend a night up a tree?”

“What do you think, Jai?”

“Ma say you make it up. And I don’t see how you could climb up a tree.”

“I can’t tell you how often I fall down.”

It was better than he had imagined to be back in the sooty green hall with the shelflike loft, the long pitchpine table, the unrelated pieces of furniture, the photographs of Pundit Tulsi, the kitchen safe with the Japanese coffee-set.

“Uncle Mohun, that man did really chase you with a cutlass when you try to give a coupon to his wife?”

“Yes.”

“Why you didn’t give him one too?”

“Go away. You children getting too smart for me.”

He ate and washed his hands and gargled. Shama urged him to be careful of his tie and jacket: as though they were not new to her, as though she had a wifely interest even in clothes she had not known from the start.

He went up the stairs, past the landing with the broken piano. In the verandah he saw Hari, the holy man, and Hari’s wife. They barely greeted him. They both seemed untouched by his new fame or his new suit. Hari, in his pundit’s clothes, looked jaundiced and unwell as always; his wife’s solemnity was tinged with worry and fatigue. Mr. Biswas had often surprised them in similar quiet domestic scenes, withdrawn from the life about them.

He felt he was intruding, and hurried past the door with the coloured glass panes into the Book Room, which smelled mustily of old paper and worm-eaten wood. His books were there with traces of their soaking: bleached covers, stained and crinkled pages. Anand came into the room. His hair was long on his big head; he was in his “home-clothes”. Mr. Biswas held Anand to his leg and Anand rubbed against it. He asked Anand about school and got shy, unintelligible replies. They had little to talk about.

“Exactly when they did start seeing my name in the papers?” Mr. Biswas asked.

Anand smiled, raised one foot off the floor, and mumbled.

“Who see it first?”

Anand shook his head.

“And what they say, eh? Not the children, but the big people.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? But what about the photo? Coming out every day. What they say when they see that?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Only Auntie Chinta say you look like a crook.”

“Who is the pretty baby? Tell me, who is the pretty baby?”

It was Sharna, corning into the room and wandering about it with a baby in her arms.

Mr. Biswas had not seen his fourth child. And now he was embarrassed to look.

Shama came closer but did not raise her eyes. “Who is that man?” she said to the baby. “Do you know that man?”

Mr. Biswas did not respond. He felt suffocated, sickened by the picture of mother and child as by the whole furtive domestic scene in this room above the hall: father, mother, children.

“And who is this?” Shama had taken the baby to Anand. “This is brother.” Anand tickled her chin and the baby gurgled.

“Yes, this is brother. Oh, isn’t she a pretty baby?”

He noticed that Shama had grown a little plumper.

He relented. He took a step towards Shama and immediately she held up the baby to him.

“Her name is Kamla,” Shama said in Hindi, her eyes still on the baby.

“Nice name,” he said in English. “Who give it?”

“The pundit.”

“This one register too, I suppose?”

“But you were here when she was born-” And Shama stopped, as though she had ventured on to dangerous ground.

Mr. Biswas took the baby.

“Give her back to me,” Shama said after a short time. “She might get your clothes dirty.”

The reconciliation was soon complete, and on terms that made Mr. Biswas feel he had won a victory. It was arranged for him to meet Mrs. Tulsi in Port of Spain. She pretended not to know that he had ever left Shama and Hanuman House; he had come to Port of Spain to see the doctor, hadn’t he? Mr. Biswas said he had. She was glad he was better; Pundit Tulsi always used to say that good health was worth any fortune. She never asked about his job, though she said that she expected much from Mr. Biswas and always had; which was why she had been so ready to agree when he came that afternoon to ask for Shama’s hand.

Mrs. Tulsi proposed that Mr. Biswas should move his family to Port of Spain and live with her son and herself. Unless, of course, Mr. Biswas was thinking of buying a house of his own; she was only a mother and had no control over Shama’s fate. If they came, however, they would have the run of the house, except for those rooms used by Owad and herself. In return they would pay eight dollars a month, Shama would cook, do all the housework and collect the rents from her other two houses: a difficult business: not worth the trouble to get an outsider to do it and she was too old to do it herself.

The offer was stupendous: a house, no less. It was the climax of his current good fortune, which must now, he felt, surely end. To delay acceptance, to cover up his nervousness, he talked about the difficulty of collecting rents. Mrs. Tulsi talked about Pundit Tulsi and he listened with solemn sympathy.

They were in the front verandah. Ferns in baskets hung from the eaves, softening the light, cooling the air. Mr. Biswas reclined on his morris chair. It was an experience, so new he could not yet savour it, to find himself turned all at once from a visitor into a dweller, in a house that was solid and finished and painted and elegant all over, with a level, gapless floor, straight concrete walls, panelled doors with locks, a complete roof, a ceiling varnished in the drawingroom, painted elsewhere. Finishing details, which up to a few minutes before he had taken for granted, he now noted, one by one, as for the first time. Nothing had to be added, nothing was makeshift; there were no surprises of mud walls or tree-branches, no secret ways of doing anything; everything worked as it was meant to.

The house stood on high pillars and was one of the newest and most imposing in the street. The district had been recently redeveloped and was rising fast, though in every street there were still a number of dwellings of the stubborn poor, unfenced wooden huts which spoke of the time when the district was part of a sugar-estate. The streets were straight; every lot measured one hundred feet by fifty; and a sewerage trace, almost a street itself, ran down the middle of each block, separating back fences. So there was space; space below the floor of the house itself, space at the back, space at the sides, space for a garden at the front.

Could this luck have been more complete?

Ramchand and Dehuti were delighted. The camplife which Mr. Biswas’s presence enforced on them in their two rooms, though pleasant at first, had begun to be irksome. They were glad, too, that Mr. Biswas had been settled. They felt responsible for that as well as the reconciliation. One unexpected result of the negotiations was that Dehuti attached herself to Hanuman House, joining the dozens of strange women who, to Mr. Biswas’s surprise, were always willing to turn up days before any large function at Hanuman House, abandoning husbands and children, to cook and clean and generally serve, without payment. Dehuti worked hard and was always invited. She often went with the Tulsi sisters to other functions; and at weddings sang the sad songs which had not been sung for her. In time no one thought of her as Mr. Biswas’s sister, not even Mr. Biswas, to whom she became only one of the women attached to the Tulsis.

Once more, then, the furniture moved. And what had choked the barrackroom made little impression on the house at Port of Spain. The fourposter and Shama’s dressingtable went into a bedroom; the kitchen safe with the coffee-set remained in the back verandah with the green table. The hatrack and the rockingchair alone had places of honour, in the front verandah; they were put out every morning and brought in every night, to prevent them being stolen. For the rest, the house remained furnished in the manner which Mrs. Tulsi had thought appropriate to the city. In the drawing-room four cane-bottomed bentwood chairs stood stiffly around a marble topped three-legged table which carried a potted fern on a crocheted and tasselled white cloth. In the diningroom there was a frigid-looking washstand with a ewer and basin. Mrs. Tulsi had brought none of the statuary from Hanuman House but many of the brass vases, which, filled with potted plants, were disposed about the verandah and brought in every night.

Anand and Savi were not easily persuaded to leave Hanuman House. They remained there for some weeks after Shama had left with Myna and Kamla. Then Savi came one Sunday evening with Mrs. Tulsi and the god. She saw the street lamps and the lights of the ships in the harbour. Mrs. Tulsi took her to the Botanical Gardens; she saw the ponds and grassy slopes of the sunken Rock Gardens; she heard the band play; and she stayed. Anand, however, refused to be allured, until the younger god said, “They have a new sweet drink in Port of Spain. Something called Coca Cola. The best thing in the world. Come with me to Port of Spain, and I will get your father to buy you a Coca Cola and some real icecream. In cardboard cups. Real icecream. Not homemade.”

To the children of Hanuman House home-made was not a word of commendation. Home-made icecream was the flavourless (officially coconut) congelation churned out by Chinta after lunch on Christmas Day. She used an old, rusted freezer; she said it “skipped”; and to hasten the freezing she threw lumps of ice into the mixture. The rust from the freezer dripped on the icecream and penetrated it, like a ripple of chocolate.

And it was purely this promise of real icecream and Coca Cola that drew Anand to Port of Spain.

On a Sunday afternoon, when shadows had withdrawn to under the eaves of houses, when the city was hard and bright and empty, with doors closed everywhere, and the glass windows of shops reflected only those opposite, Mr. Biswas took Anand on a tour of Port of Spain. They walked with a sense of adventure in the middle of empty streets; they heard their footsteps; like this, the city could be known; it held no threat. They looked at cafй after cafй, rejecting, at Anand’s insistence, all those which claimed to sell only home-made cakes and icecream. At last they found one which was suitable. On a high red stool, a revelation and luxury in itself, Anand sat at the counter, and the icecream came. In a cardboard tub, frosted, cold to the touch. With a wooden spoon. The cover had to be taken off and licked; the icecream, light pink and spotted with red, steamed: one preparatory delight after another.

“It don’t taste like icecream at all,” Anand said. He cleaned the tub, and it was such a perfectly made thing he would have liked to keep it.

When he sipped the Coca Cola he said, “It is like horse pee.” Which was what some cousin had said of a drink at Hanuman House.

“Anand!” Mr. Biswas said, smiling at the man behind the counter. “You’ve got to stop talking like that. You are in Port of Spain now.”

The house faced east, and the memories that remained of these first four years in Port of Spain were above all memories of morning. The newspaper, delivered free, still warm, the ink still wet, sprawled on the concrete steps, down which the sun was moving. Dew lay on trees and roofs; the empty street, freshly swept and washed, was in cool shadow, and water ran clear in the gutters whose green bases had been scratched and striped by the sweepers’ harsh brooms. Memories of taking the Royal Enfield out from under the house and cycling in a sun still cool along the streets of the awakening city. Stillness at noon: stripping for a short nap: the window of his room open: a square of blue above the unmoving curtain. In the afternoon, the steps in shadow; tea in the back verandah. Then an interview at a hotel, perhaps, and the urgent machinery of the Sentinel. The promise of the evening; the expectation of the morning.

With Mrs. Tulsi and Owad away on week-ends and during the holidays it was possible at times for Mr. Biswas to forget that the house belonged to them. And their presence was hardly a strain. Mrs. Tulsi never fainted in Port of Spain, never stuffed soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub into her nostrils, never wore bay-rum-soaked bandages around her forehead. She was neither distant nor possessive with the children, and her relations with Mr. Biswas became less cautious and formal as his friendship with Owad grew. Owad appreciated Mr. Biswas’s work and Mr. Biswas, flattered to be established as a wit and a madman, developed a respect for the young man who read such big books in foreign languages. They became companions; they went to the cinema and the seaside; and Mr. Biswas showed Owad transcripts, which no paper printed, of court proceedings in cases of rape and brothel-keeping.

Mr. Biswas ceased to ridicule or resent the excessive care Mrs. Tulsi gave to her younger son. Mrs. Tulsi believed that prunes, like fish brains, were especially nourishing for people who exercised their brains, and she fed Owad prunes every day. Milk was obtained for him from the Dairies in Phillip Street; it came in proper milk botdes with silver caps; not like the milk Shama got from a man six lots away who, oblivious of the aspirations of the district, kept cows and delivered milk in rum bottles stopped with brown paper.

Though with Owad and Mrs. Tulsi Mr. Biswas’s attitude towards his children was gently deprecatory, he was watching and learning, with an eye on his own household and especially on Anand. Soon, he hoped, Anand would qualify to eat prunes and drink milk from the Dairies.

His household established, Mr. Biswas set about establishing his tyrannies.

“Savi!”

No answer.

“Savi! Savi! Oh-Savi-yah! Oh, you there. Why you didn’t answer?”

“But I come.”

“Is not enough. You must come and answer.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“All right, Pa.”

“Good. On that table in the corner you will find cigarettes, matches and a Sentinel notebook. Hand them to me.”

“O God! That is all you call me for?”

“Yes. That is all. Answer back again, and I make you read out something for me to take down in shorthand.”

Savi ran out of the room.

“Anand! Anand!”

“Yes, Pa.”

“That is better. You are getting a little training now. Sit down there and call out this speech.”

Anand snatched Bell’s Standard Elocutionist and angrily read out some Macaulay.

“You reading too fast.”

“I thought you was writing shorthand.”

“You answering back too! You see what happen to you children, spending all that time at Hanuman House. Just for that, check while I read back.”

“O God!” And Anand stamped, regretting the dying day.

But the checking went on.

Then Mr. Biswas said, “Anand, this is not a punishment. I ask you to do this because I want you to help me.”

He had discovered, with surprise, that this sentence soothed Anand, and he always offered it at the end of these sessions as a consolation.

It was soon established that he did much of his work in bed and was to be expected to call constantly for paper, pencils to be sharpened, matches, cigarettes, ashtrays to be emptied, books to be brought, books to be taken away. It was also established that his sleep was important. He flew into terrible rages when awakened, even at a time he had fixed.

“Savi,” Shama would say, “go and wake your father.”

“Let Anand go.”

“No, the both of you go.”

To Shama, who began to complain of his “strictness”-a word which gave him a curious satisfaction-he said, “It is not strictness. It is training.”

Mrs. Tulsi, approving if a little surprised, told tales of the severe training to which Pundit Tulsi had submitted his children.

And whenever Mrs. Tulsi was away Shama made claims of her own. She was unable to faint like Mrs. Tulsi but she complained of fatigue and liked to be attended by her children. She got Savi and Anand to walk on her and said in Hindi, “God will bless you,” with such feeling that they considered it a sufficient recompense. Soon, and without this recompense, it became the duty of Savi and Anand to walk on Mr. Biswas as well.

Shama herself did not escape training. She had to file all the stories Mr. Biswas wrote. Mr. Biswas said she did this inefficiently. He gave her his pay-packet unopened and when she said that the money was insufficient he accused her of incompetence. And so Shama started on her laborious, futile practice of keeping accounts. Every evening she sat down at the green table in the back verandah and noted every penny she had spent during the day, slowly filling both sides of the pages of a bloated, oilstained Sentinel notebook with her Mission-school script.

“Your little daily puja, eh?” Mr. Biswas said.

“No,” she said. “I only trying to give you a raise.”

Mr. Biswas never asked to see Shama’s accounts, but she did them partly as a reproach to Mr. Biswas and partly because she enjoyed it. Whatever his other qualities, Mr. Burnett didn’t believe in paying generously and while he edited the Sentinel Mr. Biswas’s salary never rose above fifty dollars a month, money which went almost as soon as it came. Shama’s household accounts were complicated by the rents she collected. She spent the rent money on the household and then had to make it up with the household money. The figures nearly always came out wrong. And every other week-end Shama’s accounting reached a pitch of frenzy, and she was to be seen in the back verandah puzzling over the Sentinel notebook, the rent book, the receipt book, doing innumerable little addition and subtraction sums on scraps of paper and occasionally making memoranda. Shama wrote curious memoranda. She wrote as she spoke and once Mr. Biswas came on a note that said, “Old Creole woman from 42 owe six dollars.”

“I always did say that you Tulsis were a pack of financial geniuses,” he said.

She said, “I would like you to know that I used to come first in arithmetic.”

And when Savi and Anand came to her for help with their arithmetic homework she said, “Go to your father. He was the genius in arithmetic.”

“Know more than you anyway,” he said. “Savi, ought twos are how much?”

“Two.”

“You are your mother’s daughter all right. Anand?”

“One.”

“But what happening these days? They are not teaching as they used to when I was a boy.”

He found fault with all the textbooks.

“Readers by Captain Cutteridge! Listen to this. Page sixty-five, lesson nineteen. Some of Our Animal Friends.” He read in a mincing voice:” ‘What should we do without our animal friends? The cow and the goat give us milk and we eat their flesh when they are killed.’ You hear the savage? And listen. ‘Many boys and girls have to tie up their goats before going to school in the morning, and help to milk them in the afternoon.’ Anand, you tie up your goat this morning? Well, you better hurry up. Is nearly milking time. That is the sort of stuff they fulling up the children head with these days. When I was a boy it used to be the Royal Reader and Blackie’s Tropical Reader. Nesfield’s Grammar!” he exclaimed. “I used to use Macdougall’s.” And he sent Anand hunting for the Macdougall’s, a typographical antique, its battered boards hinged with strips of blue tape.

From time to time he called for their exercise books, said he was horrified, and set himself up as their teacher for a few days. He cured Anand of a leaning towards fancy lettering and got him to abridge the convolutions of his C and J and S. With Savi he could do nothing. As a teacher he was exacting and short-tempered, and when Shama went to Hanuman House she was able to tell her sisters with pride, “The children are afraid of him.”

And, partly to have peace on Sundays, and partly because the combination of the word “Sunday” with the word “school” suggested denial and a spoiling of pleasure, he sent Anand and Savi to Sunday school. They loved it. They were given cakes and soft drinks and taught hymns with catchy tunes.

At home one day Anand began singing, “Jesus loves me, yes I know.”

Mrs. Tulsi was offended. “How do you know that Jesus loves you?”

“‘Cause the Bible tells me so,” Anand said, quoting the next line of the hymn.

Mrs. Tulsi took this to mean that, without provocation, Mr. Biswas was resuming his religious war.

“Roman cat, your mother,” he told Shama. “I thought a good Christian hymn would remind her of happy childhood days as a baby Roman kitten.”

But the Sunday school stopped. In its place, and also to counter the influence of Captain Cutteridge, Mr. Biswas began reading novels to his children. Anand responded but Savi was again a disappointment.

“I can’t see Savi ever eating prunes and drinking milk from the Dairies,” Mr. Biswas said. “Let her go on. All I see her doing is fighting to make up accounts like her mother.”

Unmoved by Mr. Biswas’s insults, Shama continued to write up her accounts, continued to wrestle once a fortnight with the rent money, and continued to serve eviction notices. Unknown to her family and almost unknown to herself, Shama had become a creature of terror to Mrs. Tulsi’s tenants. To get the rents she often had to serve eviction notices, particularly on “old creole woman from 42”. It amused Mr. Biswas to read the stern, grammatical injunctions in Shama’s placid handwriting, and he said, “I don’t see how that could frighten anybody.”

Shama conducted her exciting operations without any sense that they were exciting. She was unwilling to risk serving notices personally. So late at night, when the tenant was almost certain to be in bed, Shama went out with her notice and pot of glue and pasted the notice on the two leaves of the door, so that the tenant, opening his door in the morning, would tear the notice and would not be able to claim that it had not been served.

Mr. Biswas learned shorthand, though of a purely personal sort. He read all the books he could get on journalism, and in his enthusiasm bought an expensive American volume called Newspaper Management, which turned out to be an exhortation to newspaper proprietors to invest in modern machinery. He discovered, and became addicted to, the extensive literature aimed at people who want to become writers; again and again he read how manuscripts were to be presented and was warned not to ring up the busy editors of London or New York newspapers. He bought Short Stories: How to Write Them by Cecil Hunt and How to Write a Book, by the same author.

His salary being increased about this time, he ignored Shama’s pleas and bought a secondhand portable typewriter on credit. Then, to make the typewriter pay for itself, he decided to write for English and American periodicals. But he could find nothing to write about. The books he had read didn’t help him. And then he saw an advertisement for the Ideal School of Journalism, Edgware Road, London, he filled in and cut out the coupon for the free booklet. The booklet came after two months. Printed sheets of various colours fell from it: initialled testimonials from all over the world. The booklet said that the Ideal School not only taught but also marketed; and it wondered whether Mr. Biswas might not find it worth his while to take a course in short story writing as well. The principal of the Ideal School (a bespectacled grandfatherly man, from the spotty photograph) had discovered the secret of every plot in the world and his discovery had been accepted by the British Museum in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Mr. Biswas was impressed but couldn’t spare the money. There had already been a row with Shama when he had used up the salary increase for a further three months to pay for the first two journalism lessons. In due course the first lesson came.

“Even people with outstanding writing ability say they cannot find subjects. But in reality nothing is easier. You are sitting at your desk.” (Mr. Biswas read this in bed.) “You look through your window. But wait. There is an article in that window. The various types of window, the history of the window, windows famous in history, houses without windows. And the story of glass itself can be fascinating. Already, then, you have subjects for two articles. You look through your window and you see the sky. The weather is always a subject of conversation and there is no reason why you cannot make it the subject of a lively article. The demand for such material is enormous. For your first exercise, then, I want you to write four bright articles on the seasons. You may incorporate as many of these hints as you wish:

“Summer. The crowded trains to the seaside, the chink of ice in a glass, the slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab…”

“Slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab,” Mr. Biswas said. “The only fish I see is the fish that does come around every morning in a basket on the old fishwoman head.”

“… the tradesmen’s blinds, the crack of bat on ball on the village green, the lengthening shadows

Mr. Biswas wrote the article on summer; and with the help of the hints, wrote other articles on spring, winter and autumn.

“Autumn is with us again!” ‘Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness,’ as the celebrated poet John Keats puts it so well. We have chopped up logs for the winter. We have gathered in the corn which soon, before a blazing fire in the depths of winter, we shall enjoy, roasted or boiled on the cob…”

He received a letter of congratulation from the Ideal School and was told that the articles were being submitted without delay to the English Press. In the meantime he was asked to apply himself to the second lesson and write pieces on Guy Fawkes Night, Some Village Superstitions, The Romance of Place-Names (“Your vicar is likely to prove a mine of colourful information”), Characters at the Local.

He was stumped. No hints were given for these exercises and he wrote nothing. He didn’t tell Shama. Not long after he received a heavy envelope from England. It contained his articles on the seasons which he had typed out neatly on Sentinel paper and in the manner prescribed by the Ideal School. A printed letter was attached.

“We regret to inform you that your articles have been submitted without success to: Evening Standard, Evening News, The Times, The Tatler, London Opinion, Geographical Magazine, The Field, Country Life. At least two editors spoke highly of the work but were forced to reject it through lack of space. We ourselves feel that work of such quality should not be consigned to oblivion. Why not try your local newspaper? That could very well be the beginning of a regular Nature column. Editors are always looking for new ideas, new material, new writers. At any rate let us know what happens. We at the Ideal like to hear of our pupils’ successes. In the meantime continue with your exercises.”

“Continue with your exercises!” Mr. Biswas said. He thankfully abandoned Guy Fawkes and Characters at the Local, and ignored the expostulations which reached him at regular intervals for the next two years from the Edgware Road.

The typewriter became idle.

“It pay for itself,” Shama said. “No wonder it now have to rest.”

But soon the machine drew him again; and often, while Shama moved heavily about the back verandah and kitchen, Mr. Biswas sat before the typewriter on the green table, inserted a sheet of Sentinel paper, typed his name and address at the top righthand corner, as the Ideal School and all the books had recommended, and wrote:

Escape

by M. Biswas

At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children…

Here he often stopped. Sometimes he went on to the end of the page; sometimes, but rarely, he typed frenziedly for page after page. Sometimes his hero had a Hindi name; then he was short and unattractive and poor, and surrounded by ugliness, which was anatomized in bitter detail. Sometimes his hero had a Western name; he was then faceless, but tall and broad-shouldered; he was a reporter and moved in a world derived from the novels Mr. Biswas had read and the films he had seen. None of these stories was finished, and their theme was always the same. The hero, trapped into marriage, burdened with a family, his youth gone, meets a young girl. She is slim, almost thin, and dressed in white. She is fresh, tender, unkissed; and she is unable to bear children. Beyond the meeting the stories never went.

Sometimes these stories were inspired by an unknown girl in the advertising department of the Sentinel. She often remained unknown. Sometimes Mr. Biswas spoke; but whenever the girl accepted his invitation-to lunch, a film, the beach-his passion at once died; he withdrew the invitation and avoided the girl; thus in time creating a legend among the girls of the advertising department, all of whom knew, though he did not suspect, for he kept it as a heavy, shameful secret, that at the age of thirty-three Mohun Biswas was already the father of four children.

Still, at the typewriter, he wrote of his untouched barren heroines. He began these stories with joy; they left him dissatisfied and feeling unclean. Then he went to his room, called for Anand, and to Anand’s disgust tried to play with him as with a baby, saying, “Shompo! Gomp!”

Forgetting that in his strictness, and as part of her training, he had ordered Shama to file all his papers, he thought that these stories were as secret at home as his marriage and four children were at the office. And one Friday, when he found Shama puzzling over her accounts and had scoffed as usual, she said, “Leave me alone, Mr. John Lubbard.”

That was one of the names of his thirty-three-year-old hero.

“Go and take Sybil to the pictures.”

That was from another story. He had got the name from a novel by Warwick Deeping.

“Leave Ratni alone.”

That was the Hindi name he had given to the mother of four in another story. Ratni walked heavily, “as though perpetually pregnant”; her arms filled the sleeves of her bodice and seemed about to burst them; she sucked in her breath through her teeth while she worked at her accounts, the only reading and writing she did.

Mr. Biswas recalled with horror and shame the descriptions of the small tender breasts of his barren heroines.

Shama sucked her teeth loudly.

If she had laughed he would have hit her. But she never looked at him, only at her account books.

He ran to his room, undressed, got his own cigarettes and matches, took down Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and got into bed.

It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas, painting the kitchen safe and the green table with a tin of yellow paint, yielded to an impulse and painted the typewriter-case and parts of the typewriter as well.

For long the typewriter remained unused, until Anand and Savi began learning to type on it.

But still, in the office, whenever he had cleaned his typewriter or changed the ribbon and wished to test the machine, the sentence he always wrote was: At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children…

So used to thinking of the house as his own, and in his new confidence, he made a garden. He planted rose-bushes at the side of the house, and at the front dug a pond for water-lilies, which spread prodigiously. He acquired more possessions, the most massive of which was a combined bookcase and desk, of such weight and sturdiness that three men were required to put it into place in his bedroom, where it stayed until they all moved from Port of Spain to Shorthills. Mice nested in the bookcase, protected and nourished by the mass of paper with which the bookcase was stuffed: newspapers (Mr. Biswas insisted that all the newspapers for a month should be kept, and there were quarrels when a particular issue could not be found); every typewritten letter Mr. Biswas had received, from the Sentinel, the Ideal School, people anxious or grateful for publicity; the rejected articles on the seasons, the unfinished Escape stories (at first shamefully glanced at, though later Mr. Biswas read them and regretted he had not taken up short story writing seriously).

Encouraged by Shama, he took an increasing interest in his personal appearance. In his silk suit and tie he had never ceased to surprise her by his elegance and respectability; and whenever she bought him anything, a shirt, cufflinks, a tiepin, he said, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! One of these days.” Sometimes, while he was dressing, he would make an inventory of all the things he was wearing and think, with wonder, that he was then worth one hundred and fifty dollars. Once on the bicycle, he was worth about one hundred and eighty. And so he rode to his reporter’s job and its curious status: welcomed, even fawned upon, by the greatest in the land, fed as well as anybody and sometimes even better, yet always, finally, rejected.

“A hell of a thing today,” he told Shama. “As we were leaving Government House H.E. asked me, ‘Which is your car?’ I don’t know. I suppose reporters in England must be rich like hell.”

But Shama was impressed. At Hanuman House she started dropping names, and Padma, Seth’s wife, traced a tenuous and intricate family relationship between Seth and the man who had driven the Prince of Wales during his visit to Trinidad.

On herself Shama spent little. Unable to buy the best and, like all the Tulsi sisters, having only contempt for the second-rate in cloth and jewellery, she bought nothing at all and made do with the gifts of cloth she received every Christmas from Mrs. Tulsi. Her bodices became patched on the breasts and under the arms; and the more Mr. Biswas complained the more she patched. But though her indifference to clothes seemed at times almost like inverted pride, she did not wholly lose her concern for appearances. At Hanuman House a wedding invitation to Mrs. Tulsi was meant for her daughters as well; and one large gift, invariably part of the Tulsi Store stock, went from the House. But now Shama got invitations in her own right and during the Hindu wedding season she borrowed deeply from the rent money, committing herself to almost inextricable entanglement with her accounts, to buy presents, usually water-sets.

“Forget it this time,” Mr. Biswas said. “They must be so used by now to seeing you with a water-set in your hand that I am sure they would believe that you did carry one.”

“I know what I am doing,” Shama said. “My children are going to be married one day too.”

“And when they give back all the water-sets poor Savi wouldn’t be able to walk, for all the glasses and jugs. If they remember, that is. At least leave it for a few more years.”

But weddings and funerals had become important to Shama. From weddings she returned tired, heavy-lidded and hoarse after the night-long singing, to find a house in confusion: Savi in tears, the kitchen in disorder, Mr. Biswas complaining about his indigestion. Pleased at the wedding, the gift that did not disgrace her, the singing, the return home, Shama would say, “Well, as the saying goes, you never miss the water till the well runs dry.”

And for the following day or two, when she held Mr. Biswas and the children absolutely in her power, she would be very gloomy; and it was at these times that she said, “I tell you, if it wasn’t for the children-”

And Mr. Biswas would sing, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl!”

As important as weddings and funerals were to Shama, holiday visits became to the children. They went first of all to Hanuman House. But with every succeeding visit they felt more like strangers. Alliances were harder to take up again. There were new jokes, new games, new stories, new subjects of conversation. Too much had to be explained, and Anand and Savi and Myna often ended by remaining together. As soon as they went back to Port of Spain this unity disappeared. Savi returned to bullying Myna; Anand defended Myna; Savi beat Anand; Anand hit back; and Savi complained.

“What!” Mr. Biswas said. “Hitting your sister! Shama, you see the sort of effect one little trip to the monkey house does have on your children?”

It was a two-fold attack, for the children preferred visiting Mr. Biswas’s relations. These relations had come as a revelation. Not only were they an untapped source of generosity; Savi and Anand had also felt up to then that Mr. Biswas, like all the fathers at Hanuman House, had come from nothing, and the only people who had a proper family were the Tulsis. It was pleasant and novel, too, for Savi and Anand and Myna to find themselves flattered and cajoled and bribed. At Hanuman House they were three children among many; at Ajodha’s there were no other children. And Ajodha was rich, as they could tell by the house he was building. He offered them money and was absurdly delighted that they should know its value sufficiently well to take it. Anand got an extra six cents for reading That Body of Yours; it would have been worth it for the praise alone. They were feted at Pratap’s; Bipti was embarrassingly devoted and their cousins were shy and admiring and kind. At Prasad’s they were again the only children and lived in a mud hut, which they thought quaint: it was like a large doll’s house. Prasad didn’t give money, but a thick red exercise book, a Shirley Temple fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman’s ink. And so, with this encouragement to milk and prunes, the profitable round of holiday visits ended.

Then came the news that Mrs. Tulsi had decided to send Owad abroad to study, to become a doctor.

Mr. Biswas was overwhelmed. More and more students were going abroad; but they were items of news, remote. He had never thought that anyone so close to him could escape so easily. Concealing his sadness and envy, he made a show of enthusiasm and offered advice about shipping lines. And at Arwacas some of Mrs. Tulsi’s retainers defected. Forgetting that they were in Trinidad, that they had crossed the black water from India and had thereby lost all caste, they said they could have nothing more to do with a woman who was proposing to send her son across the black water.

“Water on a duck’s back,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “The number of times that mother of yours has made herself outcast!”

There was talk about the suitability and adequacy of the food Owad would get in England.

“Every morning in England, you know,” Mr. Biswas said, “the scavengers go around picking up the corpses. And you know why? The food there is not cooked by orthodox Roman Catholic Hindus.”

“Suppose Uncle Owad want more,” Anand said. “You think they will give it to him?”

“Hear the boy,” Mr. Biswas said, squeezing Anand’s thin arms. “Let me tell you, eh, boy, that you and Savi come out of the monkey house as going concerns only because of the little Ovaltine you drink.”

“No wonder the others can hold Anand and beat his little tail,” Shama said.

“Your family are tough,” Mr. Biswas said. He spat the word out and made it an insult. “Tough,” he repeated.

“Well, I could say one thing. None of us have calves swinging like hammocks.”

“Of course not. Your calves are tough. Anand, look at the back of my hands. No hair. The sign of an advanced race, boy. And look at yours. No hair either. But you never know. With some of your mother’s bad blood flowing in your veins you could wake up one morning and find yourself hairy like a monkey.”

Then, after a trip to Hanuman House, Shama reported that the decision to send Owad abroad had reduced Shekhar, the elder god, married man though he was, to tears.

“Send him some rope and soft candle,” Mr. Biswas said.

“He never did want to get married,” Shama said.

“Never did want to get married! Never see anybody skip off so smart to check mother-in-law’s money.”

“He wanted to go to Cambridge.”

“Cambridge!” Mr. Biswas exclaimed, startled by the word, starded to hear it coming so easily from Shama. “Cambridge, eh? Well, why the hell he didn’t go? Why the hell the whole pack of you didn’t go to Cambridge? Frighten of the bad food?”

“Seth was against it.” Shama’s tone was injured and conspiratorial.

Mr. Biswas paused. “Well, you don’t say. You don’t say!”

“I glad it please somebody.”

She could give no more information, and at last said impatiently, “You getting like a woman.”

She clearly felt that an injustice had been done. And he knew the Tulsis too well to be surprised that the sisters, who never questioned their own neglected education, cat-in-bag marriage and precarious position, should yet feel concerned that Shekhar, whose marriage was happy and whose business was nourishing, had not had all that he might.

Shekhar was coming to spend a week-end in Port of Spain. His family would not be with him and old Mrs. Tulsi would be in Arwacas: the brothers were to be boys together for one last week-end. Mr. Biswas waited for Shekhar with interest. He came early on Friday evening. The taxi hooted; Shama switched on the lights in the verandah and the porch; Shekhar ran up the front steps in his white linen suit and breezed through the house on his leather-heeled shoes, charging it with excitement, depositing on the diningtable a bottle of wine, a tin of peanuts, a packet of biscuits, two copies of Life and a paper-backed volume of Halevy’s History of the English People. Shama greeted him with sadness, Mr. Biswas with a solemnity which he hoped could be mistaken for sympathy. Shekhar responded with geniality: the absent geniality of the businessman sparing time from his business, the family man away from his family.

Owad’s expensive new suitcases were in the back verandah and Mr. Biswas was painting Owad’s name on them.

“Sort of thing to make you feel you want to go away,” Mr. Biswas said.

Shekhar wasn’t drawn. After the wine and peanuts and biscuits had been shared he showed himself almost paternally preoccupied with the arrangements for Owad’s journey, and in spite of Mr. Biswas’s coaxings never once mentioned Cambridge.

“You and your mouth,” Mr. Biswas told Shama.

She had no time for argument. She felt honoured at having to entertain her two brothers at once, on such an important occasion, and was determined to do it well. She had prepared all week for the week-end, and shortly after breakfast that morning had begun to cook.

From time to time Mr. Biswas went into the kitchen and whispered, “Who paying for all this? The old she-fox or you? Not me, you hear. Nobody sending me to Cambridge. Next week, when I eating dry ice, nobody sending me food by parcel post from Hanuman House, you hear.”

It was a Hanuman House festival in miniature, and to the children almost like a game of makebelieve. They had the freedom of the kitchen and nibbled and tasted whenever they could. Shekhar bought sweets for them and on Sunday sent them to the one-thirty children’s show at the Roxy. And Mr. Biswas got on so well with the brothers that he was invaded by the holiday feeling that they were all men together, and he thought himself privileged to be host to the two sons of the family, one of whom was going abroad to become a doctor. He attempted genuinely to contribute to the enthusiasm, talking again about shipping lines and ships as though he had travelled in them all; he hinted at the write-up he was going to give Owad and flattered him by asking him to refuse to see reporters from the other newspapers; he spoke deprecatingly about Anand’s achievements and obtained compliments from Shekhar.

Sunday brought the Sunday Sentinel and Mr. Biswas’s scandalous feature, “I Am Trinidad’s Most Evil Man”, one of a series of interviews with Trinidad’s richest, poorest, tallest, fattest, thinnest, fastest, strongest men; which was following a series on men with unusual callings: thief, beggar, night-soil remover, mosquito-killer, undertaker, birth-certificate searcher, lunatic-asylum warden; which had followed a series on one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed men; which had come about when, after an M. Biswas interview with a man who had been shot years before in the neck and had to cover up the hole in order to speak, the Sentinel office had been crowded with men with interesting mutilations, offering to sell their story.

Mr. Biswas’s article was hilariously received by Owad and Shekhar, particularly as the most evil man was a wellknown Arwacas character. He had committed one murder under great provocation and after his acquittal had developed into a genial bore. The title of the interview promised for the following week, with Trinidad’s maddest man, aroused further laughter.

After breakfast all the men-and this included Anand-went for a bathe at the harbour extension at Docksite. The dredging was incomplete, but the sea-wall had been built and in the early morning parts of the sea provided safe, clean bathing, though at every footstep the mud rose, clouding the water. The reclaimed land, raised to the level of the sea-wall, was not as yet real land, only crusted mud, sharp along the cracks which patterned it like a coral fan.

The sun was not out and the high, stationary clouds were touched with red. Ships were blurred in the distance; the level sea was like dark glass. Anand was left at the edge of the water, near the wall, and the men went ahead, their voices and splashings carrying far in the stillness. All at once the sun came out, the water blazed, and sounds were subdued.

Aware of his unimpressive physique, Mr. Biswas began to clown; and, as he did more and more now, he tried to extend his clowning to Anand.

“Duck, boy!” he called. “Duck and let us see how long you can stay under water.”

“No!” Anand shouted back.

This abrupt denial of his father’s authority had become part of the clowning.

“You hear the boy?” Mr. Biswas said to Owad and Shekhar. He spoke an obscene Hindi epigram which had always amused them and which they now associated with him.

“You know what I feel like doing?” he said a little later. “See that rowingboat there, by the wall? Let us untie it. By tomorrow morning it will be in Venezuela.”

“And let us throw you in it,” Shekhar said.

They chased Mr. Biswas, caught him, held him above the water while he laughed and squirmed, his calves swinging like hammocks.

“One,” they counted, swinging him. “Two-”

Suddenly he became affronted and angry.

“Three!”

The smooth water slapped his belly and chest and forehead like something hard and hot. Surfacing, his back to them, he took some time to rearrange his hair, in reality wiping away the tears that had come to his eyes. The pause was long enough to tell Owad and Shekhar that he was angry. They were embarrassed; and he was recognizing the unreasonableness of his anger when Shekhar said, “Where is Anand?”

Mr. Biswas didn’t turn. “The boy is all right. Ducking. His grandfather was a champion diver.”

Owad laughed.

“Ducking, hell!” Shekhar said, and began swimming towards the wall.

There was no sign of Anand. In the shadow of the wall the rowingboat barely rocked above its reflection.

Silently Mr. Biswas and Owad watched Shekhar. He dived. Mr. Biswas scooped up a handful of water and let it fall on his head. Some of it ran down his face; some of it sprinkled the sea.

Shekhar reappeared near the sea-wall, shook the water from his head and dived again.

Mr. Biswas began to wade towards the wall. Owad began to swim. Mr. Biswas began to swim.

Shekhar surfaced again, near the rowingboat. There was alarm on his face. He was holding Anand under his left arm and was pulling strongly with his right.

Owad and Mr. Biswas moved towards him. He shouted to them to keep away. All at once he stopped pulling with his right hand, stood up, and was only waist-high in water. Behind him, in shadow, the rowingboat barely moved.

They carried Anand to the top of the wall and rolled him. Then Shekhar did some kneading exercises on his thin back. Mr. Biswas stood by, noticing only the large safetypin-one of Shama’s, doubtless-on Anand’s blue striped shirt, which lay in the small heap of his clothes.

Anand spluttered. His expression was one of anger. He said, “I was walking to the boat.”

“I told you to stay where you were,” Mr. Biswas said, angry too.

“And the bottom of the sea drop away.”

“The dredging,” Shekhar said. He had not lost his look of alarm.

“The sea just drop away,” Anand cried, lying on his back, covering his face with a crooked arm. He spoke as one insulted.

Owad said, “Anyway, you’ve got the record for ducking, Shompo.”

“Shut up!” Anand screamed. He began to cry, rubbing his legs on the hard, cracked ground, then turning over on his belly.

Mr. Biswas took up the shirt with the safetypin and handed it to Anand.

Anand snatched the shirt and said, “Leave me.”

“We shoulda leave you,” Mr. Biswas said, “when you was there, ducking.” As soon as he spoke the last word he regretted it.

“Yes!” Anand screamed. “You shoulda leave me.” He got up and, going to his heap of clothes, began to dress furiously, forcing his clothes over his wet and gritty skin. “I am never going to come out with any of you again.” His eyes were small and red, the lids swollen.

He walked away from them, quickly, his small body silhouetted against the sun, across the weed-ridden mud flat. Unused, his towel remained rolled, a large bundle below his arm.

“Well,” Mr. Biswas said. “Back for a little duck?”

Owad and Shekhar smiled. Then, slowly, they all dressed.

“I never thought the day would come when I would be glad that I was a sea scout,” Shekhar said. “It was just like a hole in the sea, you know. And there was a helluva pull. By tomorrow little Anand would really have been in Venezuela.”

They found Shama anxious to know why Anand had been sent back. He had said nothing and had locked himself in his room.

Savi and Myna burst into tears when they heard.

The lunch was the climax of the week-end festivities, but Anand did not come out of his room. He ate only a slice of water melon which Savi took to him.

Later that afternoon, after Shekhar had left, Shama gave vent to her annoyance. Anand had spoiled the week-end for everybody and she was going to flog him. She was dissuaded only by Owad’s pleas.

“My children! My children!” Shama said. “Well, the example set. They just following.”

The next day Mr. Biswas wrote an angry article about the lack of warning notices at Docksite. In the afternoon Anand came home from school a little more composed and, extraordinarily, without being asked, took out a copy book from his bag and handed it to Mr. Biswas, who was in the hammock in the back verandah. Then Anand went to change.

The copy book contained Anand’s English compositions, which reflected the vocabulary and ideals of Anand’s teacher as well as Anand’s obsession with the stylistic device of the noun followed by a dash, an adjective and the noun again: for example, “the robbers-the ruthless robbers”.

The last composition was headed “A Day by the Seaside”. Below that the phrases supplied by the teacher had been copied down: project a visit-feverish preparations-eager anticipation-laden hampers-wind blowing through open car-spirits overflowing into song-graceful curve of coconut trees-arc of golden sand-crystalline water-pounding surf-majestic rollers-energetically battling the waves-cries of delirious joy-grateful shade of coconut trees-glorious sunset-sad to leave-memory to be cherished in future days-looking forward in eager anticipation to paying a return visit.

Mr. Biswas was familiar with the clarity and optimism of the teacher’s vision, and he expected Anand to write: “With anticipation-eager anticipation-we projected a visit to the seaside and we made preparations-feverish preparations-and then on the appointed morning we struggled with hampers-laden hampers-into the motorcar.” For in these compositions Anand and his fellows knew nothing but luxury.

But in this last composition there were no dashes and repetitions; no hampers, no motorcar, no golden arcs of sand; only a walk to Docksite, a concrete sea-wall and liners in the distance. Mr. Biswas read on, anxious to share the pain of the previous day. “I raised my hand but I did not know if it got to the top. I opened my mouth to cry for help. Water filled it. I thought I was going to die and I closed my eyes because I did not want to look at the water.” The composition ended with a denunciation of the sea.

None of the teacher’s phrases had been used but the composition had been given twelve marks out of ten.

Anand had come back to the verandah and was having his tea at the table.

Mr. Biswas wished to be close to him. He would have done anything to make up for the solitude of the previous day. He said, “Come and sit down here and go through the composition with me.”

Anand became impatient. He was pleased by the marks but was fed up with the composition and even a little ashamed of it. He had been made to read it out to the class, and the confession that he had not struggled with laden hampers into a car and driven to palm-fringed beaches but had walked to common Docksite had caused some laughter. So had the sentences: “I opened my mouth to cry for help. Water filled it.”

“Come,” Mr. Biswas said, making room in the hammock.

“No!” Anand shouted.

But there was no one to laugh.

Mr. Biswas’s hurt turned to anger. “Go and cut me a whip,” he said, getting out of the hammock. “Go on. Quick sharp.”

Anand stamped down the back stairs. From the neem tree that grew at the edge of the lot and hung over into the sewerage trace he cut a thick rod, far thicker than those he normally cut. His purpose was to insult Mr. Biswas. Mr. Biswas recognized the insult and was further enraged. He seized the rod and beat Anand savagely. In the end Shama had to intervene.

“I can’t stand this,” Savi cried. “I can’t stand you people. I am going back to Hanuman House.”

Myna was crying as well.

Shama said to Anand, “You see what you cause?”

He said nothing.

“Good!” Savi said. “All this shouting and screaming make this house sound like every other house in the street. I hope the low minds of some people are satisfied.”

“Yes,” Mr. Biswas said calmly. “Some people are satisfied.”

His smile drove Savi to fresh tears.

But Anand had his revenge that evening.

Now that there were only a few days left to Owad in Trinidad, and very few before the family came to Port of Spain for the farewell, Mr. Biswas and Anand ate as many meals as possible with him. They ate formally, in the diningroom. And that evening, just before Mr. Biswas sat at the table, Anand pulled the chair from under him, and Mr. Biswas fell noisily to the floor.

“Shompo! Lompo! Gomp!” Owad said, roaring with laughter.

Savi said, “Well, some people are satisfied.”

Mr. Biswas didn’t talk during the meal. Afterwards he went for a walk. When he came back he went directly to his room and never once called to anyone to get his cigarettes or matches or books.

It was his habit to walk through the house at six in the morning, rustling the newspaper and getting everyone up. Then he himself went back to bed: he had the gift of enjoying sleep in snatches. He woke no one the next morning and didn’t show himself while the children were getting ready for school.

But before Anand left, Shama gave him a six-cents piece.

“From your Father. For milk from the Dairies.”

At three that afternoon, when school was over, Anand walked down Victoria Avenue, past the racketing wheels and straps of the Government Printery, crossed Tragarete Road for the shade of the ivory-covered walls of Lapeyrouse Cemetery, and turned into Phillip Street where, in the cigarette factory, was the source of the sweet smell of tobacco which hung over the district. The Dairies looked expensive and forbidding in white and pale green. Anand tiptoed to the caged desk, said to the woman, “A small bottle of milk, please,” paid, got his voucher, and sat on a tall pale green stool at the milky-smelling bar. The white-capped barman tried to stab off the silver top a little too nonchalantly and, failing twice, pressed it out with a large thumb. Anand didn’t care for the ice-cold milk and the cloying sweetness it left at the back of his throat; it also seemed to have the tobacco smell, which he associated with the cemetery.

When he got home Shama gave him a small brown paper parcel. It contained prunes. They were his, to eat as and when he pleased.

Both he and Savi were told to keep the milk and the prunes secret, lest Owad should hear of it and laugh at them for their presumptuousness.

And almost immediately Anand began to pay the price of the milk and prunes. Mr. Biswas went to the school and saw the headmaster and the teacher whose vocabulary he knew so well. They agreed that Anand could win an exhibition if he worked, and Mr. Biswas made arrangements for Anand to be given private lessons after school, after milk. To balance this, Mr. Biswas also arranged for Anand to have unlimited credit at the school shop; thus deranging Shama’s accounts further.

Savi’s heart went out to Anand.

“I am too glad,” she said, “that God didn’t give me a brain.”

In the week before Owad’s departure the house filled up with sisters, husbands, children and those of Mrs. Tulsi’s retainers who remained faithful. The women came in their brightest clothes and best jewellery and, though only twenty miles from their villages, looked exotic. Heedless of stares, they stared; and made comments in Hindi, unusually loud, unusually ribald, because in the city Hindi was a secret language, and they were in holiday mood. A tent covered the back of the yard where Anand and Owad had sometimes played cricket. Fire-holes had been dug on the pitch itself, and over these food was always being cooked in large black cauldrons specially brought from Hanuman House. The visitors had come with musical instruments. They played and sang late into the night, and neighbours, too fascinated to object, peeped through holes in the corrugated iron fences.

Few of the visitors knew Mr. Biswas or knew the position he held in the house. And all at once this position became uncertain. He found himself squeezed into one room, and for periods lost track of Shama and his children. “Eight dollars,” he whispered to Shama. “That is the rent I pay every month. I have my rights.”

The rose-bushes and the lily-pond suffered.

“Set up trip-wires,” he told Shama. “Then let them carry on. ‘Arй, what have we here?’ He imitated an old woman talking Hindi. “Then, oops! Trip! Bam! Fall. All the pretty clothes get dirty like hell. Face wet with mud. Let that happen a few times. Then they will learn that flowers don’t just grow like that.”

After two days he gave up his flowers as lost. He went for long walks in the evening and stayed out as late as possible, calling at various police stations on the chance of picking up a story. One night he stayed out until the street dogs began their round, futile creatures that hunted in packs, fled at the sound of a human foot and left a trail of overturned dustbins and sifted garbage. The house was alive but subdued when he got back. He found four children on his bed. They were not his. Thereafter he occupied his room early in the evening, bolted the door and refused to answer knocks, calls, scratches and cries.

And all at once, too, the bond between Owad and himself seemed to have evaporated. Owad was out for much of the time making farewell calls; when he came to the house he was immediately besieged by friends and relations who gazed on him and wept and offered advice which they later discussed among themselves, to prove their concern: advice about money, the weather, food, alcohol, women.

The time came for photographs. Husbands, children and friends watched as Owad posed with Shekhar, with Mrs. Tulsi, with Shekhar and Mrs. Tulsi, with Shekhar, Mrs. Tulsi and the whole array of the sisters who, because the occasion was sad, ignored the pleas of the Chinese photographer and scowled at the camera.

On the last day Seth arrived. He wore his khaki uniform; his bluchers rang on the floor; he dominated, imposing formality wherever he went. His absence had been noted, and now everyone was expectant. But after the final family council Owad, Shekhar, Mrs. Tulsi and Seth looked only solemn, which could have been a sign of disagreement, or sorrow.

Mr. Biswas achieved a minor notoriety when he brought the Sentinel photographer to the house, cleared the drawing-room and did his best to appear to be directing both Owad and the photographer. But on the following morning the story, on page three-TRINIDAD MAN OFF TO U.K. FOR MEDICAL STUDIES-was given little attention, for those who were not occupied with dressing their children for the wharf or getting wharf passes were at the service Hari was conducting in the tent.

