A House for Mr Biswas: Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Mr Biswas’s parents had “another quarrel” just before his birth, leading his mother, Bipti, to take her three children from his father, Raghu, and walk to the village where her own parents lived. Bipti told them about “Raghu’s miserliness”—as usual, her father affectionately chalked it up to fate, even though fate led him to the Caribbean sugar plantations and “left him to die in a crumbling mud hut in the swamplands,” perhaps leaving him grateful for his survival. Bipti’s mother, Bissoondaye, put the children to bed and brought a midwife. In the middle of the night, Mr Biswas was born with six fingers, “in the wrong way.” Bissoondaye hung cactus strips over her doors and windows to keep evil spirits out, but the midwife warned that “this boy will eat up his own mother and father.”

A pundit (later revealed as Pundit Sitaram) came the next day to explain that Mr Biswas was indeed born at “the inauspicious hour” of midnight and predict his personality with an old astrological almanac: Mr Biswas would have spaces between his teeth, meaning he would be “a lecher,” “a spendthrift,” and/or “a liar.” In addition, his six fingers meant to “keep him away from trees and water”—particularly natural water. The boy’s evil could be avoided if Mr Biswas’s father would not see him for twenty-one days—and then, on the twenty-first day, only look at him in a brass plate covered in handmade coconut oil.

Pundit Sitaram recommended a name starting with “Mo,” and Bipti could only think of “hun,” so Mr Biswas became Mohun—a holy name for Krishna, the pundit assured Bipti, who apologetically paid him what little she could afford.

On his ninth day of life, Mr Biswas’s sixth finger simply fell off in bed; Bipti “thought this was an excellent sign” and buried it in the backyard. He got “attention and respect” thereafter—his family massaged him and stretched out his limbs—and Bipti held a celebration for him nine days later, which people throughout the village attended. Raghu came too, but agreed to leave until the twenty-first day after a lengthy argument with Bipti and her parents.

Bissoondaye began making coconut oil, which was ready when Raghu came back on the twenty-first day, well-dressed and “very correct.” Mr Biswas was very confused at being held above an oiled brass plate, but the viewing was successful. Bipti and her children went home to Raghu, and henceforth “Mr Biswas’s importance steadily diminished.” “He still carried weight,” but his family never forgot his unlucky nature and particularly his unlucky sneeze, since he so often caught colds—whenever he sneezed in the morning, his father would superstitiously stay home from work; Mr Biswas’s sneeze predicted “minor mishaps” of all sorts.  

One morning, Raghu heard Mr Biswas sneeze from the road, and Bipti had to convince him to go on to work; he returned shortly thereafter with a leg “swathed in bloody bandages,” but the cart-man who brought him in would not help him get home because he feared Mr Biswas’s sneeze. Raghu had a “deep fear” that Mr Biswas would bankrupt the family—he always felt on the brink of destitution and became more cautious the more he accumulated wealth. 

Raghu picked up his paychecks on Saturday, as the Indian clerk shouted out amounts that the overseer paid workers from stacks of bills and coins. He was fascinated by the bags the overseer filled with coins and began converting his currency down to fill his own bags, which he proceeded to hide—nobody knew where, and rumors of his wealth just led him to spend even less.

“Mr Biswas grew,” and his limbs became “dusty and muddy and unwashed,” covered in eczema and stinking sores. He was stunted from malnutrition but never noticed that he was hungry or never went to school—he only minded that he could not go in ponds and rivers, like his brothers Pratap and Prasad (whom his father taught to swim) but enjoyed his baths and played with Dehuti, his sister. At nine and eleven, Prasad and Pratap were already acting like adults, caring for buffaloes in the fields. Mr Biswas could not go to the buffalo pond, and so when he was old enough he joined the “grass-gang” (whom the buffalo boys endlessly mocked).

Later, Mr Biswas would have begun working on the cane fields (but would never have advanced on the estates because he was illiterate). Pratap, who was also illiterate, nevertheless found success: he made enough to buy his own land, sell his own cane, and eventually purchase “a large, strong, well-built house.” Mr Biswas never went down this path—instead, “events which were to occur presently” led him down a path that ended up with him reading Marcus Aurelius in his Slumberking bed.

When his neighbor Dhari’s cow birthed a calf, he paid Mr Biswas to bring it water. Mr Biswas took a liking to the calf, and upon walking it to feed one day he came across the shallow stream where Bipti and Dehuti washed the family’s clothes. He returned to the stream periodically, disturbing its fish and watching his spit disappear into it, transfixed, until one day the calf disappeared. He searched all afternoon but gave up, went home, and hid in the bushes.

From the bushes, Mr Biswas watched his parents send a reluctant Prasad to fetch firewood. Mr Biswas slipped inside the family’s hut from behind to hide under Raghu’s bed, where he pondered the dusty cloth smells and the muffled sounds that surrounded him. Dhari came to report that his calf had gone missing, and Raghu told him and Prasad to go search for Mohun and the missing animal. Bipti mentioned that Mohun “knows he mustn’t go near water” and Dhari wailed, believing that Mr Biswas must have drowned his calf in the pond.

