A House for Mr Biswas: Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

After leaving home, Mr Biswas could not say where his house was or whether anyone found Raghu’s money. The land where they lived soon yielded oil, and while working on an article years later Mr Biswas “saw nothing but oil derricks and grimy pumps” there. “The world carried no witness to Mr Biswas’s birth and early years,” a truth he first encountered at the Canadian Mission school in Pagotes, where his teacher Lal—a convert from Hinduism to Presbyterianism—asked him for his age and birth certificate, which Bipti could not produce.

Tara took Bipti to the decrepit office of an uncouth solicitor named F.Z. Ghany, who handled a few cases in a different village each day of the week, in order to come up with a “buth suttificate” for Mr Biswas. Bipti insisted that only Pundit Sitaram knew when Mr Biswas was born, but Tara did not trust him, so Bipti chose June 8, and Ghany had them sign a certificate with the “nice Hindu name” of Mohun Biswas, who was busy “spitting carefully” in a corner of the room. Ghany encouraged Bipti to bring in her other children the next week, and finally “official notice was taken of Mr Biswas’s existence, and he entered the new world.”

At school, the children chanted multiplication tables, which Lal found delightful—he appreciated their “thoroughness, discipline, and […] stick-to-it-ivenesss,” which he felt Hindus usually lacked. He caned Mr Biswas with a tamarind rod for miscalculating “ought twos” and asked another student (Alec) where he found his bodice he was wearing—from his sister-in-law, the boy explained, and Lal told him to tell her the multiplication tables he learned.

From Lal, Mr Biswas also learned about poems and prayers, geology and desert oases. But he viewed it all as “unreal” until he heard about the Great War from Alec, the boy who wore the bodice and other brightly-colored clothes “because I is a Portuguese or something.” He “revealed his secret” to Mr Biswas, who “dramatically unbuttoned” to do the same, and later shared his “Dodd’s Kidney Pills.”

Alec and Mr Biswas were inseparable; they smoked cigarettes for the first time and traded their shirt buttons for marbles together. Mr Biswas began to copy Alec’s intricate drawings of letters and, when he wrote “CANCELLED” beautifully on a math test he had little interest in completing, Lal yelled for the “sign-painter” to come write “I AM AN ASS” on the blackboard, which Mr Biswas did exquisitely, to the class’s approval.

In their six years of friendship, Mr Biswas and Alec learned next to nothing about one another’s lives at home. Mr Biswas was embarrassed and unhappy with his accommodation in a mud hut full of strangers, and especially with Bipti’s sense of depression and lack of affection. His fully-grown, boring brothers visited at Christmastime, and although Dehuti lived nearby, he almost never saw her, except when Tara’s husband “held a religious ceremony and needed Brahmins to feed.” He went over in a clean dhoti and his sister served him food, but upon leaving “he became once more only a labourer’s child.” Indeed, later in life, he could always get along with the rich but always had to return home to poverty.

Ajodha, Tara’s thin and cold husband, made Mr Biswas uncomfortable. Ajodha liked when others read to him and often paid Mr Biswas to read from an American newspaper’s medical column about risks to the body, whose author inexplicably continued to think of something new every day for several decades. Whenever he visited Tara, then, Mr Biswas had little occasion to see his sister.

Bipti worried that none of her children had married, and Tara nevertheless decided to pull Mr Biswas out of school and make him into a pundit. Pundit Jairam taught him Hindi, scriptures, and ceremonies for eight months in the house he shared with the “crushed, hard-working” wife who took care of him. Jairam was famous for his outspoken religious views, and Mr Biswas began receiving attention when he visited Tara to lead prayers and bring the money and gifts her visitors offered back to Jairam.

One day, Pundit Jairam received a large bunch of bananas as a gift, and as they ripened beautifully Mr Biswas figured that there were plenty and decided to take two, but their absence was obviously noticeable. Jairam came home, ate his dinner, and talked through his religious arguments. The next morning, Mr Biswas remembered what he had done and began collecting flowers for puja, but Jairam did not come, so he went to bring his teacher some milk.

At breakfast, Pundit Jairam gave his plate to Mr Biswas and told him to eat. Mr Biswas declined, for the food was not his own; Jairam ordered his wife Soanie to bring the bunch of bananas and told Mr Biswas that they must be his now, since he touched them, and that he must eat them all now lest they go to waste. Mr Biswas was surprised by Jairam’s tone but started to eat, taking no pleasure in the bananas’ taste and eating one after another until he grew sick. He never ate bananas again and began getting stomachaches whenever he felt “excited or depressed or angry.” He also grew constipated, and his unpredictable defecation led him to leave Jairam and return to Pagotes.

One night, Mr Biswas was afraid to go to the latrine in the dark and risk waking up Pundit Jairam. He used a handkerchief instead and threw it off the back verandah, only for Jairam to berate him in the morning: the handkerchief landed on the oleander tree, polluting its flowers so they could no longer be used for puja. Jairam told Mr Biswas he could never be a true pundit—Mr Biswas destroyed his father, Raghu, and Jairam could not let the same happen to him. And so Jairam sent Mr Biswas back to Pagotes.