Finally they went to the wharf. Only newborn babies and their mothers stayed behind. The Tulsi contingent stared at the ship; and the ship’s rails were presently lined with in-transit passengers and members of the ship’s company, getting an unusually exotic glimpse of Port of Spain harbour. The word went around that well-wishers could go aboard and in a matter of minutes the Tulsis and their friends had overrun the ship. They stared at officers and passengers and the photographs of Adolf Hitler, and listened attentively to the guttural language around them, to mimic it later. The older women kicked at decks and rails and the sides of the ship, testing its seaworthiness. Some of the more susceptible took it in turns to sit on Owad’s bunk and weep. The men were shyer, and more respectful before the might of the ship; they wandered about silently with their hats in their hands. Whatever doubts remained about ship and crew vanished when an officer began giving out presents: lighters to the men, dolls in country dress to the women. And all the time, unnoticed by those he was seeking to impress, Mr. Biswas scurried knowingly about the ship, talking to the foreigners and writing in his notebook.

They came out of the ship and massed formally in front of a magenta-coloured shed with French and English notices forbidding smoking. From somewhere a chair had been obtained and Mrs. Tulsi sat on it, her veil pulled low over her forehead, a handkerchief crushed in one hand, with Sushila, the sickroom widow, at her side.

Owad started to kiss, strangers first. But they were too many; soon he abandoned them and concentrated on the family. He kissed each sister into a spurt of tears; he shook the men by the hand, and when it was Mr. Biswas’s turn he smiled and said, “No more ducking.”

Mr. Biswas was unaccountably moved. His legs shook; he felt unsteady. He said, “I hope war doesn’t break out-” Tears rushed to his eyes, he choked and could say no more.

Owad had passed on. He embraced the children; then Shekhar; then Seth, who cried copiously; and finally Mrs. Tulsi, who didn’t cry at all.

He went into the ship. Presently he appeared at the rails and waved. A passenger joined him; they began to talk.

The passengers’ gangway was drawn up. Then there were shouts, raucous, unsustained singing, and three Germans with bruised faces and torn and dirty clothes came staggering along the wharf, comically supporting one another, drunk. Someone from the ship called to them harshly; they shouted back and, drunk and collapsing though they were, and without touching the rope-rail, they walked up the narrow gang-board at the stern. All the doubts about the ship were re-excited.

Whistles: waves from ship, from shore: the ship edging away: the dock less protected, the dark, dirty water surfaced with litter. And soon they stood quite exposed in front of the customs shed, staring at the ship, staring at the gap it had left.

The weakness that had come to him at the touch of Owad’s hands remained with Mr. Biswas. There was a hole in his stomach. He wanted to climb mountains, to exhaust himself, to walk and walk and never return to the house, to the empty tent, the dead fire-holes, the disarrayed furniture. He left the wharves with Anand and they walked aimlessly through the city. They stopped at a cafй and Mr. Biswas bought Anand icecream in a tub and a Coca Cola.

The paper would sprawl on the sunny steps in the morning; there would be stillness at noon and shadow in the afternoon. But it would be a different day.

2. The New Regime

Having no further business in Port of Spain, Mrs. Tulsi returned to Arwacas. The tent was taken down and after a few days the house was cleared of stragglers. Mr. Biswas set about restoring his rose-beds and the lily-pond, whose edges had collapsed, turning the water into bubbling mud. He worked without heart, feeling the emptiness of the house and not knowing how much longer he would be allowed to stay there. None of Mrs. Tulsi’s furniture had been removed: the house there seemed to be awaiting change. Some of the savour went out of his job at the Sentinel. He needed to address his work mentally to someone. At first this had been Mr. Burnett; then it had been Owad. Now there was only Shama. She seldom read his articles; when he read them aloud to her she showed neither interest nor amusement and made no comments. Once he gave her the typescript of an article and she infuriated him by turning over the last page and looking for more. “No more, no more,” he said. “I don’t want to strain you.”

And from Hanuman House came more reports of disturbance. Govind, the eager, the loyal, was discontented; Shama reported his seditious sayings. Nothing had outwardly changed, but Mrs. Tulsi no longer directed and her influence was beginning to be felt more and more as only that of a cantankerous invalid. With her two sons settled, she appeared to have lost interest in the family. She spent much of her time in the Rose Room, acquiring illnesses, grieving for Owad. As for Seth, he still controlled; but his control was superficial. Though nothing had been said openly, Shekhar’s reported displeasure, uncontradicted, lay against him and made him suspect to the sisters. When all was said and done Seth was not of the family and he alone could not maintain its harmony, as had been shown by his helplessness when squabbles had arisen between sisters during Mrs. Tulsi’s absences in Port of Spain. Seth ruled effectively only in association with Mrs. Tulsi and through her affection and trust. That trust, not officially withdrawn, was no longer so fully displayed; and Seth was even beginning to be resented as an outsider.

Then came rumours that Seth had been inspecting properties.

“Buying it for Mai, you think?” Mr. Biswas asked.

Shama said, “I glad it make somebody happy.”

And Mr. Biswas was soon to regret his jubilation. The Christmas school holidays came and Shama took the children to Hanuman House. By now they were complete strangers there. The old crepe paper decorations and the goods in the dark, choked Tulsi Store were petty country things after the displays in the Port of Spain shops, and Savi felt pity for the people of Arwacas, who had to take them seriously. At last on Christmas Eve the store was closed and the uncles went away. Savi, Anand, Myna and Kamla hunted for stockings and hung them up. And got nothing. There was no one to complain to. Some of the sisters had secretly provided gifts for their children; and on Christmas morning in the hall, where Mrs. Tulsi was not waiting to be kissed, the gifts were displayed and compared. With Owad in England, Mrs. Tulsi in her room, all the uncles away, and Shekhar spending the day with his wife’s family, there was no one to organize games, to give a lead to the gaiety. And Christmas was reduced to lunch and Chinta’s icecream, as tasteless and rust-rippled as ever. The sisters were sullen; the children quarrelled, and some were even flogged.

Shekhar came on the morning of Boxing Day with a large bag of imported sweets. He went up to Mrs. Tulsi’s room, had lunch in the hall, and then went away again. When Mr. Biswas arrived later that afternoon he found that the talk among the sisters was not of Seth, but of Shekhar and his wife. The sisters felt that Shekhar had abandoned them. Yet no one blamed him. He was under the influence of his wife, and the fault was wholly hers.

Relations between the sisters and Shekhar’s wife had never been easy. Despite the untraditional organization of Hanuman House, where married daughters lived with their mother, the sisters were alert to certain of the conventions of Hindu family relationships: mothers-in-law, for example, were expected to be hard on daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law were to be despised. But Shekhar’s wife had from the first met Tulsi patronage with arrogant Presbyterian modernity. She flaunted her education. She called herself Dorothy, without shame or apology. She wore short frocks and didn’t care that they made her look lewd and absurd: she was a big woman who had grown fat after the birth of her first child, and her dresses hung from her high, shelflike hips as from a hoop. Her voice was deep, her manner hearty; once, when she had damaged her ankle, she used a stick, and Chinta remarked that it suited her. Added to all this she sometimes sold the tickets at her cinema; which was disgraceful, besides being immoral. So far, however, from making any impression on Dorothy, the sisters continually found themselves defeated. They had said she wouldn’t be able to keep a house: she turned out to be maddeningly house-proud. They had said she was barren: she was bearing a child every two years. Her children were all girls, but this was scarcely a triumph for the sisters. Dorothy’s daughters were of exceptional beauty and the sisters could complain only that the Hindi names Dorothy had chosen-Mira, Leela, Lena-were meant to pass as Western ones.

And now old charges were made again and for the benefit of Shama and other attentive visiting sisters fresh details added. As the talk scratched back and forth over the same topic these details became increasingly gross: Dorothy, like all Christians, used her right hand for unclean purposes, her sexual appetite was insatiable, her daughters already had the eyes of whores. Over and over the sisters concluded that Shekhar was to be pitied, because he had not gone to Cambridge and had instead been married against his will to a wife who was shameless. Padma, Seth’s wife, was present, and Seth’s behaviour could not be discussed. Whenever Cambridge was mentioned looks and intonation made it clear to Padma that she was excluded from this implied criticism of her husband, that she, like Shekhar, was to be pitied for having such a spouse. And Mr. Biswas marvelled again at the depth of Tulsi family feeling.

Mr. Biswas had always got on well with Dorothy; he was attracted by her loudness and gaiety and regarded her as an ally against the sisters. But on that hot still afternoon, when a holiday stateness lay over Arwacas, the hall, with its confused furniture, its dark loft and sooty green walls, with flies buzzing in and out of the white sunny spots on the long table, seemed abandoned, deprived of animation; and Mr. Biswas, feeling Shekhar’s absence as a betrayal, could sympathize with the sisters.

Savi said, “This is the last Christmas I spend at Hanuman House.”

Change followed change. At Pagotes Tara and Ajodha were decorating their new house. In Port of Spain new lampposts, painted silver, went up in the main streets and there was talk of replacing the diesel buses by trolley-buses. Owad’s old room was let to a middle-aged childless coloured couple. And at the Sentinel there were rumours.

Under Mr. Burnett’s direction the Sentinel had overtaken the Gazette and, though some distance behind the Guardian, it had become successful enough for its frivolity to be an embarrassment to the owners. Mr. Burnett had been under pressure for some time. That Mr. Biswas knew, but he had no head for intrigue and did not know the source of this pressure. Some of the staff became openly contemptuous and spoke of Mr. Burnett as uneducated; a joke went around the office that he had applied from the Argentine for a job as a sub-editor and his letter had been misunderstood. As if in reply to all this Mr. Burnett became increasingly perverse. “Let’s face it,” he said. “Editorials from Port of Spain didn’t have much effect in Spain. They are not going to stop Hitler either.” The Guardian responded to the war by starting a fighter fund: in a box on the front page twelve aeroplanes were outlined, and as the fund rose the outlines were filled in. Right up to the end the Sentinel had been headlining the West Indian cricket tour of England, and when the tour was abandoned it printed a drawing of Hitler which, when cut out and folded along certain dotted lines, became a drawing of a pig.

Early in the new year the blow fell. Mr. Biswas was lunching with Mr. Burnett in a Chinese restaurant, in one of those cubicles weakly lit by a low-hanging naked bulb, with lengths of flex loosely attached to the flyblown, grimy celotex partitions, when Mr. Burnett said, “Amazing scenes are going to be witnessed soon. I’m leaving.” He paused. “Sacked.” As if divining Mr. Biswas’s thoughts, he added, “Nothing for you to worry about, though.” Then, in quick succession, he displayed a number of conflicting moods. He was gay; he was depressed; he was glad to leave; he was sorry to go; he didn’t want to talk about it; he talked about it; he wasn’t going to talk any more about himself; he talked about himself. He ate in spasms, attacking the food as though it had done him some injury. “Shoots? Is that what they call this? There’ll be damned little bamboo left in China at this rate.” He pressed the bell, which lay at the centre of a roughly circular patch of grime on the wall. They heard it ring in some distant cavern, above a multitude of other bells, the pattering of waitresses’ feet and talk in adjacent cubicles.

The harassed waitress came and Mr. Burnett said, “Shoots? This is just plain bamboo. What do you think I have inside here?” He tapped his belly. “A paper factory?”

“That was one portion,” the waitress said.

“That was one bamboo.”

He ordered more lager and the waitress sucked her teeth and went out, leaving the swing door swinging rapidly to and fro.

“One portion,” Mr. Burnett said. “They make it sound like hay. And this damned room is like a stall. I’m not worried. I’ve got other strings to my bow. You too. You could go back to your sign-writing. I leave, you leave. Let’s all leave.”

They laughed.

Mr. Biswas returned to the office in a state of great agitation. He had been associated, and zestfully, with some of the most frivolous excesses of the Sentinel. Now at the thought of each he felt a stab of guilt and panic. He was expecting to be summoned to mysterious rooms and told by their secure occupants that his services were no longer required. He sat at his desk-but it belonged to him no more than the columns of the Sentinel he filled-and listened to the noises made by the carpenters. Those were the noises he had heard on his first day in the office; building and rebuilding had gone on without interruption ever since. The newsroom came to its afternoon life. Reporters arrived, took off their jackets, opened notebooks and typed; groups gathered at the green water-cooler and broke up again; at some desks proofs were being corrected, the inner pages laid out. For more than four years he had been part of this excitement. Now, waiting for the summons, he could only observe it.

Getting to believe that by staying in the office he was increasing the risk of dismissal, he left early and cycled home. Fear led to fear. Suppose he had to send the children back to Hanuman House, would there be anyone to receive them? Suppose Mrs. Tulsi gave him notice-as Shama did so often to the tenement people-where would he go? How would he live?

The years stretched ahead, dark.

When he got home he mixed and drank some Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, undressed, got into bed and began to read Epictetus.

But the days went by and no summons came. And at last it was time for Mr. Burnett to leave. Mr. Biswas wanted to make some gesture to show his gratitude and sympathy, but he could think of nothing. And after all Mr. Burnett was escaping; he was staying behind. The Sentinel reported Mr. Burnett’s departure on the society page. There was an unkind photograph of Mr. Burnett looking uncomfortable in a dinner jacket, his small eyes popping in the flash of the camera, a cigar stuck in his mouth as if for comic effect. He was reported as being sorry to leave; he had to take up an appointment in America; he had learned much from his association with Trinidad and the Sentinel, and he would take a great interest in the progress of both; he thought the standards of local journalism “surprisingly high”. It was left to the other newspapers to reveal the other strings to his bow that Mr. Burnett had spoken about. They reported that an Indian troupe, made up of dancers, a fire-walker, a snake-charmer and a man who could rest on a bed of nails, was accompanying Mr. Burnett, a former editor of a local newspaper, on his travels to America. One headline was THE CIRCUS MOVES ON.

And the new regime started at the Sentinel. The day after Mr. Burnett’s departure the newsroom was hung with posters which said DON”T BE BRIGHT, JUST GET IT RIGHT and NEWS NOT VIEWS and FACTS? IF NOT AXE and CHECK IT OR CHUCK IT. Mr. Biswas regarded them all as aimed at himself alone, and their whimsicality scared him. The office was subdued and everyone wore a look of earnestness, those who had gone up, those who had gone down. Mr. Burnett’s news editor had been made a sub-editor. His bright reporters had been variously scattered. One went to Today’s Arrangements, Invalids and The Weather, one to Shipping, one to Diana’s Diary on the society page, one to Classified Advertisements. Mr. Biswas joined Court Shorts.

“Write?” he said to Shama. “I don’t call that writing. Is more like filling up a form. X, aged so much, was yesterday fined so much by Mr. Y at this court for doing that. The prosecution alleged. Electing to conduct his own defence, X said. The magistrate, passing sentence, said. “

But Shama approved of the new regime. She said, “It will teach you to have some respect for people and the truth.”

“Hear you. Hear you! But you don’t surprise me. I expect you to talk like that. But let them wait. New regime, eh. Just see the circulation drop now.”

It was only to Shama that Mr. Biswas spoke about the changes. At the office the subject was never mentioned. Mr. Burnett’s favourites avoided one another and, fearing intrigue, mixed with no one else. Apart from the posters there had been no directive, but they had all, so far as their new duties permitted o writing, changed their styles. They wrote longer paragraphs of complete sentences with bigger words.

Presently the directives came, in a booklet called Rules for Reporters; and it was in keeping with the aloof severity of the new authorities that the booklets should have appeared on every desk one morning without explanation, with only the name of the reporter, preceded by a “Mr”, in the top right-hand corner.

“He must have got up early this morning,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama.

The booklet contained rules about language, dress, behaviour, and at the bottom of every page there was a slogan. On the front cover was printed “THE RIGHTEST NEWS IS THE BRIGHTEST NEWS”, the inverted commas suggesting that the statement was historical, witty and wise. The back cover said: REPORT NOT DISTORT.

“Report not distort,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “That is all the son of a bitch doing now, you know, and drawing a fat salary for it too. Making up those slogans. Rules for Reporters. Rules!”

A few days later he came home and said, “Guess what? Editor peeing in a special place now, you know. ‘Excuse me. But I must go and pee-alone.’ Everybody peeing in the same place for years. What happen? He taking a course of Dodd’s Kidney Pills and peeing blue or something?”

In Shama’s accounts Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder appeared more often, always written out in full.

“Just watch and see,” Mr. Biswas said. “Everybody going to leave. People not going to put up with this sort of treatment, I tell you.”

“When you leaving?” Shama asked.

And worse was to come.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose they just want to frighten me. I will henceforward-henceforward: you hear the sort of words that son of a bitch using-I will henceforward spend my afternoons at the cemeteries of Port of Spain. Just hand me that yellow book. Rules for Reporters! Let me see. Anything about funerals? By God! They damn well have it in! ‘The Sentinel reporter should be soberly dressed on these occasions, that is, in a dark suit.’ Dark suit! The man must think I haven’t got a wife and four children. He must think he paying me a fortune every fortnight. ‘Neither by his demeanour nor by his dress should the reporter offend the mourners, since this will certainly lose the paper much goodwill. The Sentinel reporter should remember that he represents the Sentinel. He should encourage trust. It cannot be stressed too often that the reporter should get every name right. A name incorrectly spelt is offensive. All orders and decorations should be mentioned, but the reporter should use his discretion in making inquiries about these. To be ignorant of an individual’s decorations is almost certain to offend him. To ask an OBE whether he is an MBE is equally likely to offend. Far better, in this hypothetical case, to make inquiries on the assumption that the individual is a CBE. After the immediate family, the names of all mourners should be set out in alphabetical order.’

“God! God! Isn’t this just the sort of arseness to make you go and dance on the grave afterwards? You know, I could turn the funeral column into a bright little feature. Yesterday’s Undertakings. By Gravedigger. Just next to Today’s Arrangements. Or set it next to Invalids. Heading: Going Going, Gone. How about this? Photo of weeping widow at graveside. Later, photo of widow hearing about will and laughing. Caption: ‘Smiling, Mrs. X? We thought so. Where there’s a will there is a way.’ Two photos side by side.”

In the meantime he bought a dark serge suit on credit. And while Anand walked beside the wall of Lapeyrouse Cemetery on his way to the Dairies in the afternoon, Mr. Biswas was often inside the cemetery, moving solemnly among the tombstones and making discreet inquiries about names and decorations. He came home tired, complaining of headaches, his stomach rising.

“A capitalist rag,” he began to say. “Just another capitalist rag.”

Anand remarked that his name no longer appeared in it.

“Glad like hell,” Mr. Biswas said.

And on four Saturdays in succession he was sent to unimportant cricket matches, just to get the scores. The game of cricket meant nothing to him, but he was made to understand that the assignment was part of his retraining and he cycled from fourth-class match to fourth-class match, copying symbols and scores he did not understand, enjoying only the brief esteem of surprised and thrilled players under trees. Most of the matches finished at half past five and it was impossible to be at all the grounds at the same time. It sometimes happened that when he got to a ground there was no one there. Then secretaries had to be hunted out and there was more cycling. In this way those Saturday afternoons and evenings were ruined, and often Sunday as well, for many of the scores he had gathered were not printed.

He began to echo phrases from the prospectus of the Ideal School of Journalism. “I can make a living by my pen,” he said. “Let them go ahead. Just let them push me too far.” At this period one-man magazines, nearly all run by Indians, were continually springing up. “Start my own magazine,” Mr. Biswas said. “Go around like Bissessar, selling them myself. He tell me he does sell his paper like hot cakes. Like hot cakes, man!”

He abandoned his own regime of strictness at home and instead spoke so long of various members of the Sentinel staff that Shama and the children got to feel that they knew them well. From time to time he indulged in a tiny rebellion.

“Anand, on your way to school stop at the cafй and telephone the Sentinel. Tell them I don’t feel like coming to work today.”

“Why you don’t telephone them yourself? You know I don’t like telephoning.”

“We can’t always do what we like, boy.”

“And you want me to say that you just don’t feel like going out to work today.”

“Tell them I’m sick. Cold, headache, fever. You know.”

When Anand left, Mr. Biswas would say, “Let them sack me. Let them sack me like hell. Think I care? I want them to sack me.”

“Yes,” Shama said. “You want them to sack you.”

But he was careful to space out these days.

He made himself unpopular among the boys and young men of the street who played cricket on the pavement in the afternoons and chattered under the lamp-post at night. He shouted at them from his window and, because of his suit, his job, the house he lived in, his connexion with Owad, his influence with the police, they were cowed. Sometimes he ostentatiously went to the cafй and telephoned the local police sergeant, whom he had known well in happier days. And he rejoiced in the glares and the mutterings of the players when, soberly dressed, unlikely to offend mourners, he cycled out to his funerals in the afternoon.

He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear with the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times was for him almost like an act of sacrifice. He shared his discovery with Anand; and though he abstracted some of the pleasure of Dickens by making Anand write out and learn the meanings of difficult words, he did this not out of his strictness or as part of Anand’s training. He said, “I don’t want you to be like me.”

Anand understood. Father and son, each saw the other as weak and vulnerable, and each felt a responsibility for the other, a responsibility which, in times of particular pain, was disguised by exaggerated authority on the one side, exaggerated respect on the other.

Suddenly the pressure ceased at the Sentinel. Mr. Biswas was taken off court shorts, funerals and cricket matches, and put into the Sunday Magazine, to do a weekly feature.

“If they did just push me so much farther,” he told Shama, “I would have resigned.”

“Yes. You would have resigned.”

“Sometimes I don’t know why the hell I ever bother to talk to you.”

He had in fact mentally composed many sonorous letters of resignation, varying from the abusive to the dignified to the humorous and even to the charitable (these ended with his best wishes for the continued success of the Sentinel).

But the features he now wrote were not the features he wrote for Mr. Burnett. He didn’t write scandalous interviews with one-eyed men: he wrote serious surveys of the work done by the Institute for the Blind. He didn’t write “I Am Trinidad’s Maddest Man”: he wrote about the splendid work of the Lunatic Asylum. It was his duty to praise, to look always beyond the facts to the official figures; for it was part of the Sentinel’s new policy of sobriety that this was the best of all worlds and Trinidad’s official institutions its most magnificent aspects. He had not so much to distort as to ignore: to forget the bare, toughened feet of the children in an orphanage, the sullen looks of dread, the shameful uniforms; to accept a temporary shaming eminence and walk through workshops and vegetable gardens, noting industry, rehabilitation and discipline; to have lemonade and a cigarette in the director’s office, and get the figures; to put himself on the side of the grotesques.

These features were not easy to write. In the days of Mr. Burnett once he had got a slant and an opening sentence, everything followed. Sentence generated sentence, paragraph led to paragraph, and his articles had a flow and a unity. Now, writing words he did not feel, he was cramped, and the time came when he was not sure what he did feel. He had to note down ideas and juggle them into place. He wrote and rewrote, working extremely slowly, nagged by continual headaches, completing his articles only to meet the Thursday deadline. The results were laboured, dead, incapable of giving pleasure except to the people written about. He didn’t look forward to Sunday. He was up early as usual, but the paper remained on the front steps until Shama or one of the children brought it in. He avoided turning to his article for as long as possible. It was always a surprise, when he did turn to it, to see how photographs and layout concealed the dullness of the matter. Even then he did not read through what he had written, but glanced at odd paragraphs, looking for cuts and changes that would indicate editorial disapproval. He said nothing to Shama, but he lived now in constant expectation of the sack. He knew his work was not good.

At the office the authorities remained aloof. There was no criticism, but no reassurance. The new regime was still a forbidden subject and reporters still did not mix easily. Of Mr. Burnett’s favourites only the former news editor was generally accepted; he had, indeed, become an office character. He had grown haggard with worry. He lived in Barataria and came up every morning by bus through the packed, narrow and dangerous Eastern Main Road. He had developed a fear that he would die in a road accident and leave his wife and baby daughter unprovided for. All travel terrified him; morning and evening he had to travel; and every day he laid out stories of accidents, with photographs of “the twisted wreckage”. He spoke continually of his fear, ridiculed it and allowed himself to be ridiculed. But as the afternoon wore on his agitation became more marked, and at the end he was quite frantic, anxious to go home, yet fearing to leave the office, the only place where he felt safe.

Untended, the rose trees grew straggly and hard. A blight made their stems white and gave them sickly, ill-formed leaves. The buds opened slowly to reveal blanched, tattered blooms covered with minute insects; other insects built bright brown domes on the stems. The lily-pond collapsed again and the lily-roots rose brown and shaggy out of the thick, muddy water, which was white with bubbles. The children’s interest in the garden was spasmodic, and Shama, claiming that she had learned not to interfere with anything of Mr. Biswas’s, planted some zinnias and marigolds of her own, the only things, apart from an oleander tree and some cactus, that had flourished in the garden of Hanuman House.

The war was beginning to have its effects. Prices were rising everywhere. Mr. Biswas’s salary was increased, but the increases were promptly absorbed. And when his salary reached thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents a fortnight the Sentinel started giving COLA, a cost-of-living allowance. Henceforth it was COLA that went up; the salary remained stationary.

“Psychology,” Mr. Biswas said. They make it sound like a tea party at the orphanage, eh?” He raised his voice. “All right, kiddies? Got your cake? Got your icecream? Got your cola?”

The shorter the money became, the worse the food, the more meticulously Shama kept her accounts, filling reporter’s notebook after reporter’s notebook. These she never threw away; they lay in a swollen, grubby pile on the kitchen shelf.

There were fights in shops for hoarded, weevil-ridden flour. The police kept a sharp eye on stall holders in markets, and a number of vegetable growers and small farmers were fined and imprisoned for selling above the scheduled price. Flour continued to be scarce and full of weevils; and Shama’s food became worse.

To Mr. Biswas’s complaints she said, “I walk miles every Saturday to save a cent here and a cent there.”

And soon, food forgotten, they were quarrelling. Their quarrels lasted from day to day, from week to week, quarrels differing only in words from those they had had at The Chase.

“Trapped!” Mr. Biswas would say. “You and your family have got me trapped in this hole.”

“Yes,” Shama would say. “I suppose if it wasn’t for my family you would have a grass roof over your head.”

“Family! Family! Put me in one poky little barrackroom and pay me twenty dollars a month. Don’t talk to me about your family.”

“I tell you, if it wasn’t for the children-”

And often, in the end, Mr. Biswas would leave the house and go for a long night walk through the city, stopping at some empty shack of a cafй to eat a tin of salmon, trying to stifle the pain in his stomach and only making it worse; while below the weak electric bulb the sleepy-eyed Chinese shopkeeper picked and sucked his teeth, his slack, bare arms resting on a glasscase in which flies slept on stale cakes. Up to this time the city had been new and held an expectation which not even the deadest two o”clock sun could destroy. Anything could happen: he might meet his barren heroine, the past could be undone, he would be remade. But now not even the thought of the Sentinel’s presses, rolling out at that moment reports of speeches, banquets, funerals (with all names and decorations carefully checked), could keep him from seeing that the city was no more than a repetition of this: this dark, dingy cafй, the chipped counter, the flies thick on the electric flex, the empty Coca Cola cases stacked in a corner, the cracked glasscase, the shopkeeper picking his teeth, waiting to close.

And in the house, while he was out, the children would come out of bed and go to Shama. She would take down her bloated reporter’s notebooks and try to explain how she had spent the money given her.

At school one day Anand asked the boy who shared his desk, “Your father and mother does quarrel?”

“What about?”

“Oh, about anything. About food, for instance.”

“Nah. But suppose he ask her to go to town and buy something. And suppose she don’t buy it. Boy!”

One evening, after a quarrel had flared up and died without being concluded, Anand went to Mr. Biswas’s room and said, “I have a story to tell you.”

Something in his manner warned Mr. Biswas. He put down his book, settled a pillow against the head of the bed and smiled.

“Once upon a time there was a man-” Anand’s voice broke.

“Yes?” Mr. Biswas said, in a mocking friendly voice, still smiling, scraping his lower lip with his teeth.

“Once upon a time there was a man who-” His voice broke again, his father’s smile confused him, he forgot what he had planned to say and abandoning grammar, added quickly, “Who, whatever you do for him, wasn’t satisfied.”

Mr. Biswas burst out laughing, and Anand ran out of the room, trembling with rage and humiliation, to the kitchen, where Shama comforted him.

For many days Anand didn’t speak to Mr. Biswas and, in secret revenge, didn’t drink milk at the Dairies, but iced coffee. Mr. Biswas was effusive towards Savi and Myna and Kamla, and relaxed with Shama. The atmosphere in the house was less heavy and Shama, now Anand’s defender, took much pleasure in urging Anand to speak to his father.

“Leave him, leave him,” Mr. Biswas said. “Leave the storyteller.”

Anand became steadily more morose. When he came home after private lessons one afternoon he refused to eat or talk. He went to his room, lay down on the bed and, despite Shama’s coaxings, stayed there.

Mr. Biswas came in and presently walked into the room, saying in his rallying voice, “Well, well. What happen to our Hans Andersen?”

“Eat some prunes, son,” Shama said, taking out the little brown paper-bag from the table drawer.

Mr. Biswas saw the distress on Anand’s face and his manner changed. “What’s the matter?”

Anand said, “The boys laugh at me.”

“He who laughs last laughs best,” Shama said.

“Lawrence say that his father is your boss.”

There was silence.

Mr. Biswas sat on the bed and said, “Lawrence is the night editor. Nothing to do with me.”

“He say they have you like an office boy in the office.”

“You know I write features.”

“And he say that when you go to his father house you have to go to the back door.”

Mr. Biswas stood up. His linen suit was crumpled, the jacket pulled out of shape by the notebooks in the pockets, the tops of which were dirty and a little frayed.

“You never went to his father house?”

“Why should he go to Lawrence’s house?” Shama said.

“And you never went to the back door?”

Mr. Biswas walked to the window. It was dark; his back was to them.

“Let me put on the light,” Shama said briskly. Her footsteps were heavy. The light went on. Anand covered his face with his arm. “Is that all that’s been upsetting you?” Shama asked. “Your father has nothing to do with Lawrence. You heard what he said. “

Mr. Biswas went out of the room.

Shama said, “You shouldn’t have told him that, you know, son.”

For the rest of that evening Shama walked and talked and did everything as noisily as she could.

The next morning, with his books and lunch parcel in his bag and the six cents for milk in his pocket, Anand was kissing Shama in the back verandah when Mr. Biswas came to him and said, “I don’t depend on them for a job. You know that. We could go back any time to Hanuman House. All of us. You know that.”

On Saturday he took the children on a surprise visit to Ajodha’s. Tara and Ajodha were as delighted as the children, and the visit lasted till Sunday. There was much to look at in the new house. It was a grand two-storeyed concrete house built and decorated and furnished in the modern manner. The concrete blocks looked like rough-hewn stone; there was no dust-collecting fretwork hanging from the eaves; doors and windows were varnished, not painted, and closed and opened in interesting ways; chairs were upholstered and vast, not small and cane-bottomed; floors were stained and polished; the lavatory flushes were chainless. In the drawing-room they studied Tara’s photographs of the dead; they saw Raghu in his flower-strewn coffin surrounded by his thin, big-eyed children. The kitchen was enormous and abounded in modern contrivances; Tara, old, slow and oldfashioned, seemed out of place in it. When they were tired of the house they wandered about the yard, which had not changed. They talked to the cowman and the gardener, examined the various people who called, and played among the abandoned frames of motor vehicles. After lunch on Saturday they went to the cinema, and on Sunday Ajodha arranged an excursion.

The following week-end they went again, and the weekend after that; and soon this week-end visit was established. They travelled up on Saturday morning, since that was the only time it was reasonably easy to get a bus out of Port of Spain. As soon as they got on the bus in the George Street station Mr. Biswas changed, dropping his week-day moroseness and becoming gay and even impish. The mood lasted until Sunday evening; then they were all silent as they got nearer the city, the house, Shama, Monday morning. For a day or two afterwards the house in Port of Spain seemed dark and clumsy.

Shama went on only one of these visits, and that she almost ruined. The old, unspoken antagonism between the families still existed and she was not eager to go. There had been a minor quarrel just before they went through the gate, and Shama was sullen when she stepped into Tara’s house. Then, either from pride, or because she was made uneasy by the grandeur of the house, or because she was unable to make the effort, she remained sullen throughout the week-end. She said afterwards that she had known all along that Ajodha and Tara did not care for her; and she never went again.

She was often alone in Port of Spain. The children were not anxious to go with her to Hanuman House, and as dissension there increased she went less often herself, regretting the old warmth, fearing to be involved in new quarrels. She had hardly moved outside her own family and did not know how to get on with strangers. She was shy of people of another race, religion or way of life. Her shyness had got her a reputation for hardness among the tenants, and she had done little to get to know the woman who lived in Owad’s old room. But now, alone at the week-ends, she felt the need of company and sought out the woman, who not only responded, but showed herself exceedingly curious. And Shama took down her account books and explained.

So the house became Shama’s, the place where she stayed, the place to which Mr. Biswas and the children returned with sadness after the week-end.

And during the week Anand’s life was a misery. While Mr. Biswas struggled with features on the splendid work of the Chacachacare Leper Settlement (with a photograph of lepers at prayer) and the Young Offenders’ Detention Institution (with a photograph of young offenders at prayer), Anand wrote down and learned by heart copious notes on geography and English. Textbooks were discarded; only the notes of the teacher mattered; any deviation was instantly and severely punished; and there was not a day when some boy was not flogged and put to stand behind the blackboard. For this was the exhibition class, where no learning mattered except that which led to good examination results; and the teacher knew his job. At home Mr. Biswas read Anand Self-Help and on his birthday gave him Duty, adding as a pure frivolity a school edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Childhood, as a time of gaiety and irresponsibility, was for these exhibition pupils only one of the myths of English Composition. Only in compositions did they give delirious shouts of joy and their spirits overflowed into song; only there did they indulge in what the composition notes called “schoolboy’s pranks”.

Anand, following the example of those Samuel Smiles heroes who had in youth concealed the brilliance of their later years, did what he could to avoid school. He pretended to be ill; he played truant, forged excuses, was found out and flogged; he destroyed his shoes. He abandoned private lessons one afternoon, telling the teacher that he was wanted at home for a Hindu prayer ceremony which could take place only at half past three that afternoon, and telling his parents that the teacher’s mother had died and the teacher had gone to the funeral. Mr. Biswas, anxious to remain in the teacher’s favour, cycled to the school the next day to offer his condolences. Anand was called a young scamp (the teacher sank in his estimation for using a word that sounded so slangy), flogged and left behind the blackboard. At home Mr. Biswas said, “Those private lessons are costing me money, you know.” “Pranks” were permitted only in English Composition.

Most of his male cousins had undergone the brahminical initiation, and though Anand shared Mr. Biswas’s distaste for religious ritual, he was immediately attracted by this ceremony. His cousins had had their heads shaved, they were invested with the sacred thread, told the secret verses, given little bundles and sent off to Benares to study. This last was only a piece of play-acting. The attraction of the ceremony lay in the shaving of the head: no boy with a shaved head could go to a predominantly Christian school. Anand began a strong campaign for initiation. But he knew Mr. Biswas’s prejudices and worked subtly. He told Mr. Biswas one evening that he was unable to offer up the usual prayers with sincerity, since the words had become meaningless. He needed an original prayer, so that he could think of each word. He wanted Mr. Biswas to write this prayer for him, though he made it clear that, unlike Mr. Biswas, he wanted no east-west compromise: he wanted a specifically Hindu prayer. The prayer was written. And Anand got Shama to bring a coloured print of the goddess Lakshmi from Hanuman House. He hung the print on the wall above his table and objected when lights were turned on in the evening before he had said his prayer to Lakshmi. Shama was delighted at this example of blood triumphing over environment; and Mr. Biswas, despite his Aryan aversion to Sanatanist, Tulsi-like idol worship, could not hide the honour he felt at being asked to write Anand’s prayer. After some time Anand complained that the whole procedure was improper, a mockery, and would continue to be so until he had been initiated.

Shama was thrilled.

But Mr. Biswas said, “Wait till the long holidays.”

And so, during the long holidays, when Savi and Myna and Kamla were making their round of holiday visits, including a fortnight at a beach house Ajodha had rented, Anand, shaved and thoroughly brahmin, but ashamed of showing his bald head, stayed in Port of Spain and Mr. Biswas gave him portions of Macdougall’s Grammar to learn and listened to him recite his geography and English notes. The evening worship of Lakshmi stopped.

Towards the end of that year a letter came to Mr. Biswas from Chicago. The stamp was cancelled: REPORT OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POSTMASTER. Though the envelope was long the letter was short, a third of the paper being taken up by the florid, raised red and black letterhead of a newspaper. The letter was from Mr. Burnett.

Dear Mohun, As you can see, I have left my little circus and am back in the old business. As a matter of fact I didn’t leave the circus. It left me. Perhaps fire in Trinidad is different. But when that boy from St. James was given one small American fire to walk through, he just ran. Away. My guess is that he is somewhere on Ellis Island, with nobody to claim him. The snake-charmer was all right until his snake bit him. We gave him a good funeral. I hunted high and low to get a Hindu priest to say the last few words, but no luck. I was going to do the job myself, but I couldn’t dress the part, not being able to tie the headpiece or the tailpiece. Now and then I see a copy of the Sentinel. Why don’t you give America a try?

Though the letter was a joke and nothing in it was to be taken seriously, Mr. Biswas was moved that Mr. Burnett had written at all. He immediately began to reply, and went on for pages, writing detailed denigrations of the new members of the staff. He thought he was being light and detached, but when at lunchtime he re-read what he had written he saw how bitter he appeared, how much he had revealed of himself. He tore the letter up. From time to time, until he died, he thought of writing. But he never wrote. And Mr. Burnett never wrote again.

The school term ended and the children, forgetting the disappointment of the previous year, talked excitedly of going to Hanuman House for Christmas. Shama spent hours in the back verandah sewing clothes on an old hand machine which, mysteriously, was hers, how or since when no one knew. The broken wooden handle was swathed in red cotton and looked as though it had bled profusely from a deep wound; the chest, waist, rump and hind quarters of the animal-like machine, and its wooden stall, were black with oil and smelled of oil; and it was a wonder that cloth emerged clean and unmangled from the clanking, champing and chattering which Shama called forth from the creature by the touch of a finger on its bloody bandaged tail. The back verandah smelled of machine oil and new cloth and became dangerous with pins on the floor and pins between floorboards. Anand marvelled at the delight of his sisters in the tedious operations, and marvelled at their ability to put on dresses bristling with pins and not be pricked. Shama made him two shirts with long tails, the fashion among the boys at school (even exhibition pupils have their unscholarly moments) being for billowing shirts, barely tucked into the trousers.

But none of the clothes Shama made then were worn at Hanuman House.

One afternoon Mr. Biswas came back from the Sentinel and as soon as he pushed his cycle through the front gate he saw that the rose garden at the side of the house had been destroyed and the ground levelled, red earth mingling with the black. The plants were in a bundle against the corrugated iron fence. The stems, hard and stained and blighted on the outside, yet showed white and wet and full of promise where they had been cleanly gashed; their illformed leaves had not begun to quail; they still looked alive.

He threw his bicycle against the concrete steps.

“Shama!”

He walked briskly, his footsteps resounding, through the drawingroom to the back verandah. The floor was littered with scraps of cloth and tangles of thread.

“Shama!”

She came out of the kitchen, her face taut. Her eyes sought to still his voice.

He took in the table and the sewingmachine, the scraps of cloth, the thread, the pins, the kitchen safe, the rails, the banister. Below, in the yard, standing in a group against the fence, he saw the children. They were looking up at him. Then he saw the back of a lorry, a pile of old corrugated iron sheets, a heap of new scantlings, two Negro labourers with dusty heads, faces and backs. And Seth. Rough and managerial in his khaki uniform and heavy bruised bluchers, the ivory cigarette holder held down in one shirt pocket by the buttoned flap.

He saw it clearly. For what seemed a long time he contemplated it. Then he was running down the back steps; Seth looked up, surprised; the labourers, stooping on the lorry, looked up; and he was fumbling among the scantlings. He tried to take one up, had misjudged its size, abandoned it, Shama saying from the verandah, “No, no,” picked up a large stained wet stone from the bleaching-bed and “Who tell you you could come and cut down my rose trees? Who?” Scraping the words out of his throat so that they didn’t seem to come from where he stood, but from someone just behind him. A labourer jumped down from the lorry, there was surprise and even dread in Seth’s eyes. “Pa!” one girl cried, and he hoisted his arm, Shama saying “Man, man.” His wrist was seized, roughly, by large hot gritty fingers. The stone fell to the ground.

Disarmed, he was without words. Beside the three men he felt his frailty, his baggy linen suit beside Seth’s tight khaki clothes and the labourers’ working rags. The cuffs of his jacket bore the imprints of dirty fingers; his wrist burned where it had been held.

Seth said, “You see. You make your children frighten like hell.” And to the loaders, “All right, all right.”

The unloading continued.

“Rose trees?” Seth said. “They did just look like black sage bush to me.”

“Yes,” Mr. Biswas said. “Yes! I know they just look like bush to you. Tough!” he added. “Tough!” As he turned he stumbled against the bed of bleaching stones.

“Oops!” Seth said.

“Tough!” Mr. Biswas repeated, walking away.

Shama followed him.

Heads were withdrawn from the fence on either side. Curtains dropped back into place.

“Thug!” Mr. Biswas said, going up the steps.

“Eh, eh,” Seth said, smiling at the children. “Helluva temper, man. But my lorries can’t sleep in the road.”

From the verandah Mr. Biswas, unseen, said, “This is not the end of this. The old lady will have something to say about this, I guarantee you. And Shekhar.”

Seth laughed. “The old hen and the big god, eh?” He looked up at the verandah and said in Hindi, “Too many people have the idea that everything belongs to the Tulsis. How do you think this house was bought?”

Mr. Biswas appeared at the banister of the verandah.

Anand looked away.

“You will be hearing from my solicitor,” Mr. Biswas said. “And those two rakshas you have with you. They too.” He disappeared again.

The labourers, unaware of their identification with Hindu mythological forces of evil, unloaded.

Seth winked at the children. “Your father is a damn funny sort of man. Behaving as though he own the place. Let me tell you that when you children born your father couldn’t feed you. Ask him. And see the gratitude I get? Everybody defying me these days. Or you don’t know?”

“Savi! Myna! Kamla! Anand!” Shama called.

“You know what your father was doing when I pick him up and marry him to your mother? You know? He tell you? He wasn’t even catching crab. He was just catching flies.”

“Savi! Anand!”

They hesitated, afraid of Seth, afraid of the house and Mr. Biswas.

“Today, look! White suit, collar and tie. And me. Still in the same dirty clothes you see me with since you born. Gratitude, eh? But I will tell you children that if I leave them today, all of them-your father, mother and all-all of them start catching crab tomorrow, I guarantee you.”

From somewhere in the house Mr. Biswas’s voice came, raised, indistinct, heated.

Seth moved to the lorry.

“Eh, Ewart?” he said gently to one of the loaders. “They was nice roses, eh?”

Ewart smiled, his tongue over his top lip, and made sounds which committed him in no way.

Seth jerked his chin toward the house, still the source of angry, indistinct words. He smiled. Then he stopped smiling and said, “We mustn’t pay any mind to these damn jackasses.”

The children moved to the foot of the back steps, where they were hidden from Seth and the loaders.

Mr. Biswas’s mutterings died away.

Suddenly an obscenity cracked out from the house. The children were quite still. There was silence, even from the lorry. Anand could have wept. Then the corrugated iron sheets jangled again.

A series of resonant crashes came from the kitchen.

“Cut down the rose trees,” Mr. Biswas was shouting. “Cut them down. Break up everything else.”

The children, now below the house, heard his footsteps on the floor above as he went from room to room, pulling things down.

Anand walked under the house to the front, past Mr. Biswas’s abandoned bicycle. The fence cast a shadow over the pavement and part of the road. Anand leaned against the fence and envied the calm of the other houses in the street, the group of boys and young men, the cricket players, the night chatterers, around the lamp-post.

Fresh noises came from the yard. It was not Mr. Biswas pulling things down, but Seth and Ewart and Ewart’s colleague putting up a shed for Seth’s lorries at the side of the house, over Mr. Biswas’s garden.

On the road the shadows of houses and trees quickly lengthened, were distorted, became unrecognizable and finally dissolved into darkness.

Mr. Biswas came down the front steps.

“Come with me for a walk.”

Anand would have liked to go, if only because he didn’t want to hurt by refusing. But he wanted more to inspect the damage and comfort Shama.

The damage was slight. Mr. Biswas had ordered his destruction with economy. The mirror of Shama’s dressingtable had been unhinged and thrown on the bed, where it lay intact, reflecting the ceiling. The books had been knocked about a good deal; Selections from Sankamcharya had suffered especially. Mrs. Tulsi’s marble topped tables had all been overturned; the marble tops, crashing, must have been responsible for some of the more frightening noises. Many of the brass vases had been dented, and two potted palms had lost their pots without in any way losing their shape. The hatrack was in a semi-recumbent position against the half-wall of the front verandah, but it had been thrown there gently: a few hooks had snapped, but the glass was whole. In the kitchen no glass or china had been thrown, only noisy things like pots and pans and enamel plates.

When Mr. Biswas returned his mood had changed.

“Shama, how did those marble tops break?” he asked, mimicking Mrs. Tulsi. Then he acted himself. “Break, Mai? What break? Oh, marble top. Yes, Mai. It really break. It look as if it break. Now I wonder how that happened.” He examined the broken hooks of the hatrack. “Didn’t know metal was such a funny thing. Come and look, Savi. Is not smooth inside, you know. Is more like packed sand.” As for the re-diffusion set, which he had kicked from room to room and disembowelled, he said, “I wanted to do that for a long time. The company always saying that they replace sets free.”

When the engineers saw the battered box and asked what had happened, he said, “I feel we listen to it too hard.” They left a brand-new set in exchange, of the latest design.

Every night Seth’s lorries rested in the shed at the side of the house. Mr. Biswas had never thought of Tulsi property as belonging to any particular person. Everything, the land at Green Vale, the shop at The Chase, belonged simply to the House. But the lorries were Seth’s.

3. The Shortfalls Adventure

Despite the solidity of their establishment the Tulsis had never considered themselves settled in Arwacas or even Trinidad. It was no more than a stage in the journey that had begun when Pundit Tulsi left India. Only the death of Pundit Tulsi had prevented them from going back to India; and ever since they had talked, though less often than the old men who gathered in the arcade every evening, of moving on, to India, Demerara, Surinam. Mr. Biswas didn’t take such talk seriously. The old men would never see India again. And he could not imagine the Tulsis anywhere else except at Arwacas. Separate from their house, and lands, they would be separate from the labourers, tenants and friends who respected them for their piety and the memory of Pundit Tulsi; their Hindu status would be worthless and, as had happened during their descent on the house in Port of Spain, they would be only exotic.

But when Shama went hurrying to Arwacas to give her news of Seth’s blasphemies, she found Hanuman House in commotion. The Tulsis had decided to move on. The clay-brick house was to be abandoned, and everyone was full of talk of the new estate at Shorthills, to the northeast of Port of Spain, among the mountains of the Northern Range.

The High Street was bright and noisy as always at the Christmas season, though because of the war there were few imported goods in the shops. In the Tulsi Store there were no Christmas goods except for the antique black dolls, and no decorations except Mr. Biswas’s faded, peeling signs. Many shelves were empty; everything that could be of use at Shorthills had been packed.

And Shama’s news was stale. The disagreement between Seth and the rest of the family had already turned to open war. He and his wife and children had left Hanuman House and were living in a back street not far away; they were taking no part in the move to Shortfalls. The cause of the quarrel remained obscure, each side accusing the other of ingratitude and treachery, and Seth abusing Shekhar in particular. Neither Mrs. Tulsi nor Shekhar had made any statement. Shekhar, besides, was seldom in Arwacas, and it was the sisters who carried on the quarrel. They had forbidden their children to speak to Seth’s children; Seth had forbidden his children to speak to the Tulsi children. Only Padma, Seth’s wife, was welcome, as Mrs. Tulsi’s sister, at Hanuman House; she could not be blamed for her marriage and continued to be respected for her age. Since the breach she had paid one clandestine visit to Hanuman House. The sisters regarded her loyalty as a tribute to the rightness of their cause; that she had had to come secretly was proof of Seth’s brutality.

The crop season was at hand and the sugarcane fields, managerless, were open to the malice of those who bore the Tulsis grudges. Two fires had already been started and there were rumours that Seth was stirring up fresh trouble, claiming Tulsi property as his own. The husbands of some sisters said they had been threatened.

Yet the talk was less of Seth than of the new estate. Shama heard its glories listed again and again. In the grounds of the estate house there was a cricket field and a swimming pool; the drive was lined with orange trees and gri-gri palms with slender white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves. The land itself was a wonder. The saman trees had lianas so strong and supple that one could swing on them. All day the immortelle trees dropped their red and yellow bird-shaped flowers through which one could whistle like a bird. Cocoa trees grew in the shade of the immortelles, coffee in the shade of the cocoa, and the hills were covered with tonka bean. Fruit trees, mango, orange, avocado pear, were so plentiful as to seem wild. And there were nutmeg trees, as well as cedar, poui, and the bois-canot which was light yet so springy and strong it made you a better cricket bat than the willow. The sisters spoke of the hills, the sweet springs and hidden waterfalls with all the excitement of people who had known only the hot, open plain, the flat acres of sugarcane and the muddy ricelands. Even if one didn’t have a way with land, as they had, if one did nothing, life could be rich at Shorthills. There was talk of dairy fanning; there was talk of growing grapefruit. More particularly, there was talk of rearing sheep, and of an idyllic project of giving one sheep to every child as his very own, the foundation, it was made to appear, of fabulous wealth. And there were horses on the estate: the children would learn to ride.

Though it was never clear afterwards why this large decision had been taken so suddenly, and puzzling that the last corporate effort of the Tulsis should have been directed towards this uprooting, Shama left for Port of Spain full of enthusiasm. She wanted to be part of her family again, to share the adventure.

“Horses?” Mr. Biswas said. “I bet you when you go there all you find is one old monkey swinging from the liana on the saman tree. I can’t understand this craziness that possess your family.”

Shama spoke about the sheep.

“Sheep?” Mr. Biswas said. “To ride?”

She said that Seth was no longer part of the family and that two husbands who had left Hanuman House after disagreements with Seth had rejoined the family for the move to Shortfalls.

Mr. Biswas didn’t listen. “About those sheep. Savi get one, Anand get one, Myna get one, Kamla get one. Make four in all. What are we going to do with four sheep. Breed more? To sell and kill? Hindus, eh? Feeding and fattening just in order to kill. Or you see the six of us sitting down and making wool from four sheep? You know how to make wool? Any of your family know how to make wool?”