A crowd of neighbors congregated; some exclaimed that they had seen Mr Biswas bring the calf to the pond, but Raghu decried them as “a pack of liars.” A carter named Lakhan noted that Raghu seemed not to care about his son, and the two argued about who would dive into the pond to look for him. Raghu suggested that Dhari was responsible, because he charged Mr Biswas with caring for the calf, but Dhari threatened to bring the matter before a magistrate, so Raghu led the villagers to the pond.

Mr Biswas listened to this uproar “at first with pleasure, then with apprehension.” He heard his father come and go, and then finally left his hiding place at night to find his sister Dehuti crying over his clothing. When she saw him, she began to scream, but an elderly neighbor named Sadhu came to comfort her and brought her away, leaving Mr Biswas “alone in the dark hut, and frightened.”

The villagers congregated around the unassuming pond as Raghu went diving after his son, convinced that “there is something down there” but unable to see and unwilling to let Lakhan take over. He went down again and recovered the calf, covered in slime and weeds, and then yet again as Lakhan continued to insist on taking a turn to look for Mr Biswas. The villagers suddenly heard a sneeze, fell silent, turned and saw Mr Biswas; but Raghu had not returned and Lakhan dove in to recover his unconscious body—“but it was too late.”

Bipti began sending the villagers with messages, most importantly to her childless sister Tara, “a person of standing” who married a relatively well-off merchant. Clad in heavy gold and silver jewelry, Tara soon came to plan the funeral.

At the funeral, Mr Biswas earned the attendees’ “honour and sympathy,” but also “a little dread.” He spontaneously started smelling and tasting raw flesh (even though he never tried meat) and began spitting furiously. Tara led the women in wailing for Bipti; because “cremation was forbidden,” Raghu lay in a coffin wearing his finest dhoti. “Photo now,” exclaimed Tara, but the photographer declared it too dark and brought everyone outside. He was “of mixed Chinese, Negro and European blood,” so could not understand the family’s Hindi as they brought the coffin outside. Bipti and her four children posed for the photograph, with Tara translating the photographer’s English.

Mr Biswas first saw the photograph in 1937, hung on the wall in Tara’s drawingroom amidst many other photos of funerals, friends, and landscapes. It was faded and punctuated by the photographer’s stamp and signature. He “was astonished at his own smallness,” his visible scabs and eczema, and the “unnaturally large, staring eyes” of everyone in the picture.

Tara rightly anticipated that the photograph would be “a record of the family all together for the last time,” as they split up shortly after the funeral. Bipti sent Dehuti to Tara, where she would learn etiquette and find odds of marrying well but have to live as Tara’s servant. Tara told Bipti to buy Dehuti new clothes, but Bipti confessed that Raghu left her nothing—even though Tara and everyone else in the village knew about his miserliness. The family searched the hut for his money, and Tara called Bipti a fool after she continued to insist there was none.

Unable to cook, the family began to eat with Sadhu; Mr Biswas thought his unsalted food tasted like raw flesh and spat it out. After Bipti gave him Raghu’s blanket, he screamed all night, as the raw smell seemed to emanate from it. Bipti awoke to a familiar but unidentifiable noise, which she soon realized was someone traipsing around the family’s garden, breaking the bottles Raghu had planted there. She woke up Prasad and Pratap—while Mr Biswas “closed his eyes to keep out the danger”—and, out the window, they saw Dhari digging up the bottles and singing. Pratap threatened to “beat him like a snake” and Dhari taunted them, saying that he was “here to look after you.” Bipti closed the window and let Dhari continue, assuring her sons that their neighbor was “only after your father’s money” and remembering Raghu’s warnings “about the people of this village.”

Pratap and Prasad woke before dawn, remained silent about Dhari’s meddling in the garden and went to work at the buffalo pond. After sunrise, Bipti went outside to see their flowers uprooted and vegetables destroyed. Dhari yelled from across the street, and she called him a “shameless vagabond” back. Surveying the garden he destroyed, he warned that “they will keep on looking” for Raghu’s money, and asked whether Bipti might want to help “them” out. Bipti had nowhere to turn: “she distrusted the police, and Raghu had no friends.”

At night, Bipti, Pratap and Prasad waited with Raghu’s cutlasses and sticks—Mr Biswas again drifted off to sleep but woke to hear Dhari singing wedding songs as Pratap paced frantically around the hut with his cutlass. Bipti saw Lakhan, Dhari, and another neighbor, Oumadh, searching the garden with lanterns. Pratap yelled that he would kill them and sobbed as Bipti comforted him and sent him to sleep. Dhari warned, “we will be here every night now to look after you,” and Pratap sat on the ground holding his cutlass.

“In the end Bipti sold the hut and the land to Dhari” before moving with Mr Biswas to live with some of Tara’s relatives in Pagotes. Pratap and Prasad went to live with a distant relative and continue working on sugar-estates, “and so Mr Biswas came to leave the only house to which he had some right.” Everyone had left, and he grew apart from his “increasingly useless and impenetrable mother,” leaving him to feel “really quite alone.”