The children did not want to move to a place they didn’t know, and they were a little frightened of living with the Tulsis again. Above all, they did not want to be referred to as “country pupils” at school; the advantages-being released fifteen minutes earlier in the afternoon-could not make up for the shame. And Mr. Biswas turned Shama’s propaganda into a joke. He read out “The Emperor’s New Clothes” from Bell’s Standard Elocutionist; he drove imaginary flocks of sheep through the drawingroom, making bleating noises. As always during the holidays, he announced his arrival by ringing his bicycle bell from the road; then the children walked out in single file to meet him, staggering under imaginary loads. “Watch it, Savi!” he would call. “Those tonka beans are heavy like hell, you know.” Later he would ask, “Make a lot of wool today?” And once, when Anand came into the drawingroom just as the lavatory chain was pulled, Mr. Biswas said, “Walking back? What’s the matter? Forgot your horse at the waterfall?”

Shama sulked.

“Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! Anand, Savi, Myna! Come and sing a Christmas carol for your mother.”

They sang “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night”.

Shama’s gloom, persisting, defeated them all. And that Christmas, the first they spent by themselves, was made more memorable by Shama’s gloom. She could not make icecream because she didn’t have a freezer, but she did what she could to turn the day into a miniature Hanuman House Christmas. She got up early and waited to be kissed, like Mrs. Tulsi. She spread a white cloth on the table and put out nuts and dates and red apples; she cooked an extravagant meal. She did everything punctiliously, but as one martyred. “Anybody would think you were making another baby,” Mr. Biswas said. And in his diary, a Sentinel reporter’s notebook which he had begun to fill at Mr. Biswas’s suggestion, as an additional exercise in English Composition and as practice in natural writing, Anand wrote, “This is the worst Christmas Day I have ever spent;” and, not forgetting the literary purpose of the diary, added, “I feel like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.”

But Shama never relented.

Soon she received impressive assistance. The house became full of sisters and husbands on their way to and from Shorthills. The fine dresses, veils and jewellery of the sisters contrasted with their mood, which they seemed to get from Shama. They fixed Mr. Biswas with injured, helpless, accusing woman’s looks which he found difficult to ignore. The jokes about sheep and waterfalls and tonka beans stopped; he locked himself in his room. Sometimes Shama, after much coaxing from her sisters, dressed and went to Shorthills with them. She came back gloomier than ever, and when Mr. Biswas said, “Well, tell me, girl, tell me,” she did not reply and only cried silently. When Mrs. Tulsi came Shama cried all the time.

Since the quarrel with Seth Mrs. Tulsi had ceased to be an invalid. She had left the Rose Room to direct the move from Arwacas and was, indeed, the source of the new enthusiasm. She tried to persuade Mr. Biswas to join the move, and Mr. Biswas, flattered at this attention, listened sympathetically. There would be no Seth, Mrs. Tulsi said; one could live for nothing at Shorthills; Mr. Biswas would be able to save his salary; there were many good sites for houses, and with timber from the estate Mr. Biswas might even build himself a little house.

“Leave him, leave him,” Shama said. “All this talk about house was only to spite me.”

“But if I keep my job in Port of Spain I don’t see how I would be able to do anything on the estate,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

He wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to move for Shama’s sake; or whether, without Seth, she needed as many men as possible around her; or whether she wanted no one, by his coolness, to make her question her own enthusiasm. And he agreed to go to Shorthills with her one morning, to have a look at the estate.

He made Anand telephone the Sentinel and went with Mrs. Tulsi to the bus stop. There he suffered some moments of anxiety, for with her long white skirt, her veil, her arms braceleted from wrist to elbow and a thick gold yoke around her neck, Mrs. Tulsi was noticeable in any Port of Spain street, and Mr. Biswas feared he would be spotted by someone from the office. He leaned against the lamp-post, hiding his face.

“Regular bus service,” he said after a time.

“From Shorthills, the buses always leave on the dot.”

“Instead of giving every child a sheep, better to give them a horse. Ride to school. Ride back.”

At last the bus came, empty except for the driver and the conductor. The body had been made locally, a crude jangling box of wood and tin and felt and large naked bolts. Mr. Biswas bumped exaggeratedly up and down on the rough wooden seat. “Just practising,” he said.

The city ended abruptly at the Maraval terminus. The road climbed anl dipped; hills intermittently shut out the view. After half an hour Mr. Biswas pointed to the bush on a roundabout. “Estate?” They went past a puzzling huddle of three crumbling shacks. Two black water barrels stood in the hard yellow yard. “Cricket field?” Mr. Biswas said. “Swimming pool?”

After many curves and climbs the road straightened out and ran steadily down into a widening valley. The hills looked wild, the tops of trees rising one behind the other: a coagulation of greenery. But here and there the faded thatch of a lean-to, warm against the still, dark green, showed that the wilderness had been charted. Houses and huts appeared on either side of the road, widely separated and so hidden by green that, from the bus, Shorthills was only flitting patches of colour: the rust of a roof, the pink or ochre of a wall.

“Next bus to Port of Spain in ten minutes,” the conductor said conversationally. Mr. Biswas got up. Mrs. Tulsi pulled him down. “They like to reverse first.” The bus reversed in a dirt lane and came to rest on the verge, under an avocado pear tree.

The driver and conductor squatted under the tree, smoking. Across the road and next to the lane in which the bus had reversed Mr. Biswas saw an open square of ground, mounds and faded wreaths alone indicating its purpose.

Mr. Biswas waved at the forlorn little cemetery and the dirt lane which, past a few tumbledown houses, disappeared behind bush and apparently led only to more bush and the mountain which rose at the end. “Estate?” he asked.

Mrs. Tulsi smiled. “And on this side.” She waved at the other side of the road.

Beyond a deep gully, whose sides were sheer, whose bed was strewn with boulders, stones and pebbles, perfectly graded, Mr. Biswas saw more bush, more mountains. “A lot of bamboo,” he said. “You could start a paper factory.”

It was easy to see just how far the buses went. Up to the dirt lane the road was smooth, its centre black and dully shining. Past that the road narrowed, was gravelly and dusty, its edges obscured by the untended verge.

“I suppose we go along there,” Mr. Biswas said.

They began walking.

Mrs. Tulsi bent down and tore up a plant from the verge. “Rabbit meat,” she said. “Best food for rabbits. In Arwacas you have to buy it.”

Below the overarching trees the road was in soft shadow. Sunlight spotted the gravel in white blurs, spotted the wet green verges, the dark ridged trunks of trees. It was cool. And then Mr. Biswas began seeing the fruit trees. Avocado pear trees grew at the side of the road as casually as any bush; their fruit, only just out of flower, were tiny but already perfectly shaped, with a shine they would soon lose. The land between the road and the gully widened; the gully grew shallower. Beyond it Mr. Biswas saw the tall immortelles and their red and yellow flowers. And then the untrodden road blazed with the flowers. Mr. Biswas picked one up, put it between his lips, tasted the nectar, blew, and the bird-shaped flower whistled. Even as they stood flowers fell on them. Under the immortelles he saw the cocoa trees, stunted, their branches black and dry, the cocoa pods gleaming with all the colours between yellow and red and crimson and purple, not like things that had grown, but like varnished wax models stuck on to dead branches. Then there were orange trees, heavy with leaf and fruit. And always they walked between two hills. The road narrowed; they heard no sound except that of their feet on the loose gravel. Then, far away, they heard the bus starting on its journey back to bustling, barren, concrete and timber Port of Spain. Impossible that it was less than an hour away!

The gully grew shallower and shallower, and then it was only a depression carpeted with a soft vine of a tender green. Mrs. Tulsi bent down and disturbed it. A vine hung from her fingers; it had a faint smell of mint.

“Old man’s beard,” she said. “In Arwacas they grow it in baskets.”

The house was partly hidden by a large, branching, towering saman tree. Swollen parasite vines veined its branches and massive trunk; wild pines sprouted like coarse hair from every crotch; and it was hung with lianas. Below the tree, beside the gully, there was a short walk lined with orange trees, and around the trunk there was a clump of wild tannia, pale green, four feet tall, nothing but stem and giant heart-shaped leaves, cool with quick beads of dew.

An old signpost stood slightly askew in the gully. The letters were bleached and faint: Christopher Columbus Road. It was fitting. The land, though fruitful from a former cultivation, felt new.

“This used to be the old road,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

And Mr. Biswas found it easy to imagine the other race of Indians moving about this road before the world grew dark for them.

Nothing in Shama’s accounts had prepared him for the view of the house from the gully, at the end of the tree-lined drive. It was a two-storeyed house with a long verandah on the lower floor; it stood far from the road on an escarpment on the hill, above a broad flight of concrete steps, white against the surrounding green.

And everything was as Shama had said. On one side of the drive there was a cricket field; the pitch was red and broken: obviously the village team did not use matting. On the other side, beyond the saman tree, the lianas, the wild tannia, there was a swimming pool, empty, cracked, sandy, plants pushing up through the concrete, but it was easy to see it mended and filled with clear water; and beyond that, on an artificial mound, a cherry tree, its thick branches trimmed level at the bottom above a wrought-iron seat. And in the drive the gri-gri palms, with their white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves; though they were perhaps too old: they had grown so tall they could not be seen whole, and could even be missed.

Then at the far end of the cricket ground Mr. Biswas saw a mule. It looked old and dispirited. Untethered, it remained still, against a camouflage of cocoa-trees.

“Ah!” Mr. Biswas said, breaking the silence. “Horses.”

“That’s not a horse,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

They left the drive and stood among the wild tannia under the saman tree. Mrs. Tulsi held a liana and offered it to Mr. Biswas. While he felt it, she held a thinner liana and pulled it down. “As strong as rope,” she said. “The children could skip with this.”

They walked along the weed-ridden drive. The narrow canal at one side was silted with fine, rippled sand. “You could just sell the sand from this place,” Mrs. Tulsi said. They came to the broad flight of shallow concrete steps. Mr. Biswas went up slowly: impossible not to feel regal ascending steps like these.

On either side of the house there was an abandoned garden, flowerless except for some stray marigolds; but through the bush it was possible to see the pattern of the beds, edged with concrete and the stunted shrubs called “green tea” and “red tea”. At the end of one garden a Julie mango tree stood on a concrete-walled circular bed more than three feet high.

“Just the spot for a temple,” Mrs. Tulsi whispered.

The house was of timber, but the timber had been painted to look like blocks of granite: grey, flecked with black, red, white and blue, and marked with thin white lines. A folding screen separated the regal drawingroom from the regal diningroom; and there was a multiplicity of rooms whose purposes were uncertain. The house had its own electricity plant; not working at the moment, Mrs. Tulsi said, but it could be fixed. There was a garage, servants’ quarters, an outdoor bathroom with a deep concrete tub. The kitchen, linked to the house by a roofed way, was vast, with a brick oven. The hill rose directly behind the kitchen; the view through the back window was of the green hillside just a few feet away. And tonka beans grew on the hill.

“Who owned the house before?” Mr. Biswas asked.

“Some French people.”

This, allied to a brief acquaintance during his Aryan days with the writings of Remain Rolland, gave Mr. Biswas a respect for the French.

They walked and looked. The silence, the solitude, the fruitful bush in a broken landscape: it was an enchantment.

They heard the bus in the distance.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose it is time to go home now.”

“Home?” said Mrs. Tulsi. “Isn’t this your home now?”

So the Tulsis left Arwacas. The lands were rented out and it fell to the tenants to contend with Seth’s claims. The Tulsi Store was leased to a firm of Port of Spain merchants. At Port of Spain one of the tenements was sold and Shama relieved of her rent-collecting duties. It was only then that Shama, still sulking after her victory, disclosed that Mrs. Tulsi had decided to raise the rent of the Port of Spain house. Mr. Biswas was shocked, and to shock him further Shama brought down her account books and showed how his salary went to the grocer almost as soon as it came, how her debts were rising.

The solitude and silence of Shorthills was violated. The villagers bore the invasion without protest and almost with indifference. They were an attractive mixture of French and Spanish and Negro and, though they lived so near to Port of Spain, formed a closed, distinctive community. They had a rural slowness and civility, and spoke English with an accent derived from the French patois they spoke among themselves. They appeared to exercise some rights on the grounds of the house. They played cricket on the cricket field most afternoons and there was a match every Sunday, when the grounds were virtually taken over by the villagers. For some time after the coming of the Tulsis courting couples strolled about the orange walks and the drive in the afternoon, disappearing from time to time into the cocoa woods. But this custom soon ceased. The couples, finding themselves surprised at every turn by a Tulsi, moved further up the gully.

Mr. Biswas’s first impression on moving to Shorthills was that the Tulsi family had increased. Seth and his family were absent; but those sisters who for one reason and another had lived away from Hanuman House had brought their families; and there were many married grandchildren as well, and their families.

Mr. Biswas was given a room on the upper floor, one of six rooms of equal size about a central corridor. It was a hotel-like arrangement, with a couple in each room, and widows and children moving about the common area downstairs. Mr. Biswas’s room became the headquarters of his family; it was there that Anand did his homework, there that the children came to complain, there that Mr. Biswas gave them delicacies to eat in private. The fourposter, Shama’s dressingtable, the bookcase and desk and the table were in this room; the rest of his furniture, rockingchair, hatrack, kitchen safe, was disposed, like his children at night, about the house.

The drawingroom furnishings of Hanuman House had been similarly scattered. There could be no division of this house into the used and the unused, and the thronelike chairs, the statuary and the vases were left in the drawingroom, which in appearance and purpose presently became the equivalent of the Hanuman House hall.

A certain unpleasantness was added to Mr. Biswas’s situation by the presence directly across the corridor of a brother-in-law he had never seen at Hanuman House, a tall, contemptuous man who had taken an immediate dislike to him and expressed this dislike by a quivering of the nostrils.

Anand said, “Prakash say his pappa got more books than you.”

Mr. Biswas sent Anand to find out what books Prakash’s father had.

Anand reported, “All the books exactly the same size. On the cover they have a green shield marked ‘Boots’. And they are all by a man called W. C. Tuttle.”

“Trash,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Trash,” Anand told Prakash.

“You call my books trash?” Prakash’s father asked Mr. Biswas some mornings later, when they opened their doors at the same time.

“I didn’t call your books trash.”

The nostrils quivered. “What about your Epictetus and Manxman and Samuel Smiles?”

“How do you know about my Epictetus?”

“How do you know about my books?”

Thereafter Mr. Biswas locked his room whenever he left it. The news spread and there were comments.

“So you start up already?” Shama said.

And having got to Shorthills, everyone waited, for the sheep, the horses, for the swimming pool to be repaired, the drive weeded, the gardens cleaned, the electricity plant fixed, the house repainted.

Waiting, the children stripped the saman tree of its lianas. But there was no use to which they could put these improbable and pleasing growths; they were not good for skipping, as Mrs. Tulsi had said: the thin ones frayed easily, the fat ones were unwieldy. Hari cut down the Julie mango tree on the raised bed at the end of the garden and built a small, kennel-like box-board hut; this was the temple. The reader of W. C. Tuttle put up a large framed print of the goddess Lakshmi in the drawingroom and offered up his own prayers before it every evening; Prakash said his father knew more of these matters than Hari. The brick oven in the kitchen was levelled; the roofed way between the house and kitchen was pulled down and the open area roofed with old corrugated iron and tree-branches from the hillside at the back.

Anand’s patience broke. Spreading a rumour among the children that the house was going to be repainted right away but that the old paint had to be scraped off first, he soon had more than a dozen helpers working on the granite blocks. They made many pink and cream scars on the grey verandah walls before they were noticed; and this effort to force improvements ended in a mass flogging.

Mr. Biswas, too, was waiting for improvements. But he did not greatly care about them. For him Shorthills was an adventure, an interlude. His job made him independent of the Tulsis; and Shorthills was an insurance against the sack. It also provided an opportunity to save, an opportunity to plunder. And secretly he was plundering: half a dozen oranges at a time, half a dozen avocado pears or grapefruit or lemons, sold to a cafй keeper in St. Vincent Street with some story about the variety of fruit trees he had in his backyard. The money was little but regular, the thrill of plundering delicious. Plunder! The very sound of the word excited Mr. Biswas. Cycling to work in the cool of the morning and whistling in his way, he would suddenly jump off his bicycle, look right, look left, pull down oranges or avocado pears, drop them into his saddlebag, hop on to his saddle and cycle measuredly away, whistling.

He came back one afternoon to find the cherry tree cut down, the artificial mound partly dug up, the swimming pool partly filled in. By the end of the week the mound was a flat black patch and the swimming pool did not exist. A tent was put up over the area occupied by the pool and sisters and husbands remarked again and again that it was wonderful not only to have so much bamboo so near but not to have to pay for it either, as they had had to at Arwacas.

The tent was for wedding guests. It appeared that a whole wave of Shama’s nieces was to be married off. One marriage had been arranged before the move, and during the idle weeks at Shorthills the idea had grown. Action was swift and sudden. Details-the bridegrooms and dowries-had been easily settled, and now the puzzling estate was forgotten and all energy went to preparing for the weddings. Days before the ceremony guests and retainers and dancers, singers and musicians came from Arwacas. They slept in the tent, the verandah, the garage, the covered space between the kitchen and house, and by day wandered through the grounds and woods, plundering.

Much bamboo was used in the decorations. The drive and walks were lined with bamboo poles placed horizontally on vertical bamboo poles; every horizontal section was filled with oil and fitted with a wick. On the night of the weddings many small flickering flames seemed to be suspended in the darkness; trees, outlined, not illuminated, looked solid; and the grounds felt protected, a warm cave in the night. The seven bridegrooms came in seven cavalcades with seven teams of drummers, followed by the stupefied villagers. At the foot of the concrete steps there were seven ceremonies of welcome, and in the wedding-tent, built over one of the gardens flattened for the purpose, the seven wedding ceremonies went on all night, while in the tent over the swimming pool there was singing, dancing and feasting.

When the weddings were over, the population of the house temporarily reduced by seven, the guests gone away, and the tents over the ruined garden and swimming pool taken down, everyone began waiting again, for the small cricket pavilion to be restored, the drive cleaned, its culverts mended, the canal cleared of silt, for the evergreen hedges at the bottom of the hill to be trimmed, for the unruined garden to be replanted. Unasked, the children did what they could, but their scattered efforts made no impression on the grounds. They collected tonka beans from the hillside and, not knowing what to do with them, left them in the garage, where they presently rotted and smelled.

Then suddenly some sheep appeared. Half a dozen scraggy, bare, bewildered sheep. The children had been promised sheep, but they had expected fleecy things, and there was no rush to claim these. The sheep remained nibbling in the cricket field, offending the children and the cricketers.

Nothing was done to the cocoa trees or the orange trees. Week by week the bush advanced and the estate, from looking neglected, began to look abandoned. There was still no one to plan or direct. As suddenly as she had emerged from her sickroom to supervise the move, so Mrs. Tulsi had now withdrawn. She had a small room on the lower floor, overlooking the ruined garden and Hari’s box-board temple. But her window was closed, the room was sealed against light and air, and there, in an ammoniac darkness, she spent much of the day, looked after by Sushila and Miss Blackie. It was as though her energy had been stimulated only by the quarrel with Seth and, ebbing, had depressed her further into exhaustion and grief.

Govind tore down the cricket pavilion one day. A rough cowshed went up in its place, and Mr. Biswas heard, with astonishment, that his cow was to be stabled there.

“Cow? My cow?”

It turned out that the cow, whose name was Mutri, was one of Shama’s secret possessions, like her sewingmachine. Mutri had been kept on the estate at Arwacas with all the other Tulsi cows. She was an old black cow, tired, with short bruised horns.

“What about the milk?” Mr. Biswas asked. “The calves?”

“What about the grass?” Shama replied. “The water? The feed?”

Govind looked after the cows and for that reason alone Mr. Biswas made no further inquiries. Govind was becoming increasingly surly. He scarcely spoke to anyone, and worked off his rages on the cows. He beat them with thick lengths of wood and at milking time the slightest misdemeanour threw him into a rage. The animals didn’t moan or wince or show anger; they only tried to move away. No one protested; there was no one to complain to.

Mr. Biswas said, “Poor Mutri.”

Before cows and sheep the cricketers retreated. The cricket field turned to mud and manure, and someone planted a pumpkin vine at the edge of it.

Then the tree-cutting began. In less than a morning the reader of W. C. Tutde cut down the gri-gri palms along the drive. He came back sweating to the house and, since none of the watertaps worked, had a bath at a waterbarrel. Mrs. Tulsi ate the hearts of the trees, which had been recommended to her by one of her Arwacas friends, and the children consoled themselves with the red berries. Govind, asserting himself, then cut down the orange trees: they were blighted, encouraged snakes, and could conceal thieves.

“Damn stupid thieves if they think they could find anything in this place,” Mr. Biswas said. “They cut down the trees only to make it easier to pick the oranges, that is all.”

The oranges were collected by Govind and Chinta and their children, put into sacks and sent to Port of Spain by bus. Everyone wondered who took the money. The trees were chopped into logs and burned in the kitchen, the moss-covered barks making excellent kindling.

The children lost heart. They now had to be compelled to gather tonka beans, to pick oranges and avocado pears to be sent to Port of Spain. On some Saturdays they pulled up weeds from the drive, urged on by the adults to hollow competitions to see who could amass the highest pile of weeds.

The plumbing remained unrepaired. Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside. The house toilet, unused, became a sewingroom.

In place of the orange trees and the palm trees: eedlings were planted along the drive and hedged around with bamboo stakes. The cows broke down the cricket field fence. The sheep, escaping, broke down the bamboo stakes and stripped the seedlings clean. The silt rose in the canal at the side of the drive. Weeds grew from the cracks in the concrete culvert and up the wide, shallow steps.

Every morning Hari said his prayers and rang his bell and beat his gong in his boxboard kennel in the ruined garden; and every evening the man Mr. Biswas now thought of as W. C. Tuttle said his prayers before the framed print in the drawingroom. The rubbish heap started by the Tulsis at the foot of the hill grew higher and wider. The sheep, neglected, unfruitful, survived. The cows were milked. The pumpkin vine spread rapidly in the manured mud and broke into frail yellow flower. The first pumpkin, the first Tulsi fruit, was welcomed with enthusiasm; and since, because of a Hindu taboo no one could explain, women were forbidden to cut pumpkins open, a man was invited to do so. And the man was W. C. Tuttle.

It was W. C. Tuttle who dismantled the electricity plant and melted down the lead to make dumbbells. And it was W. C. Tuttle who announced that a furniture factory was to be started. Scores of cedar trees were cut down, sawed and stacked in the garage, and W. C. Tuttle sent to his own village for a Negro called Theophile. Theophile was a blacksmith whose trade had declined with the coming of the motorcar. He was lodged in a small room below the drawing-room, fed three times a day and turned loose among the cedar planks. He made many benches; gaining confidence, he put together a vast, irregularly oval table; then a number of wardrobes like sentry-boxes. No joint was clean; no door fitted; and the soft wood showed many little clusters of hammer indentations. It was stated by W. C. Tuttle, his wife, his children and Theophile himself that stain and varnish would hide these flaws. And, Tulsi excitement mounting, Theophile went to work on moms chairs. W. C. Tuttle ordered a bookcase. Mr. Biswas ordered a bookcase. The doors of Mr. Biswas’s bookcase sloped at the top and would have formed a peak if they could meet: Theophile said it was a style. By this time the planks on the oval table had shrunk, the joints were loose and the wax had dropped out, and the wardrobe doors could never close. Theophile worked with saw and hammer and nails on the table and wardrobes; then the chairs and bookcases needed attention; then the wardrobes gave trouble again. Theophile was dismissed to his village, and there was no further talk about the furniture factory. The morris chairs fell apart and were used as firewood; some of the more adventurous children slept on the table at night. W. C. Tuttle, acting as Mrs. Tulsi’s agent, sold the cedar planks in the garage. Shortly afterwards he bought a lorry, and hired it out to the Americans.

Then the Americans came to the village. They had decided to build a post somewhere in the mountains, and day and night army lorries rolled through the village on skid chains. The lane next to the cemetery was widened and on the dark green mountains in the distance a thin dirt-red line zigzagged upwards. The Tulsi widows got together, built a shack at the corner of the lane and stocked it with Coca Cola, cakes, oranges and avocado pears. The American lorries didn’t stop. The widows spent some money on a liquor licence and, with great trepidation, spent more money on cases of rum. The lorries didn’t stop. One night a lorry crashed into the shack. The widows retreated.

Though surrounded by devastation, Mr. Biswas remained detached. He paid no rent; he spent nothing on food; he was saving most of his salary. For the first time he had money, and every fortnight it was increasing. He closed his heart to sorrow and anger at a dereliction he was powerless to prevent; and, recognizing with a thrill that it was now every man for himself-the phrase gave him much pleasure-he continued to plunder, enjoying the feeling that in the midst of chaos he was calmly going about his own devilish plans.

Then the news of the ravages of W. C. Tuttle and Govind was whispered through the house. W. C. Tuttle had been selling whole cedar trees. Govind had been selling lorry loads of oranges and papaws and avocado pears and limes and grapefruit and cocoa and tonka beans. Mr. Biswas felt exceedingly foolish next morning when he dropped half a dozen oranges into his bag. He wondered, too, how it was possible for someone to steal a cedar tree without being noticed. Shama, outraged like most of the sisters, explained the trees had been sold on the ground, for very little. The buyers’ lorries had come to the estate from the north, taking the roundabout, dangerous and virtually unused road over the mountains. Nothing would have been known had not the clearing on the hillside grown too large and attracted the attention of the estate overseer, a sad worried man who had come with the estate, like the mule, and without knowing what his duties were, had to look occupied to keep his job.

Govind and Chinta ignored the whispers and silence. W. C. Tuttle replied to them by scowling and exercising with his dumbbells. His wife looked offended. The nine little Tuttles refused to speak to the other children.

The villagers at last banded against the Tulsis. Many of the Tulsi children were going to schools in Port of Spain and they filled the seven o”clock bus at the terminus near the graveyard. The villagers, who had hitherto found the hourly bus service to Port of Spain quite adequate, began to board the bus just before it reached the graveyard, paying the extra penny to be sure of their seat to Port of Spain. And the children found that the seven o”clock bus came in nearly full, and no one got out. There was no great competition for the vacant seats, and for many days most of the children did not go to school, until W. C. Tuttle, frowningly forgiving, offered, for no more than the bus fare, to take the children to school on his lorry.

The lorry had to be at the American base at six in the morning. Therefore the children could not be deposited at school much after half past five. To do this they had to leave Shorthills at a quarter to five. So they had to be up at four. It was still night when, sitting close together on planks fixed to the tray of the lorry, their teeth chattering, they drove through the chilly hills below the low dripping trees; and the street lamps were still on when they got to Port of Spain. They were put down outside their schools before newsboys delivered papers, before servants were up, before the school gates opened. They remained on the pavement and played hopscotch in the pre-dawn light. The caretaker of the girls’ school rose at six and dressed hurriedly and let them in, asking them not to make too much noise and disturb his wife, who was still asleep. The caretaker’s house was small, with only two rooms and a tiny, partly-exposed kitchen; and the caretaker had a numerous family. They had been used to wandering about the school yard in the early mornings dressed as they pleased; they brushed their teeth and spat in the sandy yard; they quarrelled; they slipped naked from house to outdoor bathroom and towelled themselves in the open; they cooked and ate under the tamarind tree; they hung up intimate washing. Now correctness was imposed on them from dawn. While the caretaker and his family breakfasted, in silence, the children became hungry again and ate the lunches which had been prepared from them three hours before. It was the best time to eat the lunches, for by midday the curry was beginning to go red and smell. The children who kept their food till lunchtime often gave it away then in exchange for things like bread and cheese; and, the reputation of Indian food surviving even Tulsi cooking, both sides thought they were getting the better bargain.

The return to Shortfalls had its own problems. The children left school at three. The lorry left the American base at six. It was therefore out of the question if the children were to get home before eight. And the bus service from Port of Spain became more difficult from week to week. Because of wartime shortages and restrictions there were fewer city buses, and the Shorthills bus was used by people who didn’t go all the way. To get the bus the children had to walk nearly three miles to the terminus at the railway station. The last uncrowded bus was the two-thirty; to get this meant leaving school shortly after lunch. The child who hoped to get the three-thirty left school at half past two, walked to the terminus and joined the waiting crowd. There was no queue and the bus on its arrival became the object of an immediate scrimmage. People scrambled through the open windows, climbing up on tyres and the cap of the petrol tank, and burst through the emergency exit at the back; so that even if a child managed to squeeze in first through the door he found the seats taken. So the children walked until they could be taken on by the bus when it was less full, or by the lorry returning from the American base. Mrs. Tulsi sent word from her room that the children could lessen the fatigue of walking in the afternoon if they all sang; if the girls were molested they were to take off their shoes (they wore crepe soles) and strike the molester on the head.

Eventually, however, a car was bought, and one of the sons-in-law drove it to Port of Spain with the children and the oranges. It was a Ford V-8 of the early nineteen-thirties, not inelegant, and it might have performed less erratically if it carried a lighter load. Under the weight of children and oranges it sank low on the rear springs, the bonnet was slightly uptilted, and for the steeper climbs the children had to get off. Often the car broke down and then the driver, who knew nothing about cars, asked the children to push. Like ants around a dead cockroach the children surrounded the car (the girls in their dark blue uniforms) and pushed and pulled. Sometimes they pushed for more than a mile. Sometimes they pushed the car to the top of a hill, jumped aside as it rolled down, heard it start, raced after it, the driver urging them to hurry, sprang inside three at a time. Then the engine stalled; and they sat, crouched or half-stood, suffocated and silent, waiting for the fruitless, scraping whine of the starter. Sometimes the car got into Port of Spain with one side of the bonnet up and a child on the wing, operating a pump of some sort. Sometimes the car didn’t get to Port of Spain at all. This pleased the children more than the driver; he had no packed lunch. Sometimes the car was laid up for days. Then the children went to Port of Spain by lorry; or they surprised the villagers, who had relaxed their precautions, by taking the seven o”clock bus.

The Ford V-8 was finally abandoned when some of the lesser sons-in-law, not profiting by the experience of the children, went in it one evening to a film-show in Port of Spain. The house blazed with lights all night; and the sisters concerned, armed with sticks to daunt molesters, made frequent sallies along the Port of Spain road. The men returned just before dawn, pushing. The children went to school by lorry. The car was pushed from the road into the gully and up to the clump of wild tannia under the saman tree, where, being presently stripped by an unknown person of its saleable parts, it remained, a plaything for the children.

Another car was bought, another Ford V-8, but a sports model with a dicky seat. And into this, miraculously, all the children were squeezed, standing in the dicky seat like stemmed flowers in a vase. A second trip was made for the oranges. While they were in the country the children could pretend to be on the top of a stagecoach, but when they got to Port of Spain they attracted derisive attention and missed the shelter of the saloon.

So for the children Shorthills became a nightmare. Daylight was nearly always gone when they returned, and there was little to return to. The food grew rougher and rougher and was eaten more casually, in the kitchen itself, where the brick floor had been topped with mud, or in the covered space between the kitchen and the house. No child knew from one night to the next where he was going to sleep; beds were made anywhere and at any time. On Saturdays the children pulled up weeds; on Sundays they collected oranges or other fruit.

At week-ends the children submitted to the laws of the family. But during the week, when they spent so much time away from the house, they formed a community of their own, outside family laws. No one ruled; there were only the weak and the strong. Affection between brother and sister was despised. No alliance was stable. Only enmities were lasting, and the hot afternoon walks which Mrs. Tulsi had seen lightened by song were often broken by bitter fights of pure hate.

Mr. Biswas scarcely saw his children, and they became separated from one another. Anand felt disgraced by his sisters. They were all among the weak. Myna had developed a bad bladder; every journey with her involved shame. Sometimes the car stopped, sometimes it didn’t. Kamla walked in her sleep; but this was a novelty and was thought endearing, especially in one so young. Savi was unnoticed until she had been chosen to sing at a school concert organized by the distributors of a face lotion called Limacol. She had never used Limacol but agreed with the master of ceremonies that the slogan, “The Freshness of a Breeze in a Bottle”, was just. Then in a high voice and with many quaverings she sang “Some Sunday Morning” and was given a miniature Limacol bottle. The Tulsi sisters were shocked. They spoke of Savi almost as of a public entertainer, and lectured their children. Thereafter Savi was mocked and ridiculed. She drew maps with minutely indented coastlines, on the basis of her observations at beaches. She had attempted to propagate this method and had some disciples; but now one of Govind’s daughters said that these indentations were as stupid and conceited as the quavers with which Savi had sung “Some Sunday Morning”, and Savi’s disciples recanted. When one evening she was put off the bus because she had lost her fare, and had to walk all the way to Shorthills, arriving after nightfall, ill with fright and fatigue, and having to be massaged by Shama, it was felt that justice had been done. The news of the massage in the room on the upper floor, Savi’s tears, Mr. Biswas’s rage when he returned, quickly went round the house. Kamla, the petted sleepwalker, was pumped for details, and Kamla gave them, pleased to excite so much interest and amusement.

Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept him aloof. At first this was only a pose, and imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt, and at Shorthills contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable.

The children were ready to go to school one morning. Their lunches, wrapped in brown paper, were stuffed in their bags, and the car was waiting on the road. Quickly the children filled the car. They squashed in. They wedged themselves in. They screwed themselves in. A door was slammed. Anand, somewhere in the dicky seat, heard a shriek and a groan. They came from Savi. The children, always breathless and bad-tempered when the car was stationary, shouted for the car to drive off. But someone cried, “Quick! Open the door. Her hand.”

Anand laughed. No one joined him. The car emptied and he saw Savi sitting on the wet rabbit-grass of the verge. He could not bear to look at her hand.

Shama and Mr. Biswas and some of the sisters came out to the road.

Myna said, “Anand laugh, Pa.”

Mr. Biswas slapped Anand hard.

And Mr. Biswas decided that the time had come for him to withdraw from the Shorthills adventure. A return to Port of Spain was impossible. When he went for walks about the estate he kept his eye open for a suitable site.

Then, in quick succession, a number of deaths occurred.

Sharma, the son-in-law who collected oranges and drove the children to school, slipped off a mossy orange branch one rainy morning and broke his neck. He died almost at once. The children did not go to school that day. Sharma’s widow tried to turn the holiday into a day of mourning. She sobbed and wailed and embraced everyone who went near her and asked for messages to be sent. Messages were sent and Sharma’s relations turned up in the afternoon, nondescript people, not able even in their sorrow to drown their shyness. They put Sharma in a plain coffin and carried him to the graveyard, where the village had assembled to see the Hindu rites. Hari, in white jacket and beads, whined over the grave and sprinkled water over it with a mango leaf.

“Same thing he did to my house,” Mr. Biswas said to Anand.

Sharma’s widow shrieked, fainted, revived and tried to fling herself into the grave. The villagers watched with interest. Some of the knowing whispered about suttee.

W. C. Tuttle took over the job of driving the children to school. He placed all his children in the front seat next to himself and stuffed the others into the dicky seat. He complained about the behaviour of the car and attributed all its faults to Sharma. Soon there was talk that W. C. Tuttle was using the car to transport his subsidiary plunder. He threatened not to drive the car if the talk didn’t stop. There was no one else who could drive, apart from the surly Govind, and the talk stopped.

Despite W. C. Tuttle’s abuse Sharma was speedily forgotten. And one hot Sunday afternoon, when nearly everyone was out of doors, Anand came upon Hari and his wife sitting alone in the diningroom, at one end of the vast cedar table that had been made by W. C. Tuttle’s blacksmith. They made a sad couple. Hari’s wife had tears in her eyes, and Hari’s expressionless face was yellow. Anand, wishing to animate them and to show off a new accomplishment, offered to recite a poem to them. He had just mastered all the gestures illustrated on the frontispiece of Bell’s Standard Elocutionist. Hari and his wife looked moved; they smiled and asked Anand to recite.

Anand drew his feet together, bowed, and said, “Bingen on the Rhine.” He joined his palms, rested his head on them, and recited:

“A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers.”

He was pleased to see that the smiles of Hari and his wife had been replaced by looks of the utmost solemnity.

“There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears.

“But a comrade stood beside him while his life blood ebbed away.”

Anand’s voice quavered with emotion. Hari stared at the floor. His wife fixed her large eyes on a spot somewhere above Anand’s shoulder. Anand had not expected such a full and immediate response. He increased the pathos in his voice, spoke more slowly and exaggerated his gestures. With both hands on his left breast he acted out the last words of the dying legionnaire.

“Tell her the last night of my life, for ere this moon be risen,

“My body will be out of pain, my soul be out of prison.”

Hari’s wife burst out crying. Hari put his hand on hers. In this way they listened to the end; and Anand, after being given a six-cents piece, left them shaken.

Less than a week later Hari died. It was only then that Anand learned that Hari had known for some time that he was going to die soon. W. C. Tuttle, ferociously brahminical in an embroidered silk jacket, did the last rites. The house went into mourning for Hari; no one used sugar or salt. He was one of those men who, by a negativeness that amounts to charity, are thought of kindly by everyone. He had taken part in no disputes; his goodness, like his scholarship, was a family tradition. Everyone had been used to seeing Hari as the officiating pundit at religious ceremonies; everyone had been used to receiving the consecrated foods from him every morning. Hari, in dhoti, his forehead marked with sandalwood paste; Hari doing morning and evening puja; Hari with his religious texts on the elaborately carved bookrest: these had been fixed sights in the Tulsi house. There had been no one to take Seth’s place. There was no one to take Hari’s.

The duty of the puja was shared by many of the men and boys. Sometimes even Anand had to do it. Untutored in the prayers, he could only go through the motions of the ritual. He washed the images, placed fresh flowers on the shrine, diverted himself by trying to stick the stem of a flower in the crook of a god’s arm or between the god’s chin and chest. He put fresh sandalwood paste on the foreheads of the gods, on the smooth black and rose and yellow pebbles, and on his own forehead; lit the camphor, circled the flame about the shrine with his right hand while with his left he tried to ring the bell; blew at the conch shell, emitting a sound like that of a heavy wardrobe scraping on a wooden floor; then, his cheeks aching from the effort of blowing the conch shell, he hurried out to eat, first making the round of the house to offer the milk and tulsi leaves which, unbelievably, he had consecrated. When he dressed for school he brushed the caked sandalwood marks from his forehead.

About a fortnight after Hari died news came from Arwacas of another death. Anand was working at the table in the room on the upper floor one evening, and Mr. Biswas was reading in bed, when the door was thrown open and Savi ran in and said, “Great Aunt Padma is dead!”

Mr. Biswas closed his eyes and put his hand on his heart.

Anand screamed, “Savi!”

She stood still, her eyes shining.

From downstairs a deep-drawn lamentation burst out and spread through the house, rising, falling, relayed from one sister to the other and back again, like the barking of dogs at night.

Sharma’s death had done little more than upset routine. Hari’s had saddened. Padma’s terrified. She was Mrs. Tulsi’s sister: death had come closer to them all. She had known them all their lives; she had died away from them. The sisters said these things over and over as they embraced each other and embraced their children. The house shook with footsteps, shrieks, wails and the crying of frightened children. Mrs. Tulsi was reported to be out of her mind; there were rumours that she too was dying. The children stuck pins into lamp wicks and murmured incantations to keep off fresh disaster. They heard Mrs. Tulsi clamouring to be taken to the body of her sister. The cry was taken up by some of the sisters, and despite the hour and despite the quarrel with Seth, preparations were made and the lorry and sports car set off for Arwacas, and only men and children were left in the house.

The women returned the following afternoon, with more than their grief. For most of them it had been their first visit to Arwacas since the move, their first glimpse of Seth. They had not spoken to him, but the truce had enabled them to inspect the property which Seth, still vigorously pursuing the quarrel, had bought on the High Street not far from Hanuman House, a first step, they had been told, to his buying over of Hanuman House itself. It was a grocery and it was large enough and new enough and well enough stocked to alarm the sisters. But there could be no talk of Seth just then.

Padma appeared in many dreams that night. In the morning every dream was recounted and it was agreed that Padma’s spirit had come to the house in Shorthills, which she had never visited while she lived. This was confirmed by the experience of one sister. In the middle of the night she had heard footsteps in the road. She recognized them as Padma’s. There was silence as Padma had crossed the gully, footsteps again as Padma came up the sandy drive and up the concrete steps. Padma had then made a tour of the house, sat down on the back steps and wept. Many people saw Padma after that. Much attention was given to the story of one of the Tuttle children. In broad daylight he had seen a woman in white walking from the graveyard towards the house. He caught up with her and said, “Aunt.” She turned. It wasn’t an aunt. It was Padma; she was crying. Before he could speak she pulled her veil over her face, and he had run. When he looked back he saw no one.

Yet it was some time before the sisters realized that Padma appeared so often because she had a message. They then decided that anyone who saw her should ask what her message was. The messages varied. At first Padma merely asked after certain people and said she wished she were alive and with them; sometimes she also said she had died of a broken heart. But Padma’s later messages, when whispered from sister to sister, from child to child, caused consternation. She said Seth had driven her to take poison; she said Seth had poisoned her; she said Seth had beaten her to death and bribed the doctor not to have a post mortem.

“Don’t tell Mai,” the sisters said.

Anger overrode their grief. Every sister cursed Seth and vowed never to speak to him again.

Mrs. Tulsi kept to the room with the closed windows. Sushila and Miss Blackie made brandy poultices for her eyelids, as before, and massaged her head with bay rum. But in the box-board temple at the end of the ruined, overgrown garden there was no Hari to say prayers for her and the house. Bells were rung and gongs were struck, but the luck, the virtue had gone out of the family.

And two of the sheep died. The canal at the side of the drive was at last completely silted over and the rain, which ran down the hillside in torrents after the briefest shower, flooded the flat land. The gully, no longer supported by the roots, began to be eaten away. The old man’s beard was deprived of a footing; its thin tangled roots hung over the banks like a threadbare carpet. The gully bed, washed clean of black soil and the plants that grew on it, showed sandy, then pebbly, then rocky. It could no longer be forded by the car, and the car stayed on the road. The sisters were puzzled by the erosion, which seemed to them sudden; but they accepted it as part of their new fate.

Govind stopped looking after the cows. He bought a secondhand motorcar and operated it as a taxi in Port of Spain. W. C. Tuttle opened a quarry on the estate. His enterprise aroused envy. He had been the first to sell estate trees; now that there were few trees to sell he was selling the very earth. Mr. Biswas continued to transport his plunder of oranges and avocado pears in the saddlebag of his bicycle.

For nearly all the sisters still with husbands Shorthills had become only an interlude. For the widows there was only Shorthills, and land they did not understand. It was not rice-land or caneland. But the widows united, and after much whispered discussion and ostentatious silence when other sisters, husbands or their children were near, the widows announced that they were going to start a chicken farm. To feed the chickens they needed maize. They cut down a hillside, burned it, and planted maize. Then they bought some chickens and set them loose. At first the chickens stayed close to the house and sometimes inside it, leaving their droppings everywhere. Presently snakes and mongooses attacked the chickens. Those that survived took to the bush, learned to fly high, and laid their eggs where the widows couldn’t get them. In the meantime the maize was reaped and husked. The widows and their children ate much corn, boiled and roasted. The remainder was heaped in the verandah; there were no chickens to give it to. The corn turned from pale yellow to hard bright orange. Intermittently the widows and their children shelled the cobs on graters. There was talk of selling maize flour; with the continuing shortage of wheat flour the prospects were considered bright. The widows invested in a mill: two circular slabs of toothed stone resting one on the other. After some time and much labour a little flour was ground, but there was not the demand for it that the widows had expected. The maize remained in the verandah; weevils and other insects burrowed neatly through the golden cobs.

Mrs. Tulsi remained in her dark room, devising economies and issuing directives about food. She had heard that the Chinese, an ancient race, ate bamboo shoots. The estate abounded in bamboo; Mrs. Tulsi ordered that bamboo shoots were to be eaten. But what were bamboo shoots? Were they the neat little green buds at the joints of the bamboo trunks? Were they the very young bamboo stalks? Were they the very young bamboo leaves? No one knew. Buds, stalks and leaves were collected, washed, chopped, boiled, and curried with tomatoes. No one could eat it. The leaves of the shining bush, a prolific shrub that grew even in sand, had been used in the house to make a mildly purgative brew that was not unpleasant and was reputedly good for colds, coughs and fevers. Mrs. Tulsi directed that tea should no longer be bought: the shining bush was to be used instead. Already the widows and their children were making coffee and chocolate from the beans on the estate. Now maize flour was to be used instead of wheat flour, and coconut oil was to be made, not bought. No one had thought of growing vegetables and, since they too could not be bought, efforts were made to find vegetable substitutes: hard coconut, green papaw, green mango, green pomme cithиre, and almost any green fruit. But when Mrs. Tulsi ordered the widows to experiment with birds’ nests, which the Chinese ate, and the widows looked at the long stockinglike corn-bird nests of dry twigs hanging from the saman tree, there was such an outcry that the idea was dropped.

It was W. C. Tuttle’s duty, after taking the children to school, to bring back stale cakes for the cows. To prevent them being stolen, the cakes were heaped in the verandah next to the widows’ dry corn. The widows’ children, foraging among the stale cakes, came upon some that were still edible. The news was reported to Mrs. Tulsi; thereafter stale cakes were shared between the cows and the widows. In this period of experiment many new foods were discovered. The children discovered that brown sugar in a dry pancake made a better lunch than curried bamboo, which could not be exchanged for anything at school. Someone hit upon the idea of dipping sardines in condensed milk, and someone else made the accidental discovery that condensed milk burned in the tin had an original and pleasing flavour.

Economy went further. Directing that no tins were to be thrown away, Mrs. Tulsi summoned a tinker from Arwacas. For a fortnight he shared the household food, slept in the verandah, and made tin cups and tin plates; from a sardine tin he made a whistle. Ink was no longer bought; a violet liquid, faint but unwashable, was extracted from the small berries of the black sage. Mrs. Tulsi, hearing that coconut husks were being thrown away, decided that mattresses and cushions were to be made, and possibly sold. The widows and their children soaked and pounded and stretched and shredded the coconut husks, washed the fibre and dried it. Then Mrs. Tulsi sent for the mattress-maker from Arwacas. He came and made mattresses and cushions for a month.

Sisters with husbands fed their children secretly. And when it was learned that some of the widows’ sons had killed a sheep, roasted it in the woods and eaten it, W. C. Tuttle expressed his outrage at this un-Hindu act, refused to eat any more from the common kitchen and made his wife cook separately. One of his sons reported that W. C. Tuttle’s brahmin mouth had burst into sores the day the sheep was eaten. Mr. Biswas, though unable to produce W. C. Tuttle’s spectacular symptoms, made Shama cook separately as well. Touched by the prevailing obsession with food, Mr. Biswas had been making experiments of his own. He had decided that the gospo, a mixture of the orange and the lemon, and the shadduck, which no one ate, had extraordinary virtues. There was one gospo tree on the estate, and the fruit had been used by the children to play cricket (using bats of bois-canot). Mr. Biswas put an end to that. He drank a glass of the unpleasant gospo juice every morning and made his children do the same, until the gospo tree, which stood at one corner of the cricket field, collapsed into the gully after a flood, still laden with its hybrid fruit.

With the disappearance of the gospo tree the cricket field shrank rapidly. After every shower part of it was carved away, leaving a grass-covered overhang which collapsed in a day or two and was carried off by the next downpour. The drive became tall with weeds, and through the weeds a narrow, curiously wavering path led to the concrete steps, now cracked and sagging and bursting into vegetation at every crack. The evergreen hedge was a tangle of small trees, and whenever it rained the grounds smelled fresh, as of fish, telling that snakes were about.

No one had time to fight the bush. The widows, when not cooking or washing or cleaning or looking after the cows, were making coffee or chocolate or coconut oil or grinding maize. Their clothes became patched, their arms hard. They looked like labourers, and they had to bear with the exulting comments Seth sent through common friends. He had given his life to the family; then he had been rejected and slandered. Their punishment was only beginning. Had he not said that when he left them they would all start catching crabs?

And the widows worked like men. When the gully became a gorge they threw a bridge of coconut trunks across it. The gorge widened; the trunks collapsed. The widows built another bridge; that collapsed too. The widows prevailed on Mrs. Tulsi to buy lengths of rail. The rails were laid across the gorge, coconut trunks laid across the rails, and for a time this structure survived, shaky, slippery, with gaps through which a child might fall to the rocks below.

Mr. Biswas could no longer ignore the dereliction about him; yet when he spoke about moving, Shama, though excluded from the councils of the widows and the confidences of the other sisters, became sullen and sometimes cried.

Then came the scandal of the eighty dollars.

Chinta announced one day that someone had stolen eighty dollars from her room. It was an astonishing announcement, not only because an accusation of theft had never been made in the family before, but also because no one knew that Chinta and Govind had so much money. Chinta told again and again of the last time she had checked the money, and of the accident that had led her to find out that the money was missing. She said she knew who had stolen the money, but was waiting for the thief to trip himself up.

After a few days the thief had not tripped himself up, and Chinta went on searching, drawing crowds wherever she went. Sometimes she spoke Hindi incantations; sometimes she searched with a candle in one hand and a crucifix in the other; sometimes she spat on her left palm, struck the spittle with a finger, and searched in the direction indicated by the flight of the spittle. Finally she decided to hold a trial by Bible and key.

“The old Roman cat and kitten,” Mr. Biswas said to Shama. “Like mother, like daughter. But look, eh, I don’t want my children meddling in that sort of tomfoolery.”

This was repeated throughout the house.

Chinta said, “I don’t blame him.”

The Bible-and-key trial lasted the whole of one afternoon. Chinta invoked the names of Saints Peter and Paul and spoke the accusations; Miss Blackie, invoking the same names, defended; and the innocence of everyone except Mr. Biswas and his family was established.

Mr. Biswas refused to have his room searched and ignored Shama’s pleas that he should allow the children to be tried. “She is a Roman cat,” he said. “So what? I look like a Hindu mouse?” For some time he and Govind had not spoken; now he and Chinta did not speak. Shama attempted to maintain relations with Chinta, but was rebuffed.

“I am not blaming anybody,” Chinta said. “I am only blaming the man who set the example.”

Then the whisperings began.

“Don’t talk to them. But watch them.”

“Vidiadhar! Quick! I left my purse on the table in the diningroom.”

“Anand likes his nose to run. He swallows the snot. It is like condensed milk to him.”

“Savi does eat the scabs of sores.”

“You ever see Kamla’s head? Crawling with lice. But she is like a monkey. She eats them.”

And the girls begged Mr. Biswas to move.

He had found a site such as he always wanted, isolated, unused and full of possibilities. It was some way from the estate house, on a low hill buried in bush and well back from the road. The house was begun and, unblessed, completed in less than a month. Its pattern was precisely that of the house he had attempted in Green Vale, precisely that of thousands of houses in rural Trinidad. It had a verandah, two bedrooms and a drawingroom, and stood on tall pillars. Estate trees provided the timber; he had to pay only for the sawing. He bought corrugated iron for the roof, plain glass and frosted glass for the windows, coloured glass for the drawingroom door, and cement for the pillars.

The speed with which the house went up took him by surprise. The builders had given him no opportunity to withdraw, and at the end he found that his savings were nearly all gone. He felt uneasy. His circumstances had changed; but his ambition had remained steady, and now seemed only idyllic and absurd. He had built his own house, in a place as wild and out-of-the-way as he could have wished. But Shama had to walk a mile to the village to do her shopping, water had to be brought up the hill from a spring in the cocoa woods. And there was the problem of transport. He had to cycle long distances every day, and though he had cut himself off from the family, his children had to go to school in the family car.

After he had bought a Slumberking bed (delivered by two Port of Spain vanmen who swore as they made their various trips up and down the improperly cleared and precipitous path) his money was exhausted. The house was not painted. It stood red-raw in its unregulated green setting, not seeming to invite habitation so much as decay.

Shama, though pained by the quarrel with Chinta, did not approve of the move. She regarded it as provocative, and like the children, she had watched the house rise and wished it not to be completed. The children wanted to go back to Port of Spain, to the life they had had before Shorthills. They knew about the housing shortage but blamed Mr. Biswas for not trying hard enough. The new house imprisoned them in silence and bush. They had no pleasures, no cinema shows, no walks, no games even, for the land around the house still smelled of snakes. The nights seemed longer and blacker. The girls stayed close to Shama, as though frightened to be by themselves; and in her shanty kitchen Shama sang sad Hindi songs.

Late one afternoon, not long after they had moved, Anand found himself alone in the house. Mr. Biswas was out, the girls were in the kitchen with Shama. The house felt bare, unused and still exposed; corners held no secrets; none of the furniture seemed to have found its place. Moved by boredom more than curiosity, Anand opened the bottom drawer of Shama’s dressingtable. In an envelope he found his parents’ marriage certificate and the birth certificates of his sisters and himself. On a birth certificate, which he did not at first recognize as Savi’s, he saw a name, Basso, which he had never heard used. He saw Mr. Biswas’s harsh scrawl: Real calling name: Lakshmi. In the column headed “Father’s Occupation” labourer had been energetically scratched out and proprietor written in. No other birth certificate had been so scribbled over. Some photographs were wrapped in crinkled brown paper. One was of the Tulsi sisters standing in a straight line and scowling; the others were of the entire Tulsi family, of Hanuman House, of Pundit Tulsi, of Pundit Tulsi in Hanuman House.

In the kitchen Shama was singing her doleful song and slapping dough between her palms.

Anand came upon a bundle of letters. They were all still in their envelopes. The stamps were English and bore the head of George V. From one envelope fell small brown photographs of an English girl, a dog, a house with a faded X on a window; in another envelope there was a newspaper clipping with one name underlined in ink in a long paragraph of names. The letters were neatly written and said little at great length. They spoke about letters received, about school, about holidays; they thanked for photographs. Abruptly they were touched with feeling; they expressed surprise that arrangements for marriage had been made so soon; they attempted to soften surprise with congratulation. Then there were no more letters.

Anand closed the drawer and went to the drawingroom. He rested his elbows on the windowsill and looked out. The sun had just set and the bush was turning black against a sky that was still clear. Smoke came through the kitchen door and window and Anand listened to Shama singing. Darkness filled the valley.

That evening Shama discovered the ransacked drawer.

“Thief!” she said. “Some thief was in the house.”

Refusing to yield to the gloom of his family and his own feeling that he had been rash, Mr. Biswas set about clearing the land. He spared only the poui trees, for their branches and their yellow flowers, which came out bright and pure for one week in the year. The integrity of living bush was replaced by a brown chaos of collapsed and dying trees. Through this Mr. Biswas made a winding path from the house down to the road, cutting steps into the earth and shoring them with bamboo. The debris could not be immediately fired, for though the leaves were dead and brittle the wood was green. Waiting, Mr. Biswas cut poui sticks and roasted them in bonfires. And he was reminded of a duty.

He sent for his mother. He had for so long been telling her-ever since he was a boy in the back trace-that she was to come to stay with him when he had built his own house, that he now doubted whether she would come. But she came, for a fortnight. Her feelings could not be read. He was at first extravagantly affectionate. But Bipti remained calm, and Mr. Biswas followed her example. It was as if the relationship between them had been granted without their asking, and had only to be accepted.

Though the children understood Hindi they could no longer speak it, and this limited communication between them and Bipti. From the start, however, Shama and Bipti got on well. Shama gave not a hint of the sullenness she used with Bipti’s sister Tara; to Mr. Biswas’s surprise and pleasure, she treated Bipti with all the respect of a Hindu daughter-in-law. She had touched Bipti’s feet with her fingers when Bipti came, and she never appeared before Bipti with her head uncovered.

Bipti helped with the housework and on the land. When, after Bipti’s death, Mr. Biswas wished to be reminded of her, he thought less of his childhood and the back trace than of this fortnight at Shorthills. He thought of one moment in particular. The ground in front of the house had been only partly cleared, and one afternoon, when he had pushed his bicycle up the earth steps to the top of the hill, he saw that part of the ground, which he had left that morning cumbered and unbroken, had been cleared and levelled and forked. The black earth was soft and stoneless; the spade had cut cleanly into it, leaving damp walls as smooth as mason’s work. Here and there the prongs of the fork had left shallow parallel indentations on the upturned earth. In the setting sun, the sad dusk, with Bipti working in a garden that looked, for a moment, like a garden he had known a dark time ages ago, the intervening years fell away. Thereafter the marks of a fork in earth made him think of that moment at the top of the hill, and of Bipti.

The children looked forward to the firing of the land as to a celebration. The Civil Defence authorities had given them a taste for large conflagrations, and now they were to have a hill on fire in their own backyard. It would be almost as good as the mock air-raid on the Port of Spain race course. Of course there would be no dummy houses to burn, no ambulances, no nurses attending to people groaning at mock wounds, no Boy Scouts on motor bicycles dashing about through the thick smoke with dummy dispatches; but at the same time there would be none of those eager firefighters who, in spite of the public outcry, had rescued some of the dummy buildings before they were even scorched.

Mr. Biswas, displaying manual skills which his children secretly distrusted, dug trenches and prepared little nests of twigs and leaves at what he called strategic points. On Saturday afternoon he summoned the children, soaked a brand in pitch-oil, set it alight, and ran from nest to nest, poking the brand in and jumping back, as though he had touched off an explosion. A leaf caught here and a twig there, blazed, shrank, smouldered, died. Mr. Biswas didn’t wait to see. Ignoring the cries of the children, he ran on, leaving a trail of subsiding wisps of dark smoke.

“Is all right,” he said, coming down the hillside, the brand dripping fire. “Is all right. Fire is a funny thing. You think it out, but it blazing like hell underground.”

One of the smoke wisps shrank like a failing fountain.

“That one take your advice and gone underground,” Savi said.

“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing one itching ankle against the other. “Perhaps it is a little too green. Perhaps we should wait until next week.”

There were protests.

Savi put her hand to her face and backed away.

“What’s the matter?”

“The heat,” Savi said.

“You just carry on. See if you don’t get hot somewhere else. Clowns. That’s what I’m raising. A pack of clowns.”

From the kitchen Shama shouted, “Hurry up, all-you. The sun going down.”

They went to examine the nests Mr. Biswas had fired. They found them collapsed, reduced: shallow heaps of grey leaves and black twigs. Only one had caught, and from it the fire proceeded unspectacularly, avoiding thick branches and nibbling at lesser ones, making the bark curl, attacking the green wood with a great deal of smoke, staining it, then retreating to run up a twig with a businesslike air, scorching the brown leaves, creating a brief blaze, then halting. On the gound there were a few isolated flames, none higher than an inch.

“Fireworks,” Savi said.

“Well, do it yourself.”

The children ran to the kitchen and seized the pitch-oil Shama had bought for the lamps. They poured the pitch-oil haphazardly on the bush and set it alight. In minutes the bush blazed and became a restless sea of yellow, red, blue and green. They exchanged theories about the various colours; they listened with pleasure to the chatter and crackle of the quick fire. Too soon the tall flames contracted. The sun set. Charred leaves rose in the air. After dinner they had the sad task of beating down the fire at the edge of the trench. The brown sea had turned black, with red glitters and twinkles.

“All right,” Mr. Biswas said. “Puja over. Books now.”

They retired to the bare drawingroom. From time to time they went to the window. The hill was black against a lighter sky. Here and there it showed red and occasionally burst into yellow flame, which seemed unsupported, dancing in the air.

Anand was in a bus, one of those dilapidated, crowded buses that ran between Shorthills and Port of Spain. Something was wrong. He was lying on the floor of the bus and people were looking down at him and chattering. The bus must have been running over a newly-repaired road: the wheels were kicking up pebbles against the wings.

Myna and Kamla stood over him, and he was being shaken by Savi. He lay on his bedding in the drawingroom.

“Fire!” Savi said.

“What o”clock it is?”

“Two or three. Get up. Quick.”

The chattering, the pebbles against the wings, was the noise of the fire. Through the window he saw that the hill had turned red, and the land was red in places where no fire had been intended.

“Pa? Ma?” he asked.

“Outside. We have to go to the big house to tell them.”

The house appeared to be encircled by the red, unblazing bush. The heat made breathing painful. Anand looked for the two poui trees at the top of the hill. They were black and leafless against the sky.

Hurriedly he dressed.

“Don’t leave us,” Myna said.

He heard Mr. Biswas shouting outside, “Just beat it back. Just beat it back from the kitchen. House safe. No bush around it. Just keep it back from the kitchen.”

“Savi!” Shama called. “Anand wake?”

“Don’t leave us,” Kamla cried.

All four children left the house and walked past the newly-forked land in front to the path that led to the road. Just below the brow of the hill they were surprised by an absolute darkness. Between the path and the road there was no fire.

Myna and Kamla began to cry, afraid of the darkness before them, the fire behind them.

“Leave them,” Shama called. “And hurry up.”

Savi and Anand picked their way down the earth steps they couldn’t see.

“You can hold my hand,” Anand said.

They held hands and worked their way down the hill, into the gully, up the gully and into the road. Trees vaulted the blackness. The blackness was like a weight; it was as if they wore hats that came down to their eyebrows. They didn’t look up, not willing to be reminded that darkness lay above them and behind them as well as in front of them. They fixed their eyes on the road and kicked the loose gravel for the noise. It was chilly.

“Say Rama Rama,” Savi said. “It will keep away anything.”

They said Rama Rama,

“Is Pa to blame for this,” Savi said suddenly.

The repetition of Rama Rama comforted them. They became used to the darkness. They could distinguish trees a few yards ahead. The squat concrete box, where behind a steel door estate explosives were kept, was a reassuring white blur on the roadside.

At last they came to the bridge of coconut trunks. The white fretwork along the eaves of the house were visible. In Mrs. Tulsi’s room, as always at night, a light burned. They made their way across the dangerous bridge and emerged into the open, grateful at that moment for the tree-cutting of Govind and W. C. Tuttle. The tall wet weeds on the drive stroked their bare legs. They sniffed, alert for the smell of snakes.

They heard a heavy breathing. They could not tell from which direction it came. They stopped muttering Rama Rama, came close together and began to run towards the concrete steps, a distant grey glow. The breathing followed, and a dull, unhurried tramp.

Glancing to his left, Anand saw the mule in the cricket field. It was following them, moving along the snarled fence-wires. They reached the end of the drive. The mule reached the corner of the field and stopped.

They ran up the concrete steps, avoiding the overhanging nutmeg tree. They fumbled with the bolt on the verandah gate and the noise frightened them. They scratched at doors and windows, tapped the wall of Mrs. Tulsi’s room, rattled the tall drawingroom doors. They called. There was no reply. Every noise they made seemed to them an explosion. But in the silence and blackness they were only whispering. Their footsteps, their knockings, Anand’s stumbling among the stale cakes and the widow’s corn, sounded only like the scuttling of rats.

Then they heard voices: low and alarmed: one aunt whispering to another, Mrs. Tulsi calling for Sushila.

Anand shouted: “Aunt!”

The voices were silenced. Then they were raised again, this time defiantly. Anand knocked hard on a window.

A woman’s voice said, “Two of the little people!”

There was an exclamation.

They were thought to be the spirits of Hari and Padma.

Mrs. Tulsi groaned and spoke a Hindi exorcism. Inside, doors were opened, the floor pounded. There was loud aggressive talk about sticks, cutlasses and God, while Sushila, the sickroom widow, an expert on the supernatural, asked in a sweet conciliatory voice, “Poor little people, what can we do for you?”

“Fire!” Anand cried.

“Fire,” Savi said.

“Our house on fire!”

And Sushila, though she had taken part in the whisperings against Savi and Mr. Biswas, found herself obliged to continue talking sweetly to Savi and Anand.

The apprehension of the house turned to joyous energy at the news of the fire.

“But really,” Chinta said, as she happily got ready, “what fool doesn’t know that to set fire to land in the night is to ask for trouble?”

Lights went on everywhere. Babies squealed, were hushed. Mrs. Tuttle was heard to say, “Put something on your head, man. This dew isn’t good for anyone.” “A cutlass, a cutlass,” Sharma’s widow called. And the children excitedly relayed the news: “Uncle Mohun’s house is burning down!” Some thrilled alarmists feared that the fire might spread through the woods to the big house itself; and there was speculation about the effects of the fire on the explosives.

The journey to the fire was like an excursion. Once there, the Tulsi party fell to work with a will, cutting, clearing, beating. It became a celebration. Shama, host for the second time to her family, prepared coffee in the kitchen, which was untouched. And Mr. Biswas, forgetful of animosities, shouted to everyone, “Is all right. Is all right. Everything under control.”

Some eggs were discovered, burnt black, and dry inside. Whether they were snakes’ eggs or the eggs of the widows’ errant hens no one knew. A snake was found burnt to death less than twenty yards from the kitchen. “The hand of God,” Mr. Biswas said. “Burning the bitch up before it bite me.”

Morning revealed the house, still red and raw, in a charred and smoking desolation. Villagers came running to see, and were confirmed in their belief that their village had been taken over by vandals.

“Charcoal, charcoal,” Mr. Biswas called to them. “Anybody want charcoal?”

For days afterwards the valley darkened with ash whenever the wind blew. Ash dusted the plot Bipti had forked.

“Best thing for the land,” Mr. Biswas said. “Best sort of fertilizer.”

4. Among the Readers and Learners

He could not simply leave the house in Shorthills. He had to be released from it. And presently this happened. Transport became impossible. The bus service deteriorated; the sports car began to give as much trouble as its predecessor and had to be sold. And just about this time Mrs. Tulsi’s house in Port of Spain fell vacant. Mr. Biswas was offered two rooms in it, and he immediately accepted.

He considered himself lucky. The housing shortage in Port of Spain had been aggravated by the steady arrival of illegal immigrants from the other islands in search of work with the Americans. A whole shanty town had sprung up at the east end of the city; and even to buy a house was not to assure yourself of a room, for there were now laws against the indiscriminate eviction Shama had so coolly practised.

He put up a sign in the midst of the desolation he had created: HOUSE FOR RENT OR SALE, and moved to Port of Spain. The Shorthills adventure was over. From it he had gained only two pieces of furniture: the Slumberking bed and Theophile’s bookcase. And when he moved back to the house in Port of Spain, he did not move alone.

The Tuttles came, Govind and Chinta and their children came, and Basdai, a widow. The Tuttles occupied most of the house. They occupied the drawingroom, the diningroom, a bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom; this gave them effective control of both the front and back verandahs, for which they paid no rent. Govind and Chinta had only one room. Chinta hinted that they could afford more, but were saving and planning for better things; and, as if in promise of this, Govind suddenly gave up wearing rough clothes, and for six successive days, during which he smiled maniacally at everyone, appeared in a different threepiece suit. Every morning Chinta hung out five of Govind’s suits in the sun, and brushed them. She cooked below the tall-pillared house, and her children slept below the house, on long cedar benches which Theophile had made at Shorthills. Basdai, the widow, lived in the servantroom, which stood by itself in the yard.

Mr. Biswas’s two rooms could be entered only through the front verandah, which was Tuttle territory. At first Mr. Biswas slept in the inner room. Light and noise from the Tuttles’ drawingroom came through the ventilation gaps at the top of the partition and drove him to the front room, where he was enraged by the constant passage of Shama and the children to and from the inner room. Shama, like Chinta, cooked below the house; and when Mr. Biswas shouted for his food or his Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, it had to be taken to him up the front steps, in full view of the street.

The house was never quiet, and became almost unbearable when W. C. Tuttle bought a gramophone. He played one record over and over:

One night when the moon was so mellow

Rosita met young man Wellow.

He held her like this, his loveliness,

And stole a kiss, this fellow.

Tippy-tippy-tum tippy-tum

– and here W. C. Tuttle always joined in, whistling, singing, drumming; so that whenever the record came on, Mr. Biswas was compelled to listen, waiting for W. C. Tuttle’s accompaniment to:

Tippy-tippy-tum tippy-tum

Tippy-tippy-teeeee pi-tum-tum tum

A dispute also arose between W. C. Tuttle and Govind. They both parked their vehicles in the garage at the side of the house, and in the morning one was invariably in the way of the other. They conducted this quarrel without ever speaking to one another. W. C. Tuttle told Mrs. Tuttle that her brothers-in-law were unlettered, Govind grunted at Chinta, and both wives listened penitentially. And now, away from Mrs. Tulsi, the sisters also had daily squabbles of their own, about whose children had dirtied the washing, whose children had left the we filthy. Basdai, the widow, often mediated, and sometimes there were maudlin reconciliations in the Tuttles’ back verandah. It was Chinta who remarked that these reconciliations had the habit of taking place after the Tuttles had acquired some new item of furniture or clothing.

Despite the strict brahminical regime of his household, W. C. Tuttle was all for modernity. In addition to the gramophone he possessed a radio, a number of dainty tables, a morris suite; and he created a sensation when he bought a four foot high statue of a naked woman holding a torch. An especially long truce followed the arrival of the torchbearer, and Myna, wandering about the Tuttles’ establishment one day, accidentally broke off the torchbearing arm. The Tuttles sealed their frontiers again. Myna, in response to wordless pressure, was flogged, and a frostiness came once more into the relations between the Tuttles and the Biswases. Matters were not helped when Shama announced that she had ordered a glass cabinet from the joiner in the next street.

The glass cabinet came.

Chinta shouted to her children in English. “Vidiadhar and Shivadhar! Stay away from the front gate. I don’t want you to go breaking other people things and have other people saying that is because I jealous.”

As the elegant cabinet was being taken up the front steps one of the glass doors swung open, struck the steps and broke. This was observed by the Tuttles, imperfectly concealed behind the jalousies on either side of the drawingroom door.

“Oh! Oh!” Mr. Biswas said that evening. “Glass cabinet come, Shama. Glass cabinet come, girl. The only thing you have to do now is to get something to put inside it.”

She spread out the Japanese coffee-set on one shelf. The other shelves remained empty, and the glass cabinet, for which she had committed herself to many months of debt, became another of her possessions which were regarded as jokes, like her sewingmachine, her cow, the coffee-set. It was placed in the front room, which was already choked with the Slumberking, Theophile’s bookcase, the hatrack, the kitchen table and the rockingchair. Mr. Biswas said, “You know, Shama girl, what we want to put these rooms really straight is another bed.”

In the house the crowding became worse. Basdai, the widow, who had occupied the servantroom as a base for a financial assault on the city, gave up that plan and decided instead to take in boarders and lodgers from Shorthills. The widows were now almost frantic to have their children educated. There was no longer a Hanuman House to protect them; everyone had to fight for himself in a new world, the world Owad and Shekhar had entered, where education was the only protection. As fast as the children graduated from the infant school at Shorthills they were sent to Port of Spain. Basdai boarded them.

Between her small servantroom and the back fence Basdai built an additional room of galvanized iron. Here she cooked. The boarders ate on the steps of the servantroom, in the yard, and below the main house. The girls slept in the servantroom with Basdai; the boys slept below the house, with Govind’s children.

Sometimes, driven out by the crowd and the noise, Mr. Biswas took Anand for long night walks in the quieter districts of Port of Spain. “Even the streets here are cleaner than that house,” he said. “Let the sanitary inspector pay just one visit there, and everybody going to land up in jail. Boarders, lodgers and all. I mad to lay a report myself

The house, pouring out a stream of scholars every morning and receiving a returning stream in the afternoon, soon attracted the attention of the street. And whether it was this, or whether a sanitary inspector had indeed made a threat, news came from Shorthills that Mrs. Tulsi had decided to do something. There was talk of flooring and walling the space below the house, talk of partitions and rooms, of lattice work above brick walls. The outer pillars were linked by a half-wall of hollow clay bricks, partly plastered, never painted; there was no sign of lattice work. Instead, to screen the house, the wire fence was pulled down and replaced by a tall brick wall; and this was plastered, this was painted; and the people in the street could only make surmises about the arrangements for the feeding and lodging of the childish multitude who, in the afternoons and evenings and early mornings, buzzed like a school.

The children were divided into residents and boarders, and subdivided into family groups. Clashes were frequent. The boarders also brought quarrels from Shorthills and settled them in Port of Spain. And all evening, above the buzzing, there were sounds of flogging (Basdai had flogging powers over her boarders as well), and Basdai cried, “Read! Learn! Learn! Read!”

And every morning, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, his tie carefully knotted, Mr. Biswas left this hell and cycled to the spacious, well-lit, well-ventilated office of the Sentinel.

Now when he said to Shama: “Hole! That’s what your family has got me in. This hole!” his words had an unpleasant relevance. For whereas before he had spoken of his house in the country and his mother-in-law’s estate, now he kept his address as secret as an animal keeps its hole. And his hole was not a haven. His indigestion returned, virulently; and he saw his children increasingly riddled with nervous afflictions. Savi suffered from a skin rash, and Anand suddenly developed asthma, which laid him in bed for three days at a time, choking, having his chest scorched and peeled by the futile applications of a medicated wadding.

Still the boarders came. The education frenzy had spread to Mrs. Tulsi’s friends and retainers at Arwacas. They all wanted their children to go to Port of Spain schools, and Mrs. Tulsi, fulfilling a duty that had been imposed in a different age, had to take them in. And Basdai boarded them. The floggings and the rows increased. The cries of “Read! Learn!” increased; and every morning, not long after the babbling children had streamed through the narrow gateway between the high walls, Mr. Biswas emerged, neatly dressed, and cycled to the Sentinel.

Despite his duties and despite the fear of the sack, which he had never quite lost, even during the adventure at Shorthills, the office now became the haven to which he escaped every morning; and like Mr. Burnett’s news editor, he dreaded leaving it. It was only at midday, when the readers and learners were at school and W. C. Tuttle and Govind were at work, that he found the house bearable. He gave himself a longer midday break and stayed later in the office in the afternoons.

Then once more Shama started to bring out her account books, and once more she showed how impossible it was for them to live on what he earned. Self-disgust led to anger, shouts, tears, something to add to the concentrated hubbub of the evening, the nerve-torn helplessness. In daylight, in a Sentinel motorcar and with a Sentinel photographer, he drove through the open plain to call on Indian farmers to get material for his feature on Prospects for This Year’s Rice Crop. They, illiterate, not knowing to what he would return that evening, treated him as an incredibly superior being. And these same men who, like his brothers, had started on the estates and saved and bought land of their own, were building mansions; they were sending their sons to America and Canada to become doctors and dentists. There was money in the island. It showed in the suits of Govind, who drove the Americans in his taxi; in the possessions of W. C. Tuttle, who hired out his lorry to them; in the new cars; the new buildings. And from this money, despite Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, despite Samuel Smiles, Mr. Biswas found himself barred.

It was now that he began to speak to his children of his childhood. He told them of the hut, the men digging in the garden at night; he told them of the oil that was later found on the land. What fortune might have been theirs, if only his father had not died, if only he had stuck to the land like his brothers, if he had not gone to Pagotes, not become a sign-writer, not gone to Hanuman House, not married! If only so many things had not happened!

He blamed his father; he blamed his mother; he blamed the Tulsis; he blamed Shama. Blame succeeded blame confusedly in his mind; but more and more he blamed the Sentinel, and hinted savagely to Shama, almost as if she were on the board of the paper, that he was going to keep his eye open for another job, and that if the worst came to the worst he would get a job as a labourer with the Americans.

“Labourer!” Shama said. “With those hammocks you have for muscles, I would like to see how long you would last.”

Which either made him angry, or reduced him to an absurd puckishness. Then, lying on the Slumberking in vest and pants, as was his wont when he indulged in speculations about the future, he would lift up one leg and prod the slack calf with a finger, or make it swing, as he had done when they were newly married, in the long room at Hanuman House. These were the times (for the children were not excluded from this talk about money) when Mr. Biswas delivered insincere homilies on the honest manner of his livelihood, and told his children that he had nothing to leave them but good education and a sound training.

It was at one of these sessions that Anand told how at school boys were being challenged to say what their fathers did. This, a new school game, had spread even to the exhibition class. The most assiduous challengers came from the most harassed and insecure strata, and their aggressive manner suggested that they were neither harassed nor insecure themselves. Anand, who had read in an American newspaper that “journalist” was a pompous word, had said that his father was a reporter; which, though not grand, was unimpeachable. Vidiadhar, Govind’s son, had said that his father worked for the Americans. “That is what all of them are saying these days,” Anand said. “Why didn’t Vidiadhar say that his father was a taxi-driver?”

Mr. Biswas didn’t smile. Govind had six suits, Govind was making money, Govind would soon have his own house. Vidiadhar would be sent abroad to get a profession. And what awaited Anand? A job in the customs, a clerkship in the civil service: intrigue, humiliation, dependence.

Anand felt his joke going bad. And a few days later, when a new quiz was going round the school-what did the boys call their parents?-Anand, wishing only to debase himself, lied and said, “Bap and Mai,” and was duly derided; while Vidiadhar, shrewd despite his short stay at the school, unhesitatingly said, “Mummy and Daddy.” For these boys, who called their parents Ma and Pa, who all came from homes where the sudden flow of American dollars had unleashed ambition, push and uncertainty, these boys had begun to take their English compositions very seriously: their Daddies worked in offices, and at week-ends Daddy and Mummy took them in cars to the seaside, with laden hampers.

Mr. Biswas knew that for all his talk he would never leave the Sentinel to go to work for the Americans as labourer, clerk or taxi-driver. He lacked the taxi-driver’s personality, the labourer’s muscles; and he was frightened of throwing up his job: the Americans would not be in the island forever. But as a gesture of protest against the Sentinel, he enrolled all his children in the Tinymites League of the Guardian, the rival paper; and in the Junior Guardian, for years thereafter, Mr. Biswas’s children were greeted on their birthdays. The pleasure he got from this was enhanced when W. C. Turtle, imitating, enrolled his children among the Tinymites as well.

The Sentinel had its revenge. A small but steady decline in circulation hinted to the directors that there might be something wrong with their policy that conditions in the colony could not be better; they began to admit that readers might occasionally want views instead of news, and that news was not necessarily bright if right. For not only was the Guardian winning over Sentinel readers, the Guardian was also getting people who had never read newspapers. So the Sentinel started the Deserving Destitutes Fund, the name suggesting that there was not a necessary inconsistency between the fund and the leaders which spoke of the unemployed as the unemployable. The Deserving Destitutes Fund was an answer to the Guardians Neediest Cases Fund; but while the Neediest Cases Fund was a Christmas affair, the Deserving Destitutes Fund was to be permanent.

Mr. Biswas was appointed investigator. It was his duty to read the applications from destitutes, reject the undeserving, visit the others to see how deserving or desperate they were, and then, if the circumstances warranted it, to write harrowing accounts of their plight, harrowing enough to encourage contributions for the fund. He had to find one deserving destitute a day.

“Deserving Destitute number one,” he told Shama. “M. Biswas. Occupation: investigator of Deserving Destitutes.”

The Sentinel could not have chosen a better way of terrifying Mr. Biswas, of reviving his dread of the sack, illness or sudden disaster. Day after day he visited the mutilated, the defeated, the futile and the insane living in conditions not far removed from his own: in suffocating rotting wooden kennels, in sheds of box-board, canvas and tin, in dark and sweating concrete caverns. Day after day he visited the eastern sections of the city where the narrow houses pressed their scabbed and blistered faзades together and hid the horrors that lay behind them: the constricted, undrained backyards, coated with green slime, in the perpetual shadow of adjacent houses and the tall rubble-stone fences against which additional sheds had been built: yards choked with flimsy cooking sheds, crowded fowl-coops of wire-netting, bleaching stones spread with sour washing: smell upon smell, but none overcoming the stench of cesspits and overloaded septic tanks: horror increased by the litters of children, most of them illegitimate, with navels projecting inches out of their bellies, as though they had been delivered with haste and disgust. Yet occasionally there was the neat room, its major piece of furniture, a table, a chair, polished to brilliance; giving no hint of the squalor it erupted into the yard. Day after day he came upon people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them. But he could only lift his trouser turn-ups, pick his way through mud and slime, investigate, write, move on.

He was treated with respect by most of the DDS or Deserving Destees, as, in order to lessen the dread they inspired, he had begun to call them. But sometimes a destitute turned sullen and, suddenly annoyed by Mr. Biswas’s probings, refused to divulge the harrowing details Mr. Biswas needed for his copy. On these occasions Mr. Biswas was accused of being in league with the rich, the laughing, the government. Sometimes he was threatened with violence. Then forgetting shoes and trouser turn-ups, he retreated hastily to the street, pursued by words, his undignified movements followed with idle interest by several dozen people, all destitute, all perhaps deserving. “Deserving Destitute Turns Desperate,” he thought, visualizing the morning’s headline. (Though that would never have done: the Sentinel wanted only the harrowing details, the grovelling gratitude.)

His bicycle suffered. First the valve-caps were stolen; then the rubber handlegrips; then the bell; then the saddlebag in which he had transported his plunder from Shorthills; and one day the saddle itself. It was a pre-war Brooks saddle, highly desirable, new ones being unobtainable. Cycling that afternoon from the east end of the city to the west end, continually bobbing up and down, unable to sit, had been fatiguing and, judging by the stares, spectacular.

There were other dangers. He was sometimes accosted by burly Negroes, pictures of health and strength; “Indian, give me some money.” Occasionally exact sums were demanded: “Indian, give me a shilling.” He had been used to such threatening requests from healthy Negroes outside the larger cinemas, but there the bright lights and the watchful police had given him the confidence to refuse. In the east end the lights were not bright and there were few policemen; and, not wishing to antagonize destitutes any more than was necessary, he took the precaution of going on his investigations with coppers distributed about his pockets. These he gave, and later recovered from the Sentinel as expenses.

And other dangers. Once, climbing up a short flight of steps and pushing past the obstructing lace curtain in a room of exceptional cleanliness, he found himself confronted by a woman of robust appearance. Her large lips were grotesquely painted; rouge flared on her black cheeks. “You from the paper?” she asked. He nodded. “Give me some money,” she said, as roughly as any man. He gave her a penny. His promptness surprised her. She gazed at the coin with awe, then kissed it. “You don’t know what a thing it is, when a man give you money.” His experience on “Court Shorts” enabling him to recognize a piece of the prostitute’s lore, he made perfunctory inquiries and prepared to go. “Where my money?” the woman said. She followed him to the door, shouting, “The man-me right here, behind this curtain, and now he don’t want to pay.” She called the women and children of the yard and the yards on either side to witness her injury; and Mr. Biswas, feeling that his suit, his air of respectability, and the time of day gave some weight to the accusation, hurried guiltily away.

It was some time before he could distinguish the applications of the fraudulent: people who merely wanted the publicity, those who wanted to work off grudges, those who had wanted merely to write, and an astonishing number of well-to-do shopkeepers, clerks and taxi-drivers who wanted money and publicity, and offered to share what money they got with Mr. Biswas. Many of his early visits were wasted, and since he had to provide a convincing destitute every morning he had sometimes had to take a mediocre destitute and exaggerate his situation.

The authorities at the Sentinel continued neither to comment on his work nor to interfere; and this policy, which he had at first regarded as sinister, now made his position one of responsibility and power. His recommendations were the only things that mattered; his decision was final. He was given a by-line and described as “Our Special Investigator”, which won Anand some respect at school. And for the first time in his life Mr. Biswas was offered bribes. It was a mark of status. But, largely through a distrust of the Deserving Destees, he accepted nothing, though he did allow a crippled Negro joiner to make him a diningtable at a low price.

He wished he hadn’t, for when the table came it made the congestion in his rooms absolute. Shama’s glass cabinet was taken to the inner room, and the table placed in his, parallel to the bed and separated from it by a way so narrow that, after bending down to put on his shoes, for instance, he often knocked his head when he straightened up; and if, having put his shoes on, he stood up too quickly, he struck the top of his hip-bone against the table. The generous joiner had made the table six feet long and nearly four feet wide, wide enough to make shutting and opening the side window possible only if you climbed on to the table. On his restless nights Mr. Biswas had been in the habit of relegating Anand to the foot of the Slumberking; now when this happened Anand left the bed in a huff and spent the rest of the night on the table, an arrangement Mr. Biswas tried to make permanent. The window had to remain open: the room would have been stifling otherwise. The afternoon rain came swiftly and violently. Shama could never mount the table quickly enough; and presently that part of the table directly below the window acquired a grey, black-spotted bloom which defied all Shama’s stainings, varnishings and polishings. “First and last diningtable I buy,” Mr. Biswas said.

He was lying in vest and pants on the Slumberking one evening, reading, trying to ignore the buzzing and shrieks of the readers and learners, and W. C. Tuttle’s new gramophone record of a boy American called Bobby Breen singing “When There’s a Rainbow on the River”. Someone came into the room and Mr. Biswas, his back to the door, added to the pandemonium by wondering aloud who the hell was standing in his light.

It was Shama. “Hurry up and get some clothes on,” she said excitedly. “Some people have come to see you.”

He had a moment of panic. He had kept his address secret, yet since he had become investigator of destitutes he had been repeatedly traced. Once, indeed, he had been accosted by a destitute just as he was wheeling his bicycle between the high walls. He had pretended that he was investigating a deserving case, and as this had looked likely, he had managed to get rid of the man by taking down his particulars there and then, standing on the pavement, and promising to investigate him as soon as possible.

Now he twisted his head and saw that Shama was smiling. Her excitement contained much self-satisfaction.

“Who?” he asked, jumping out of bed, striking the top of his hip-bone against the diningtable. Standing between the table and the bed, it was impossible for him to bend down to get his shoes. He sat down carefully on the bed again and fished out a shoe.

Shama said it was the widows from Shorthills.

He relaxed. “I can’t see them outside?”

“Is private.”

“But how the hell I can see them inside here?” It was a problem. The widows would have to stand just inside the door, in the narrow area between the bed and the partition; and he would have to stand between the bed and the table. However, it was evening. He took the cotton sheet from below the pillow and threw it over himself.

Shama went out to summon the widows, and the five widows entered almost at once, in their best white clothes and veils, their faces roughened by sun and rain, their demeanour grave and conspiratorial as it always was whenever they were hatching one of their disastrous schemes: poultry farming, dairy farming, sheep raising, vegetable growing.

Mr. Biswas, the sheet pulled halfway up his chest, scratched his bare, slack arms. “Can’t ask you to sit down,” he said. “Nowhere to sit down. Except the table.”

The widows didn’t smile. Their solemnity affected Mr. Biswas. He stopped scratching his arms and pulled the sheet up to his armpits. Only Shama, already conspicuous in her patched and dirty home-clothes, continued to smile.

Sushila, the senior widow, came to the foot of the bed and spoke.

Could they be considered Deserving Destitutes?

She spoke in a steady, considered way.

Mr. Biswas was too embarrassed to reply.

Of course, Sushila said, they couldn’t all be Deserving Destitutes. But couldn’t one?

It was impossible. However destitute they might be, they were relations. But they had put on their best clothes and jewellery and come all the way from Shorthills, and he could not reject them at once. “What about the name?” he asked.

That had occurred to them. The Tulsi name need not be mentioned. Their husbands’ names could be used.

Mr. Biswas thought rapidly. “But what about the children at school?”

They had thought of that too. Sushila had no children. And as for the photograph: with veil, glasses and a few pieces of facial jewellery she could be effectively disguised.

Mr. Biswas could think of no other delaying objection. He scratched his arms slowly.

The widows gazed solemnly, then accusingly at him. As his silence lengthened, Shama’s smile turned to a look of annoyance; in the end she, too, was accusing.

Mr. Biswas slapped his left arm. “I would lose my job.”

“But that time,” Sushila said, “when you were the Scarlet Pimpernel, you went around dropping tokens-okens to your mother, your brothers and all the children.”

“That was different,” Mr. Biswas said. “I am sorry. Really.”

The five widows were silent. For some time they remained immobile, staring at Mr. Biswas until their eyes went blank. He avoided their eyes, felt for cigarettes, and patted the bed until the matchbox rattled.

Sushila started on a deep sigh, and one by one the widows, staring at Mr. Biswas’s forehead, sighed and shook their heads. Shama gave Mr. Biswas a look of perfect fury. Then she and the widows trooped out of the door.

A child was being flogged downstairs. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone was playing “One Night When the Moon Was so Mellow”.

“I am sorry,” Mr. Biswas said, to the back of the last widow. “But I would lose my job. Sorry.”

And really he was sorry. But even if they were not relations, he could not have made their case convincing. How could one speak of a woman as destitute when she lived on her mother’s estate, in one of her mother’s three houses; when her brother was studying medicine in the United Kingdom; and when another brother was a figure of growing importance in the South, his name all over the paper, in the gossip columns, in the news columns for his business deals and political statements, in his own stylish advertisements (“Tulsi Theatres Trinidad proudly present…”)?

It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas had another request which disturbed him. It came from Bhandat, Ajodha’s ostracized brother. Mr. Biswas had never seen Bhandat since Bhandat had left the rumshop in Pagotes for his Chinese mistress in Port of Spain; he had only heard from Jagdat, Bhandat’s son, that Bhandat was living in a poverty which he bore with fortitude. Mr. Biswas could do nothing for Bhandat. They were related, and again it would have been impossible to make a case for a man whose brother was known to be one of the wealthiest men in the colony.

Bhandat had given an address in the city centre which might have led someone without a knowledge of the city’s slums to believe that Bhandat was a dealer in cocoa or sugar, an import-and-export king. In fact he lived in a tenement that lay between an importer of eastern goods and an exporter of sugar and copra. It was an old, Spanish style building. The flat faзade, diversified by irregular areas of missing plaster, small windows with broken shutters, and two rusty iron balconies, rose directly from the pavement.

From the exporter came the rancid smell of copra and the heavy smell of sacked sugar, a smell quite different from the fetid, sweet smell of the sugar factories and buffalo ponds Mr. Biswas remembered from his boyhood. From the importer came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the smell of dust, straw, the urine and droppings of horses, donkeys and mules. At every impediment the gutters had developed a wrinkled film of scum, as white as the skin on boiled milk, with a piercing, acrid smell, which, blended and heated by the afternoon sun, rose suffocatingly from the road and pursued Mr. Biswas as he turned off into the sudden black shadow of an archway between the tenement and the exporter’s. He leaned his bicycle against the cool wall, fought off the bees from the exporter’s sugar, and made his way down a cobbled lane along which ran a shallow green and black gutter, glittering in the gloom. The lane opened out into a paved yard which was only slightly wider. On one side was the high blank wall of the exporter’s; on the other was the wall of the tenement, with windows that gaped black above dingy curtains. A leaning standpipe dripped on a mossy base and fed the gutter; at the end of the yard, their doors open, were a newspaper-littered lavatory and a roofless bathroom. Above was the sky, bright blue. Sunlight struck diagonally across the top of the exporter’s wall.

Beyond the standpipe Mr. Biswas turned into a passage. He was passing a curtained doorway when a shrill voice cried out, almost gaily, “Mohun!”

He felt he had become a boy again. All the sense of weakness and shame returned.

It was a low, windowless room, lit only by the light from the passage. A folding screen barred off one corner. In another corner there was a bed, and from it came gurgling happy sounds. Bhandat was not decrepit. Mr. Biswas, who had feared to find him shrunken to a melodramatic Indian decrepitude, was relieved. The face was thinner; but the bumps on the top lip were the same; the eyebrows, still those of a worrying man, bunched over eyes that were still bright.

Bhandat raised thin arms. “You are my child, Mohun. Come.” The shrillness in the voice was new.

“How are you, Uncle?”

Bhandat didn’t seem to hear. “Come, come. You may think you are a big man, but to me you are still my child. Come, let me kiss you.”

Mr. Biswas stood on the sugarsack rug and bent over the stale-smelling bed. He was at once pulled vigorously down. He saw that the distempered ceiling and walls were coated with dust and soot, felt Bhandat’s unshaven chin scraping against his neck, felt Bhandat’s dry lips on his cheek. Then he cried out. Bhandat had pulled sharply at his hair. He jumped back and Bhandat hooted.

Waiting for Bhandat to calm down, Mr. Biswas looked around the room. Clothes hung on one wall from nails that had been driven into the mortar between the stones. On the gritty concrete floor what had at first looked like bundles of clothes turned out to be stacks of newspapers. Next to the screen there was a small table with more newspapers, a cheap writingpad, a bottle of ink and a chewed pen: it was at that table, no doubt, that Bhandat had written his letter.

“You are examining my mansion, Mohun?”

Mr. Biswas refused to be moved. “I don’t know. It seems to me that you are all right here. You should see how some people live.” And he nearly added, “You should see how I live.”

“I am an old man,” Bhandat said, in his new, hooting voice. His eyes became wet, and a small, unreliable smile appeared on his lips.

Mr. Biswas edged further away from the bed.

Sounds came from behind the dingy cotton-print screen: a clink of a coal-pot ring, the striking of a match, brisk fanning. The Chinese woman. A thrill of curiosity ran through Mr. Biswas. White charcoal smoke rose above the screen, coiled about the room and escaped, racing, through the door.

“Why do you use Lux Toilet Soap?”

Mr. Biswas saw that Bhandat was staring at him earnestly. “Lux Toilet? I think we use Palmolive. A green thing-”

Bhandat said in English, “I use Lux Toilet Soap because it is the soap used by lovely film stars.”

Mr. Biswas was disturbed.

Bhandat turned on his side and began to rummage among the newspapers on the floor. “None of my worthless sons ever come to see me. You are the only one, Mohun. But you were always like that.” He frowned at a newspaper. “No. This one is over. Fernandes Rum. The perfect round in every circle. That is the sort of thing they want. Rum, Mohun. Remember? Ah! Yes, this is the one.” He handed Mr. Biswas a newspaper and Mr. Biswas read the details of the Lux slogan competition. “Help an old man, Mohun. Tell me why you use Lux Toilet Soap.”

Mr. Biswas said, “I use Lux Toilet Soap because it is antiseptic, refreshing, fragrant and inexpensive.”

Bhandat frowned. The words had made no impression on him. And Mr. Biswas knew for sure then, what he had intuited and dismissed: Bhandat was deaf.

“Write it down, Mohun,” Bhandat cried. “Write it down before I forget it. I don’t have any luck with these things. Crosswords. Missing Ball competitions. Slogans. They are all the same.”

While Mr. Biswas wrote, Bhandat began on an account of his life. His deafness must have occurred some time ago: he spoke in complete sentences, which gave his talk a literary quality. It was a familiar story of jobs acquired and lost, great enterprises which had failed, wonderful opportunities Bhandat had not taken because of his own honesty or the dishonesty of his associates, all of whom were now famous and rich.

He liked the slogan. “This is bound to win, Mohun. Now, what about the crosswords, Mohun. Couldn’t you make me win just one?”

Mr. Biswas was saved from replying, for just then the woman came from behind the screen. She moved briskly, furtively, setting an enamel plate with small yellow cakes on the table, pulling out the chair, placing it next to where Mr. Biswas stood, then hurrying behind the screen again. She was middle-aged, very thin, with a long neck and a small face. She gave an impression of perpendicularity: her unwashed black hair hung straight, her washed-out blue cotton dress dropped straight, her thin legs were straight.

Mr. Biswas looked at Bhandat for signs of embarrassment. But Bhandat went on talking undisturbed about the competitions he had entered and lost.

The woman came out again with two tall enamel cups of tea. She put a cup on the table and pushed the plate of cakes towards Mr. Biswas, who was now seated on the chair she had pulled out. She gave the other cup to Bhandat, who sat up to receive it, handing her the sheet of paper on which Mr. Biswas had written the slogan.

Bhandat sipped his tea, and for a moment he could have been Ajodha. The gesture was the same: the slow bringing of the cup to the lips, the half-closing of the eyes, the lips resting on the brim, the blowing at the tea. Then came the sip with closed eyes, as though the drink had been consecrated; and peace spread across the tormented face.

He opened his eyes: torment returned. “It good, eh?” he said to the woman in English. She glanced hastily at Mr. Biswas. She seemed anxious to return behind her screen.

“He is a big man now,” Bhandat said. “But you know, I did know him when he was a boy so high.” He gave a hoot. “Yes, so high.”

Mr. Biswas tried to avoid Bhandat’s gaze by taking one of the yellow cakes and biting at it.

“Since he was a boy so high. He is a big man now. But I used to put the licks on him good too, you know. Eh, Mohun? Yes, man.” Bhandat held the cup in his left hand and whipped his right forefinger against his thumb.

This was the moment Mr. Biswas had feared. But now that it had come, he found only that he was relieved. Bhandat had not revived the shame: he had removed it.

The cup trembled in Bhandat’s hand. The woman ran to the bed and opened her mouth wide. No words came out of that mouth: only a clacking of the tongue that erupted, at the end, into a shrill croak.

The tea had spilled on the bed, on Bhandat. And Mr. Biswas, thinking of deafness, dumbness, insanity, the horror of the sexual act in that grimy room, felt the yellow cake turn to a sweet slippery paste in his mouth. He could neither chew nor swallow. On the bed Bhandat was in a paroxysm of rage, cursing in Hindi, while the woman, unheeding, took the cup from his hand, ran behind the screen and brought out a floursack rag, burned in places, and began rubbing briskly on the sheet and Bhandat’s vest.

“You awkward barren cow!” Bhandat screamed in Hindi. “Always full to the brim! Always full to the brim!”

As she rubbed, her thin dress shook, revealing the thick coarse hair under her arms, the shape of her graceless body, the outline of one of her undergarments. Mr. Biswas forced himself to swallow the paste in his mouth and washed it down with the strong sweet tea. He was glad when the woman rolled up the floursack rag, put it under Bhandat’s vest, and went behind the screen.

Bhandat calmed down at once. He smiled impishly at Mr. Biswas and said, “She doesn’t understand Hindi.”

Mr. Biswas rose to go.

The woman appeared again, and croaked at Bhandat.

“Stay and eat a proper meal, Mohun,” Bhandat said. “I am not so poor that I can’t afford to feed my child.”

Mr. Biswas shook his head and tapped the notebook in his jacket pocket.

The woman withdrew.

“Antiseptic, fragrant, refreshing and inexpensive, eh? God will thank you for this, Mohun. As for those worthless sons of mine-” Bhandat smiled. “Come and let me kiss you before you go, Mohun.”

Mr. Biswas smiled, left Bhandat hooting, and went behind the screen to say good-bye to the woman. A lighted coal-pot stood on a box; on another box there were vegetables and plates. A basin of dirty water rested on the wet, black floor.

He said, “I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything.”

The woman nodded.

“Is his back, really.”

The words were low but clear. She was not dumb!

He did not wait for an explanation. He hurried out of the room into the lane. It was chokingly warm. Once more he received the shock of the street’s hot smells. The bees, honey-makers, buzzed around the exporters’ sweating sugarsacks. Bits of the coarse cake were still between his teeth. He swallowed. Instandy his mouth filled with saliva again.

As soon as he got to the house he went to the old bookcase, dug past his newspaper clippings, his correspondence from the Ideal School, a nest of pink blind baby mice, and took out his unfinished Escape stories, the dreams of the barren heroine. He took the stories to the lavatory in the yard and stayed there for some time, creating a din of his own, pulling the chain again and again. When he came out there was a little queue of readers and learners, impatient but interested.

On Sundays the din of the readers and learners was at its peak, and Mr. Biswas started once more to take his children on visits to Pagotes. But now he spent little time with them when they got there. Jagdat, like a vicious schoolboy eager to corrupt, was always anxious to get Mr. Biswas out of the house, and Mr. Biswas was always willing. Between Jagdat and Mr. Biswas there had developed an easy, relaxing relationship. They had never quarrelled; they could never be friends; yet each was always pleased to see the other. Neither believed or was interested in what the other said, and did not feel obliged even to listen. Mr. Biswas liked, too, to be with Jagdat in Pagotes, for once outside the house Jagdat was a person of importance, Ajodha’s heir, and his manner was that of someone used to obedience and affection. Despite his age, his family, his premature, attractive grey hair, Jagdat was still treated as the young man for whom allowances had to be made. His main pleasure lay in breaking Ajodha’s rules, and for a few hours Mr. Biswas had to pretend that these rules applied to him as well. Smoking was forbidden: they began to smoke as soon as they were in the road. Drinking was forbidden, and on Sunday mornings rumshops were closed by law: therefore they drank. Jagdat had an arrangement with a rum-shop-keeper who, in return for free petrol from Ajodha’s pumps, offered the use of his drawingroom for this Sunday morning drinking. In this drawingroom, which was strangely respectable, with four highly polished morris chairs around a small table, Mr. Biswas and Jagdat drank whisky and soda. In the beginning they were young men, for whom the world was still new, and neither mentioned the affections to which he had that day to return. But there always came a time when, after a silence, with each willing the talk to continue as before, anxieties and affections returned. Jagdat mentioned his family; he spoke their names: they became individuals. Mr. Biswas spoke about the Sentinel, about Anand and the exhibition. And always at the end the talk turned to Ajodha. Mr. Biswas heard old and new stories of Ajodha’s selfishness and cruelty; again and again he heard how it was Bhandat who had made Ajodha’s early success possible. Distrustful of the family, despite the drink, Mr. Biswas listened and made no comments, only squeezing in words about the Tulsis from time to time, half-heartedly trying to suggest that he had suffered as grand a betrayal as Bhandat. One Sunday morning he told Jagdat about his visit to Bhandat.

“Ah! So you see the old man then, Mohun? How he keeping? Tell me, he say anything about that bloodsucking hog?”

This was clearly Ajodha. Mr. Biswas, looking down at his glass as though deeply moved, shook his head.

“You see the sort of man he is, Mohun. No malice.”

Mr. Biswas drank some whisky. “He tell me that none of you does go to see him or give him a little help or anything. “

After a pause Jagdat said, “Son of a bitch lying like hell. That old bitch he living with smart too, you know. She always putting him up to something or the other.”

Thereafter Jagdat never spoke of Bhandat, and Mr. Biswas resolved only to listen.

At these sessions Jagdat gave every indication of growing drunk. Mr. Biswas nearly always became drunk, and when they left the rumshop-keeper’s drawingroom they sometimes decided to break more rules. They went to Ajodha’s garage, filled one of Ajodha’s vans or lorries with Ajodha’s petrol and drove to the river or the beach. Jagdat drove very fast, but with acute judgement; and it was a recurring mortification to Mr. Biswas to find that as soon as they got back to Ajodha’s Jagdat became quite sober. He said that he had been out on some business, described conversations and incidents with an abundance of inconsequential, credible detail, and talked happily all through lunch. Mr. Biswas said little and moved with a slow precision. His children noted his bloodshot eyes and wondered what had happened to subdue the vivacity he had shown earlier that morning in the bus-station in Port of Spain.

At lunch Ajodha invariably spoke to Mr. Biswas of his business problems. “They didn’t give me that contract, you know, Mohun. I think you should write an article about these Local Road Board contracts.” And: “Mohun, they are not giving me a permit to import diesel lorries. Can you find out why? Will you write them a letter for me? I am sure the oil companies are behind it. Why don’t you write an article about it, Mohun?” And there and then followed the looking at official forms, correspondence, illustrated booklets from American firms, with Mr. Biswas adopting a side-sitting attitude, breathing away from Ajodha, mumbling inanities through half-closed lips about the war and restrictions.

When the children asked Mr. Biswas what was wrong he complained of his indigestion; and sometimes he slept through the afternoon. He did get indigestion too: his increased consumption of Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, his silence, his unquenchable thirst were symptoms which Shama came to understand, to her shame.

So the children often found themselves on their own at Pagotes. There was only Tara to welcome them, and she was now crippled by asthma. In the large, well-equipped, empty house only the antagonism between Ajodha and his nephews could be felt. Anything could lead to a quarrel: the pronunciation of “Iraq”, a discussion of the merits of the Buick. As quarrels became more frequent they became shorter, but so violent and obscene it seemed impossible that uncle and nephews could ever speak to one another again. Yet in a few minutes Ajodha would come out of his room, his glasses on, papers in his hand, and there would be normal talk and even laughter. Ajodha was bound to his nephews, and they to him. Ajodha needed his nephews in his business, since he distrusted strangers; he needed them more in his house, since he feared to be alone. And Jagdat and Rabidat, with large unacknowledged families, with no money, no gifts, and no status except that they derived from Ajodha’s protection, knew that they were tied to Ajodha for as long as he lived. Rabidat, of the beautiful, exposed body, seemed to have his prognathous mouth perpetually set for a snarl. Jagdat’s giggles could turn in a moment to screams and tears. In Ajodha’s presence he was always on the verge of hysteria: it showed in his small unsteady eyes, which always belied his hearty, back-slapping manner.

More and more the children felt like intruders. They became aware of their status. And they were eventually humiliated.

In response to a plea from Aunt Juanita of the Guardian Tinymites League, Anand had gone around with a blue card collecting money for Polish refugee children. He had collected from teachers, the school caretaker, shopkeepers, and even from W. C. Tuttle. The cashier at the Dairies in Port of Spain had given six cents and congratulated him for undertaking good works while yet so young. And in the back verandah at Pagotes one Sunday morning, after he had read out an article on the importance of breathing, he presented the blue card to Ajodha and asked for a contribution.

Ajodha bunched his eyebrows and looked offended.

“You are a funny sort of family,” Ajodha said. “Father collecting money for destitutes. You collecting for Polish refugees. Who collecting for you?”

It was a long time before Anand went back to Ajodha’s. He collected no more money for Polish refugees, tore up the card. The money he had collected melted away, and for some months he lived in the dread of being summoned by Aunt Juanita to account for it. The kindness he received every afternoon from the woman in the Dairies was like a pain.

These Sunday excursions, mornings of makebelieve, afternoons and evenings of distress, grew less frequent, and Mr. Biswas found himself more fully occupied with his campaigns at home.

To combat W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone Chinta and Govind had been giving a series of pious singings from the Ramayana. The study of the Ramayana, which Chinta had started many years before, while Mr. Biswas still lived at Green Vale, was now apparently complete; she sang very well. Govind sang less mellifluously: he partly whined and partly grunted, from his habit of singing while lying on his belly. Caught in this crossfire of song, which sometimes lasted a whole evening, Mr. Biswas, listening, listening, would on a sudden rush in pants and vest to the inner room and bang on the partition of Govind’s room and bang on the partition of W. C. Tuttle’s drawingroom.

The Tuttles never replied. Chinta sang with added zest. Govind sometimes only chuckled between couplets, making it appear to be part of his song: the Ramayana singer is free to add his own rubric in sound between couplets. Sometimes, however, he interrupted his singing to shout insulting things through the partition. Mr. Biswas shouted back, and then Shama had to run upstairs to silence Mr. Biswas.

Govind had become the terror of the house. It was as if his long spells in his taxi with his back to his passengers had turned him into a complete misanthrope, as if his threepiece suits had buttoned up whatever remained of his eagerness and loyalty and turned it into a brooding which was liable to periodic sour eruptions. He had suffered a corresponding physical change. His weak handsome face had become gross and unreadable, and since he had taken to driving a taxi his body had lost its hardness and broadened into the sort of body that needs a waistcoat to give it dignity, to suggest that the swelling flesh is under control. His behaviour was odd and unpredictable. The Ramayana singing had taken nearly everyone by surprise, and would have been amusing if it hadn’t coincided with several displays of violence. For days he noticed nobody; then, without provocation, he fastened his attention on someone and pursued him with childish taunts and a frightening smile. He insulted Shama and the children; Shama, appreciating the limitations of Mr. Biswas’s hammock-like muscles, bore these insults in silence. He made a number of surprise assaults on Basdai’s readers and learners and generally terrorized them. Appeals to Chinta were useless; the fear Govind inspired was to her a source of pride. The story how Govind had once thrashed Mr. Biswas she passed on to her children, and they passed it on to the readers and learners, terrifying them utterly.

A quarrel between Govind and Mr. Biswas upstairs was invariably accompanied by a quarrel between their children downstairs.

Once Savi said, “I wonder why Pa doesn’t buy a house.”

Govind’s eldest daughter replied, “If some people could put money where their mouth is they would be living in palaces.”

“Some people only have mouth and belly.”

“Some people at least have a belly. Other people have nothing at all.”

Savi took these defeats badly. As soon as the quarrel upstairs subsided she went to the inner room and lay down on the fourposter. Not wishing to hurt herself again or to hurt her father, she could not tell him what had happened; and he was the only person who could have comforted her.

In the circumstances W. C. Tuttle came to be regarded as a useful ally. His physical strength matched Govind’s (though this was denied by Govind’s children), and their dispute about the garage still stood. It helped, too, that W. C. Tuttle and Mr. Biswas had something in common: they both felt that by marrying into the Tulsis they had fallen among barbarians. W. C. Tuttle regarded himself as one of the last defenders of brahmin culture in Trinidad; at the same time he considered he had yielded gracefully to the finer products of Western civilization: its literature, its music, its art. He behaved at all times with a suitable dignity. He exchanged angry words with no one, contenting himself with silent contempt, a quivering of his longhaired nostrils.

And, indeed, apart from the unpleasantness caused by the gramophone, there was between Mr. Biswas and W. C. Tuttle only that rivalry which had been touched off when Myna broke the torchbearer’s torchbearing arm and Shama bought a glass cabinet. The battle of possessions Mr. Biswas lost by default. After the acquisition of the glass cabinet (its broken door unrepaired, its lower shelves filled with schoolbooks and newspapers) and the grateful destitute’s diningtable, Mr. Biswas had no more room. W. C. Tuttle had the whole of the front verandah: he bought two morris rockingchairs, a standard lamp, a rolltop desk and a bookcase with sliding glass doors. Mr. Biswas had gained a slight advantage by being the first to enrol his children in the Guardian Tinymites League; but he had squandered this by imitating W. C. Tuttle’s khaki shorts. W. C. Tuttle’s shorts were proper shorts, and he had the figure for them. Mr. Biswas lacked this figure, and his khaki shorts were only long khaki trousers which Shama, against her judgement, had amputated, and hemmed on her machine with a wavering line of white cotton. Mr. Biswas suffered a further setback when the Tuttle children revealed that their father had taken out a life insurance policy. “Take out one too?” Mr. Biswas said to Myna and Kamla. “If I start paying insurance every month, you think any of you would live to draw it?”

The picture war started when Mr. Biswas bought two drawings from an Indian bookshop and framed them in passepartout. He found he liked framing pictures. He liked playing with clean cardboard and sharp knives; he liked experimenting with the colours and shapes of mounts. He saw the glass cut to his measurements, he cycled tremulously home with it, and a whole evening was transformed. Framing a picture was like writing a sign: it required neatness and precision; he could concentrate on what his hands did, forget the house, subdue his irritations. Soon his two rooms were as hung with pictures as the barrackroom in Green Vale had been with religious quotations.

W. C. Turtle began with a series of photographs, in large wooden frames, of himself. In one photograph W. C. Tuttle, naked except for dhoti, sacred thread and caste-marks, head shown except for the top-knot, sat crosslegged, fingers bunched delicately on his upturned soles, and meditated with closed eyes. Next to this W. C. Tuttle stood in jacket, trousers, collar, tie, hat, one well-shod foot on the running-board of a motorcar, laughing, his gold tooth brilliantly revealed. There were photographs of his father, his mother, their house; his brothers, in a group and singly; his sisters, in a group and singly. There were photographs of W. C. Tuttle in various transitory phases: W. C. Tuttle with beard, whiskers and moustache, W. C. Tuttle with beard alone, moustache alone; W. C. Tuttle as weight-lifter (in bathing trunks, glaring at the camera, holding aloft the weights he had made from the lead of the dismantled electricity plant at Shorthills); W. C. Tuttle in Indian court dress; W. C. Tuttle in full pundit’s regalia, turban, dhoti, white jacket, beads, standing with a brass jar in one hand, laughing again (a number of blurred, awestruck faces in the background). In between there were pictures of the English countryside in spring, a view of the Matterhorn, a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, and a picture entitled “When Did You Last See Your Father?” It was W. C. Tuttle’s way of blending East and West.

But Govind, taxi-driving, Ramayana -grunting, remained untouched by this or any other rivalry and continued as menacing and offensive as before. The readers and learners openly wished that he would be maimed or killed in a motor accident. Instead, he won a safety award and had his hand shaken by the mayor of Port of Spain. This appeared to free him of all inhibitions, and both Basdai and Mr. Biswas began to talk of calling in the police.

But the police were never called. For, quite suddenly, Govind ceased to be a problem.

An abrupt, stunning silence fell on the house one evening. The learners and readers stopped buzzing. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone went dead. The Ramayana singing broke off in mid-couplet. And from Govind’s room came a series of grunts, thumps, cracks and crashes.

Anand came running on tiptoe into Mr. Biswas’s room and whispered joyfully, “Daddy is beating Mummy.”

Mr. Biswas sat up and listened. It sounded true. Vidiadhar’s Daddy was beating Vidiadhar’s Mummy.

The whole house listened. And when the noises from Govind’s room died down, and Govind resumed whining out the Ramayana, the buzzing downstairs built up again, a new, satisfied sound, and W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone played, music of celebration.

So it was whenever Chinta was beaten by Govind. Which was often. The readers and learners recovered from their terror, for having found this outlet, Govind sought no other. Her beatings gave Chinta a matriarchal dignity and, curiously, gained her a respect she had never had before. They had the subsidiary effects of quelling her children, killing her song, and rousing her to cultural rivalry.

Vidiadhar was also in the exhibition class. He was not in the star section, like Anand; but Chinta put this down only to bribery and corruption. And one afternoon, while Anand was sitting on the end stool at the bar in the Dairies, an Indian boy came in. It was Vidiadhar. Anand was surprised. Vidiadhar looked surprised as well. And in their surprise, neither boy spoke to the other. Vidiadhar walked past Anand to the stool at the other end of the bar and asked for a half-pint of milk. Anand was pleased to see him making this mistake: money was first paid at the desk, and the receipt presented to the barman. So Vidiadhar had to walk past the whole row of high stools again, get his receipt from the cashier, and walk past the stools once more to the end he had chosen. Without looking at one another, they drank their milk, slowly, each unwilling to be the first to leave. Neither had intended to cut the other; the cutting had simply happened. But each boy considered he had been cut; and never again, until they were men, did they speak. In the shifting, tangled, multifarious relationships in that crowded house, this silence remained constant. It became historic. Then Vidiadhar said that he had done the cutting that afternoon, and Anand said that he had done it. And every afternoon, at five minutes past three, the people in the Dairies saw two Indian boys sitting at opposite ends of the milk bar, drinking half-pints of milk through straws, not looking at one another, never speaking.

Myna and Kamla, resenting the challenge of Vidiadhar, who was now openly eating prunes, began to claim astounding scholastic achievements for Anand.

“My brother read more books than all of all-you put together.”

“Hear you. But all right. If Anand read so much, let him tell me who is the author of Singing Guns.” This from a young Tuttle.

“Tell him, Anand. Tell him who is the author of Singing Guns.”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah-ah-ah!”

“But how you could expect him to know that?” Myna said. “He does only read books of common sense.”

“Okay. Anand does read a lot of books. But my brother write a book. A whole book. And he writing another right now.”

The writer had indeed done that. He was the eldest Tuttle boy. He had impressed his parents by a constant demand for exercise books and by a continuous show of writing. He said he was making notes. In fact, he had copied out every word of Nelson’s West Indian Geography, by Captain Cutteridge, Director of Education, author of Nelson’s West Indian Readers and Nelson’s West Indian Arithmetics. He had completed the Geography in more than a dozen exercise books, and was at the moment engaged on the first volume of Nelson’s West Indian History, by Captain Daniel, Assistant Director of Education.

With the exhibition examination less than two months away, Anand lived a life of pure work. Private lessons were given in the morning for half an hour before school; private lessons were given in the afternoon for an hour after school; private lessons were given for the whole of Saturday morning. Then in addition to all these private lessons from his class teacher, Anand began to take private lessons from the headmaster, at the headmaster’s house, from five to six. He went from school to the Dairies to school again; then he went to the headmaster’s, where Savi waited for him with sandwiches and lukewarm Ovaltine. Leaving home at seven in the morning, he returned at half past six. He ate. Then he did his school homework; then he prepared for all his private lessons.

All the boys in the star section of the exhibition class endured almost similar privation, but they strove to maintain the fiction that they were schoolboys given to pranks, enjoying the most carefree days of their lives. There were a few anxious boys who talked of nothing but work. But most talked of the football season just beginning, the Santa Rosa race meeting just concluded, giving one another to understand that their Daddies had taken them to the races in cars with laden hampers and that they had proceeded to bet, and lose, vast sums on the pari mutuel. They discussed the prospects of Brown Bomber and Jetsam at the Christmas meeting (the examination was in early November and this was a means of looking beyond it). Anand was not the most backward in these conversations. Though horseracing bored him to a degree, he had made it his special subject. He knew, for example, that Jetsam was by Flotsam out of Hope of the Valley; he claimed to have seen all three horses and spread a racetrack story that the young Jetsam used to eat clothes left out to dry. Retailing some more racetrack gossip, he maintained (and began to be known for this) that, in spite of a career of almost unmitigated disaster, Whitstable was the finest horse in the colony; it was a pity he was so erratic, but then these greys were temperamental.

The talk turned one Monday lunchtime to films, and it appeared that nearly every boy who lived in Port of Spain had been to see the double programme at the London Theatre over the week-end: Jesse James and The Return of Frank James.

“What a double!” the boys exclaimed. “A major double!”

Anand, whose championship of Whitstable had established him as the holder of the perverse opinion, said he didn’t care for it.

The boys rounded on him.

Anand, who had not seen the double, repeated that he didn’t care for it. “Give me When the Daltons Rode and The Daltons Ride Again. Any day, old man.”

It was just his luck for one boy to say then, “I bet you he didn’t go to see it! You could see that old crammer going to a theatre?”

“You are a hypocritical little thug,” Anand said, using two words he had got from his father. “You are a bigger crammer than me.”

The boy wished to shift the conversation: he was a tremendous crammer. He repeated, less warmly, “I bet you didn’t go.” By now, however, the other boys had prepared to listen, and the accuser, gaining confidence, said, “All right-all right. He went. Just let him tell me what happened when Henry Fonda-”

Anand said, “I don’t like Henry Fonda.”

This created a minor diversion.

“How you mean, you don’t like Fonda. Anybody would think that you never see Fonda walk.”

“That is walk, old man.”

“All right-all right,” the accuser went on. “What happened when Henry Fonda and Brian Donlevy-”

“I don’t like him either,” Anand said. And, to his great relief, the bell rang.

He could tell from the annoyance of his accuser that the cross-examination would be continued. He went straight after school to the Dairies; when he came back it was time for private lessons; and after private lessons he managed to slip away to the headmaster’s. When he got home he said he could do no work that evening and wanted to go to the London Theatre, to give his brain a rest.

“I have no money,” Shama said. “You will have to ask your father.”

Mr. Biswas said, “When you get to my age you wouldn’t care for Westerns.”

Anand lost his temper. “When I get to your age I don’t want to be like you.”

He regretted what he had said. He was, indeed, fatigued; and Mr. Biswas’s dismissing manner had seemed to him callous. But he made no apology. He talked instead about the headaches he was getting and said he was sure he was suffering from brainfag and brainfever, crammer’s afflictions, which his rivals at school had often prophesied for him.

Mr. Biswas said, “I haven’t got a red cent on me. I don’t get pay till the day after tomorrow. Right now I am dipping into the Deserving Destees’ petty cash at the office. Go and ask your mother.”

As usual, it turned out that she did have some money. “How much you want?”

Anand calculated. Adult, twelve cents, children, half price. Just to make sure, however, he said, “Thirty-six cents.” He would return the change afterwards.

“Thirty-six cents. Well, boy, you clean me out. Look.”

All he saw in her purse were a few coppers. But she always managed. And pay day was the day after tomorrow.

The evening show began at half past eight. Mr. Biswas and Anand left the house at about eight. Not far from the cinema there was a Chinese cafй. Something had to be bought there; it was part of the cinema ritual. They had eighteen cents to spend. They bought peanuts, channa and some mint sweets, six cents in all.

The entrance to the London pit was through a narrow tunnel, as to a dungeon of romance. It allowed not more than one person to advance at a time and enabled the ticket-collector, who sat at the end with a stout stick laid across the arms of his chair, to repel gate-crashers. Mr. Biswas and Anand arrived to find the mouth of the tunnel blocked by a turbulent, unaccommodating mob. They stood hesitantly at the edge of the mob, and in an instant, driven from behind, found themselves part of it. They lost control of their hands and feet. Anand, wedged between tall men, shut off from light and air, could only allow himself to be carried along. Cries of frustration and anguish ran through the mob: the film had started: they could hear the opening music. The pressure on Anand increased; he feared he would be crushed against the angle of wall and tunnel; Mr. Biswas called to him in a voice that seemed to come from far; he could not answer; he could not look up or down. There was only the thought that at the end of this lay Henry Fonda and Brian Donlevy and Tyrone Power, all of whom, despite what he had said at school, commanded Anand’s highest esteem. He heard men crying for tickets; they were getting near. Through a small, semicircular, lighted hole in the wall of the tunnel money was being pushed in, tickets out, and the hands of the ticketseller occasionally flashed: a woman’s hands, fat and cool.

It was Mr. Biswas’s turn. Struggling to remain in front of the hole, to prevent himself being swept down, ticketless, to the ticket-collector with the stick, he placed a shilling on the smooth, shining wood. “One and a half

A woman’s voice said, “Half price only at matinee.” The hands, about to tear a ticket from the reel, waited.

“Two, then.”

Two green tickets were pushed towards him, and he and Anand yielded gratefully to the pressure at their backs.

“Hey, you!” the woman’s voice called from the hole.

Selling had stopped, and the clamour redoubled all down the tunnel.

“You!”

Mr. Biswas went back to the lighted hole.

“What you mean, giving me only a shilling?” The coin lay on her palm.

“Two twelves.”

“Two twenties. Sixteen cents more.”

Anand stood where he was. The turmoil and the shouting became remote.

The soundtrack indicated that a fire was in progress. People who had seen the film before recognized the sound; it wound them up to a frenzy.

How could he have forgotten that there was half price only at matinees? How could he have forgotten that on Mondays as on Saturdays and Sundays, the price was not twelve cents, but twenty?

Mr. Biswas put the two green tickets down. One was torn off and given back to him, with four cents.

They stood against the wall next to the ticket-collector, while the men who had been behind them hurried past, rearranging their disordered clothes.

“You go,” Mr. Biswas said.

Anand’s cheeks bulged over the mint sweet. He had stopped sucking it; it felt cold and wet. He shook his head. Shock had taken away all desire to see the films; if he stayed he would have to walk home alone at midnight.

They were continually jostled. They were in the way.

Mr. Biswas said, “I’ll come back for you.”

Anand hesitated. But at that moment there was a new scramble up the tunnel; someone shouted, “Why the hell you don’t go if you going?”; the ticket-collector said, “Make up your mind. You blocking the way.” And Anand said to Mr. Biswas, “You go,” and Mr. Biswas, appearing to obey instantly, vanished behind many backs and was propelled into the cinema to see films he hadn’t wanted to see.

Anand stayed in the tunnel, pressed flat against the wall, while people passed inside. Presently, with the film well advanced, the tunnel was empty. The distempered ochre walls were rubbed shiny. In the lighted hole the hands were knitting.

He walked past the Woodbrook Market Square, the Chinese cafй, the Murray Street playground. The house, when he returned to it, was humming. But no one saw him. He went straight to the front room, took off his shoes and lay down on the Slumberking.

There Shama found him when she came upstairs and turned on the light.

“Boy! You had me frightened. You didn’t go to the theatre?”

“Yes. But I had a headache.”

“And your father?”

“He is there.”

The front gate clicked, and someone came up the concrete steps. The door opened and they saw Mr. Biswas.

“Well!” Shama said. “You had a headache too?”

He didn’t answer. He worked his way between table and bed, and sat on the bed.

“I can’t understand the pair of you,” Shama said. She went into the inner room, came out with some sewing and went downstairs.

Mr. Biswas said, “Boy, get me the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare. And my pen.”

Anand climbed over the head of the bed and got the book and the pen.

For some time Mr. Biswas wrote.

“Blasted thing blot like hell. But, still, read it.”

On the fly-leaf, below the four masculine names that had been chosen for Savi before she was born, Anand read: “I, Mohun Biswas, do hereby promise my son Anand Biswas that in the event of his winning a College Exhibition, I will buy him a bicycle.” Signature and date followed.

Mr. Biswas said, “I think you’d better witness it.”

Anand wrote the latest version of his signature and added “witness” in brackets.

“All fair and square now,” Mr. Biswas said. “Just a minute though. Let me see the book again. I think I left out something.”

He took the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare, changed the full stop of his declaration into a comma and added, war conditions permitting.

In the house the eruptions of sound had ceased. The humming had subsided to a low, steady burr. It was late. Shama and Savi came up and went to the inner room, where Myna and Kamla were already asleep. Anand lay down on the Slumberking, separated from Mr. Biswas by a bank of pillows. He pulled the cotton sheet over his face to keep out the light, and soon fell asleep. Mr. Biswas stayed awake for some time, reading. Then he got up, turned off the light, and felt his way back to the bed.

He awoke, as nearly always now, when it was still night. He never wished to know the time: it would be too early or too late. The house was full of sound: with renters, readers and learners upstairs and downstairs, the house snored. The world was without colour; it awaited no one’s awakening. Through the open window, above the silhouette of trees and the roof of the house next door, he could see the deep starlit sky. It magnified his distress. Anguish quickened to panic, the familiar knot in his stomach.

He slept late next morning; bathed in the open-air bathroom, ate in the sunny front room, put on yesterday’s shirt (he wore one shirt for two days), wrist-watch, tie, jacket, hat; and, respectably attired, cycled out to interview destitutes.

And at school, when confronted by his accuser, Anand said, “Of course I went. But I hated it so much I left before it began.”

It was agreed that it was a characteristic remark.

Anand’s attacks of asthma occurred at intervals of four weeks or less, and Mr. Biswas and Shama feared that he might get one during the week of the exhibition examination. But the attack came in the week before, ran for its three days, and then, his chest discoloured and peeling from the medicated wadding, Anand was free to attend to his last, intensive private lessons. His labours were increased when Mr. Biswas, determined to leave as little as possible to chance, wrote essays on the Grow More Food Campaign and the Red Cross and made Anand commit them to memory, Mr. Biswas flattering himself that he had concealed his own personality in these essays and made them the work, not of a dissident adult, but of a brilliant and loyal schoolboy. They were as full of noble sentiments as a Sentinel leader; they appealed urgently for support for campaign and society; they said that the war had to be won, to preserve those free institutions which Anand dearly loved.

The examination was on a Saturday. On Friday evening Shama laid out Anand’s speechday clothes and all his equipment. Anand, objecting to the clothes, said it was like preparing for a puja. And Chinta, who had kept her plans secret, did have a little puja for Vidiadhar. A pundit came up from Arwacas on his motorbike on Friday evening and spent the night among the readers and learners below the house. On Saturday morning, while Anand was doing a last-minute revision, Vidiadhar bathed in consecrated water, put on a dhoti and faced the pundit across a sacrificial fire. He listened to the pundit’s prayers, burned some ghee and chipped coconut and brown sugar, and the readers and learners rang bells and struck gongs.

Anand did not escape ritual himself. He had to wear the dark-blue serge shorts, the white shirt, the unchewed school tie; and Shama, braving his anger, sprinkled his shirt with lavender water when he wasn’t looking. He said he was willing to rely on the clock in the school hall, but he was given Mr. Biswas’s Cyma wrist-watch; it hung on his wrist like a loose bracelet and had to be pulled down to his forearm. He was given Mr. Biswas’s pen, in case his own should fail. He was given a large new bottle of ink, in case the examiners didn’t provide enough. He was given many blotters, many Sentinel pencils, a pencil sharpener, a ruler, and two erasers, one for pencil, one for ink. He said, “Anybody would believe I am going to this place to get married.” Lastly, Shama gave him two shillings. She didn’t say what this was a precaution against, and he didn’t ask.

Similar attentions were being bestowed on a simpering, lip-licking Vidiadhar; he was also provided by Chinta with many charms, which were put on under the pundit’s supervision and with ostentatious secrecy, after much shooing away of curious readers and learners. At last the boys left for the school, both smelling of lavender, Vidiadhar going in his father’s taxi, Anand walking, accompanied by Mr. Biswas, who wheeled his Royal Enfield bicycle. Halfway down the street Anand put his hand in his trousers pocket and felt something soft, small and round. It was a dry lime. It must have been put there by Shama, to cut bad luck. He threw it into the gutter.

It was as Anand feared. The exhibition candidates, prepared for years for the sacrificial day, had all come dressed for the sacrifice. They all wore serge shorts, white shirts and school ties, and Anand could only guess at what charms these clothes concealed. Their pockets were stuffed with pens and pencils. In their hands they carried blotters, rulers, erasers and new pots of ink; some carried complete cases of mathematical instruments; many wore wrist-watches. The schoolyard was full of Daddies, the heroes of so many English compositions; they seemed to have dressed with as much care as their sons. The boys looked at the Daddies; and the Daddies, wrist-watchless, eyed each other, breeders of rivals. There were few cars outside the school and Vidiadhar had achieved a temporary glory when he arrived in his father’s car. But Govind hadn’t left quickly enough and the boys, skilled in noticing such things, saw the H on the number plate which indicated that the car was for hire. Altogether it was a dreadful day, a day of reckoning, with Daddies exposed to scrutiny on every side, and the examination to follow.

Anand wanted Mr. Biswas to go at once. Not that Mr. Biswas couldn’t withstand scrutiny; but no boy with an anxious father at his side could pretend that he didn’t care about the examination, and Anand wanted passionately to give that impression. Mr. Biswas submitted and left, thinking about the ingratitude and callousness of children. Anand joined the fatherless boys who, for the benefit of the Daddies, were making an exaggerated show of being schoolboys: they shouted, bullied the bullied, called each other by nicknames, and laughed noisily at stale, but private, classroom jokes. Loudly they discussed the football match that was to take place that afternoon in the Savannah, just at the end of the street; many said they were going to watch it. One brave soul talked about the film he had seen the night before. They talked, their sweating hands staining blotters, rulers, and slipping over ink-bottles; and they waited.

When the bell rang the schoolyard was instantly stilled. Shouts were suspended, sentences hung unfinished. The traffic on Tragarete Road could be heard, the din from the kitchens of the Queen’s Park Hotel. A fluttering of white shirts; newly polished shoes pattering on the asphalt quadrangle and grating up the concrete steps; a wavering line of blue serge at every door; unemphatic footsteps in the hall; here and there a defiant banging of a desk-lid. Then silence. And the Daddies, alone in the schoolyard, looked at the hall doors.

Slowly they dispersed. Three hours later they began to reassemble, their clothes hanging a little more loosely, their faces shining. Many carried oilstained paper parcels. They stood in the shade of buildings and trees and stared at the hall doors. A self-possessed invigilator in shirtsleeves walked slowly up and down, sheets of paper in his hand; from time to time he coughed noiselessly into a loosely-clenched fist. A car stopped not far from the school gates; the middle-aged driver lounged in the angle of seat and door, rested a newspaper on the steering-wheel and read, picking his nose.

Then a hamper appeared. A wicker basket with the edges of an ironed white napkin peeping out below the flaps. A uniformed maid held the hamper in the crook of her arm and waited in the shade of the tree next to the caretaker’s house, ignoring the glances of the Daddies with oilstained paper parcels.

More cars came. Mr. Biswas, fresh from writing up the sensational decline and fall of a destitute for the Sunday Sentinel, arrived on his Royal Enfield. Yielding to a habit he had formed since frequenting destitutes, he chained the bicycle to the school rails. He walked into the schoolyard with his bicycle clips still on: they gave him an urgent, athletic air.

Two more hampers came. Their carriers, one in uniform, one in a black cotton frock, stood next to the other hamper carrier.

Govind came. His mood had changed since the morning. He slammed the door of his taxi hard and paced up and down outside the school gates, smiling at the pavement, humming, his hands behind his back.

A flutter as of pigeons in the hall: papers being collected. A steady and prolonged banging of desk-lids, a shuffling and a scraping, footsteps more assertive than in the morning, a disorderly rash of white shirts, many broken lines of blue serge: as though the disciplined battalion of a few hours before had been routed and were retreating hurriedly, their equipment abandoned. And the Daddies advanced, like people welcoming a train, some purposefully, claiming their own, some getting lost in the eddies of white and dark blue, and hesitating.

Even in this disorder the hampers were noted, and two provided surprises, for their recipients were mild mannered and insignificant; they were now being bullied by maids and led to classrooms.

Everywhere Daddies were getting reports. Question papers were displayed, inkstained fingers pointed. Already, too, backs were being turned, and brown paper parcels and white paper parcels unwrapped and furtively explored.

Mr. Biswas saw Vidiadhar first: running down the steps, a lime bulging clearly in each trouser pocket, clothes a little battered, but a face as gay and as fresh and as unstained as when he went in. The little thug. He joined a group of fatherless who had gathered around the class-teacher. No longer posing for the Daddies or one another, they were anxious, excited and shrill.

Anand avoided them when he came out. The pen Mr. Biswas had lent him, just in case, had leaked in his shirt pocket and left a large wet stain: it was as though his heart had bled ink. His hair was disordered, his lips black and moustached with ink, his cheeks and forehead smudged. His face was drawn; he looked dejected, exhausted and irritable.

“Well,” Mr. Biswas said, smiling, his heart sinking. “It went all right?”

“Take your bicycle clips off!”

Stunned by the boy’s vehemence, Mr. Biswas obeyed.

Anand handed him the question papers, clumsily folded, already dirty. Mr. Biswas began opening them.

“Oh, put it in your pocket,” Anand said, and Mr. Biswas obeyed again.

A worried Chinese boy, looking irreparably scruffy, with over-broad and over-long serge trousers napping below thin knees, left the group around the teacher and came up to them. In one small hand he unashamedly held a large cheese sandwich, far too thick, it would have seemed, for his narrow mouth; but one end of the sandwich was already irregularly pinked. In the other hand he had a bottle of aerated water. His shrunken face was distorted with anxiety: sandwich and aerated water were irrelevant.

“Biswas,” he said, paying no attention to Mr. Biswas. “That sum about the cyclist-”

“Oh, don’t bother me,” Anand said.

Mr. Biswas smiled apologetically at the boy, but the boy didn’t notice. Daddyless, he wandered off, alone with his anxieties, no one to assure him that his answer was right, the teacher’s wrong.

“You shouldn’t behave like that,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Here. Take back your pen.”

Mr. Biswas took back his pen. It dripped with ink.

“And your wrist-watch.” Anand was anxious to get rid of every reminder of the morning’s preparations.

Govind and Vidiadhar had gone. So had the other cars. The yard was less noisy. Mr. Biswas took Anand to the Dairies for lunch. Crowded with boys and their fathers, it had become an unfamiliar place. As a treat Anand had a chocolate drink instead of milk; but he didn’t enjoy that or anything else: it was only part of the day’s sacrificial ritual.

The schoolyard filled again. Cars came back, deposited boys, and left. The hampers and the maids left. When the bell rang there was not the instant and complete silence of the morning: there was chatter, shuffling and banging, dwindling to silence.

Mr. Biswas opened Anand’s question papers. The arithmetic paper was filled in its margins with crabbed and frantic figures: fractions being reduced, and many little multiplications, some completed, some abandoned. Mr. Biswas didn’t like the look of them. Then he saw that on the geography paper Anand had written his initials elaborately, outlining them in pencil, shading them in pencil; and this dismayed him entirely.

The afternoon session was shorter, and at the end of it few Daddies were in the schoolyard. Only one car came. The drama of the day was over. There was no rush out of the hall. The boys took off their ties, folded them and put them in their shirt pockets with the broad end hanging out (a recent fashion). An invigilator, in a dingy jacket and bicycle clips, brought his rickety bicycle down the steps: no longer remote and awesome, only a man going home after work.

Anand, his tie in his shirt pocket, his collar turned up, ran smiling to Mr. Biswas. “Look!” he said, showing the English paper.

One of the essay subjects was the Grow More Food Campaign.

They smiled at each other, conspirators.

“Biswas!” a boy called. “You coming to the Savannah?”

“Yes, man!”

He ran to join the boys; and Mr. Biswas, loaded with the pen and pencils, the ruler and erasers and bottle of ink, cycled home.

It was strange that, having talked about football and racing all through the term, the boys should now, watching an important football match, talk about nothing but the examination.

Anand returned home shortly after nightfall. His serge trousers were dusty, his shirt wet with perspiration, and he was very gloomy.

“I’ve failed,” he said.

“What happened?” Mr. Biswas asked.

“In the spelling paper. The synonyms and homonyms. They were so easy I thought I’d leave them for last. Then I just didn’t do them.”

“You mean you left out a whole question?”

“I realized it in the Savannah.”

The gloom spread to Savi and Myna and Kamla and Shama, and was deepened by the joy of Vidiadhar’s brothers and sisters. Vidiadhar had been untouched by the day’s events, and was at that moment in the Roxy Theatre, seeing the complete serial of Daredevils of the Red Circle. He had brought home question papers that were quite clean except for gay ticks at the side of those questions he had answered. His arithmetic answers, neatly written on a strip of paper, were all correct. He had known the meanings of all the difficult words; he had spotted the synonyms and had not been fooled by one homonym. And he had not had private lessons. He had not had private lessons after private lessons. No one had taken him Ovaltine and sandwiches at five. He had not been going for very long to a Port of Spain school; he had drunk little milk and eaten few prunes.

“I always say,” Shama said, though she had never said anything of the sort, “I always say that carelessness was going to be your downfall.”

“In a few years you will look back on this and laugh,” Mr. Biswas said. “You did your best. And no true effort is ever wasted. Remember that.”

“What about you?” Anand said.

And though they slept on the same bed, neither spoke to the other for the rest of the evening.

Anand had no more work to do that year and no more milk to drink, but on Monday he went to school. All Saturday’s candidates were there. They had become a superior, leisured caste. A few boys did spend the day writing the examination as nearly as possible as they had done on Saturday. (The Chinese boy, with a mortification that amounted almost to terror, got the correct answer to the sum about the cyclist.) The others flaunted their idleness. At first they were content to be in the classroom and not of the class, seeing the exhibition discipline enforced on next year’s candidates. But this soon palled, and they wandered out into the yard. Their attitude to the examination had changed since Saturday afternoon: they all now had tales of disaster. Anand, believing none of them, magnified his own blunder. In the end they were all boasting of how badly they had done; and apparently none of them really cared. Time hung heavily on their hands, and the afternoon was only partially enlivened by a packet of cigarettes: disappointing, but a prank, at last. For the first time for many years Anand was free to go home as soon as the afternoon bell rang. Up to last week this had seemed the supreme freedom. But now he dreaded leaving the boys, dreaded going back to the house. He did not get home till six.

Unusually, Mr. Biswas was below the house, in that section of it which Shama used as a kitchen. He was in his working clothes, and tired, but very gay.

“Ah, the young man himself,” he greeted Anand. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve got something for you, young man.” He took out an envelope from his jacket pocket.

It was a letter from an English judge. He said he had been following Mr. Biswas’s work in the Sentinel, admired it, and would like to meet Mr. Biswas, to try and persuade him to join a literary group he had formed.

“What about me, eh. What about me. I tell you, man, no true effort is wasted. Not that I expect to get anything from that blasted paper. Or from you.”

Mr. Biswas’s elation was extravagant. Anand thought he knew why. But he was in no mood to give comfort, to associate himself with weakness. He handed back the letter to Mr. Biswas without a word.

Mr. Biswas took the letter absently, told Shama to send up his food, and went to the front room. He was alone, too, when he awoke in the night to the snoring house, Anand asleep beside him, and looked through the window at the clear, dead sky.

He saw the judge the next day, and went to the meeting of the literary group on Friday evening. He was especially glad to be out of the house then, for on Friday evenings the widows came up from Shorthills and spent the night below the house. Encouraged by the success of Indian shirtmakers, the widows had decided to go into the clothesmaking business. Since none of the five could sew at all well, they had decided to learn, and every Friday they went to the sewing classes at the Royal Victoria Institute, each widow specializing in a different aspect of the craft. They came in the late afternoon, they were rapturously welcomed by the readers and learners, and Basdai fed them. The readers and learners, not subject to Basdai’s floggings while their mothers were present, were unusually vociferous; there was an air of festival.

Mr. Biswas found himself a little out of his depth in the literary group. Apart from the poems in the Royal Reader and Bell’s Standard Elocutionist, the only poems he knew were those of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Edward Carpenter; and at the judge’s the emphasis was on poetry. But there was much to drink, and it was late when Mr. Biswas came back and wheeled his bicycle below the house, his head ringing with the names of Lorca and Eliot and Auden. The readers and learners were asleep on benches and tables. The widows, dressed in white and singing softly, sat below a weak bulb, playing cards, drinking coffee, and handling pieces of sewing which had grown grubby over the weeks of tuition. He went up the dark front stairs and turned the light on in his room. Anand sprawled on the bed behind the bank of pillows. He undressed and squeezed himself between the diningtable and the bed. Shama came from the inner room, in answer to the light, and noted those symptoms, of slowness, precision and silence, which she associated with his Sunday excursions to Pagotes.

As a condition of his acceptance by the group he had to read something of his own. He didn’t know what to offer them. He couldn’t write poetry, and he had thrown away the “Escape” stories. He knew that story well, however; it could be written again. He still could think of no satisfactory end, but he had read enough of modern prose to know that a neat end might offend the group. He couldn’t make his hero the faceless “John Lubbard”, who was “tall, broad-shouldered, handsome”; he would be laughed down. He had to be ruthless. His hero would be Gopi, a country shopkeeper, “small, spare and shrunken”. He took a Sentinel pad, got into bed and, neatly, began to write the familiar words: At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children…

Those words were never read to the group. This story, like the others, was never finished. For, even before Gopi could meet his barren heroine, news came that Bipti, Mr. Biswas’s mother, had died.

He called the children away from school and they went with Shama to Pratap’s. From the road the open verandah and steps, thick with mourners, appeared to be draped with white. He had not expected such a crowd. Tara was there, and Ajodha, looking annoyed. But most of the mourners he didn’t know: the families of his sister-in-law, his brother’s friends, Bipti’s friends. He might have been attending the funeral of a stranger. The body laid out in a coffin on the verandah belonged more to them. He longed to feel grief. He was surprised only by jealousy.

Shama did her duty and wept. Dehuti, who had been ostracized since her marriage, sat halfway up the steps, shrieking at new mourners and grabbing at their feet, as if anxious to trip them up, to prevent them going any further. The mourners, finding their trousers or skirts clutched to a wet face, stroked Dehuti’s covered head and at the same time tried to shake their garments free. No one made any effort to move Dehuti. Her story was known, and it was felt that she was doing a penance which it would have been improper to interrupt. Ramchand was more controlled but equally impressive. He occupied himself with the funeral arrangements, and behaved with such authority that no one would have guessed that he had not spoken to Bipti or Mr. Biswas’s brothers.

Mr. Biswas went past Dehuti to look at the body. Then he did not wish to see it again. But always, as he wandered about the yard among the mourners, he was aware of the body. He was oppressed by a sense of loss: not of present loss, but of something missed in the past. He would have liked to be alone, to commune with this feeling. But time was short, and always there was the sight of Shama and the children, alien growths, alien affections, which fed on him and called him away from that part of him which yet remained purely himself, that part which had for long been submerged and was now to disappear.

The children did not go to the burial ground. They strayed about Pratap’s large yard, eyed other groups of children, town children versus country children. Anand, in his exhibition clothes, led his sisters through the vegetable garden to the cowpen. They examined a broken cartwheel. Behind the pen they surprised a hen and its brood scratching a dung heap. Girls and chickens fled in opposite directions, and the country children tittered.

Back in Port of Spain, they noticed Mr. Biswas’s stillness, his silence, his withdrawal. He did not complain about the noise; he discouraged, but gently, all efforts to engage him in conversation; he went alone for long night walks. He summoned no one to get his matches or cigarettes or books. And he wrote. He told no one what he was writing. He wrote with energy but without enthusiasm, doggedly, destroying sheet after sheet. He ate little, but his indigestion had gone. Shama bought him tinned salmon, his favourite food; she had the girls clean his bicycle and made Anand pump the tyres every morning. But he did not appear to notice these attentions.

She went to the front room one evening and stood at the head of the bed. He was writing; his back was to her. She was in his light, but he did not shout.

“What’s the matter, man?”

He said in an expressionless voice, “You are blocking the light.” He laid down paper and pencil.

She worked her way between the table and bed and sat on the edge of the bed, near his head. Her weight created a minor disturbance. The pillow tilted and his head slipped off it, falling almost into her lap. He tried to move his head, but when she held it he remained still.

“You don’t look well,” she said.

He accepted her caresses. She stroked his hair, remarked on its fine quality, said it was going thin, but not, thank God, going grey like hers. She pulled out a hair from her head and laid it across his chest. “Look,” she said, “completely grey,” laughing.

“Grey all right.”

She looked over his chest to the sheets he had put down. She saw My Dear Doctor, with the My crossed out and written in again.

“Who you writing to?”

She couldn’t read more, for beyond the first line the handwriting had deteriorated into a racing scrawl.

He didn’t reply.

For some time, until the position became uncomfortable for Shama, they remained like that, silent. She stroked his head, looked from him to the open window, heard the buzz and shrieks upstairs and downstairs. He closed his eyes and opened them under her stroking.

“Which doctor?” Though there had been a long silence, there seemed to be no break between her questions.

He was silent.

Then he said, “Doctor Rameshwar.”

“The one who…”

“Yes. The one who signed my mother’s death certificate.”

She went on stroking his head, and, slowly, he began to speak.

There had been some trouble about the certificate. No, it wasn’t really trouble. Pratap had first dispatched messages; Prasad had come and they had both gone, with urgent grief, to the doctor’s. It was midday, hot; the body would not last. They had been made to wait for very long in the doctor’s verandah; they had complained, and the doctor had damned them and damned their mother. His bad temper continued all the way to the house; with anger and disrespect he had examined Bipti’s body, signed the certificate, demanded his fee and left. This had been told to Mr. Biswas by his brothers, not in anger; they told it simply as part of the tribulations of the day: the death, the sending of messages, the arrangements.

“And why didn’t you tell me?” Shama asked in Hindi.

He didn’t say. It was something that concerned him alone. By speaking of it he would have exposed himself to the disregard of Shama and the children; he would also have involved them in his own humiliation.

Shama’s solace was a surprise. She spoke to the children, and he was further strengthened when they expressed, not hurt, but anger.

He became almost gay, and addressed himself to the letter now with something like zest. He read out to Anand the drafts he had made and asked for comments. The drafts were hysterical and libellous. But in his new mood, and after many re-writings, the letter developed into a broad philosophical essay on the nature of man. Both he and Anand thought it humorous, charitable and in parts correctly condescending; and it thrilled them to think of the doctor’s surprise at receiving such a letter from the relation of someone he had thought to be only a peasant. Mr. Biswas introduced himself as the son of the woman whose death the doctor had so rudely certified. He compared the doctor to an angry hero of a Hindu epic, and asked to be forgiven for mentioning the Hindu epics to an Indian who had abandoned his religion for a recent superstition that was being exported wholesale to savages all over the world (the doctor was a Christian). Perhaps the doctor had done so for political reasons or social reasons, or simply to escape from his caste; but no one could escape from what he was. This theme was developed and the letter concluded that no one could deny his humanity and keep his selfrespect. Mr. Biswas and Anand hunted through the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare and found the play of Measure for Measure rich in things that could be quoted. They also quoted from the New Testament and the Gita. The letter ran to eight pages. It was typed on the yellow typewriter and posted; and Mr. Biswas, exhilarated by his fortnight’s work, said to Anand, “How about a few more letters before Christmas? One to a business man. To fix up Shekhar. One to an editor. Fix up the Sentinel. Publish them as a booklet. Dedicate it to you.”

But the wound was still there, too deep for anger or thoughts of retribution. What had happened was locked away in time. But it was an error, not a part of truth. He wished this stated; and he wanted to do something that would be a defiance of what had happened. The body, lying in earth, was unhallowed, and he owed it honour: the mother who had remained unknown and whom he had never loved. Waking in the night, he felt exposed and vulnerable. He longed for hands to cover him all over, and he could only fall asleep again with his hands over his navel, unable to bear the feel of any alien object, however slight, on that part of his body.

To do honour he had no gifts. He had no words to say what he wanted to say, the poet’s words, which held more than the sum of their meanings. But awake one night, looking at the sky through the window, he got out of bed, worked his way to the light switch, turned it on, got paper and pencil, and began to write. He addressed his mother. He did not think of rhythm; he used no cheating abstract words. He wrote of coming up to the brow of the hill, seeing the black, forked earth, the marks of the spade, the indentations of the fork prongs. He wrote of a journey he had made a long time before. He was tired; she made him rest. He was hungry; she gave him food. He had nowhere to go; she welcomed him. The writing excited, relieved him; so much so that he was able to look at Anand, asleep beside him, and think, “Poor boy. Failed his exam.”

The poem written, his selfconsciousness violated, he was whole again. And when on Friday the five widows arrived in Port of Spain for their sewing lessons at the Royal Victoria Institute, and the house resounded with clatter and chatter and shrieks and singing and the radio and the gramophone, Mr. Biswas went to the meeting of his literary group and announced that he was going to read his offering at last.

“It is a poem,” he said. “In prose.”

Everything glowed richly in the judge’s dimly-lit verandah. On the table there were bottles of whisky and rum, ginger and soda water, and a bowl of crushed ice.

Mr. Biswas sat in the chair below the reading light and sipped his whisky and soda. “There is no title,” he said. And, as he had expected, this was received with satisfaction.

Then he disgraced himself. Thinking himself free of what he had written, he ventured on his poem boldly, and even with a touch of selfmockery. But as he read, his hands began to shake, the paper rustled; and when he spoke of the journey his voice failed. It cracked and kept on cracking; his eyes tickled. But he went on, and his emotion was such that at the end no one said a word. He folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket. Someone filled his glass. He stared down at his lap, as if angry, as if he had been completely alone. He said nothing for the rest of the evening, and in his shame and confusion drank much. When he went home the widows were singing softly, the children were asleep, and he shamed Shama by being noisily sick in the outdoor lavatory.

Whatever happened, Anand would go to college. So Mr. Biswas and Shama decided. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be cruel and foolish to give the boy nothing more than an elementary school education. The girls agreed. They had not had any milk and prunes, and their chances of going to high schools were slight; but they did badly in their classes and did not consider themselves worthy. Myna and Kamla insisted that Mr. Biswas should make a public declaration that Anand was going to the college, for Vidiadhar was behaving as though he had already won the exhibition and was openly learning Latin and French and algebra and geometry, the wonderful subjects taught at the college.

The declaration was made, though neither Mr. Biswas nor Shama could say where the money was going to come from.

Shama talked of recovering her cow Mutri from Shorthills.

“Where you going to keep it?” Mr. Biswas asked. “With the boarders downstairs?”

“Milk selling at ten and twelve cents a bottle,” Shama said.

“What about grass, eh? You think you could just tie out Mutri in Adam Smith Square or the Murray Street playground? You’ve been reading too much Captain Cutteridge. And how much milk you think poor old Mutri going to give after living all those years with your family?”

Commercial ventures were running high in Shama’s mind since one of the widows, despairing of any but long-term returns from the clothesmaking scheme, had brought up a bag of oranges from Shorthills one Friday. She was exceptionally grave. She called one of her sons aside and ordered him to place the oranges on a tray, the tray on a box, and the box on the pavement. Then she went to the Royal Victoria Institute. The widow’s idea was simplicity itself: it required little effort and no outlay. There was much agitated discussion among the sisters that evening; many plans were adumbrated, and futures tremulously envisaged. The widow herself said nothing, and continued as grave and mournful as before, sucking thread, threading needles, and sewing.

The appearance of a shallow heap of oranges on a tray outside the tall blank walls of the house created a small sensation in the residential street. And it increased Mr. Biswas’s dread of being traced to his home by impatient destitutes.

With the exhibition examination and the death of his mother he had been neglecting the destitutes. Correspondence had accumulated, and as he was sitting in the Sentinel office one morning and typing for the tenth time, Dear Sir, Your letter awaited me on my return from holiday…, a reporter came to his desk and said, “Congrats, old man.”

It was the Sentinel’s education correspondent. He held some typewritten sheets. They were the exhibition results.

In a page of names the name stood out.

Anand had been placed third, had got one of the twelve exhibitions.

As bewitching as the news was the generosity with which it was welcomed by the older members of the staff. The very young, who had sat the examination not many years before, were aloof and unimpressed.

But third! Third in the island! It was fantastic. Only two boys more intelligent! It couldn’t be grasped right away.

Recovering, Mr. Biswas attempted to deflect some of the praise. “Mark you, the teacher knows his stuff.” But he couldn’t keep this up. “Careless boy, too, you know. Left out one whole question. In the spelling paper. Synonyms and homonyms.”

He began to lose his audience.

“He knew them. Thought they were easy.”

Reporters returned to their desks.

“And then didn’t do them at all. Left them out. A whole question.”

After a light-hearted morning in which he investigated the circumstances of two destitutes with a good humour which offended those people, he returned to the office and invited the education correspondent and Mr. Burnett’s news editor to have beers with him at the cafй on the corner. There, surrounded by flamboyant murals of revelry on tropical beaches, they drank: three men, none over forty, who considered their careers closed and rested their ambitions on the achievements of their children. The success of the son of one gave the others hope. They shared Mr. Biswas’s joy; they could not achieve his delirium.

“You could leave old Mutri to die in peace,” he said to Shama when he got back to the quiet house at midday; and his gaiety had her guessing. “What about oranges? Want to go in the selling business? Join the widows? The five financial wizards.”

The orange venture had in fact failed. Three oranges had been sold to a stray American soldier for a penny; the others had gone bad in the sun. The failure was put down to the unsuitability of the site and the snobbishness and jealousy of the neighbours who, to spite the widow, had preferred to go all the way to the city market to buy their oranges at a higher price. The widow’s son was also blamed for his lack of enthusiasm and his false pride: he had stood some distance from the tray of oranges and tried to pretend that they had nothing to do with him.

When Mr. Biswas broke the news of the exhibition, Shama set about defending the widows, and she and Mr. Biswas had a long and friendly squabble about the Tulsi family. It was like old times, and Mr. Biswas, the victor as always, solaced Shama by saying, what he had forgotten for some time, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! One of these days.”

“I suppose it would look nice in my coffin.”

The school had taken the first four places and won seven of the twelve exhibitions. The teacher’s notes and private lessons, legendarily virtuous, had triumphed once again. Five of the exhibitions went to known crammers like Anand and the Chinese boy and aroused little comment. The sixth went to one of the mild, hamper-fed boys; he was now considered sly. But the biggest surprise was provided by the boy who had come first. He was a Negro boy of astonishing size. He was a year younger than Anand but looked incomparably older. His forearms were already veined, and his chin and cheeks were dotted with little springs of hair. He had been loud in his denunciation of crammers; he had taken a leading part in discussions about films and sport; he had a phenomenal knowledge of English county cricket scores throughout the nineteen-thirties; and he had introduced the topic of sex. He claimed to have had many sexual encounters and his talk encouraged the belief that when he left school after private lessons, his satchel bouncing off his high bottom, it was not to do homework but to indulge in sexual intrigue and, joyously, to be pursued by older women. He displayed a convincing knowledge of the female body and its functions; and the conception of his life away from school as one of indifference to books and notes and homework was reinforced by his passionate devotion to the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, whose style he successfully imitated in his English compositions. His popularity was at its lowest that morning; his success cast doubt on all his tales of sexual adventure. He protested that he had not worked, that he had done no more than a hasty last-minute revision, and that the result had surprised him more than anyone else. But he protested in vain.

Photographers from the newspapers came. The exhibitioners straightened their ties and were photographed. Then they were free. They had ceased to be members of the school. School and teacher dwindled, and the boys were anxious to be out of the yard. None dared say he wanted to go home to break the news; besides, none wanted to put an end to the day.

The city was black and white in the sun. Trees were still, the sky high. They walked up to the Savannah, sat and looked at the people going in and out of the Queen’s Park Hotel. In the whitewashed bays on either side of the hotel entrance two doorkeepers of a rare blackness stood in stiff snow-white tunics. The effect was severe but picturesque. The boys wondered aloud what made the hotel get the blackest men in the island for that job, and what made the men take the job. Then they had a long discussion whether, given such a blackness, they would take the job themselves. The taxi-drivers, squatting on the asphalt pavement, chuckled; and the doorkeepers, compelled because of the constant coming and going to maintain their statuesque pose, could only make furtive threatening gestures and open their mouths to frame silent, hurried obscenities. The boys laughed and retreated. They walked along the Savannah, always in the shade of large trees. At Queen’s Park West they came on a mobile stall selling syrupy ice shavings in two colours. They bought; they sucked; they stained hands, faces, shirts. Then the Negro boy, anxious to regain his character, suggested that they should go to the Botanical Gardens to look for copulating couples. They went, they looked. Deployed by the Negro boy, they surprised one couple into a hasty show of decency. The second time they were chased by an enraged American sailor. They retreated to the Rock Gardens, and walked past the architectural marvels of Maraval Road. They walked past the Scottish baronial castle, the Moorish mansion, the semi-Oriental palace, the Bishop’s Spanish Colonial residence, and came to the blue and red Italianate college, empty now, though there were two cars below a pillared and balustraded balcony. They were proud and a little frightened. Kings for half a day, they would soon be new boys here, and nothing. The clock struck three. They looked up at the tower. The dial would be seen for weeks and months and years; those chimes would become familiar. They would warn of many things; they would mark many beginnings and ends. Now they said that the half-holiday was over. “See you next term,” the boys said, and went their separate ways.

That evening, while Mr. Biswas and the parents of the other exhibitioners beat their way to the teacher’s door with gifts of rum and whisky, trussed fowls and hobbled goats, the Tuttle children were set to their books with a new rigidity, although Christmas was not far off and the school term nearly ended. The writer, encouraged, completed the first volume of Captain Daniel’s West Indian History. For Vidiadhar it was an unhappy evening. He was given no food. For he had not won an exhibition, Vidiadhar who had brought home clean question papers with ticks beside the questions he had done and a neat list of correct answers to the arithmetic sums, who had begun to learn Latin and French, who had gone to the intercollegiate football match and uttered partisan cries. Now, deprived of his Latin and French books, he was made to sit up late before his exhibition notes, and was repeatedly flogged by Chinta.

The newspapers next morning carried photographs of Anand and the other exhibitioners. There were also columns of fine print containing the names of the many hundred who had only passed the examination. The readers and learners searched among these for Vidiadhar’s name. They didn’t find it. Always on the winning side, the readers and learners turned over the page and pretended to look there, and then they pretended to go through the classified advertisements, which were in the same small type. Having no flogging powers over the readers and learners, and unable now to threaten them with Govind, Chinta could only abuse them. She abused them individually; she abused Shama; she abused W. C. Tuttle; she abused Anand and his sisters; she accused Mr. Biswas of bribing the examiners; she brought up the theft of the eighty dollars. Her voice was a grating whine; her eyes were red, her whole face inflamed. The readers and learners giggled. Vidiadhar, enjoying the holiday granted to the school for its exhibition successes, was set to his exhibition notes again. From time to time Chinta interrupted her abuse to scream at him. “Watch me! Give me that knife and see if I don’t cut his little tongue.” And: “You are going to live on bread and water from now on. That is the only thing that will satisfy some people in this house.” Sometimes she fell silent and ran, literally ran, to the table where he sat and twisted his ears as if she were winding up an alarm clock, until, like an alarm, Vidiadhar went off. Then she slapped him and cuffed him, pulled his hair and pressed her fingers around his throat. Stupefied, Vidiadhar filled page after page with meaningless notes in his crapaud-foot handwriting; and his sisters and brothers scowled at everyone as though they were all responsible for Vidiadhar’s failure and punishment.

All day and all evening Chinta kept it up, her shrill voice part of the background noise of the house, until even W. C. Tuttle was driven to comment, in his pure Hindi, in a voice loud enough to penetrate the partition of Mr. Biswas’s inner room, whence the comment was reported to Mr. Biswas in the front room, preparing the way for a reconciliation between the two men, which was completed when W. C. Tuttle’s second eldest boy, due to write the exhibition examination next year, came down to ask Anand to be his tutor.

And it was from the Tuttles that Anand got the only presents he had for winning the exhibition: a copy of The Talisman from W. C. Tuttle, which he found unreadable, and a dollar from Mrs. Tuttle, which he gave to Shama. Mr. Biswas was ashamed to mention the promise in the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare, and Anand didn’t remind him: he was content to assume that war conditions did not permit the buying of a bicycle. There was no prize from the school either. Again war conditions did not permit; and as “a war measure” Anand was given a certificate printed by the Government Printery at the bottom of the street, “in lieu of” the leather-bound, gilt-edged book stamped with the school crest.

It had been a year of scarcity, of rising prices and fights in shops for hoarded flour. But at Christmas the pavements were crowded with overdressed shoppers from the country, the streets choked with slow but strident traffic. The stores had only clumsy local toys of wood, but the signs were bright as always with rosy-cheeked Santa Clauses, prancing reindeer, holly and berries and snow-capped letters. Never were destitutes more deserving, and Mr. Biswas worked harder than ever. But everything-shops, signs, crowds, noise, busyness-generated the urgent gaiety that belonged to the season. The year was ending well.

And it was to end even better.

One morning early in Christmas week, when Mr. Biswas was looking through applications in the hope of finding a destitute carpenter for Christmas Eve, a well-dressed middle-aged man whom he did not know came straight to his desk, handed him an envelope with a stiff gesture, and, without a word, turned and walked briskly out of the newsroom.

Mr. Biswas opened the envelope. Then he pushed back his chair and ran outside. The man was in a car and already driving away.

“You didn’t see him?” the receptionist asked. “He did ask for you. Doctor feller. Rameshwar.”

He had returned the letter. The error had been acknowledged.

“What about it, boy?” he said to Anand later that day. “Series of letters. To a doctor. A judge. Businessman, editor. Brother-in-law, mother-in-law. Twelve Open Letters, by M. Biswas. What about it?”

5. The Void

The college had no keener parent than Mr. Biswas. He delighted in all its rules, ceremonies and customs. He loved the textbooks it prescribed, and reserved to himself the pleasure of taking Anand’s exhibitioner’s form to Muir Marshall’s in Marine Square and bringing home a parcel of books, free. He papered the covers and lettered the spines. On the front and back endpapers of each book he wrote Anand’s name, form, the name of the college, and the date. Anand was put to much trouble to conceal this from the other boys at school who wrote their own names and were free to desecrate their books in whatever way they chose. Though it concerned neither Anand nor himself, Mr. Biswas went to the college speech day. He insisted, too, on going to the Science Exhibition, and spoiled it for Anand; for while the Negro boy ran to the parentless, saying, “Look, man, a snail can screw itself,” Anand had to remain with Mr. Biswas who, dutifully beginning at the beginning, looked long and carefully at the electrical exhibits and got no further than the microscopes. “Stand up here,” he told Anand. “Hide me while I pull out this slide. Just going to cough and spit on it. Then we could both have a look.” “Yes, Daddy,” Anand said. “Of course, Daddy.” But they didn’t see the snails. When, as an experiment, each boy was given a homework book which parents or guardians were supposed to fill in and sign every day, Mr. Biswas filled in and signed punctiliously. Few other parents did; and the homework books were soon abandoned, Mr. Biswas filling in and signing to the last. He had no doubt that his interest in Anand was shared by the entire college; and when Anand went back to classes after one of his asthmatic attacks, Mr. Biswas always asked in the afternoon, “Well, what did they say, eh?” as though Anand’s absence had dislocated the running of the school.

In October Myna was put on milk and prunes. She had unexpectedly been chosen to sit the exhibition examination in November. Mr. Biswas and Anand went with her to the examination hall, Anand condescending, revisiting the scenes of his childhood. He saw his name painted on the board in the headmaster’s room, and was touched at this effort of the school to claim him. When Myna came out at lunchtime she was very cheerful, but under Anand’s severe questioning she had grown dazed and unhappy, had admitted mistakes and tried to show how other mistakes could be construed as accurate. Then they took her to the Dairies, all three feeling that money was being wasted. When the results came out no one congratulated Mr. Biswas, for Myna’s name was lost in the columns of fine print, among those who had only passed.

Change had come over him without his knowing. There had been no precise point at which the city had lost its romance and promise, no point at which he had begun to consider himself old, his career closed, and his visions of the future became only visions of Anand’s future. Each realization had been delayed and had come, not as a surprise, but as a statement of a condition long accepted.

But it was not so when, waking up one night, he saw that he had for some time grown to accept his circumstances as unalterable: the buzzing house, the kitchen downstairs, the food being brought up the front steps, the growing children and Shama and himself squeezed into two rooms. He had grown to look upon houses-the bright drawingrooms through open doors, the chink of cutlery from diningrooms at eight, when he was on the way to a cinema, the garages, the hose-sprayed gardens in the afternoons, the barelegged lounging groups in verandahs on Sunday mornings-he had grown to look upon houses as things that concerned other people, like churches, butchers’ stalls, cricket matches and football matches. They had ceased to rouse ambition or misery. He had lost the vision of the house.

He sank into despair as into the void which, in his imagining, had always stood for the life he had yet to live. Night after night he sank. But there was now no quickening panic, no knot of anguish. He discovered in himself only a great unwillingness, and that part of his mind which feared the consequences of such a withdrawal was increasingly stilled.

Destitutes were investigated and the deserving written about. The truce with W. C. Tuttle was broken, patched up and broken again. The readers and learners read and learned. Anand and Vidiadhar continued not to speak, and this silence between the cousins was beginning to be known at the college, which Vidiadhar had also managed to enter, though at a suitably low form. Govind beat Chinta, wore his threepiece suits and drove his taxi. The widows stopped taking sewing lessons at the Royal Victoria Institute, gave up the clothes-making scheme and all other schemes. One came and camped, roomless, under the house, threatened to take a stall in the George Street Market, was dissuaded, and returned to Shorthills. W. C. Tuttle acquired a gramophone record of a fifteen-year-old American called Gloria Warren singing “You Are Always in My Heart”. And every morning, after the readers and learners had streamed out of the house, Mr. Biswas escaped to the Sentinel office.

Suddenly, quite suddenly, he was revivified.

It happened during Anand’s second year at the college. Because of his unrivalled experience of destitutes Mr. Biswas had become the Sentinel’s expert on matters of social welfare. His subsidiary duties had included interviewing the organizers of charities and eating many dinners. One morning he found a note on his desk requesting him to interview the newly arrived head of the Community Welfare Department. This was a government department that had not yet begun to function. Mr. Biswas knew that it was part of the plan for postwar development, but he did not know what the department intended to do. He sent for the file. It was not helpful. Most of it he had written himself, and forgotten. He telephoned, arranged for an interview that morning, and went. When, an hour later, he walked down the Red House steps into the asphalt court, he was thinking, not of his copy, but of his letter of resignation to the Sentinel. He had been offered, and had accepted, a job as Community Welfare Officer, at a salary fifty dollars a month higher than the one he was getting from the Sentinel. And he still had no clear idea of the aims of the department. He believed it was to organize village life; why and how village life was to be organized he didn’t know.

He had been immediately attracted by Miss Logie, the head of the department. She was a tall, energetic woman in late middle age. She was not pompous or aggressive, as he had found women in authority inclined to be. She had the graces, and even before there was talk of the job he had found himself attempting to please. She also had the attraction of novelty. He had known no Indian woman of her age as alert and intelligent and inquiring. And when the matter of the job was raised he had no hesitation. He rejected Miss Logie’s offer of time to think it over; he feared all delay.

He walked light-heartedly down St. Vincent Street back to the office. What had just happened was unexpected in every way. He had stopped thinking of a new job. He had paid no more than a journalist’s attention to all the talk of postwar development, since he did not see how it involved him and his family. And now, on a Monday morning, he had walked into a new job, and his job made him part of the new era. And it was a job with the government! He thought with pleasure of all the jokes he had heard about civil servants, and felt the full weight of the fears that had been with him since Mr. Burnett had left. He could have been sacked from the Sentinel at any moment; there was nothing or no one to protect him. But in the Service no one could be sacked just like that. There were things like Whitley Councils, he believed. The matter would have to go through all sorts of channels-that was the delicious word-and this, he understood, was such a complicated proceeding that few civil servants ever did get the sack. What was that story about the messenger who had stolen and sold all a department’s typewriters? Didn’t they just say, “Put that man in a department where there are no typewriters”?

How many letters of resignation he had mentally addressed to the Sentinel! Yet when, letters having passed between the Secretariat and himself, the moment came and he sat up in the Slumberking to write to the Sentinel, he used none of the phrases and sentences he had polished over the years. Instead, to his surprise, he found himself grateful to the paper for employing him for so long, for giving him a start in the city, equipping him for the Service.

He felt a fool when he received the editor’s reply. In five lines he was thanked for his letter, his services were acknowledged, regret was expressed, and he was wished luck in his new job. The letter was typed by a secretary, whose smart lowercase initials were in the bottom left corner.

Working out his notice, he let the Destees slide, and prepared zestfully for his new job. He borrowed books from the Central Library and from the department’s small collection. He began with books on sociology and immediately came to grief: he could not understand their charts or their language. He moved on to simpler paperbacked books about village reconstruction in India. These were more amusing: they gave pictures of village drains before and after, showed how chimneys could be built at no cost, how wells could be dug. They stimulated Mr. Biswas to such a degree that for a few days he wondered whether he oughtn’t to practise on the little community in his own house. A number of books laid a puzzling stress on the need for folk dances and folk singing during the carrying out of cooperative undertakings; some gave examples of songs. Mr. Biswas saw himself leading a singing village as they cooperatively mended roads, cooperatively put up superhuts, cooperatively dug wells; singing, they harvested one another’s fields. The picture didn’t convince: he knew Indian villagers too well. Govind, for instance, sang, and W. C. Tuttle liked music; but Mr. Biswas couldn’t see himself leading them and the singing readers and learners to re-concrete the floor under the house, to plaster the half-walls, to build another bathroom or lavatory. He doubted whether he could even get them to sing. He read of cottage industries: romantic words, suggesting neatly clad peasants with grave classical features sitting at spinning wheels in cooperatively built superhuts and turning out yards and yards of cloth before going on to the folk singing and dancing under the village tree in the evening, by the light of flambeaux. But he knew what the villages were by night, when the rumshop emptied. He saw himself instead in a large timbered hall, walking up and down between lines of disciplined peasants making baskets. From cottage industries he was diverted by juvenile delinquency, which he found more appealing than adult delinquency. He particularly liked the photographs of the hardened delinquents: stunted, smoking, supercilious, and very attractive. He saw himself winning their confidence and then their eternal devotion. He read books on psychology and learned some technical words for the behaviour of Chinta when she flogged Vidiadhar.

Miss Logie, who had at first encouraged his enthusiasm, now attempted to control it. He saw her often during the month, and their relationship grew even better. Whenever she introduced him to anyone she spoke of him as her colleague, a graciousness he had never before experienced; and from being relaxed with her he became debonair.

Then he had a fright.

Miss Logie said she would like to meet his family.

Readers! Learners! Govind! Chinta! The Slumberking bed and the destitute’s diningtable! And perhaps some widow might want to try again, and there would be a little tray of oranges or avocado pears outside the gate.

“Mumps,” he said.

It was partly true. The contagion had struck down Basdai’s readers and learners wholesale, had attacked a little Tuttle; but it had not yet got to Mr. Biswas’s children.

“They are all down with mumps, I fear.”

And when later Miss Logie asked after the children, Mr. Biswas had to say they had recovered, though they had in fact just succumbed.

Promptly at the end of the month the free delivery of the Sentinel stopped.

“Don’t you think a little holiday before you begin would be refreshing?” Miss Logie said.

“I was thinking of that.” The words came out easily; they were in keeping with his new manner. And he saw himself condemned to a pay-less week among the readers and learners. “Yes, a little holiday would be most refreshing.”

“Sans Souci would be very nice.”

Sans Souci was in the northeast of the island. Miss Logie, a newcomer, had been there; he had not.

“Yes,” he said. “Sans Souci would be nice. Or Mayaro,” he added, trying to take an independent line by mentioning a resort in the southeast.

“I am sure your family would enjoy it.”

“You know, I believe they would.” Family again! He waited. And it came. She still wanted to meet them.

Poise deserted him. What could he suggest? Bringing them to the Red House one by one?

Miss Logie came to his rescue. She wondered whether they couldn’t all go to Sans Souci on Sunday.

That at least was safer. “Of course, of course,” he said. “My wife can cook something. Where shall we meet?”

“I’ll come and pick you up.”

He was caught.

“As a matter of fact I have taken a house in Sans Souci,” Miss Logie said. And then her plan came out. She wanted Mr. Biswas to take his family there for a week. Transport was difficult, but the car would come for them at the end of the week. If Mr. Biswas didn’t go, the house would be empty, and that would be a waste.

He was overwhelmed. He had regarded his holidays simply as days on which he did not go to work; he had never thought that he might use the time to take his family to some resort: the thing was beyond ambition. Few people went on such holidays. There were no boarding-houses or hotels, only beach houses, and these he had always imagined to be expensive. And now this! After all those letters to destitutes beginning, Dear Sir, Your letter awaited me on my return from holiday…

He made objections, but Miss Logie was firm. He thought it better not to make a fuss, for he did not wish to give the impression that he was making the thing bigger than it was. Miss Logie had made the offer out of friendship; he would accept as a friend. He warned her, however, that he would have to consult Shama, and Miss Logie said she understood.

But he felt that he had been found out, that he had revealed more of himself to Miss Logie than he had thought; and this feeling was especially oppressive on the following morning when, after his bath in the outdoor bathroom, he stood before Shama’s dressingtable in the inner room. In moods of self-disgust he hated dressing, and this morning he saw that his comb, which he had repeatedly insisted was his and his alone, was webbed with woman’s hair. He broke the comb, broke another, and used language which went neither with his clothes nor with the manner he assumed when he put them on.

He reported to Miss Logie that Shama was delighted, and self-reproach was quickly forgotten when he and Shama began to prepare for the holiday. They were like conspirators. They had decided on secrecy. There was no reason for this except that it was one of the rules of the house: the Tuttles, for instance, had been unusually aloof just before the arrival of the naked torchbearer, and Chinta had been almost mournful before Govind had gone into threepiece suits.

On Saturday Shama began packing a hamper.

The secret could no longer be kept from the children. The laden hamper, the car, the drive to the seaside: it was something they knew too well. “Vidiadhar and Shivadhar!” Chinta called. “You just keep your little tails here, eh, and read your books, you hear. Your father is not in any position to take you for excursion, you hear. He not drawing money regular from the government, let me tell you.” The readers and learners stood around Shama while she packed the hamper. Shama, uncharacteristically stern and preoccupied, ignored them. Her manner suggested that the whole affair-as indeed she said to Basdai, the widow, who had come to watch and offer advice-was very troublesome, and she was going through with it simply to please the children and their father.

Their destination and length of the holiday had been disclosed. The manner of transportation was still kept secret: it was to be the final surprise. It also caused Mr. Biswas much anxiety. All week he had been dreading the arrival of Miss Logie in her brand-new Buick. He intended the gap between her arrival and their departure to be as brief as possible. Under no circumstances was she to be allowed to get out of the car. For then she might go through the gate and get a glimpse of what went on below the house; she might even go there. Or she might go up the steps and knock on the front door; W. C. Tuttle would come out, and heaven knows what pose he would be in that morning: yogi, weight-lifter, pundit, lorry-driver at rest. At all costs she had to be prevented from entering the front room and seeing the Slumberking where Mr. Biswas had lain and written his formal acceptance of the post of Community Welfare Officer, seeing the destitute’s dining-table still stacked with books on sociology, village reconstruction in India, cottage industries and juvenile delinquency.

Accordingly, although Miss Logie had said she would arrive at nine, the children were fed and dressed by eight, and set up as sentinels by the gate. From time to time they deserted their posts; then, after agitated search, they were extricated from groups of readers and learners or hurried out of the lavatory. Shama was finding she had forgotten all sorts of things: toothbrushes, towels, bottle-opener. Mr. Biswas himself could not decide what book to take, and was in and out of the front room. Eventually all was ready and they stood strung out on the front steps, waiting to pounce. Mr. Biswas was dressed as for holiday: tieless, with Saturday’s shirt bearing the impress of Saturday’s tie, his coat over his arm and his book in his hand. Shama was in her ornate visiting clothes; she might have been going to a wedding.

Waiting, they were infiltrated by readers and learners. “Haul your little tail,” Mr. Biswas whispered savagely. “Get back inside. Go and comb your hair. And you, go and put on some shoes.” A few of the younger were cowed; the older, knowing that Mr. Biswas had no rights, flogging or ordering, over them, were openly contemptuous and, to Mr. Biswas’s dismay, some went out on to the pavement, where they stood like storks, jamming the sole of one foot against the smudged and streaked pink-washed wall. The gramophone was playing an Indian film song; Govind was whining out the Ramayana; Chinta’s scraping voice was raised querulously; Basdai was shrilling after some of her girls to come and help with the lunch.

Then the cries came. A green Buick had turned the corner. Mr. Biswas and his family were down the steps with suitcases and hampers, Mr. Biswas shouting angrily now to the readers and learners to get away.

When the car stopped, Mr. Biswas and his family were standing right on the edge of the pavement. Miss Logie, sitting next to the chauffeur, smiled and gave a little wave, using fingers alone. She appeared to recognize what was required of her and did not get out of the car. Expressionlessly the chauffeur opened doors and stowed away suitcases and hampers in the boot.

W. C. Tuttle came out to the verandah, the lorry-driver at rest. His khaki shorts revealed round sturdy legs, and his white vest showed off a broad chest and large flabby arms. Leaning over the half-wall of the verandah, under the hanging ferns, he put a long finger delicately to one quivering nostril and, with a brief explosive noise, emitted some snot from the other nostril.

Mr. Biswas chattered on in a daze, to divert attention from the readers and learners and W. C. Tuttle, to drown the noises from the house, the sudden piercing cry from Chinta, as from someone in agony: “Vidiadhar and Shivadhar! Come back here this minute, if you don’t want me to break your foot.”

Shy, interested readers and learners streamed steadily through the gate.

“There’s lots of room,” Miss Logie said, smiling. “It won’t be a squeeze for long. I shan’t be going all the way to Sans Souci. I don’t feel very well and a day at the beach would be too much for me.”

Mr. Biswas understood. “Only these four,” he said. “Only these four.” He kicked backwards in the direction of the readers and learners. The circle merely widened.

“Orphans,” Mr. Biswas said.

Then mercifully they were off, some of the orphans racing the Buick a little way down the street.

They commiserated with Miss Logie on her indisposition and begged her to change her mind; there would be no pleasure for them if she did not come. She said she hadn’t intended to go bathing at all; she had intended to come with them only for the ride. But presently, when it was established without doubt that there were only four children in the car and that there would be no stops for more, her resolution weakened and she said the fresh air had revived her a little and she would come with them after all.

When people stared from the road the children didn’t know whether to smile, frown or look away; those who were near the straps held on to them. Never, as from the windows of that Buick, did North Trinidad look so beautiful. They noted, as though they had never seen it before from a bus, how the landscape changed, from marsh just outside Port of Spain, to straggling suburb, to hilly country, to country village, to country town, to rice fields and sugarcane fields, with the Northern Range always on their left. They drove along the smooth new American highway, were checked on entering and leaving the American army post by soldiers with helmets and rifles. Then they drove along a winding road overarched by cool trees to Arima, which welcomed careful drivers; and on to Valencia, where the road ran straight for miles, with untouched bush on either side.

They were, Anand reflected, driving with hampers-laden hampers-to the sea. The English composition had come true.

Mr. Biswas was worried about Shama. Sitting plumply next to Miss Logie on the front seat, her elaborate georgette veil over her hair, Shama was showing herself self-possessed and even garrulous. She was throwing off opinions about the new constitution, federation, immigration, India, the future of Hinduism, the education of women. Mr. Biswas listened to the flow with surprise and acute anxiety. He had never imagined that Shama was so well-informed and had such violent prejudices; and he suffered whenever she made a grammatical mistake.

They stopped at Balandra, and walked to the dangerous part of the bay where the waves were five feet high and a sign warned against bathing. Never had water seemed so blue; never had sand shone so golden; never had bay curved so beautifully, waves broken so neatly. It was a perfect world, the curve of the coconut trees repeated in the curve of the bay, the curl of the waves, the arc of the horizon. Already they could taste the salt on their lips. The fresh wind blew; the trousers of Mr. Biswas and the chauffeur sausaged out; the women and girls held down their skirts.

They bathed where it was safe.

(And later Anand pointed out to Mr. Biswas that in spite of what she had said Miss Logie had brought her bathing suit.)

They opened the hampers and ate on the dry sand in the dangerous shade of coconut trees (“Over a million coconuts will fall on the East Coast today,” had been the hollow bright opening of a feature he had written for the Sentinel on the copra industry).

Then they drove to Sans Souci, through narrow, ill-tended roads darkened by bush on both sides. Small villages surprised them here and there, lost and lonely. And now the sea was always with them. Unseen, it thundered continuously. The wind never ceased to rage through the trees; above the swaying bush, the dancing plumes of green, the sky was high and open. From time to time they had glimpses of the sea: so near, so unending, so alive, so impersonal. What would happen if, by some accident, they should drive off the road into it?

In a dream that night this accident was to happen, and Kamla was to wake gratefully, yet to find herself in a new dread, for she had forgotten the room where they had all gone to sleep, in the large bare house at the top of the hill, impenetrably black all round, with the sea beating a little distance away and the coconut trees groaning in the perpetual wind.

They had arrived in the late afternoon and had not had much time to explore. Miss Logie, the chauffeur and the Buick had gone back; and finding themselves alone, in a large house, on holiday, they had all grown shy with one another. Night brought an additional uneasiness. In the strange, musty, blank-walled drawingroom they sat around an oil lamp, the contents of the hamper gone stale and unappetizing, the cream cheese, bought from the Dairies the day before, already gone bad. The house was large enough for them to have had one room each; but the noise, the loneliness, the unknown surrounding blackness had kept them all in one room.

Wind and sea welcomed them in the morning. Light showed them where they were. The wind and the sea raged all night, but now they were both fresh, heralds of the new day. The children walked about the shining wet grass on the top of the hill; the sea, glimpsed through the tormented coconut trees, lay below them; their hands and faces became sticky with salt.

Their shyness slowly wore away. They went to deserted beaches, where lay the partly buried wrecks of strange trees brought across the sea. Beyond the wavering tidewrack the dimpled sand was pitted with the holes of sand crabs, small, nervous creatures the colour of sand. They made excursions to the places with French names: Blanchisseuse, Matelot; and to Toco and Salybia Bay. They picked almonds, sucked them, crushed the seeds; in land so wild and remote it was inconceivable that anything was owned by anyone. From trees that bordered the road they picked bright red cashew nuts, sucked the fruit and took the nuts to the house and roasted them. The days were long. Once they came upon a group of fishermen who were talking a French patois; once they met a group of well-dressed, noisy Indian youths, one of whom asked Myna what Savi’s name was, and Mr. Biswas saw that as a father he now had fresh responsibilities. In the evenings, with the noise of sea and wind, comforting now, around them, they played cards: they had found four packs in the house.

Another discovery, in a cupboard full of tinned food, was Cerebos Salt. They had never seen salt in tins. The shop salt they knew was coarse and damp; this was fine and dry, and ran as easily as the drawing on the tin showed.

They forgot the house in Port of Spain and spread themselves about the house on the hill. It seemed there was no one in the world but themselves, nothing alive but themselves and the sea and the wind. They had been told that on a clear day they could see Tobago; but that never happened.

And then the Buick came for them.

As they drove back to Port of Spain the new shy pleasure they had found in being alone was forgotten. They were preparing for the two rooms, the city pavements, the badly concreted floor under the house, the noise, the quarrels. On the way out they had feared arrival, a casting off into the unknown; now they dreaded returning to what they knew. But they spoke of other things. Shama spoke about the evening meal, remembered she had nothing. The car stopped at a shop in the Eastern Main Road and they enjoyed a brief distinction as the occupants of a chauffeur-driven car.

There was no reception for them in Port of Spain. It was evening. The readers and learners were reading and learning. Everything was as they had left it: the weak light bulbs, the long tables, the chanting of some readers as they attempted to learn lessons by heart. Only, the house seemed lower, darker, suffocating. At first they were ignored. But presently the questioning began, the prying to see whether any disaster had befallen, for the sadness with which they had returned had already made them irritable and short-tempered.

Did the wilderness really exist? Was the house still at the top of the hill? Was the wind still making the coconut trees groan? Did the sea beat on those empty beaches? Was it at that moment of night bringing to shore those black berries, branches and strands of seaweed from miles and thoughtless miles away?

They fell asleep with the roar of wind and sea in their heads. In the morning they woke to the humming house.

Mr. Biswas did not immediately superintend lines of peasants making baskets. No one sang for him. And he encouraged no one to build better huts or to take up cottage industries. He began to survey an area, and went from house to house filling in questionnaires prepared by Miss Logie. Most of the people he interviewed were flattered. Some were puzzled: “Who send you? Government? Think they really care?” Some were more than puzzled: “You mean they paying you for this? Just to find out how we does live. But I could tell them for nothing, man.” Mr. Biswas hinted that there was more to the survey than they thought; pressed, he had to bluff. It was like interviewing destitutes; only there was no money for anyone except himself at the end. And he was doing well. In addition to his salary he could claim subsistence and travel allowances; and on many evenings he had to lay aside his books and work out his claims. He filled in a form, submitted it, and after a few days got a voucher. He took the voucher to the Treasury and exchanged it with a man behind a zoo-like cage for another voucher which was limp with handling and ticked, initialled, signed and stamped in various colours. This he exchanged at another cage, this time for real money. It took time, but these trips to the Treasury made him feel that he was at last getting at the wealth of the colony.

He found that the extra money could be spent in any of a number of new ways, and he did not save as much as he had hoped. Savi had to be sent to a better school; their food had to be improved; something had to be done about Anand’s asthma. And he decided, and Shama agreed, that it was time he got himself some new suits, to go with his new job.

Apart from the serge suit in which he had gone to funerals, he had never had a proper suit, only cheap things of silk and linen; and he ordered his new suits with love. He discovered he was a dandy. He fussed about the quality and tone of the cloth, the cut of the suits. He enjoyed fittings: the baked smell of the white-tacked cloth, the tailor’s continual reverential destruction of his own work. When the first suit was ready he decided to wear it right away. It pricked his calves unpleasantly; it had a new smell; and when he looked down at himself the cascade of brown appeared grotesque and alarming. But the mirror reassured him, and he felt the need to show off the suit without delay. There was an inter-colonial cricket match at the Oval. He did not understand the game, but he knew that there was always a crowd at these matches, that shops and schools closed for them.

It was the fashion at the time for men to appear on sporting occasions with a round tin of fifty English cigarettes and a plain box of matches held in one hand, the forefinger pressing the matchbox to the top of the tin. Mr. Biswas had the matches; he used half a day’s subsistence allowance to buy the cigarettes. Not wishing to derange the hang of his jacket, he cycled to the Oval with the tin in his hand.

As he came along Tragarete Road he heard faint scattered applause. It was just before lunch, too early for the crowds; it would have been better after tea. Nevertheless he cycled round to the stands side of the Oval, leaned his bicycle against the peeling corrugated iron fence, chained it, removed the clips from his carefully folded trousers, shook down the trousers, smoothed out the pleats, straightened the prickly jacket over his shoulders. There was no queue. He paid a dollar for his ticket and, holding his tin of cigarettes and box of matches, walked up the stairs to the stand. It was less than a quarter full. Most of the people were at the front. He spied an empty seat in the middle of one of the few packed rows.

“Excuse me,” he said, and started on a slow progress down the row, people rising before him, people rising in the row behind, people settling down again in his wake, and “Excuse me,” he kept on saying, quite urbane, unaware of the disturbance. At last he came to his seat, dusted it with a handkerchief, stooping slightly in response to a request from someone behind. While he unbuttoned his jacket a burst of applause came from all. Absently casting a glance at the cricket field, Mr. Biswas applauded. He sat down, hitched up his trousers, crossed his legs, operated the cutter on the lid of the cigarette tin, extracted a cigarette and lit it. There was a tremendous burst of applause. Everyone in the stand stood up. Chairs scraped backwards, some overturned. Mr. Biswas rose and clapped with the others. What crowd there was had advanced on to the field; the cricketers were racing away, flitting blobs of white. The stumps had disappeared; the umpires, separated by the crowd, were walking sedately to the pavilion. The match was over. Mr. Biswas did not inspect the pitch. He went outside, unlocked his bicycle and cycled home, holding the tin of cigarettes in his hand.

His one suit, hanging out to sun on Shama’s line in the backyard, did not make much of a showing against Govind’s five threepiece suits on Chinta’s line, which had to be supported by two pronged poles. But it was a beginning.

The interviews completed, it was Mr. Biswas’s duty to analyze the information he had gathered. And here he floundered. He had investigated two hundred households; but after every classification he could never, on adding, get two hundred, and then he had to go through all the questionnaires again. He was dealing with a society that had no rules and patterns, and classifications were a chaotic business. He covered many sheets with long, snakelike addition sums, and the Slumberking was spread with his questionnaires. He pressed Shama and the children into service, damned them for their incompetence, dismissed them, and worked late into the night, squatting on a chair before the diningtable. The table was too high; sitting on pillows had proved unsatisfactory; so he squatted. Sometimes he threatened to cut down the legs of the diningtable by half and cursed the destitute who had made it.

“This blasted thing is getting me sick,” he shouted, whenever Shama and Anand tried to get him to go to bed. “Getting me sick, I tell you. Sick. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t stay with my little destitutes.”

“Everywhere you go, is the same,” Shama said.

He did not tell her of his deeper fears. Already the department was under attack. Citizen, Taxpayer, Pro Bono Publico and others had written to the newspapers to ask exactly what the department was doing and to protest against the waste of taxpayers’ money. The party of Southern businessmen to which Shekhar belonged had started a campaign for the abolition of the department: a distinguishing cause, long sought, for no party had a programme, though all had the same objective: to make everyone in the colony rich and equal.

This was Mr. Biswas’s first experience of public attack, and it did not console him that such letters had always been written, that the government in all its departments was being continually criticized by all the island’s parties. He dreaded opening the newspapers. Pro Bono Publico had been particularly nasty: he had written the same letter to all three papers, and there was a whole fortnight between the letter’s first appearance and its last. Nor did it console Mr. Biswas that no one else appeared to be worried. Shama considered the government unshakable; but she was Shama. Miss Logie could always go back to where she came from. The other officers had been seconded from various government departments and they could go back to where they came from. He could only go back to the Sentinel and fifty dollars a month less.

He was glad he had written a mild letter of resignation. And, preparing for misfortune, he took to dropping in at the Sentinel office. The newspaper atmosphere never failed to excite him, and the welcome he received stilled his fears: he was regarded as one who had escaped and made good. Yet with every improvement in his condition, every saving, he felt more vulnerable: it was too good to last.

In time he completed his charts (to display the classifications clearly he joined three double foolscap sheets and produced a scroll nearly five feet long, which made Miss Logie roar with laughter); and he wrote his report. Charts and report were typed and duplicated and, he was told, sent to various parts of the world. Then he was at last free to get villagers to sing or to take up cottage industries. He was given an area. And a memorandum informed him that, to enable him to move easily about his area, he was to be given a car, on a painless government loan.

The rule of the house was followed again. The children were sworn to secrecy. Mr. Biswas brought home glossy booklets which had the aromatic smell of rich art paper and seemed to hold the smell of the new car. Secretly he took driving lessons and obtained a driving licence. Then, on a perfectly ordinary Saturday morning, he drove to the house in a brand-new Prefect, parked it casually before the gate, not quite parallel to the pavement, and walked up the front steps, ignoring the excitement that had broken out.

“Vidiadhar! Come back here this minute, if you don’t want me to break your hand and your foot.”

When Govind arrived at lunchtime he found his parking space occupied. His Chevrolet was larger, but old and unwashed; the mudguards had been dented, cut, welded; one door had been ducoed in a lustreless colour that did not exactly match; there was the H-for hire-on the number plate; and the windscreen was made ugly by various stickers and a circular plaque which carried Govind’s photograph and taxi-driver’s permit.

“Matchbox,” Govind muttered. “Who leave this matchbox here?”

He did not impress the orphans, and he did not diminish the energy of Mr. Biswas’s children who, ever since the car had been so carelessly parked by Mr. Biswas, had been wiping away dust and saying crossly how a new car collected dust. They found dust everywhere: on the body, the springs, the underside of the mudguards. They wiped and polished and discovered, with distress, that they were leaving scratches on the paintwork, very slight, but visible from certain angles. Myna reported this to Mr. Biswas.

He was lying on the Slumberking, surrounded by many glossy booklets. He asked, “You hear anything? What they saying, eh?”

“Govind say it is a matchbox.”

“Matchbox, eh. English car, you know. Would last for years and still be running when his Chevrolet is on the rubbish dump.”

He returned to studying an intricate drawing in red and black which explained the wiring of the car. He could not fully understand it, but it was his habit whenever he bought anything new, whether a pair of shoes or a bottle of patent medicine, to read all the literature provided.

Kamla came into the room and said that the orphans had been fingering the car and blurring the shine.

Mr. Biswas knelt on the bed and advanced on his knees to the front window. He lifted the curtain and, pushing a vested chest outside, shouted, “You! Boy! Leave the car alone! You think is a taxi?”

The orphans scattered.

“I coming to break the hands of some of you,” Basdai, the guardian widow, called. News of her advance and her pause to break a whip from the neem tree at the side of the yard was relayed by hoots and shouts and giggles. Some orphans, disdaining to run, were flogged on the pavement. There was crying, and Basdai said, “Well, some people satisfy now.”

Shama stayed under the house and did not go out to see the car. And when Suniti, the former contortionist, now baby-swollen, who often stopped at the house on her way to and from Shortfalls after quarrels and reconciliations with her husband, and attempted to shock by talk of getting a divorce, and wore ugly and unsuitable frocks as a mark of her modernity, when Suniti came to Shama and said, “So, Aunt, you come a big-shot now. Car and thing, man!” Shama said, “Yes, my child,” as though the car was another of Mr. Biswas’s humiliating excesses. But she had begun to prepare another hamper.

There was no need for Mr. Biswas to ask where they wanted to go. They all wanted to go to Balandra, to repeat the experience of delight: the drive in the private car, the hampers, the beach.

They went to Balandra, but it was a different experience. They did not attend to the landscape. They savoured the smell of new leather, the sweet smell of a new car. They listened to the soft, steady beat of the engine and compared it with the grinding and pounding of the vehicles they met. And they listened acutely for wrong noises. The grilled cover of an ashtray on one door did not sit properly and tinkled distractingly; they attempted to stop it with a matchstick. The ignition key had already been provided by Mr. Biswas with a chain. The chain struck the dashboard. That distracted them too. At one moment it looked as though it might rain; a few drops flecked the windshield. Anand promptly put the wiper on. “You’ll scratch the glass!” Mr. Biswas cried. They worried about putting their shoes on the floormats. They consulted the dashboard clock constantly, comparing it with those they saw on the road. They marvelled at the working of the speedometer.

“Man was telling me,” Mr. Biswas said, “that these Prefect clocks go wrong in no time.”

And they decided to call in on Ajodha.

They parked the car in the road and walked around the house to the back verandah. Tara was in the kitchen. Ajodha was reading the Sunday Guardian. Mr. Biswas said they were going to the beach and had just dropped in for a minute. There was a pause, and each of them wondered whether they should tell.

Ajodha commented on the sickliness of them all, pinched Anand’s arms and laughed when the boy winced. Then, as though to cure them at once, he made them drink glasses of fresh milk and had the servant girl peel some oranges from the bag in the corner of the verandah.

Jagdat came in, his funeral clothes relieved by his broad, bright tie, his unbuttoned cuffs folded back above hairy wrists. He asked jocularly, “Is your car outside, Mohun?”

The children studied their glasses of milk.

Mr. Biswas said gently, “Yes, man.”

Jagdat roared as at a good joke. “The old Mohun, man!”

“Car?” Ajodha said, puzzled, petulant. “Mohun?”

“A little Prefect,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Some of those pre-war English cars can be very good,” Ajodha said.

“This is a new one,” Mr. Biswas said. “Got it yesterday.”

“Cardboard.” Ajodha bunched his fingers. “It will mash like cardboard.”

“A drive, man, Mohun!” Jagdat said.

The children, Shama, were alarmed. They looked at Mr. Biswas, Jagdat smiling, slapping his hands together.

Mr. Biswas was aware of their alarm.

“You are right, Mohun,” Ajodha said. “He will lick it up.”

“It isn’t that,” Mr. Biswas said. “Seaside.” He looked at his Cyma watch. Then, noticing that Jagdat had stopped smiling, he added, “Running in, you know.”

“I run in more cars than you,” Jagdat said angrily. “Bigger and better.”

“He will lick it up,” Ajodha repeated.

“It isn’t that,” Mr. Biswas said again.

“Hear him,” Jagdat said. “But don’t give me that, eh, man. Listen. I was driving motorcars before you even learn to drive a donkey-cart. Look at me. You think I pining to drive in your sardine can? You think that?”

Mr. Biswas looked embarrassed.

The children didn’t mind. The car was safe.

“Mohun! You think that?”

At Jagdat’s scream the children jumped.

“Jagdat,” Tara said.

He strode out of the verandah into the yard, cursing.

“I know what it is, Mohun,” Ajodha said. “The first time you get a car is always the same.” He waved at his yard, the graveyard of many vehicles.

He went out with them to the road. When he saw the Prefect he hooted.

“Six horse power?” he said. “Eight?”

“Ten,” Anand said, pointing to the red disc below the bonnet.

“Yes, ten.” He turned to Shama. “Well, niece, where are you going in your new car?”

“Balandra.”

“I hope the wind doesn’t blow too hard.”

“Wind, Uncle?”

“Or you will never get there. Poof! Blow you off the road, man.”

They continued in gloom for some way.

“Wanting to drive my car,” Mr. Biswas said. “As if I would let him. I know the way he does drive cars. Lick them up in no time at all. No respect for them. And getting vexed into the bargain, I ask you.”

“I always say you have some low people in your family,” Shama said.

“Another man wouldn’t even ask a thing like that,” Mr. Biswas said. “I wouldn’t ask it. Feel how the car sitting nice on the road? Feel it, Anand? Savi?”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Poof! Blow me off the road. You wouldn’t expect an old man like that to be jealous, eh? But that is exactly what he is. Jealous.”

Yet whenever they saw another Prefect on the road they could not help noticing how small and fussy it looked; and this was strange, for their own car enclosed them securely and did not feel small in any way. They continued to listen for noises. Anand held the chain of the ignition key to keep it from striking the dashboard. When they stopped at Balandra they made sure the car was parked away from coconut trees; and they worried about the effect of the salt air on the body.

Disaster came when they were leaving. The rear wheels sank into the hot loose sand. They watched the wheels spinning futilely, kicking up sand, and felt that the car had been irremediably damaged. They pushed coconut branches and coconut shells and bits of driftwood under the wheels and at last got the car out. Shama said she was convinced that the car now leaned to one side; the whole body, she said, had been strained.

On Monday Anand cycled to school on the Royal Enfield, and the promise in the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare was thereby partly fulfilled. War conditions had at last permitted; in fact, the war had been over for some time.

And during all this time W. C. Tuttle had remained quiet. He had not attempted to reply to Mr. Biswas’s new suits, the new car, the holiday; so that it seemed that these reverses, coming one after the other, had been too much for him. But when the glory of the Prefect began to fade, when it was accepted that floormats became dirty, when washing the car became a chore and was delegated by the children to Shama, when the dashboard clock stopped and no one noticed the tinkle of the ashtray lid, W. C. Tuttle with one stroke wiped out all Mr. Biswas’s advantages, and killed the rivalry by rising above it.

Through Basdai, the widow, he announced that he had bought a house in Woodbrook.

Mr. Biswas took the news badly. He neglected Shama’s consolations and picked quarrels with her. “ ‘What is for you is for you’,” he mocked. “So that is your philosophy, eh? I’ll tell you what your philosophy is. Catch him. Marry him. Throw him in a coal barrel. That is the philosophy of your family. Catch him and throw him in a coal barrel.” He became acutely sensitive to criticism of the Community Welfare Department. The books on social work and juvenile delinquency gathered dust on the diningtable, and he returned to his philosophers. The Tuttles’ gramophone played with infuriating gaiety, and he banged on the partition and shouted, “Some people still living here, you know.”

Philosophically, he attempted to look on the brighter side. The garage problem would be simplified: with three vehicles the position had become impossible, and he had often had to leave his car on the road. There would be no gramophone. And he might even rent the rooms the Tuttles were vacating.

But the days passed and the Tuttles didn’t move.

“Why the hell doesn’t he take up his gramophone and naked woman and clear out?” Mr. Biswas asked Shama. “If he got this house.”

Basdai came up with fresh information. The house was full of tenants, and W. C. Tuttle, for all his calm, was at that moment engaged in tortuous litigation to get them out.

“Oh,” Mr. Biswas said. “Is that sort of house.” He imagined one of those rotting warrens he had visited when investigating destitutes. And now at one moment Mr. Biswas wished W. C. Tuttle out of the house immediately and at another moment wanted him to fail in his litigation. “Throwing those poor people out. Where they going to live, eh? But your family don’t care about things like that.”

One morning Mr. Biswas saw W. C. Tuttle leaving the house in a suit, tie and hat. And that afternoon Basdai reported that litigation had failed.

“I thought he was going to Ace Studios to take out another photo,” Mr. Biswas said.

Overjoyed, he did what he had so far resisted doing: he drove to see the house. To his disappointment he found that it was in a good area, on a whole lot: a sound, oldfashioned timber building that needed only a coat of paint.

Not long after Basdai reported that the tenants were leaving. W. C. Tuttle had persuaded the City Council that the house was dangerous and had to be repaired, if not pulled down altogether.

“Any old trick to throw the poor people out,” Mr. Biswas said. “Though I suppose with ten fat Tuttles jumping about no house could be safe. Repairs, eh? Just drive the old lorry down to Shorthills and cut down a few more trees, I suppose.”

“That is exactly what he is doing,” Shama said, affronted at the piracy.

“You want to know why I can’t get on in this place? That is why.” And even as he spoke he recognized that he was sounding like Bhandat in the concrete room.

The Tuttles left without ceremony. Only Mrs. Tuttle, braving the general antagonism, kissed her sisters and those of the children she found in the way. She was sad but stern, and her manner suggested that though she had nothing to do with it, her husband’s piracy was justified and she was ready for trouble. Cowed, the sisters could only be sad in their turn, and the leave-taking was as tearful as if Mrs. Tuttle had just been married.

Mr. Biswas’s hopes of renting the rooms the Tuttles had vacated were dashed when it was announced that Mrs. Tulsi was coming from Shorthills to take them over. The news cast a gloom over the whole house. Her daughters now accepted that Mrs. Tulsi’s active life was finished, that only death awaited her. But she still controlled them all in varying ways, and her caprices had to be endured. Miserable herself, Basdai made the readers and learners miserable by threats of what Mrs. Tulsi would do to them.

She came with Sushila, the sickroom widow, and Miss Blackie; and at once the house became quieter. The readers and learners were quelled, but Mrs. Tulsi’s presence brought them an unexpected advantage: they knew that if they howled loud enough beforehand they would be spared floggings.

Mrs. Tulsi had no precise illness. She was simply ill. Her eyes ached; her heart was bad; her head always hurt; her stomach was fastidious; her legs were unreliable; and every other day she had a temperature. Her head had continually to be soaked in bay rum; she had to be massaged once a day; she needed poultices of various sorts. Her nostrils were stuffed with soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub; she wore dark glasses; and she was seldom without a bandage around her forehead. Sushila was kept on the go all day. At Hanuman House Sushila had sought to gain power by being Mrs. Tulsi’s nurse; now that the organization of the house had been broken up, the position carried no power, but Sushila was bound to it, and she had no children to rescue her.

Time hung heavily on Mrs. Tulsi’s hands. She did not read. The radio offended her. She was never well enough to go out. She moved from her room to the lavatory to the front verandah to her room. Her only solace was talk. Daughters were always at hand, but talk with them seemed only to enrage her; and as her body decayed so her command of invective and obscenity developed. Her rages fell oftenest on Sushila, whom she ordered out of the house once a week. She cried out that her daughters were all waiting for her to die, that they were sucking her blood; she pronounced curses on them and their children, and threatened to expel them from the family.

“I have no luck with my family,” she told Miss Blackie. “I have no luck with my race.”

And it was Miss Blackie who received her confidences, Miss Blackie who reported and comforted. And there was the Jewish refugee doctor. He came once a week and listened. The house was always specially prepared for him, and Mrs. Tulsi treated him with love. He resurrected all that remained of her softness and humour. When he left, she said to Miss Blackie, “Never trust your race, Black. Never trust them.” And Miss Blackie said, “No”m.” Gifts of fruit were sent regularly to the doctor and sometimes Mrs. Tulsi would suddenly order Basdai and Sushila to prepare an elaborate meal and take it to the doctor’s house, treating the matter as one of urgency, as though she was satisfying some craving of her own.

Still her daughters came to the house. They knew they all had some small hold on her: they knew that she feared loneliness and never wished to push them beyond her reach; they knew they could hurt her by staying away. If Miss Blackie reported that one daughter had been particularly upset, then Mrs. Tulsi made overtures, and made promises. In such moods she might give a piece of jewellery, she might take off a ring or a bracelet and give it. So the daughters came, and none was willing to let Mrs. Tulsi be alone with any other. The visits of Mrs. Tuttle were especially distrusted. She bore abuse with unexampled patience and was able at the end to suggest that Mrs. Tulsi should look at plants, because green nourished the eyes and soothed the nerves.

Though she abused her daughters, she took care not to offend her sons-in-law. She greeted Mr. Biswas briefly but politely. And she never attempted to remonstrate with Govind, who continued to behave as before. He beat Chinta when the mood took him, and, ignoring pleas for silence for Mrs. Tulsi’s headaches, sang from the Ramayana. It was left to the sisters to comment on Govind’s behaviour.

There were times when she wished to have children about her. Then she summoned the readers and learners to scrub the floor of the drawingroom and verandah, or she made them sing Hindi hymns. Her mood changed without warning, and the readers and learners were perpetually apprehensive, never knowing whether they were required to be solemn or amusing. Sometimes she stood them in lines in her room and made them recite arithmetic tables, flogging the inaccurate with as much vigour as her arms would allow, flabby, muscleless arms, broad and loose towards the armpit, and swinging like dead flesh. Miss Blackie burst into squelchy laughter when a child made a stupid mistake or when Mrs. Tulsi made a witticism; and Mrs. Tulsi, her eyes masked by dark glasses, would give a pleased, crooked smile. In sterner moments Miss Blackie grew stern as well and moved her jaws up and down quickly, saying “Mm!” at every blow Mrs. Tulsi gave.

Another trial for the readers and learners was Mrs. Tulsi’s concern for their health. Every five Saturdays or so she called them to her room and dosed them with Epsom salts; and between these gloomy, wasted week-ends she listened for coughs and sneezes. There was no escaping her. She had learned to recognize every voice, every laugh, every footstep, every cough and almost every sneeze. She took a special interest in Anand’s wheeze and doglike cough. She bought him some poisonous herb cigarettes; when these had no effect she prescribed brandy and water and gave him a bottle of brandy. Anand, while hating the brandy and water, drank it for its literary associations: he had read of the mixture in Dickens.

Sometimes she sent for old friends from Arwacas. They came and camped for a week or so, and listened to Mrs. Tulsi. She, refreshed, talked all day and late into the night, while the friends, lying on bedding on the floor, made drowsy mechanical affirmations: “Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother.” Some visits were cut short by illness, some by carefully documented dreams of bad omen; those visitors who stayed to the end went away fatigued, doped, bleary-eyed.

Regularly too, she had pujas, austere rites aimed at God alone, without the feasting and gaiety of the Hanuman House ceremonies. The pundit came and Mrs. Tulsi sat before him; he read from the scriptures, took his money, changed in the bathroom and left. More and more prayer flags went up in the yard, the white and red pennants fluttering until they were ragged, the bamboo poles going yellow, brown, grey. For every puja Mrs. Tulsi tried a different pundit, since no pundit could please her as well as Hari. And, no pundit pleasing her, her faith yielded. She sent Sushila to burn candles in the Roman Catholic church; she put a crucifix in her room; and she had Pundit Tulsi’s grave cleaned for All Saints’ Day.

The more she was recommended not to exert herself the less she was able to exert herself, until she appeared to live only for her illness. She became obsessed with the decay of her body, and finally wanted the girls to search her head for lice. No louse could have survived the hourly dousing with bay rum which her head received, but she was enraged when the girls found nothing. She called them liars, pinched them, pulled their hair. Sometimes she was only hurt; then she shuffled out to the verandah and sat, taking her veil to her lips, feeding her eyes on the green, as Mrs. Tuttle had recommended. She would speak to no one, refuse to eat, reject all care. She would sit, feeding her eyes on the green, the tears running down her slack cheeks below her dark glasses.

Of all hands she liked Myna’s best. She wanted Myna to search her head for lice, wanted Myna to kill them, wanted to hear them being squashed between Myna’s fingernails. This preference created some jealousy, upset Myna, annoyed Mr. Biswas.

“Don’t go and pick her damn lice,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Don’t worry with your father,” Shama said, unwilling to lose this unexpected hold over Mrs. Tulsi.

And Myna went and spent hours in Mrs. Tulsi’s room, her slender fingers exploring every strand of Mrs. Tulsi’s thin, grey, bay-rum-scented hair. From time to time, to satisfy Mrs. Tulsi, Myna clicked her fingernails, and Mrs. Tulsi swallowed and said, “Ah,” pleased that one of her lice had been caught.

An additional constraint came upon the house when Shekhar and his family paid one of their visits to Mrs. Tulsi. If Shekhar had come alone he would have been more warmly welcomed by his sisters. But the antagonism between them and Shekhar’s Presbyterian wife Dorothy had deepened as Shekhar had prospered and Dorothy’s Presbyterianism had become more assertive and excluding. There had almost been an open quarrel when Shekhar, approached by the widows for a loan to start a mobile restaurant, had offered them jobs in his cinemas instead. They regarded this as an insult and saw in it the hand of Dorothy. Of course they refused: they did not care to be employed by Dorothy and they would never work in a place of public entertainment.

Shekhar could never appear as more than a visitor. He came in his car, led his wife and five elegant daughters upstairs, and for a long time nothing was heard except occasional footsteps and Mrs. Tulsi’s low voice going evenly on. Then Shekhar came downstairs by himself, forbiddingly correct in white short sleeved sports shirt and white slacks. Having listened to his mother, he now listened to his sisters, staring them in the eye and saying, “Hm-hm,” his top lip hanging over his lower lip and almost concealing it. He spoke little, as though unwilling to disturb the set of his mouth. His words came out abruptly, his expression never changed, and everything he said seemed to have an edge. When he tried to be friendly with the readers and learners he only frightened them. Yet he never appeared unkind; only preoccupied.

After lunch, prepared by Basdai and Sushila and eaten upstairs, Dorothy and her daughters passed downstairs, Dorothy booming out her greetings, her daughters remaining close together and speaking in fine, almost inaudible voices. Then Dorothy would look at her watch and say, “Caramba! Ya son las tres. Dуnde estб tu Padre? Lena, va a llamarle. Vamos, vamos. Es demasiado tarde. Well, all right, people,” she would say, turning to the outraged sisters and the wondering readers and learners, “we got to go.” Since they had taken to spending holidays in Venezuela and Colombia, Dorothy used Spanish when she spoke to her children or to Shekhar in the presence of her sisters-in-law. Later the sisters agreed that Shekhar was to be pitied; they had all noted his unhappiness.

Before they left, Shekhar and Dorothy always called on Mr. Biswas. Mr. Biswas did not relish these calls. It wasn’t only that Shekhar’s party was campaigning against the Community Welfare Department. Shekhar had never forgotten that Mr. Biswas was a clown, and whenever they met he tried to provoke an act of clowning. He made a belittling remark, and Mr. Biswas was expected to extend this remark wittily and fancifully. To Mr. Biswas’s fury, Dorothy had also adopted this attitude; and from this relationship there was no escape, since anger and retaliation were counted parts of the game. Shekhar came into the front room and asked in his brusque, humourless manner, “Is the welfare officer still well-fed?” Then he hoisted himself on to the destitute’s diningtable and threatened Mr. Biswas with the destruction of the department and joblessness. For a time Mr. Biswas responded in his old way. He told stories about civil servants, spoke of the trouble he had making up his expense sheets, the work he had looking for work. But soon he made his annoyance plain. “You take these things too personally,” Shekhar said, still playing the game. “Our differences are only political. You’ve got to be a little more sophisticated, man.”

“Be a little more sophisticated,” Mr. Biswas said, when Shekhar left. “On a hungry belly? The old scorpion. Wouldn’t care a damn if I lose my job tomorrow.”

For some time there had been rumours. And now at last the news was given out: Owad, Mrs. Tulsi’s younger son, was returning from England. Everyone was excited. Sisters came up from Shorthills in their best clothes to talk over the news. Owad was the adventurer of the family. Absence had turned him into a legend, and his glory was undiminished by the numbers of students who were leaving the colony every week to study medicine in England, America, Canada and India. His exact attainments were not known, but were felt by all to be extraordinary and almost beyond comprehension. He was a doctor, a professional man, with letters after his name! And he belonged to them! They could no longer claim Shekhar. But every sister had a story which proved how close she had been to Owad, what regard he had had for her.

Mr. Biswas felt as proprietary as the sisters towards Owad and shared their excitement. But he was uneasy. Once, many years before, he had felt that he had to leave Hanuman House before Owad and Mrs. Tulsi returned to it. Now he experienced the same unease: the same sense of threat, the same need to leave before it was too late. Over and over he checked the money he had saved, the money he was going to save. His additions appeared on cigarette packets, in the margins of newspapers, on the backs of buff government folders. The sum never varied: he had six hundred and twenty dollars; by the end of the year he would have seven hundred. It was a staggering sum, more than he had ever possessed all at once. But it couldn’t attract a loan to buy any house other than one of those wooden tenements that awaited condemnation. At two thousand dollars or so they were bargains, but only for speculators who could take the tenants to court, rebuild, or wait for the site to rise in value. Now, his anxiety growing with the excitement about him, Mr. Biswas scanned agents’ lists every morning and drove about the city looking for places to rent. When for one whole week the City Council bought pages and pages in the newspapers to serialize the list of houses it was putting up for auction because their rates had not been paid, Mr. Biswas turned up at the Town Hall with all the city’s estate agents; but he lacked the confidence to bid.

He could not avoid Mrs. Tulsi when he returned to the house. She sat in the verandah, feeding her eyes on the green, patting her lips with her veil.

And though he had nerved himself for the blow, he grew frantic when it came.

It was Shama who brought the message.

“The old bitch can’t throw me out like that,” Mr. Biswas said. “I still have some rights. She has got to provide me with alternative accommodation.” And: “Die, you bitch!” he hissed towards the verandah. “Die!”

“Man!”

“Die! Sending poor little Myna to pick her lice. That did you any good? Eh? Think she would throw out the little god like that? O no. The god must have a room to himself. You and me and my children can sleep in sugarsacks. The Tulsi sleeping-bag. Patents applied for. Die, you old bitch!”

They heard Mrs. Tulsi mumbling placidly to Sushila.

“I have my rights,” Mr. Biswas said. “This is not like the old days. You can’t just stick a piece of paper on my door and throw me out. Alternative accommodation, if you please.”

But Mrs. Tulsi had provided alternative accommodation: a room in one of the tenements whose rents Shama had collected years before. The wooden walls were unpainted, grey-black, rotting; at every step on the patched, shaky floor wood dust excavated by woodlice showered down; there was no ceiling and the naked galvanized roof was fluffy with soot; there was no electricity. Where would the furniture go? Where would they sleep, cook, wash? Where would the children study?

He vowed never to talk to Mrs. Tulsi again; and she, as though sensing his resolve, did not speak to him. Morning after morning he went from house to house, looking for rooms to rent, until he was exhausted, and exhaustion burned out his anger. Then in the afternoons he drove to his area, where he stayed until evening.

Returning late one night to the house, which seemed to him more and more ordered and sheltering, he saw Mrs. Tulsi sitting in the verandah in the dark. She was humming a hymn, softly, as though she were alone, removed from the world. He did not greet her, and was passing into his room when she spoke.

“Mohun?” Her voice was groping, amiable.

He stopped.

“Mohun?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“How is Anand? I haven’t heard his cough these last few days.”

“He’s all right.”

“Children, children. Trouble, trouble. But do you remember how Owad used to work? Eating and reading. Helping in the store and reading. Checking money and reading. Helping head and head with everybody else, and still reading. You remember Hanuman House, Mohun?”

He recognized her mood, and did not wish to be seduced by it. “It was a big house. Bigger than the place we are going to.”

She was unruffled. “Did they show you Owad’s letter?”

Those of Owad’s letters which went the rounds were mainly about English flowers and the English weather. They were semi-literary, and were in a large handwriting with big spaces between the words and big gaps between the lines. “The February fogs have at last gone,” Owad used to write, “depositing a thick coating of black on every window-sill. The snowdrops have come and gone, but the daffodils will be here soon. I planted six daffodils in my tiny front garden. Five have grown. The sixth appears to be a failure. My only hope is that they will not turn out to be blind, as they were last year.”

“He never took much interest in flowers when he was a boy,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

“I suppose he was too busy reading.”

“He always liked you, Mohun. I suppose that was because you were a big reader yourself. I don’t know. Perhaps I should have married all my daughters to big readers. Owad always said that. But Seth, you know-” She stopped; it was the first time he had heard her speak the name for years. “The old ways have become oldfashioned so quickly, Mohun. I hear that you are looking for a house.”

“I have my eye on something.”

“I am sorry about the inconvenience. But we have to get the house ready for Owad. It isn’t his father’s house, Mohun. Wouldn’t it be nice if he could come back to his father’s house?”

“Very nice.”

“You wouldn’t like the smell of paint. And it’s dangerous too. We are putting up some awnings and louvres here and there. Modern things.”

“It sounds very nice.”

“Really for Owad. Though I suppose it would be nice for you to come back to.”

“Come back to?”

“Aren’t you coming back?”

“But yes,” he said, and couldn’t keep the eagerness out of his voice. “Yes, of course. Louvres would be very nice.”

Shama was elated at the news.

“I never did believe,” she said, “that Ma did want us to stay away for good.” She spoke of Mrs. Tulsi’s regard for Myna, her gift of brandy to Anand.

“God!” Mr. Biswas said, suddenly offended. “So you’ve got the reward for lice-picking? You’re sending back Myna to pick some more, eh? God! God! Cat and mouse! Cat and mouse!”

It sickened him that he had fallen into Mrs. Tulsi’s trap and shown himself grateful to her. She was keeping him, like her daughters, within her reach. And he was in her power, as he had been ever since he had gone to the Tulsi Store and seen Shama behind the counter.

“Cat and mouse!”

At any moment she might change her mind. Even if she didn’t, to what would they be allowed to come back? Two rooms, one room, or only a camping place below the house? She had shown how she could use her power; and now she had to be courted and pacified. When she was nostalgic he had to share her nostalgia; when she was abusive he had to forget.

To escape, he had only six hundred dollars. He belonged to the Community Welfare Department: he was an unestablished civil servant. Should the department be destroyed, so would he.

“Trap!” he accused Shama. “Trap!”

He sought quarrels with her and the children.

“Sell the damn car!” he shouted. And knowing how this humiliated Shama, he said it downstairs, where it was heard by sisters and the readers and learners.

He became surly, constantly in pain. He threw things in his room. He pulled down the pictures he had framed and broke them. He threw a glass of milk at Anand and cut him above the eye. He slapped Shama downstairs. So that to the house he became, like Govind, an object of contempt and ridicule. Beside him, the Community Welfare Officer, the absent Owad shone with virtue, success and the regard of everyone.

They moved the glass cabinet, Shama’s dressingtable, Theophile’s bookcase, the hatrack and the Slumberking to the tenement. The iron fourposter was dismantled and taken downstairs with the destitute’s diningtable and the rocking-chair, whose rockers splintered on the rough, uneven concrete. Life became nightmarish, divided between the tenement room and the area below the house. Shama continued to cook below the house. Sometimes the children slept there with the readers and learners; sometimes they slept with Mr. Biswas in the tenement.

And every afternoon Mr. Biswas drove to his area to spread knowledge of the finer things in life. He distributed booklets; he lectured; he formed organizations and became involved in the complicated politics of small villages; and late at night he drove back to Port of Spain, to the tenement which was far worse than any of the houses he had visited during the day. The Prefect became coated with dust which rain had hardened and dappled; the floormats were dirty; the back seat was dusty and covered with folders and old, brown newspapers.

His duties then took him to Arwacas, where he was organizing a “leadership” course. And, to avoid the long late drive to Port of Spain, to avoid the tenement and his family, he decided to spend the time at Hanuman House. The back house had been vacant for some time, and no one lived there except a widow who, pursuing an undisclosed business scheme, had stolen back from Shorthills, trusting to her insignificance to escape Seth’s notice. There was little need for her to worry. For some time after the death of his wife Seth had acted wildly. He had been charged with wounding and using insulting behaviour, and had lost much local support. His skills appeared to have left him as well. He had tried to insuranburn one of his old lorries and had been caught and charged with conspiracy. He had been acquitted but it had cost much money; and he had thereafter grown quiescent. He looked after his dingy foodshop, sent no threats, and no longer spoke of buying over Hanuman House. The family quarrel, never bursting into incident, had become history; neither Seth nor the Tulsis were as important in Arwacas as they had been.

In the store the Tulsi name had been replaced by the Scottish name of a Port of Spain firm, and this name had been spoken for so long that it now fully belonged and no one was aware of any incongruity. A large red advertisement for Bata shoes hung below the statue of Hanuman, and the store was bright and busy. But at the back the house was dead. The courtyard was littered with packing cases, straw, large sheets of stiff brown paper, and cheap untreated kitchen furniture. In the wooden house the doorway between the kitchen and hall had been boarded over and the hall used as a storeroom for paddy, which sent its musty smell and warm tickling dust everywhere. The loft at one side was as dark and jumbled as before. The tank was still in the yard but there were no fish in it; the black paint was blistered and flaked, and the brackish rainwater, with iridescent streaks as of oil on its surface, jumped with mosquito larvae. The almond tree was still sparse-leaved, as though it had been stripped by a storm in the night; the ground below was dry and fibrous. In the garden the Queen of Flowers had become a tree; the oleander had grown until its virtue had been exhausted and it was flower-less; the zinnias and marigolds were lost in bush. All day the Sindhis who had taken over the shop next door played mournful Indian film songs on their gramophone; and their food had strange smells. Yet there were times when the wooden house appeared to be awaiting reanimation: when, in the still hot afternoons, from yards away came the thoughtful cackling of fowls, the sounds of dull activity; when in the evenings oil lamps were lit, and conversation was heard, and laughter, a dog being called, a child being flogged. But Hanuman House was silent. No one stayed when the store closed; and the Sindhis next door slept early.

The widow occupied the Book Room. This large room had always been bare. Stripped of its stacks of printed sheets, surrounded by emptiness, the muted sounds of life from neighbouring houses, the paddy rising high in the hall downstairs, it seemed more desolate than ever. A cot was in one corner; religious and comforting pictures hung low on the walls about it; next to it was a small chest in which the widow kept her belongings.

The widow, pursuing her business, visiting, was seldom in. Mr. Biswas welcomed the silence, the stillness. He requisitioned a desk and swivel-chair from government stores (strange, such proofs of power), and turned the long room into an office. In this room, where the lotuses still bloomed on the wall, he had lived with Shama. Through the Demerara window he had tried to spit on Owad and flung the plateful of food on him. In this room he had been beaten by Govind, had kicked Bell’s Standard Elocutionist and given it the dent on the cover. Here, claimed by no one, he had reflected on the unreality of his life, and had wished to make a mark on the wall as proof of his existence. Now he needed no such proof. Relationships had been created where none existed; he stood at their centre. In that very unreality had lain freedom. Now he was encumbered, and it was at Hanuman House that he tried to forget the encumbrance: the children, the scattered furniture, the dark tenement room, and Shama, as helpless as he was and now, what he had longed for, dependent on him.

On the baize-covered desk in the long room there were glasses and spoons stained white with Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder, sheafs and sheafs of paper connected with his duties as Community Welfare Officer, and the long, half-used pad in which he noted his expenses for the Prefect, parked in the grounds of the court house.

The redecoration of the house in Port of Spain proceeded slowly. Frightened by the price, Mrs. Tulsi had not handed over the job to a contractor. Instead, she employed individual workmen, whom she regularly abused and dismissed. She had no experience of city workpeople and could not understand why they were unwilling to work for food and a little pocketmoney. Miss Blackie blamed the Americans and said that rapaciousness was one of her people’s faults. Even after wages had been agreed Mrs. Tulsi was never willing to pay fully. Once, after he had worked for a fortnight, a burly mason, insulted by the two women, left the house in tears, threatening to go to the police. “My people, mum,” Miss Blackie said apologetically.

It was nearly three months before the work was done. The house was painted upstairs and downstairs, inside and out. Striped awnings hung over the windows; and glass louvres, looking fragile and out of place in that clumsy, heavy house, darkened the verandahs.

And Mr. Biswas’s nightmare came to an end. He was invited to return from the tenement. He did not return to his two rooms but, as he had feared, to one, at the back. The rooms he had surrendered were reserved for Owad. Govind and Chinta moved into Basdai’s room, and Basdai, able now only to board, moved under the house with her readers and learners. In his one room Mr. Biswas fitted his two beds, Theophile’s bookcase and Shama’s dressingtable. The destitute’s diningtable remained downstairs. There was no room for Shama’s glass cabinet, but Mrs. Tulsi offered to lodge it in her diningroom. It was safe there and made a pleasing, modern show. Sometimes the children slept in the room; sometimes they slept downstairs. Nothing was fixed. Yet after the tenement the new arrangement seemed ordered and was a relief.

And now Mr. Biswas began to make fresh calculations, working out over and over the number of years that separated each of his children from adulthood. Savi was indeed a grown person. Concentrating on Anand, he had not observed her with attention. And she herself had grown reserved and grave; she no longer quarrelled with her cousins, though she could still be sharp; and she never cried. Anand was more than halfway through college. Soon, Mr. Biswas thought, his responsibilities would be over. The older would look after the younger. Somehow, as Mrs. Tulsi had said in the hall of Hanuman House when Savi was born, they would survive: they couldn’t be killed. Then he thought: “I have missed their childhoods.”

6. The Revolution

A letter from London. A postcard from Vigo. Mrs. Tulsi ceased to be ill and irritable, and spent most of her day in the front verandah, waiting. The house began to fill with sisters, their children and grandchildren, and shook with squeals and thumps. A huge tent was put up in the yard. The bamboo poles were fringed with coconut branches which curved to form arches, and a cluster of fruit hung from every arch. Cooking went on late into the night, and singing; and everyone slept where he could find a place. It was like an old Hanuman House festival. There had been nothing like it since Owad had gone away.

A cable from Barbados threw the house into a frenzy. Mrs. Tulsi became gay. “Your heart, mum,” Miss Blackie said. But Mrs. Tulsi couldn’t sit still. She insisted on being taken downstairs; she inspected, she joked; she went upstairs and came downstairs again; she went a dozen times to the rooms reserved for Owad. And in the confusion a messenger was sent to summon the pundit even after the pundit had come, a self-effacing man who, in trousers and shirt, had passed unnoticed in the growing crowd.

The sisters announced their intention of staying awake all that night. There was so much cooking to do, they said. The children fell asleep. The group of men around the pundit thinned; the pundit fell asleep. The sisters cooked and joyously complained of overwork; they sang sad wedding songs; they made pots of coffee; they played cards. Some sisters disappeared for an hour or so, but none admitted she had gone to sleep, and Chinta boasted that she could stay awake for seventy-two hours, boasting as though Govind was still the devoted son of the family, as though his brutalities had not occurred, as though time had not passed and they were still sisters in the hall of Hanuman House.

They grew lethargic just before dawn, but the morning light kindled them into fresh, over-energetic activity. Children were washed and fed and dressed before the street awoke; the house was swept and cleaned. Mrs. Tulsi was bathed and dressed by Sushila; on her smooth skin there were small beads of perspiration, although the sun had not yet come out and she seldom perspired. Presently the visitors started arriving, many of them only tenuously related to the house, and not a few-the relations, say, of a grandchild’s in-laws-unknown. The street was choked with cars and bright with the dresses of women and girls. Shekhar and Dorothy and their five daughters came. Everyone fussed about something: children, food, wharf-passes, transport. Continually cars drove off with an important noise. Their drivers, returning, showed passes and told of encounters with startled harbour officials.

For Mr. Biswas it had been a difficult night. And the morning began badly. When he asked Anand to bring him the Guardian Anand reported that the paper had been appropriated by the pundit and had disappeared. Then he was turned out of the room while Shama and the girls dressed. Downstairs was chaos. He took one look at the bathroom and decided not to use it that day. When he went back to the room it was filled with the slight but offensive smell of face powder and there were clothes everywhere. Miserably, he dressed. “The wreck of the blasted Hesperus,” he said, using a comb to clean his brush of woman’s hair, sniffing as the dust rose visibly in the sunlight that slanted in below the striped awning. Shama noted his irritability but did not comment upon it; this enraged him further. The house, upstairs and down, resounded with impatient footsteps, shouts and shrieks.

The cavalcade left the house in sections. Mrs. Tulsi travelled in Shekhar’s car. Mr. Biswas went in his Prefect; but his family had split up and gone in other cars, and he was obliged to take some people he didn’t know.

The liner, white and reposed, lay at anchor in the gulf. A chair was found for Mrs. Tulsi and set against the dull magenta wall of the customs shed. She was dressed in white, her veil pulled over her forehead. She pressed her lips together from time to time and crumpled a handkerchief in one hand. She was flanked by Miss Blackie, in her churchgoing clothes and a straw hat with a red ribbon, and by Sushila, who carried a large bag with an assortment of medicines.

A tug hooted. The liner was being towed in. Some of the children, those who had learnt at school that one proof of the roundness of the earth was the way ships disappeared beyond the horizon, exaggerated the distance between ship and wharf. Many said the ship would come alongside in two to three hours. Shivadhar, Chinta’s younger son, said it wouldn’t do so until the evening of the following day.

But the adults were concerned with something else.

“Don’t tell Mai,” the sisters whispered.

Seth was on the wharf. He stood two customs sheds away. He was in a cheap suit of an atrocious brown, and to anyone who remembered him in his khaki uniform and heavy bluchers he looked like a labourer in his Sunday suit.

Mr. Biswas glanced at Shekhar. He and Dorothy were staring resolutely at the approaching ship.

Seth was uncomfortable. He fidgeted. He took out his long cigarette holder from his breast pocket and, concentrating, fixed a cigarette into it. With that suit, and with such uncertain gestures, the cigarette holder was an absurd affectation, and appeared so to the children who could not remember him. As soon as he had lighted the cigarette a khaki-uniformed official pounced and pointed to the large white notices in English and French on the customs sheds. Seth ejected the cigarette and crushed it with the sole of an unshining brown shoe. He replaced the holder in his breast pocket and clasped his hands behind his back.

Soon, too soon for some of the children, the ship was alongside. The tugs hooted, retrieved their ropes. Ropes were flung from ship to wharf, which now, in the shadow of the white hull, was sheltered and almost roomlike.

Then they saw him. He was wearing a suit they had never known, and he had a Robert Taylor moustache. His jacket was open, his hands in his trouser pockets. His shoulders had broadened and he had grown altogether bigger. His face was fuller, almost fat, with enormous round cheeks; if he wasn’t tall he would have looked gross.

“Is the cold in England,” someone said, explaining the cheeks.

Mrs. Tulsi, Miss Blackie, the sisters, Shekhar, Dorothy and every granddaughter who had borne a child began to cry silently.

A young white woman joined Owad behind the rails. They laughed and talked.

“Arй bap!” one of Mrs. Tulsi’s woman friends cried out through her tears.

But it was only a passing alarm.

The gangway was laid down. The children went to the edge of the quay and examined the mooring ropes and tried to look through the lighted portholes. Someone started a discussion about anchors.

And then he was down. His eyes were wet.

Mrs. Tulsi, sitting on her chair, all her effervescence gone, lifted her face to him as he stooped to kiss her. Then she held him round the legs. Sushila, in tears, opened her bag and held a bright blue bottle of smelling-salts at the ready. Miss Blackie wept with Mrs. Tulsi, and every time Mrs. Tulsi sniffed, Miss Blackie said, “Hm-mm. Hm. Mm.” Children, ungreeted, stared. The brothers shook hands, like men, and smiled at one another. Then it was the turn of the sisters. They were kissed; they burst into new tears and feverishly attempted to introduce those of their children who had been born in the intervening years. Owad, kissing, crying, went through them quickly. Then it was the turn of the eight surviving husbands. Govind, who had known Owad well, was not there, but W. C. Tuttle, who had scarcely known him, was. Long brahminical hairs sprouted out of his ears, and he drew further attention to himself by closing his eyes, neatly shaking away tears, putting a hand on Owad’s head and speaking a Hindi benediction. As his turn came nearer Mr. Biswas felt himself weakening, and when he offered his hand he was ready to weep. But Owad, though taking the hand, suddenly grew distant.

Seth was advancing towards Owad. He was smiling, tears in his eyes, raising his hands as he approached.

In that moment it was clear that despite his age, despite Shekhar, Owad was the new head of the family. Everyone looked at him. If he gave the sign, there was to be a reconciliation.

“Son, son,” Seth said in Hindi.

The sound of his voice, which they had not heard for years, thrilled them all.

Owad still held Mr. Biswas’s hand.

Mr. Biswas noted Seth’s cheap, flapping brown jacket, the stained cigarette holder. Seth held out his hands and nearly touched Owad.

Owad turned and said in English, “I think I’d better go and see about the baggage.” He released Mr. Biswas’s hand and walked briskly away, his jacket swinging.

Seth stood still. The tears suddenly stopped. But the smile remained.

The Tulsi crowd became agitated, drowning their relief in noise.

He could have turned away before, Mr. Biswas kept on thinking. He could have turned away before.

Seth’s hands dropped slowly. The smile died. One hand went up to the cigarette holder and he held his head to one side as though he was going to say something. But he only jiggled the cigarette holder, turned and walked firmly away between two customs sheds towards the main gates.

Owad came back to the group.

“With mother? With brother? With father? Or with all of all-you?” someone asked, and Mr. Biswas recognized the sardonic voice of the Sentinel photographer.

The photographer nodded and smiled at Mr. Biswas, as though he had found Mr. Biswas out.

“By himself,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Just by himself.”

Owad threw back his shoulders and laughed. His teeth showed; his moustache widened; his cheeks, shining and perfectly round, rose and rested against his nose.

“Thank you,” the photographer said.

A young reporter, whom Mr. Biswas didn’t know, came up with a notebook and pencil, and from the way he handled these implements Mr. Biswas could tell that he was inexperienced, as inexperienced as he himself had been when he interviewed the English novelist and tried to get him to say sensational things about Port of Spain.

Many emotions came to him and, saying good-bye to no one, he left the crowd and got into the Prefect, oven-hot with the windows closed, and drove to his area.

“Tulips and daffodils!” he muttered, remembering Owad’s horticultural letters as he drove along the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, past the swamplands, the crumbling huts, the rice fields.

It was just after ten when he got back to Port of Spain. The house was silent and upstairs was in darkness: Owad had gone to bed. But downstairs and in the tent lights blazed. Only the younger children were asleep; for everyone else, including those of the morning’s visitors who had decided to stay the night, the excitement of the day still lingered. Some were eating, some were playing cards; many were talking in whispers; and a surprising number were reading newspapers. Anand and Savi and Myna ran to Mr. Biswas as soon as they saw him and breathlessly began telling of Owad’s adventures in England: his firefighting during the war, the rescues he had conducted, his narrow escapes; the operations he had been called in to perform at the last minute on famous men, the jobs that had been offered to him as a result, the seat in parliament; the distinguished men he had known and sometimes defeated in public debate: Russell, Joad, Radhakrishnan, Laski, Menon: these had already become household names. The whole house had fallen under Owad’s spell, and everywhere in the tent little groups were going over Owad’s tales. Chinta had already worked up a great antipathy for Krishna Menon, whom Owad particularly disliked. And in one afternoon the family reverence for India had been shattered: Owad disliked all Indians from India. They were a disgrace to Trinidad Indians; they were arrogant, sly and lecherous; they pronounced English in a peculiar way; they were slow and unintelligent and were given degrees only out of charity; they were unreliable with money; in England they went around with nurses and other women of the lower classes and were frequently involved in scandals; they cooked Indian food badly (the only true Indian meals Owad had in England were the meals he had cooked himself); their Hindi was strange (Owad had repeatedly caught them out in solecisms); their ritual was debased; the moment they got to England they ate meat and drank to prove their modernity (a brahmin boy had offered Owad curried com beef for lunch); and, incomprehensibly, they looked down on colonial Indians. The sisters said they had never really been fooled by Indians from India; they spoke of the behaviour of the missionaries, merchants, doctors and politicians they had known; and they grew grave as they realized their responsibilities as the last representatives of Hindu culture.

The pundit, in dhoti, vest, sacred thread, caste-marks and wrist-watch, reclined on a blanket spread on the swept and flattened earth. He was reading a paper Mr. Biswas had never seen before. And Mr. Biswas saw then that the many other newspapers in the tent were similar to the pundit’s. It was the Soviet Weekly.

It was past midnight before Mr. Biswas, moving from group to group, decided he had heard enough; and when Anand tried to tell of Owad’s meeting with Molotov, of the achievements of the Red Army and the glories of Russia, Mr. Biswas said it was time for them to go to sleep. He went up to his room, leaving Anand and Savi in the festival atmosphere downstairs. His head rang with the great names the children and the sisters had spoken so casually. To think that the man who had met those people was sleeping under the same roof! There, where Owad had been, was surely where life was to be found.

For a full week the festival continued. Visitors left; fresh ones arrived. Perfect strangers-the ice-man, the salted-peanuts-man, the postman, the beggars, the street-sweepers, many stray children-were called in and fed. The food was supplied by Mrs. Tulsi and there was communal cooking, as in the old days, which seemed to have returned with Owad. The fruit hanging from the coconut-frond arches in the tent disappeared; the fronds became yellow. But Owad was still followed by admiring eyes, it was still an honour to be spoken to by him, and everything he had said was to be repeated. At any time and to anyone Owad might start on a new tale; then a crowd instantly collected. Regularly in the evening there were gatherings in the drawingroom or, when Owad was tired, in his bedroom. Mr. Biswas attended as often as he could. Mrs. Tulsi, forgetting her own illnesses and anxious instead to nurse, held Owad’s hand or head while he spoke.

He had canvassed for the Labour Party in 1945 and was considered by Kingsley Martin to be one of the architects of the Labour victory. In fact Kingsley Martin had pressed him to join the New Statesman and Nation; but he, laughing as at a private joke, said he had told Kingsley no. He had earned the bitter hatred of the Conservative Party by his scathing denunciations of Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech. Scathing was one of his favourite words, and the person he had handled most scathingly was Krishna Menon. He didn’t say, but it appeared from his talk that he had been gratuitously insulted by Menon at a public meeting. He had collected funds for Maurice Thorez and had discussed Party strategy in France with him. He spoke familiarly of Russian generals and their battles. He pronounced Russian names impressively.

“Those Russian names are ugly like hell,” Mr. Biswas ventured one evening.

The sisters looked at Mr. Biswas, then looked at Owad.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Owad said. “Biswas is a funny name, if you say it in a certain way.”

The sisters looked at Mr. Biswas.

“Rokossovsky and Coca-cola-kowsky,” Mr. Biswas said, a little annoyed. “Ugly like hell.”

“Ugly? Vyacheslav Molotov. Does that sound ugly to you, Ma?”

“No, son.”

“Joseph Dugashvili,” Owad said.

“That’s the one I had in mind,” Mr. Biswas said. “Don’t say you think that pretty.”

Owad replied scathingly, “I think so.”

The sisters smiled.

“Gawgle,” Owad said, raising his chin (he was lying in bed) and making a strangulated noise.

Mrs. Tulsi passed her hand from his chin to his Adam’s apple.

“What was that?” Mr. Biswas asked.

“Gogol,” Owad said. “The world’s greatest comic writer.”

“It sounded like a gargle.” Mr. Biswas waited for the applause, but Shama only looked warningly at him.

“You couldn’t say that in Russia,” Chinta said.

This led Owad from the beauty of Russian names to Russia itself. “There is work for everyone and everyone must work. It is distinctly written in the Soviet Constitution-Basdai, pass me that little book there-that he who does not work shall not eat.”

“That is fair,” Chinta said, taking the copy of the Soviet Constitution from Owad, opening it, looking at the title page, closing it, passing it on. “Is exactly the sort of law we want in Trinidad.”

“He who does not work shall not eat,” Mrs. Tulsi repeated slowly.

“I just wish they could send some of my people to Russia,” Miss Blackie said, sucking her teeth, shaking her skirt and shifting in her chair to express the despair to which her people reduced her.

Mr. Biswas said, “How can he, who does not eat, work?”

Owad paid no attention. “In Russia, you know, Ma”-it was his habit to address many of his sentences to her-“they grow cotton of different colours. Red and blue and green and white cotton.”

“Just growing like that?” Shama asked, making up for Mr. Biswas’s irreverence.

“Just growing like that. And you,” Owad said, speaking to a widow who had been trying without success to grow an acre of rice at Shorthills, “you know the labour it is to plant rice. Bending down, up to your knees in muddy water, sun blazing, day in, day out.”

“The backache,” the widow said, arching her back and putting her hand where she ached. “You don’t have to tell me. Just planting that one acre, and I feel like going to hospital.”

“None of that in Russia,” Owad said. “No backache and bending down. In Russia, you know how they plant rice?”

They shook their heads.

“Shoot it from an aeroplane. Not shooting bullets. Shooting rice.”

“From an aeroplane?” the rice-planting widow said.

“From an aeroplane. You could plant your field in a few seconds.”

“Take care you don’t miss,” Mr. Biswas said.

“And you,” Owad said to Sushila. “You should really be a doctor. Your bent is that way.”

“I’ve been telling her so,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

Sushila, who had had enough of nursing Mrs. Tulsi, hated the smell of medicines and asked for nothing more than a quiet dry goods shop to support her old age, nevertheless agreed.

“In Russia you would be a doctor. Free.”

“Doctor like you?” Sushila asked.

“Just like me. No difference between the sexes. None of this nonsense about educating the boys and throwing the girls aside.”

Chinta said, “Vidiadhar always keep on telling me that he want to be a aeronautical engineer.”

This was a lie. Vidiadhar didn’t even know the meaning of the words. He just liked their sound.

“He would be an aeronautical engineer,” Owad said.

“To take out the rice grains from the aeroplane gas-tank,” Mr. Biswas said. “But what about me?”

“You, Mohun Biswas. Welfare Officer. After they have broken people’s lives, deprived them of opportunity, sending you around like a scavenger to pick the pieces up. A typical capitalist trick, Ma.”

“Yes, son.”

“M-m-m-m.” It was Miss Blackie, purring.

“Using you like a tool. You have given us five hundred dollars profit. Here, we give you five dollars charity.”

The sisters nodded.

O God, Mr. Biswas thought, another scorpion trying to do me out of a job.

“But you are not really a capitalist lackey,” Owad said.

“Not really,” Mr. Biswas said.

“You are not really a bureaucrat. You are a journalist, a writer, a man of letters.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Yes, man.”

“In Russia, they see you are a journalist and a writer, they give you a house, give you food and money and tell you, ‘Go ahead and write.’ “

“Really really?” Mr. Biswas said. “A house, just like that?”

“Writers get them all the time. A dacha, a house in the country.”

“Why,” asked Mrs. Tulsi, “don’t we all go to Russia?”

“Ah,” Owad said. “They fought for it. You should hear what they did to the Czar.”

“M-m-m-m.” Miss Blackie said, and the sisters nodded gravely.

“You,” Mr. Biswas said, now full of respect, “are you a member of the Communist Party?”

Owad only smiled.

And his reaction was equally cryptic when Anand asked how, as a communist working for the revolution, he could take a job in the government medical service. “The Russians have a proverb,” Owad said. “A tortoise can pull in its head and go through a cesspit and remain clean.”

By the end of the week the house was in a ferment. Everyone was waiting for the revolution. The Soviet Constitution and the Soviet Weekly were read more thoroughly than the Sentinel or the Guardian. Every received idea was shaken. The readers and learners, happy to think themselves in a society that was soon to be utterly destroyed, relaxed their efforts to read and learn and began to despise their teachers, whom they had previously reverenced, as ill-informed stooges.

And Owad was an all-rounder. He not only had views on politics and military strategy; he not only was knowledgeable about cricket and football; he lifted weights, he swam, he rowed; and he had strong opinions about artists and writers.

“Eliot,” he told Anand. “Used to see him a lot. American, you know. The Waste Land. The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Let us go then, you and I. Eliot is a man I simply loathe.”

And at school Anand said, “Eliot is a man I simply loathe”; and added, “I know someone who knows him.”

While they waited for the revolution, life had to be lived. The tent was taken down. Sisters and married granddaughters left. Visitors no longer came in great numbers. Owad took up his duties at the Colonial Hospital and for a time the house had to be content with stories of the operations he had carried out. The refugee doctor was dismissed and Owad looked after Mrs. Tulsi himself. She improved spectacularly. “These doctors stopped learning twenty years ago,” Owad said. “They don’t even bother to keep up with the journals.” Journals had been coming to him by almost every post from England, and drug samples, which he displayed proudly, though sometimes with scathing comments.

Communal cooking had stopped, but communal life continued. Sisters and granddaughters often came to spend a night or a week-end. They brought all their illnesses to him and he attended to them without charge, giving injections wholesale with new miracle drugs which he said were as yet unknown in the colony. Later the sisters worked out what they would have had to pay another doctor, and there was a gentle rivalry as to who had been favoured with the most expensive treatment.

And Owad’s success grew. For long the emphasis in the house had been on reading and learning, which many of the readers and learners couldn’t do well and approached reluctantly. Now Owad said that this emphasis was wrong. Everyone had something to offer. Physical strength and manual skills were as important as academic success, and he spoke of the equality in Russia of peasants, workers and intellectuals. He organized swimming parties, boating expeditions, ping-pong tournaments; and such was the admiration and respect felt for him that even enemies came together. Anand and Vidiadhar played some ping-pong sets and, though not speaking a word to one another before or after, were scrupulously polite during the game, saying “Good shot!” and “Bad luck!” at the least opportunity. Vidiadhar, who had developed into a games-playing thug, more keen than competent and never picked for any college side, excelled in these family games and was the house champion.

“I can’t tell you,” Chinta said to Owad, “how Vidiadhar got me worried. That boy does sweat so much. You can’t get him to stick in a corner with some old book. He always exercising or playing some rough game or other. He done break a hand, a foot and some ribs. I does keep on trying to stop him. But he don’t listen. And he does sweat so much.”

“Nothing to worry about there,” Owad said, the doctor now. “That is quite normal.”

“You take a weight off my mind,” Chinta said, disappointed, for she believed that profuse sweating was a sign of exceptional virility and had hoped to be told so. “He does sweat so much.”

Regularly Shekhar, Dorothy and their five daughters came to the house, and these visits gave the sisters a sweet revenge. They treated Shekhar with the respect due to him, but they made their contempt for Dorothy plain. “I am sorry,” Chinta said to her one Sunday. “I cannot understand you. I only speak Spanish.” Dorothy had not spoken Spanish since Owad’s arrival and the sisters felt that they were at last making her boil down. But their behaviour had an unexpected result. For Owad, taking his cue from the sisters, spoke rallyingly to Dorothy; she responded with rough good humour and soon a familiarity grew up between them; and one Sunday, to the dismay of the sisters, Dorothy came with her cousin, a handsome young woman who had graduated from McGill University and had all the elegance of the Indian girl from South Trinidad. When they had gone Owad calmed the sisters’ fears by deriding the girl’s Canadian degree, her slight Canadian accent and her musical skills. “She went all the way to Canada to learn to play the violin,” he said. “I hope she doesn’t want to play to me. I’ll break the bow on her parents’ heads. People starving, not getting enough to eat in Trinidad, and she playing the violin in Canada!”

And though he spent more and more time with his friends and colleagues and often went south to Shekhar’s, and though when his friends called the house had to be silent and the sisters and the readers and learners hidden, the sisters continued to feel safe. For after every journey, every meeting, Owad related his adventures to them. His appetite for talk was insatiable, his dramatic gifts never failed, and the comments he made on the people he had met were invariably scathing.

The sisters now sought audience with him singly or in small groups. They came to the house, waited up for him, and when he returned they fell to talking, under the house, so as not to disturb Mrs. Tulsi’s sleep. In time each sister felt she had a special hold on him; and having received his confidences, offered hers. At first the sisters spoke of their financial difficulties. But Owad was unwilling to anticipate the revolution. Then the sisters complained. They complained about the teachers who were keeping their children back at school; they complained about Dorothy, about Shekhar, about their husbands; they complained about absent sisters. Every scandal was gone over, every petty dispute, every resentment. And Owad listened. The children listened as well, kept awake by the sisters’ bumbling and their frequent hawking and spitting (a sign of intimacy: the warmer the feeling, the noisier the hawk, the longer the period of speaking through the spittle). In the morning the sisters who had talked late into the night were brisk and exceptionally friendly towards the people they had criticized, exceptionally proprietary towards Owad.

The house was always full of sisters on Sunday, when there was communal cooking. Sometimes Shekhar came by himself and then before lunch there were discussions between the brothers and Mrs. Tulsi. The sisters did not feel threatened by these discussions as they had done when Shekhar and Dorothy and Mrs. Tulsi talked. They did not feel excluded. For, with Owad there, these discussions were like the old Hanuman House family councils. So the sisters cooked below the house and sang and were gay. They were even anxious to exaggerate the difference between their brothers and themselves. It was as if by doing so they paid their brothers a correct reverence, a reverence which comforted and protected the sisters by assigning them a place again. They spoke no Hindi, used the grossest English dialect and the coarsest expressions and vied with one another in doing menial jobs and getting themselves dirty. In this way they sealed the family bond for the day.

It was the custom on these Sunday mornings, after the discussions and before lunch, which came before the trip to the sea, for the men to play bridge.

And on this morning Shekhar, despite Anand’s pleas for sophistication, showed his disrelish of Owad’s talk about the extermination of capitalists and what the Russians had done to the Czar, and tried to turn the conversation. It turned, oddly, to modern art.

“I can’t make head or tail of this Picasso,” Shekhar said.

“Picasso is a man I loathe,” Owad said.

“But isn’t he a comrade?” Anand said.

Owad frowned. “And as for Chagall and Rouault and Braque-”

“What do you think of Matisse?” Shekhar asked, using a name he had got from Life and putting a stop to the flow of names he didn’t know.

“He’s all right,” Owad said. “Delicious colour.”

This was unfamiliar language to Shekhar. He said, “That was a nice picture they made. Didn’t do too well, though. The Moon and Sixpence. With George Sanders.”

Owad, concentrating on his cards, didn’t reply.

“These artists are funny fellers,” Shekhar said.

They were playing for matches. Anand scattered his heap and said, “Portrait by Picasso.”

Everyone laughed, except Owad.

“Is a long time now I want to read the book,” Shekhar said. “Isn’t it by Somerset Morgue-hum?”

Anand scattered his matches again.

Owad said, “Why don’t you look in the mirror if you want to see a portrait by Picasso?”

This was clearly one of Owad’s scathing comments. Shekhar smiled and grunted. The watching sisters and their children roared with laughter. Owad acknowledged their approval by smiling at his cards.

Anand felt betrayed. He had adopted all of Owad’s political and artistic views; he had announced himself as a communist at school, he had stated that Eliot was a man he loathed. It was his turn to deal. In his confusion he dealt to himself first. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, looking down and trying to inject a laugh into his voice.

“There is no need to apologize for that,” Owad said sternly. “It is simply a sign of your conceited selfishness and egocentricity.”

The watchers held their breath.

Joviality fled from the table, Shekhar studied his cards. Owad frowned at his. His foot was tapping on the concrete floor. More watchers came.

Anand felt his ears burning. He looked hard at his cards, feeling the silence that had spread to all parts of the house. He was aware of watchers coming, Savi, Myna, Kamla. He was aware of Shama.

Owad breathed heavily and swallowed noisily.

When Shekhar bid his voice was low, as though he wished to take no part in the struggle. Vidiadhar, Shekhar’s partner, bid in a voice choked by saliva; but there was no mistaking the voice of the free, unoffending man.

Anand bid stupidly.

Owad pressed his teeth far below his lower lip, shook his head slowly, tapped his feet, and breathed more loudly. When he bid, his voice, full of anger now, suggested that he was trying to redeem a hopeless situation.

The game dragged on. Anand played worse and worse. Shekhar, as though doing it against his will, gathered in trick after trick.

Owad’s breathing and swallowing made Anand feel choked. His back was cold: his shirt was wet with perspiration.

At last the game was over. Neatly, deliberately, Shekhar noted the score. They waited for Owad to speak. Shuffling the cards, though it was not his turn, breathing heavily, he said, “That’s what we get from your genius.”

The tears rushed to Anand’s eyes. He jumped up, throwing his chair backwards, and shouted, “I didn’t tell you I was any blasted genius.”

Slap! His right cheek burned; then trembled, even after Owad’s hand was removed, as though the cheek had had to wait before registering the blow. And Owad was standing and Shekhar was bending down, picking up the cards from the dusty floor. And slap! his left cheek burned and trembled heavily. He forgot the watchers, concentrating only on the breathing before, the rising of the white-shirted chest. Owad’s chair was overthrown. And Shekhar, leaning awkwardly on the table, his chair pushed back, was looking at the cards as he let them fall from one palm to another, his brow furrowed, his top lip swelling over the lower.

The table was jerked aside. Anand found himself standing ridiculously upright, half blinded by the shaming tears. Owad was striding energetically to the front steps. And then Anand had time to take in the thrill, the satisfaction of the watchers, the silence of the house, with Govind’s singing in the background, the noise of some children in the street, the roll of a car from the main road.

Shekhar still sat at the table, playing with the cards.

A mumble came from the watchers.

“You!” Anand turned to them. “What the hell are you standing up there for? Puss-puss, puss-puss all the blasted night, talk-talk-talk.”

The effect was unexpected and humiliating. They laughed. Even Shekhar lifted his head and gave his grunting laugh, shaking his shoulders.

Shama’s gravity made her almost absurd.

The watchers broke up. Everyone went back to his task. A lightness that was like gaiety spread through the house.

Shekhar stacked the cards neatly on the table, rose, put his hands on Anand’s shoulders, sighed, and went upstairs.

They heard Owad moving about from room to room.

Anand found Mr. Biswas lying in vest and pants on the bed, his back to the door, papers on his drawn-up knees. He said without turning, “You, boy? Here, see if you can work out these blasted travelling expenses right.” He passed the pad. “What’s the matter, boy?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“All right, just work those figures out. Everybody else making a fortune out of their cars. I sure I losing.”

“Pa.”

“Just a minute, boy. Ought oughts are ought. Two fives are ten. Put down ought. Carry one.” Mr. Biswas was relaxed, and even clowning: he knew that his method of multiplying always amused.

“Pa. We must move.”

Mr. Biswas turned.

“We must move. I can’t bear to live here another day.”

Mr. Biswas heard the distress in Anand’s voice. But he was unwilling to explore it. “Move? All in good time. All in good time. Just waiting for the revolution and my dacha.”

These happy moods of his father were getting rare. And Anand said nothing more.

He did the complicated sums for the travelling expenses. Presently he heard the dry, crisp sounds of the ping-pong ball, the exclamations of Owad and Vidiadhar and Shekhar and the others.

He did not go down to have the lunch to which he had looked forward; and when Shama brought it up he could not eat or drink. Mr. Biswas, his clowning mood persisting, squatted on the chair and pretended to spit on his food, to save it from Anand’s gluttony. He knew this trick infuriated Anand. But Anand did not respond.

Downstairs the men were getting ready to go to the sea. Sons asked their mothers for towels, mothers urged their sons to be careful.

“Not going with them?”

Anand didn’t reply.

Mr. Biswas had withdrawn from these excursions. They were far too energetic, and the example of Owad led to dangerous competitive feats. Instead, after lunch he went for a walk by himself, looking at houses, occasionally making inquiries, but mostly simply looking.

The brightness of their aunts and cousins, their new and excluding chumminess, drove Savi and Kamla and Myna to join Anand in their room, where they lay on the bed, for want of places to sit, and made disjointed, selfconscious conversation.

Anand sipped his orange juice. The ice had melted, the juice gone flat and warm. The girls went for a walk to the Botanical Gardens. Shama had her bath: Anand heard her singing in the open-air bathroom and washing clothes. When she came up her hair was wet and straight, her fingers pinched, but for all her songs her anxiety had not gone.

She said in Hindi, “Go and apologize to your uncle.”

“No!” It was the first word he had spoken for a long time.

She petted him. “For my sake.”

“The revolution,” he said.

“You wouldn’t lose anything. He is older than you. And your uncle.”

“Not my uncle. Shooting rice from aeroplanes!”

Shama began to sing softly. She flung her hair down over her face and beat it with a stretched towel. The noises were like muffled sneezes.

The girls came back from their walk. They were brighter and talked more easily.

Then they were silent.

The men had returned. They heard their loud talk, their footsteps; Owad’s voice raised in friendliness, breaking into laughter; the light inquiries from aunts; Shekhar’s goodbyes, his car driving off.

Savi asked Shama in a whisper, “What happened?”

“Nothing has happened,” Shama said coaxingly, not replying to Savi, but repeating her plea to Anand. “He will just go and apologize to your uncle, and that is all. Nothing at all.”

The girls did not want to desert Anand, and they feared going downstairs.

“Remember,” Shama said. “Not a word to your father. You know what he is like.”

She left the room. They heard her talking normally, even jestingly, with one of the aunts, and they admired her for her courage. Then the girls also went down, to face the righteousness of the unpersecuted.

The shower upstairs was going. Owad was in the bathroom, singing a song from an old Indian film. This was part of his virtue: it showed how untainted he had been by England and flattered everyone. For the virtue with which everyone had endowed him in his absence was now found in the smallest things: Anand remembered one sister saying that Owad had brought back from England the shoes and shirts and underclothes he had taken from Trinidad.

“Same shoes after eight years,” Anand muttered. “Blasted liar.”

The bathroom went silent.

Shama came to the room. “Quick. Before they go to the theatre.”

Anand knew the Sunday routine: the bridge, the ping-pong, lunch, the sea, the shower, dinner, then the evening show.

The cousins could be heard assembling in the diningroom. Owad’s voice, smothered by a towel, came from his bedroom.

Anand walked down the back stairs and up the stairs to the back verandah, the same verandah to which he had returned after he had nearly been drowned at Docksite. From the verandah he had a glimpse of the diningroom, where he had pulled the chair from under his father in the presence of Owad.

The cousins saw him. Some aunts saw him. The talk stopped. Faces were turned down, though the aunts continued to look solemn and offended and judicial. Then the talk broke out again. The cousins were playing with cards, idly, waiting for dinner. Vidiadhar, the sweater, was smiling down at the table, licking his lips.

Anand had to wait in the verandah for some time before Owad came out from the bedroom. He came out with his usual heavy brisk steps. As soon as he saw Anand he became stern. And there was silence.

Anand went in, held his hands behind his back.

“I apologize,” Anand said.

Owad continued to look stern.

At last he said, “All right.”

Anand didn’t know what to do. He remained where he was, so that it seemed he was waiting for an invitation to dinner and the theatre. But there was no word. He turned and walked slowly out of the room to the back verandah. As he went down the steps he heard the talk break out, heard the conscientious bustling of the aunts in the kitchen.

Shama was waiting for him in their room. He knew that her pain was as great as his, possibly greater, and he did not wish to increase it. She waited for him to do or say something, so that she could apply the soothing words. But he said nothing.

“You will eat something now?”

He shook his head. How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong!

She went downstairs.

When Owad and the cousins left she came back. He was willing to eat then.

Shortly after, Mr. Biswas returned from his walk. His mood had changed. His face was twisted with pain and Anand had to mix him some stomach powder. He was tired after his walk and wanted to go to bed. He could sleep early on Sundays; on other evenings he came back late from his area.

The light from the diningroom came through the tall ventilation gaps at the top of the partition. He called Shama and told her, “Go and get them to take off that light.”

It was an awkward request at the best of times, though before Owad’s return Shama had sometimes made it successfully. Now she could do nothing.

Mr. Biswas lost his temper. He ordered Shama and Anand to get sheets of cardboard, and with these he tried to block the gaps at the top of the partition, jumping from the bed to the ledge on the partition. Of the three sections he put up two fell down almost at once.

“Uncle Podger,” Savi said.

He was about to lose his temper with her as well; but, as if in answer to the commotion, the light in the diningroom went out. He lay down on the bed in the dark and was soon asleep, grinding his teeth, and making strange contented smacking sounds with his mouth.

Anand sat in the darkness. Shama came to the room and got into the fourposter. Anand did not want to go downstairs. He lay on the bed beside his father and remained quite still.

He was disturbed by chatter and heavy footsteps, and made wide awake by the light coming in through the two open sections above the partition. Some aunts who had been waiting up below the house were now heard moving about the kitchen. The chatter continued, and laughter.

Mr. Biswas stirred and groaned. “Good God!”

Anand felt Shama awake and anxious. Listened to in this way, the chatter was as unbearable as the dripping of a water-tap.

“God!” Mr. Biswas cried.

There was a moment’s silence in the diningroom.

“Other people in this house,” Mr. Biswas shouted.

The visiting sisters and the readers and learners could be heard awakening downstairs.

Softly, as though speaking only to the people with him, Owad said, “Don’t we all know it, old man.” There were giggles.

The giggles maddened Mr. Biswas. “Go to France!” he cried.

“And you can go to hell.” It was Mrs. Tulsi. Her words, evenly spaced, were cold and firm and clear.

“Ma!” Owad said.

Mr. Biswas didn’t know what to say. Surprise was followed by shock, shock by anger.

Shama got up from the fourposter and said, “Man, man.”

“Let him go to hell,” Mrs. Tulsi said, almost conversationally. Her voice was followed by a groan, a creaking of a bed-spring and a shuffling on the floor.

Lights went on downstairs, lit up the yard and reflected through the jalousied door into Mr. Biswas’s room.

“Go to hell?” Mr. Biswas said. “Go to hell? To prepare the way for you? Praying to God, eh? Cleaning up the old man’s grave.”

“For God’s sake, Biswas,” Owad called, “hold your damned tongue.”

“You don’t talk to me about God. Red and blue cotton! Shooting rice from aeroplanes!”

The girls came into the room.

Savi said, “Pa, stop being stupid. For God’s sake, stop it.”

Anand was standing between the two beds. The room was like a cage.

“Let him go to hell,” Mrs. Tulsi sobbed. “Let him get out.”

“Neighbour! Neighbour!” a woman cried shrilly from next door. “Anything wrong, neighbour?”

“I can’t stand this,” Owad shouted. “I can’t stand it. I don’t know what I’ve come back to.” His footsteps were heard pounding across the drawingroom. He mumbled loudly, angrily, indistinctly.

“Son, son,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

They heard him going down the steps, heard the gate click and shiver.

Mrs. Tulsi began to wail.

“Neighbour! Neighbour!”

A wonderful sentence formed in Mr. Biswas’s mind, and he said, “Communism, like charity, should begin at home.”

Mr. Biswas’s door was pushed open, fresh light and shadows confused the patterns on the walls, and Govind came into the room, his trousers unbelted, his shirt unbuttoned.

“Mohun!”

His voice was kind. Mr. Biswas was overwhelmed to tears. “Communism, like charity,” he said to Govind, “should begin at home.”

“We know, we know,” Govind said.

Sushila was comforting Mrs. Tulsi. Her wail broke up into sobs.

“I am giving you notice,” Mr. Biswas shouted. “I curse the day I step into your house.”

“Man, man.”

“You curse the day,” Mrs. Tulsi said. “Coming to us with no more clothes than you could hang on a nail.”

This wounded Mr. Biswas. He could not reply at once. “I am giving you notice,” he repeated at last.

“I am giving you notice,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

“I gave it to you first.”

There was an abrupt silence. Then in the drawingroom there was an outburst of low, amused chatter, and downstairs the readers and learners, who had kept silent all along, were whispering.

“Cha!” the woman next door said. “Bother with people business.”

Govind patted Mr. Biswas on the shoulder, gave a little laugh and left the room.

The whispers downstairs subsided. The light which came through the jalousies from the yard and striped the room was extinguished. The laughter in the drawingroom died away. Throats were cleared with faint satiric intonations, and there were muted apprehensive chuckles. There were shuffles on the floor, and whispers. Then the light went out and the room was in darkness and the house was absolutely silent.

They remained appalled in the room, not daring to move, to break the silence, unable in the dark and the stillness to believe fully in what had just happened.

Presently, exhausted by their inactivity, the children went downstairs.

Morning would show the full horror of the past few minutes.

They awoke with a sense of unease. Almost at once they remembered. They avoided one another. They listened, above the hawking and spitting, the running taps, the continuous scuffling, the fanning of coal-pots, the metallic hiss of the lavatory flush, for the footsteps and voices of Mrs. Tulsi and Owad. But the house was quiet upstairs. Then they learned that Owad had left early that morning for a week’s tour of Tobago. The instinct of Mr. Biswas’s children was to get away at once, to escape from the house to the separate reality of the streets and school.

Mr. Biswas’s anger had gone stale; it burdened him. Now there was also shame at his behaviour, shame at the whole gross scene. But the uncertainty that had been with him ever since he heard that Owad was returning from England had disappeared. He found it easy to ignore his fears; and after he had had his bath he felt energetic and even light-headed. He too was anxious to get out of the house. And as he left it his sympathy went out to Shama, who had to remain.

The sisters looked chastened. Unpersecuted, they believed in their righteousness; and though Owad’s departure, in anger, as was reported, involved them all in disgrace and threatened them all, every sister was sure of her own hold on Owad, and her attitude to Shama was one of blame and recoil.

“So, Aunt,” Suniti, the former contortionist, said, “I hear you moving to a new house, man.”

“Yes, my dear,” Shama said.

At school Anand defended Eliot, Picasso, Braque, Chagall. He who had been leaving copies of the Soviet Weekly in the readingroom between the pages of Punch and The Illustrated London News now announced that he frowned upon communism. The phrase was thought odd; but the action, coinciding with the widespread renunciation of communism by distinguished intellectuals in Europe and America, caused little comment.

Shortly after he had been taken on the Sentinel Mr. Biswas went late one night to the city centre to interview the homeless people, whose families among them, who regularly slept in Marine Square. “That conundrum-the housing question-” he had begun his article; and though the words were excised by Mr. Burnett, Mr. Biswas was taken by their rhythm and had never forgotten them. They drummed in his head that morning; he spoke them and sang them under his breath; and throughout the Monday conference at the office he was exceptionally lively and garrulous. When the conference was over he went down St. Vincent Street to the cafй with the gay murals and sat at the bar, waiting for people he knew.

“Got notice to quit, man,” he said.

He spoke lightly, expecting solicitude, but his lightness was met with lightness.

“I expect I will be joining you in Marine Square,” a Guardian reporter said.

“Hell of a thing, though. Marned with four children and nowhere to go. Know any places for rent?”

“If I know one 1 would be there right now.”

“Ah, well. I suppose it will be the square.”

“It look so.”

The cafй, close to newspaper offices, government offices and the courts, was frequented by newspapermen and civil servants; by people who came in for a drink before their cases were called and then disappeared, sometimes for months; by solicitors’ clerks and by junior clerks who spent days of tedium tracing titles at the polished desks in the outer room of the Registrar-General’s Department.

It was a title-tracer who said, “If Billy was still here I woulda tell you to go and see Billy. All-you remember Billy?

“Billy used to promise them that he wasn’t only going to get them a house, but that he was going to move them free into the bargain. Everybody rushing to get this free move-you know black people-and paying Billy deposit. When he pick up a good few deposit Billy decide it was time to put a end to this stupidness and to make tracks for the States.

“But listen. The day before he leave, Billy plan leak out. But Billy get to know that the plan leak out. So the next day, Billy ship waiting in the harbour, Billy hire a lorry, put on his khaki working-clothes and went around to all the people he take money from. Everybody so surprise they forgetting they vex. All of them telling Billy how they call police and they saying, ‘But, Billy, we hear that you was leaving today.’ And Billy saying, ‘I don’t know where you get the niggergram from. I not leaving. You leaving. I come to move you. You got everything pack?’ None of them had anything pack, and Billy start getting into one big temper, saying how they make him waste his time, and he was mad not to move them at all. And they calm him down by saying if he pass back in the afternoon they would have everything pack and ready to move. So Billy leave and the people pack and wait for Billy. They still waiting.”

The laughter broke, but Mr. Biswas could take no part in it. Outside it had grown dark. There was a blue instant of lightning, a crack and roll of thunder. The thought of driving to his area with the windows closed was not appealing. He had drunk many lagers and they had steadily reduced him to silence and stillness. He did not want to go to the country; he did not want to stay in the cafй. But the rain, which had begun to fall in heavy drops that blotted on the pavement and presently had it wet and running, encouraged him to stay, silent and unlistening on a tall stool, drinking lager, staring at the crude bright murals, surrendering to the gloom.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see a very tall, thin coloured man. He had occasionally seen this man about St. Vincent Street and knew him to be a solicitor’s clerk. In the past year or two they had been nodding to one another but they had never spoken.

“Is true?” the man asked.

Mr. Biswas noted the man’s size, the concern in his voice and in his young-old face. “Yes, man.”

“You really got notice?”

Mr. Biswas responded to this sympathy by pursing his lips, looking down at his glass and nodding.

“Hell of a thing. How long?”

“Notice. A month, I suppose.”

“Hell of a thing. Married? Children?”

“Four.”

“God! You try the government? You in the Service now, not so? And ain’t they have some sort of housing loans scheme?”

“Only for established people.”

“You can’t get a good place to rent for all the tea in China,” the man said. He edged his way around Mr. Biswas, cutting him off from the talkers, some of whom were beginning to eat, at the bar, at tables. “Much easier to buy a house really. In the long run. What you drinking? Lager? Two lagers, miss. A hell of a thing, man.”

The lagers came.

“I know,” the man said. “I was in the same position not so long ago. I only had my mother. But even that was hell, I could tell you. Is like being sick.”

“Sick?”

“When you sick you forget what it is to be well. And when you well you don’t really know what it is to be sick. Is the same with not having a place to go back to every afternoon.”

Lights were turned on in the cafй. People stood silently in every doorway, looking out at the rain. From the dark street came the hiss of wet tyres and the beat of the rain, drowning the scrape of knives and forks on plates, the chatter.

“I don’t know,” the man said. “But look. What you doing now?”

“I got to go to the country. But with all this rain-”

“You know what? You better come and have some lunch with me. No, not here.” He looked around the cafй, and in his look Mr. Biswas saw the chatterers rebuked for their callousness.

They went outside and hurried through the rain, brushing against people who stood close to walls. They turned into a side street and entered the grimy green hall of a Chinese restaurant. The coconut-fibre mat was damp and black, the floor wet. They went up bare steps and the solicitor’s clerk seemed to be continually meeting people he knew. To all of them he said, patting Mr. Biswas on the shoulder, “Hell of a thing here, man. The man got notice. And he got nowhere to go.” People looked at Mr. Biswas, made sympathetic sounds, and Mr. Biswas, muddled by the lager, the strange faces and the unexpected interest, became very tragic.

They went to a celotex-partitioned cubicle and the solicitor’s clerk ordered food.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But look. My position is this. I living with my mother in a two-storey house in St. James. But she a lil old now, you know-”

“My mother dead,” Mr. Biswas said, finding himself, to his surprise, eating. “Blasted doctor didn’t want to give a death certificate. Write him a letter, though. A long one-”

“Hell of a thing, man. But the position is this. The old queen have a lil heart trouble. Can’t climb steps and that sort of thing. It does strain the heart, you know.” The solicitor’s clerk put his hand on his chest and his shoulders see-sawed. “And right at this moment I have a offer of a house in Mucurapo which would suit the old lady right down to the ground. Trouble is, I can’t buy it unless somebody buy mine.”

“And you want me buy yours.”

“In a sort of way. I could help you and you could help me. And the old queen.”

“Upstairs house, you say.”

“All modern conveniences and full and immediate vacant possession.”

“I wish I had that sort of money, old man.”

“Wait until you see it.”

And before the meal was over Mr. Biswas had agreed to go to see the house. He knew what he was doing. He knew that he had no more than eight hundred dollars and was only wasting the clerk’s time and his own. But courtesy demanded no less.

“You would be doing me a favour,” the solicitor’s clerk said. “And you would be doing the old queen a favour.”

So in the pouring rain, the windscreen wiper occasionally sticking, they drove down St. Vincent Street and around Marine Square and along Wrightson Road-settled by secure people-and across Woodbrook to the Western Main Road, past the vast grounds and the saman-lined drive of the Police Barracks, and turned into Sikkim Street.

It was still raining when the car stopped outside the house. The fence, half concrete, with lead pipes running between square concrete pillars, was covered with the vines of the Morning Glory spattered with small red flowers drooping in the rain. The height of the house, the cream and grey walls, the white frames of doors and windows, the red brick sections with white pointing: all these things Mr. Biswas took in at once, and knew that the house was not for him.

When, racing into the house out of the rain, he met the old queen, not as old as the solicitor’s clerk had made out, he was overwhelmed by her courtesy. Continually, with his suit and tie and shining shoes and Prefect car, he felt he was deceiving the public. Here, in this house in Sikkim Street, so desirable, so inaccessible, deception was especially painful. He tried to respond to the old queen’s civility with equal civility; he tried not to think of his crowded room, his eight hundred dollars. Slowly and carefully, aware now of the lager, he sipped tea and smoked a cigarette. Hesitantly, fearing a frank appraisal would be rude, he took in the distempered walls, the washed celotex ceiling with strips of wood painted chocolate and looking brand-new, frosted-glass windows and frosted-glass doors with white woodwork, white lattice work, a polished floor, a polished morris suite. And when the solicitor’s clerk, frank and trusting, ignorant of the eight hundred dollars, insisted that Mr. Biswas should see the rooms upstairs, Mr. Biswas went round quickly, seeing a bathroom with a toilet bowl and-luxury!-a porcelain wash-basin, two bedrooms with green walls, a verandah, so cool without the sun, the Morning Glory on the fence below, his Prefect in the road, and just for a moment he thought of the house as his own, and the thought was so heady he rejected it at once and hurried downstairs.

The old queen, whose heart had not permitted her to climb the steps, greeted him as though he had returned from a long journey.

He sat in one of the morris chairs and drank more tea and took another cigarette.

Not a word had been said so far about the price. Mr. Biswas kept on fixing it in his mind at something high and impossible which would relieve him of responsibility and regret. He thought of eight thousand, nine thousand. So near the busy Main Road: an ideal site for a shop. And yet so quiet in the rain!

“Not bad for six thousand,” the solicitor’s clerk said.

Mr. Biswas smoked and said nothing.

The old queen came out from the kitchen with a plate of cakes. The solicitor’s clerk insisted that Mr. Biswas should try one. The old queen had made them herself.

Mr. Biswas took a cake. The old queen smiled at him, and he smiled back.

“Well, to be honest. We both want to make a sale in a hurry. So let’s say five five.”

Once Mr. Biswas had read a story by a French writer about a woman who worked for twenty years to pay off a debt on an imitation necklace. He had never been able to understand why it was considered a comic story. Debt was a fearful thing; and with all its it’s and might-have-beens the story came too near the truth: hope followed by blight, the passing of the years, the passing of life itself, and then the revelation of waste: Oh, my poor Matilda! But they were false! Now, sitting in the clerk’s morris chair, Mr. Biswas knew he was close to such a debt, a similar blight, a similar waste: and he was again lying awake at night, hearing the snores of the crowded house, looking through the window at the empty sky swept by silent searchlights.

“Five five and we will throw in this morris suite.” The clerk gave a little laugh. “I always hear that Indians was sharp bargainers, but I never know till now just how sharp they was.”

The old queen smiled as charitably as ever.

“I will have to think about it.”

The old queen smiled.

On the way back Mr. Biswas decided to be aggressive.

“You so anxious to sell your house I don’t understand why you don’t go to an agent.”

“Me? You mean you didn’t hear what those people was saying in the cafй. Those agents are just a bunch of crooks, man.”

He felt he had seen the last of the house. He did not know then that, in the five years of life left to him, that drive along the Western Main Road, through Woodbrook to Wrightson Road and South Quay was to become familiar and even boring.

Alone once more, his depression, his panic returned. But when he got back to the house he assumed an air of confidence and sternness and said loudly to Shama, who was surprised to see him back so soon. “Didn’t go to the country today. Been looking at some properties.”

The headache which had been nagging him, which he had put down to his uneasiness, now defined itself as the alcoholic headache he always had when he drank in the day. He went up to the room, stripped to pants and vest, tried to read Marcus Aurelius, failed, and soon fell asleep, to the astonishment of his children, who wondered how in a crisis which affected them all their father could find time for sleep so early in the afternoon.

He had seen the house like a guest under heavy obligation to his host. If it had not been raining he might have walked around the small yard and seen the absurd shape of the house. He would have seen where the celotex panels on the eaves had fallen away, providing unrestricted entry to the bats of the neighbourhood. He would have seen the staircase that hung at the back, open, with only a banister, and sheltered by unpainted corrugated iron. He would not have been deceived into cosiness by the thick curtain over the back doorway on the lower floor. He would have seen that the house had no back door at all. If he had not had to rush out of the rain he might have noticed the street lamp just outside the house; he would have known that a street lamp, so near the main road, attracted idlers like moths. But he saw none of these things. He had only a picture of a house cosy in the rain, with a polished floor, and an old lady who baked cakes in the kitchen.

If he had not been disturbed he might have queried the clerk’s eagerness more impolitely. But events were too rapid, too neat. A quarrel in the night, the offer of a house with immediate possession the very next afternoon. And before the evening was out the sum of five thousand five hundred dollars had become less inaccessible.

“Somebody come for you,” Shama was saying.

He awoke and was puzzled to find it was evening.

“Another destee?” His fame had survived his resignation from the Sentinel; destitutes still occasionally sought him out.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

He dressed, his head humming, walked through the house downstairs to the foot of the front steps and surprised the visitor, a respectably dressed Negro of the artisan class, who was waiting for him at the top of the steps.

“Good night,” the Negro said. His accent betrayed him as an illegal immigrant from one of the smaller islands. “Is about the house I come. I want to buy it.”

Everybody wanted to buy or sell houses that day. “I ain’t even pay down for it yet,” Mr. Biswas said.

“The house in Shorthills?”

“Oh, that. That. But I can’t sell that. The land isn’t mine. I don’t even rent it.”

“I know. If I buy the house I would take it away.” He went on to explain. He had bought a lot in Petit Valley. He wanted to build his own house, but building materials were scarce and expensive and he was offering to buy Mr. Biswas’s house, not as a house, but for the materials. He said he was not prepared to haggle. He had studied the building carefully and was prepared to offer four hundred dollars.

And when Mr. Biswas went back to the room with the rumpled beds, the disarrayed furniture, the chaos on Shama’s dressingtable, he had twenty twenty-dollar bills in his pocket.

“You don’t believe in God,” he said to Anand. “But look.”

Between eight hundred dollars and one thousand two hundred dollars there is a great difference. Eight hundred dollars are petty savings. One thousand two hundred dollars stand for real money. The difference between eight hundred and five thousand is immense. The difference between one thousand two hundred and five thousand is negotiable.

A week before Mr. Biswas would have dismissed any thought of buying a house for five thousand dollars. He wanted one at three thousand or three thousand five hundred; he never looked at any above four thousand. And the strange thing now was that, having raised his sights, it did not occur to him to look at other five-thousand-dollar houses.

He sought out the solicitor’s clerk the next day, paid him a deposit of one hundred dollars, and was shrewd enough to ask for a stamped receipt.

“I going to take this money and pay down right away on the house I want to buy,” the solicitor’s clerk said. “Wait until the old queen hear. She going to be so glad.”

When Shama heard she burst into tears.

“Ah!” Mr. Biswas said. “Swelling up. Vexed. You could only be happy if we just keep on living with your mother and the rest of your big, happy family, eh?”

“I don’t think anything. You have the money, you want to buy house, and I don’t have to think anything.”

And that was when Shama, leaving the room, encountered Suniti, and Suniti said, “I hear that you come like a big-shot. Buying house and thing.”

“Yes, child.”

“Shama!” Mr. Biswas called. “Tell that girl to go back and help that worthless husband of hers to look after their goats at Pokima Halt.”

The goats were an invention of Mr. Biswas which never failed to irritate Suniti. “Goats,” she said to the yard, sucking her teeth. “Well, some people at least have goats. That is more than I could say for some other people.”

Mr. Biswas had divined only part of Shama’s motives. She knew that the time had come for them to move. But she did not want this to happen after a quarrel and a humiliation. She hoped that the estrangement between her mother and herself would disappear; and she regarded Mr. Biswas’s action as rash and provocative.

He released the tremendous details one by one.

“Five thousand five hundred,” he said.

He had his effect.

“O God!” Shama said. “You mad! You mad! You hanging a millstone around my neck.”

“A necklace.”

Her despair frightened him. But it made him stiffer: he mortified himself to inflict pain on her.

“Well, we still paying for the car. And you don’t know how long this job with the government going to last.”

“Your brother hoping it won’t last at all. Tell me, eh. Deep down in your heart you really believe that this job I am doing is nothing, eh? Deep down you really believe that. Eh?”

“If you think so,” she cried, and went down the steps to the kitchen below the house, to the readers and learners and sisters and married nieces, working and talking in the light of weak, flyblown bulbs. She was surrounded by security; yet disaster was coming upon her and she was quite alone.

She went back up to the room.

“How you going to get the money?”

“You don’t worry about that.”

“If you start throwing away your money I could always help you. Tomorrow I going to go to de Lima’s and buy that brooch you always talking about.”

He sniggered.

As soon as she went out of the room he was seized by panic. He left the house and went for a walk around the Savannah, along the wide, silent, grass-lined streets of St. Clair, where open doors revealed softly lit, opulent, undisturbed interiors.

Having committed himself, he lacked the courage to go back yet found the energy to go ahead. He was encouraged by the gloom of Shama and strengthened by the enthusiasm of the children. He avoided questioning himself; and, dreading the return of Owad, he developed the anxiety that he might not after all be good enough for the house of the solicitor’s clerk and the old queen who baked cakes and served them with such grace.

It was this anxiety which made him drive on Thursday afternoon to Ajodha’s and tell Tara as soon as he saw her that he had come to borrow four thousand dollars to buy a house. She took it well; she said she was glad that he was at last going to be free of the Tulsis. And when Ajodha came in, fanning himself with his hat, Mr. Biswas was equally forthright and Ajodha treated the matter as a petty business transaction. Four thousand five hundred dollars at eight per cent, to be repaid in five years.

Mr. Biswas stayed to have a meal with them, and continued to be blunt and loud and full of bounce. It was only when he drove away that his exhilaration left him and he saw that he had involved himself not only in debt but also in deception. Ajodha did not know that the car had not yet been paid for; Ajodha did not know that he was only an unestablished civil servant. And the loan could not be repaid in five years: the interest alone would come to thirty dollars a month.

Still there were occasions he could have withdrawn. When, for instance, they went to see the house on Friday evening.

Anxious to show himself worthy of the house, he insisted that the children should put on their best clothes, and urged Shama to say as little as possible when they got there.

“Leave me behind. Leave me behind,” Shama said. “I have no shame for you and I will shame you in front of your high and mighty house-seller.”

And all the way she kept it up until, just before they turned into Sikkim Street, Mr. Biswas lost his temper and said, “Yes. You damn well will shame me. Stay and live with your family and leave me alone. I don’t want you to come in with me.”

She looked surprised. But there was no time for the quarrel to subside. They were in Sikkim Street. He drove the car past the house, parked it some distance away, called to the children to come with him if they wanted to or stay with their mother and continue living with the Tulsis if they wanted to do that, slammed the door and walked away. The children got out and followed him.

So that the one glimpse Shama had of the house before it was bought was from the moving Prefect. She saw concrete walls softly coloured in the light of the street lamp, with romantic shadows thrown by the trees next door. And she, who might have noticed the grossness of the staircase, the dangerous curve of the beams, the lack of finish in the lattice work and in all the woodwork, she who might have noticed the absence of a back door, the absence of a hundred small but important touches, sat in the car overcome by anger and dread.

While the children, on their best behaviour, made conversation with the old queen and were pleased by the interest she showed in them and her approval of nearly everything they said. They saw the polished floor, the rich curtains, the celotex ceiling, the morris suite, and they wanted to see little more. They drank tea and ate cakes; while Mr. Biswas, not at all displeased by the success of his children, smoked cigarettes and drank whisky with the solicitor’s clerk. When they went upstairs, the solicitor’s clerk went first. It was dark. They did not note the absence of a light on the staircase; the darkness masked the crudity of the construction. Used for so long to the makeshift and the oldfashioned, dazzled by what they had seen, and in the position of guests, they didn’t stop to inquire; and once they had got to the top they were too taken by the bathroom and the green bedrooms and the verandah and the rediffusion set.

“A radio!” they cried. They had forgotten what it was like to have one.

“I will leave it here if you want it,” the solicitor’s clerk said, as if offering to pay the rental of the set.

“Well, you like it?” Mr. Biswas asked, when they left.

There was no doubt that they did. Something so new, so clean, so modern, so polished. They were anxious to win Shama over to it, to get her to see it herself. But in the face of Mr. Biswas’s gaiety and triumph Shama was firm. She said she had no intention of shaming Mr. Biswas or his children.

During the week Mrs. Tulsi had been ill but placid. With Owad’s return she became maudlin. She spent most of the day in her room, asking for her hair to be soaked in bay rum, and listening for Owad’s footsteps. She sought to win him back by talking about his boyhood and Pundit Tulsi. Abusing no one, raging against no one, the tears flowing from the wells, as it seemed, of her dark glasses, she wove a lengthy tale of injustice, neglect and ingratitude. Her daughters came to listen. They came bowed and penitent and respected their brother’s silence by showing themselves solemn and correct. They spoke Hindi; they did not debase themselves; they all tried to look as though they had offended. But Owad’s mood did not break. He did not relate his adventures in Tobago; and the sisters directed their own silent accusations at Shama. Owad spent more time away from home. He mixed with his medical colleagues, a new caste separate from the society from which it had been released. He went south to Shekhar’s. He played tennis at the India Club. And, almost as suddenly as it had started, talk of the revolution ended.

7. The House

The Solicitor’s clerk was as good as his word, and as soon as the transaction was completed he and the old queen hurriedly abandoned the house. On Monday night Mr. Biswas made his final decision. On Thursday the house awaited him.

Late on Thursday afternoon they went in the Prefect to Sikkim Street. The sun came through the open windows on the ground floor and struck the kitchen wall. Woodwork and frosted glass were hot to the touch. The inside of the brick wall was warm. The sun went through the house and laid dazzling stripes on the exposed staircase. Only the kitchen escaped the sun; everywhere else, despite the lattice work and open windows, was airlessness, a concentration of heat and light which hurt their eyes and made them sweat.

Without curtains, empty except for the morris suite, with the hot floor no longer shining and polished, the sun showing only grit and scratches and dusty footprints, the house seemed smaller than the children remembered and had lost the cosiness they had noted at night, in the soft lights, with thick curtains keeping out the world. Undraped by curtains, the large areas of lattice work left the house open, to the green of the breadfruit tree next door, the bleedingheart vine thick and tendrilled on the rotting fence, the decaying slum house at the back, the noises of the street.

They discovered the staircase: unhidden by curtains, it was too plain. Mr. Biswas discovered the absence of a back door. Shama discovered that two of the wooden pillars supporting the staircase landing were rotten, whittled away towards the bottom and green with damp. They all discovered that the staircase was dangerous. At every step it shook, and at the lightest breeze the sloping corrugated iron sheets rose in the middle and gave snaps which were like metallic sighs.

Shama did not complain. She only said, “It look as though we will have to do a few repairs before we move.”

In the days that followed they made more discoveries. The landing pillars had rotted because they stood next to a tap which emerged from the back wall of the house. The water from the tap simply ran into the ground. Shama spoke about the possibility of subsidence. Then they discovered that the yard had no drainage of any sort. When it rained the water from the pyramidal roof fell directly to the ground, turned the yard into mud and spattered walls and doors, the bottoms of which appeared to have been sprayed with wet soot.

They discovered that none of the windows downstairs would close. Some grated on the concrete sill; others had been so warped by the sun that their bolts could no longer make contact with the grooves. They discovered that the front door, elegant with white woodwork and frosted panes and with herringbone lattice work on either side, flew open in a strong wind even when locked and bolted. The other drawingroom door could not open at all: it was pinned to the wall by two floorboards which had risen, pressing against each other, to make a miniature and even mountain range.

“Jerry-builder,” Mr. Biswas said.

They discovered that nothing was faced and that the lattice work was everywhere uneven, and split in many places by nails which showed their large heads.

“Tout! Crook!”

They discovered that upstairs no door resembled any other, in shape, structure, colour or hinging. None fitted. One stood six inches off the floor, like the swingdoor of a bar.

“Nazi and blasted communist!”

The upper floor curved towards the centre and from downstairs they noted a corresponding bend in the two main beams. Shama thought that the floor curved because the inner verandah wall it supported was made of brick.

“We’ll knock it down,” Shama said, “and put a wood partition.”

“Knock it down!” Mr. Biswas said. “Be careful you don’t knock down the house. For all we know it is that same wall which is keeping the whole damned thing standing.”

Anand suggested a pillar rising from the drawingroom downstairs to support the sagging beams.

Soon they began to keep their discoveries secret. Anand discovered that the square pillars of the front fence, so pretty with Morning Glory, were made of hollow bricks that rested on no foundation. The pillars rocked at the push of a finger. He said nothing, and only suggested that the mason might have a look at the fence when he came.

The mason came to build a concrete drain around the house and a low sink below the tap at the back. He was a squat Negro with catlike whiskers and he sang continually:

There was a man called Michael Finnegan

Who grew whiskers on his chin again.

His gaiety depressed them all.

Daily they moved between the hostile Tulsi house and Sikkim Street. They became short-tempered. They took little joy in the morris suite or the rediffusion set.

“‘I will leave the rediffusion set for you.’ “ Mr. Biswas said, mimicking the solicitor’s clerk. “You old crook. If I don’t see you roasting in hell!”

The rental of the rediffusion set was two dollars a month. Landrent was ten dollars a month, six dollars more than he paid for his room. Rates, which had always seemed as remote as fog or snow, now had a meaning. Landrent, rediffusion set, rates, interest, repairs, debt: he was discovering commitments almost as fast as he discovered the house.

Then the painters came, two tall sad Negroes who had been out of work for some time and were glad to get a job at the very low wages Mr. Biswas had to borrow to pay them. They came with their ladders and planks and buckets and brushes and when Anand heard them jumping about on the top floor he became anxious and went up to reassure himself that the house was not falling down. The painters did not share Anand’s concern. They continued to jump from plank to floor and he was too ashamed to tell them anything. He stayed to watch. The fresh distemper made the long, ominous crack in the verandah wall clearer and more ominous. While the rediffusion set filled the hot empty house with light music and bright commercials, the painters talked, sometimes of women, but mostly of money. When, from the rediffusion set, a woman sang, as from some near but inaccessible city of velvet, glass and gold where all was bright and secure and even sadness was beautiful:

They see me night and day time

Having such a gay time.

They don’t know what I go through

– one painter said, “That’s me, boy. Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.” Yet he had never laughed or smiled. And for Anand the songs that came over and over from the rediffusion set into the hollow, distemper-smelling house were forever after tinged with uncertainty, threat and emptiness, and their words acquired a facile symbolism which would survive age and taste: “Laughing on the Outside”, “To Each His Own”, “Till Then”, “The Things We Did Last Summer”.

And more expense was to come. Sewer pipes had not been laid down in this part of the city and the house had a septic tank. Before the painters left, the septic tank became choked. The lavatory bowl filled and bubbled; the yard bubbled; the street smelled. Sanitary engineers had to be called in, and a new septic tank built. By this time the money Mr. Biswas had borrowed had run out altogether, and Shama had to borrow two hundred dollars from Basdai, the widow who took in boarders.

But at last they could leave the Tulsi house. A lorry was hired-more expense-and all the furniture packed into it. And it was astonishing how the furniture, to which they had grown accustomed, suddenly, exposed on the tray of the lorry in the street, became unfamiliar and shabby and shameful. About to be moved for the last time: the gatherings of a lifetime: the kitchen safe (encrusted with varnish, layer after layer of it, and paint of various colours, the wire-netting broken and clogged), the yellow kitchen table, the hatrack with the futile glass and broken hooks, the rockingchair, the fourposter (dismantled and unnoticeable), Shama’s dressingtable (standing against the cab, without its mirror, with all the drawers taken out, showing the unstained, unpolished wood inside, still, after all these years, so raw, so new), the bookcase and desk, Theophile’s bookcase, the Slumberking (a pink, intimate rose on the headrest), the glass cabinet (rescued from Mrs. Tulsi’s drawingroom), the destitute’s diningtable (on its back, its legs roped around, loaded with drawers and boxes), the typewriter (still a brilliant yellow, on which Mr. Biswas was going to write articles for the English and American Press, on which he had written his articles for the Ideal School, the letter to the doctor): the gatherings of a lifetime for so long scattered and even unnoticed, now all together on the tray of the lorry. Shama and Anand rode with the lorry. Mr. Biswas drove the girls; they carried dresses which would have been damaged by packing.

They could only unpack that evening. A rough meal was prepared in the kitchen and they ate in the chaotic diningroom. They said little. Only Shama moved and spoke without constraint. The beds were mounted upstairs. Anand slept in the verandah. He could feel the floor curving below him towards the offending brick wall. He placed his hand on the wall, as if that might give him some idea of its weight. At every footstep, particularly Shama’s, he could feel the floor shake. When he closed his eyes he experienced a spinning, swaying sensation. Hurriedly he opened them again to reassure himself that the floor had not sunk further, that the house still stood.

Every afternoon they had seen an elderly Indian rocking contentedly in the verandah of the house next door. He had a square, heavy-lidded face that was almost Chinese; he always looked impassive and sleepy. Yet when Mr. Biswas, pursuing his policy of getting on good terms with the neighbours, greeted him, the man brightened at once, sat forward in his rockingchair and said, “You have been doing a lot of repairs.”

Mr. Biswas took the man’s words as an invitation to his verandah. His house was new and well-built; the walls were solid, the floor even and firm, the woodwork everywhere neat and finished. There was no fence; and a shed of rusted corrugated iron and grey-black boards abutted at the back of the house.

“Nice house you have here,” Mr. Biswas said.

“With the help of God and the boys we manage to build it. Still have to put up a fence and build a kitchen, as you see. But that could wait for the time being. You had to do a lot of repairs.”

“A few things here and there. Sorry about the septic tank.”

“You don’t have to be sorry about that. I did expect it to happen even before. He build it himself.”

“Who? The man?”

“And not only that. He build the whole house himself. Working on Saturday and Sunday and in the afternoons. It was like a hobby with him. If he employ a carpenter I didn’t see it. And I better warn you. He do all the wiring too. The man was a joke, man. I don’t know how the City Council pass a house like that. The man used to bring all sort of tree-trunk and tree-branch to use as rafters and beams.”

He was an old man, pleased that after a lifetime, with the help of his sons, he had built a solid, well-made house. The past lay in the shed at the back of his house, in the ruinous wooden houses still in the street. He spoke only out of a sense of achievement, without malice.

“A strong little house, though,” Mr. Biswas said, looking at it from the old man’s verandah. And he saw how the old man’s breadfruit tree framed the house to advantage, how elegant the lattice work looked through the bleeding-heart vine, its lack of finish unimportant at this distance. But he noticed how pronounced the crack was that spread from the brick wall in the verandah. And it was only then that he noticed how many of the celotex panels had fallen from the eaves; and even as he looked bats flew in and out. “Strong little house. That is the main thing.”

The old man continued to talk, no hint of argument in his voice. “And those pillars at the four corners. Anybody else woulda make them of concrete. You know what he make them of? Just those clay bricks. Hollow inside.”

Mr. Biswas could not hide his alarm and the old man smiled benevolently, pleased to see his information having such an effect.

“The man was a joke, man,” he went on. “As I say, it was like a hobby to him. Picking up window frames here and there, from the American base and where not. Picking up a door here and another one there and bringing them here. A real disgrace. I don’t know how the City Council pass the place.”

“I don’t suppose,” Mr. Biswas said, “that the City Council woulda pass it if it wasn’t strong.”

The old man paid no attention. “A spec’lator, that’s what he was. A real spec”lator. This ain’t the first house he built like this, you know. He build two-three in Belmont, one in Woodbrook, this one, and right now he building one in Morvant. Building it and living in it at the same time.” The old man rocked and chuckled. “But he get stick with this one.”

“He live in it a long time,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Couldn’t get anybody to buy it. Is a good little site, mark you. But he was asking too much. Four five.”

“Four five!”

“If you please. And look. Look at that little house down the road.” He pointed to a new neat bungalow, which Mr. Biswas, with his newly acquired eye for carpentry, had recognized as of good design and workmanship. “Small, but very nice. That sell this year for four five.”

A Tuttle boy, the writer, came unexpectedly to the house one afternoon, talked of this and that and then, casually, as if delivering a message he had forgotten, said that his parents were going to call that evening, because Mrs. Tuttle wanted to ask Shama’s advice about something.

Rapidly, they made ready. The floor was polished and walking on it was forbidden. Curtains were rearranged, and the morris suite and the glass cabinet and the bookcase pushed into new positions. The curtains masked the staircase; the bookcase and the glass cabinet hid part of the lattice work, which was also draped with curtains. The door that couldn’t close was left wide open and curtains hung over the doorway. The door that couldn’t open was left shut; and a curtain hung over that. The windows that couldn’t close were left open and curtains hung over them as well. And when the Tuttles came they were greeted by an enclosed, shining, softly-lit house, the morris chairs and the small palm in the brass pot reflecting on the polished floor. Shama seated them on the morris chairs, left them to marvel in silence for a minute or so, and, as cosily as the old queen herself, made tea in the kitchen and offered that and biscuits.

And the Tuttles were taken in! Shama could tell from the hardening of Mrs. Tuttle’s expression into one of outrage and self-pity, from the nervous little chuckles of W. C. Tuttle who sat with a mixture of Eastern and Western elegance on his morris chair, rubbing one hand over the ankle that rested on his left knee, twirling the long hairs in his nose with the other hand.

Mrs. Tuttle said to Myna, who had amputated the torchbearer’s torchbearing arm, “Hello, Myna girl. You forget your aunt these days. I don’t suppose you want to come round to my old house after this.”

Myna smiled, as though Mrs. Tuttle had hit on an embarrassing truth.

Mrs. Tuttle said to Shama in Hindi, “Well, it is old. But it is full of room.” She pressed her elbows to her side to show the constriction she felt in Shama’s house. “And we didn’t want to get into debt or anything like that.”

W. C. Tuttle played with the hairs in his nose and smiled.

“I don’t want anything bigger,” Shama said. “This is just right for me. Something small and nice.”

“Yes,” W. C. Tuttle said. “Something nice and small.”

And they had a moment of panic when he jumped up from his chair and, going to the wall with the lattice work, began measuring it by extending his fingers, gathering them up again and extending them once more. But it was only the length of the wall, not the quality of the work, that interested him. He measured, gave a little laugh and said, “Twelve by twenty.”

“Fifteen by twenty-five,” Shama said.

“Nice and small,” W. C. Tuttle said. “That, to me, is the beauty of it.”

And Shama had another uneasy moment when W. C. Tuttle asked to be shown upstairs. But it was night. They had enclosed the staircase with lattice work from banister to roof, with strips of wood from banister to steps, and it had all been painted. A weak bulb lit up the landing, threw the yard into darkness, and the effect of cosiness was maintained.

And how quickly they forgot the inconveniences of the house and saw it with the eyes of the visitors! What could not be hidden, by bookcase, glass cabinet or curtains, they accommodated themselves to. They mended the fence and made a new gate. They put up a garage. They bought rose trees and planted a garden. They began to grow orchids and Mr. Biswas had the exciting idea of attaching them to dead coconut trunks buried in the ground. At the side of the house, in the shade of the breadfruit tree, they had a bed of anthurium lilies. To keep the lilies cool they surrounded them with damp, rotting immortelle wood which they got from Shorthills. And it was on a visit to Shorthills that they saw the concrete pillars rising out of tall bush on the hill where Mr. Biswas had once built a house.

Soon it seemed to the children that they had never lived anywhere but in the tall square house in Sikkim Street. From now their lives would be ordered, their memories coherent. The mind, while it is sound, is merciful. And rapidly the memories of Hanuman House, The Chase, Green Vale, Shorthills, the Tulsi house in Port of Spain would become jumbled, blurred; events would be telescoped, many forgotten. Occasionally a nerve of memory would be touched-a puddle reflecting the blue sky after rain, a pack of thumbed cards, the fumbling with a shoelace, the smell of a new car, the sound of a stiff wind through trees, the smells and colours of a toyshop, the taste of milk and prunes-and a fragment of forgotten experience would be dislodged, isolated, puzzling. In a northern land, in a time of new separations and yearnings, in a library grown suddenly dark, the hailstones beating against the windows, the marbled endpaper of a dusty leather-bound book would disturb: and it would be the hot noisy week before Christinas in the Tulsi Store: the marbled patterns of oldfashioned balloons powdered with a rubbery dust in a shallow white box that was not to be touched. So later, and very slowly, in securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past.

Though Mr. Biswas had mentally devised many tortures to which he was going to put the solicitor’s clerk, he took care to avoid the cafй with the gay murals. And it was with surprise and embarrassment that he came back one afternoon, less than five months after he had moved, to find the solicitor’s clerk, a cigarette hanging from his lips, pacing with some method about the lot next to his house.

The clerk was unabashed. “How, man? How the wife? And the children? Still getting on all right with their studies?”

Instead of replying, what he felt, “Stop asking about my children and their studies, you nasty old crooked communist tout!” Mr. Biswas said that they were all well and asked, “How the old queen?”

“Half and half. The old heart still playing the fool.”

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.