Bipti was alarmed, not excited, to see Mr Biswas upon his return. She questioned him in a rage before turning protective and feeding him, but “she could not coax him out of his sullenness.” At the time, he did not realize the “absurd and touching” fact that his mother welcomed him to a home and meal that were not hers to give, but thirty years later he would recite a “simple poem in blank verse about this meeting,” in which “the circumstances improved to allegory: the journey, the welcome, the food, the shelter.”

Bipti was also irritated because she was forced to defend Dehuti, who eloped with the yard boy at Tara’s house. Upon visiting Tara’s house, Ajodha implored Mr Biswas to explain how he got himself kicked out of Pundit Jairam’s; at first, everyone laughed, but when recounting the banana incident Mr Biswas “saw his own injury very clearly” and began crying into Tara’s arms.

Alec had begun working in Ajodha’s garage, “doing mysterious greasy things.” Mr Biswas went to Ajodha’s rumshop, run by his brother Bhandat, who “apparently drank, beat his wife and kept a mistress of another race.” The shop, past its prime, was a simple construction of iron and concrete invariably full of drunk and miserable estate workers. Every night, Bhandat counted “the day’s takings”; he was paranoid and quick to anger, accusing Mr Biswas of spying for Tara because he was stealing from her every night: after giving enough drunk patrons less than they paid for, he could steal the price of one drink. He always did this with flair and grew angry with Mr Biswas afterward; seeing these antics, the drinkers took to calling Mr Biswas “smart man,” and he took revenge each morning by spitting in the rum bottles, which were all identical but labeled and priced differently.

Mr Biswas lived with Bhandat’s family, sleeping with his two sons on a floor mattress in a windowless room. Whenever the shop was closed, he would visit Bipti, Alec, or Tara, whose bookcase now had twenty volumes of The Book of Comprehensive Knowledge, mistakenly delivered by an American traveling salesman. Ajodha never read them, but he was happy to see Mr Biswas doing so, and so on Sundays Mr Biswas would read him the week’s That Body of Yours columns before perusing The Book of Comprehensive Knowledge for the rest of the day.

Ajodha encouraged him to convince Bhandat’s boys to read The Book of Comprehensive Knowledge, but they were too busy dedicating their nights to sexual fantasy, in which Mr Biswas never quite managed to participate in the proper way. They also talked about Bhandat’s mistress, whom he visited on the weekends. During the week, Bhandat shouted at and beat his wife, frightening the boys and Mr Biswas next door, and continued stealing more and more from the rumshop.

One weekend, after one of Ajodha’s relatives died, Bhandat’s family went with Ajodha and Tara to the funeral, leaving Mr Biswas with a free weekend and Bhandat’s two rooms to himself. He could not decide what to do with them, so ended up wandering around the environs all day until returning home “tired, empty, miserable, yet still excited, still unwilling to sleep.” He awoke to Bhandat, drunk and unexpectedly home early, accusing him of stealing a dollar and spying for Tara and Ajodha. Bhandat beat Mr Biswas until his cheekbone bled and kicked him out, sending him back to Bipti.

When Mr Biswas returned home, Bipti massaged him with oil “for the first time since he was a baby” and argued with him about where he might go next, reminding him that Pundit Sitaram prophesied his failures. Mr Biswas implored his mother not to go see Tara but she did, and he told her all about Bhandat’s theft and mistress. Tara did not believe his reports, and then she explained that the missing dollar was merely in the bottom of Bhandat’s pocket. Mr Biswas cried, saying, “I have no father to look after me and people can treat me how they want,” which won Tara’s sympathy. However, he blamed her for Dehuti’s departure, which pushed her over the edge: she left and Bipti told Mr Biswas he would “reduce us all to pauperdom.” Mr Biswas declared that he would get his own job and house.

Mr Biswas began looking for a job on Monday morning, walking up and down the main road and imagining himself working in each of its stores—but none of them appealed to him, except (momentarily) the undertaker’s shed full of coffins: he thought he could “help to bury Bhandat.” He pondered the strange notion of “dry goods,” wandered past food stalls, and watched carts race up and down the road. He went home to inform Bipti that he would not take a job or see Tara, but planned to kill himself, and his mother heartily encouraged him: “That would be the best thing for you. And for me.”

Energized with rage, Mr Biswas marched down the main road for miles, till he had long left town. Ramchand, Tara’s former yard boy and Dehuti’s husband, tapped him on the shoulder and greeted him amicably. Ramchand said that he was working at a different rumshop, explained that Dehuti often asked about Mr Biswas, and invited him over for dinner. Mr Biswas was impressed that Ramchand cared about his approval—he was of a lower caste, after all, even if he made good money. At dinner, Mr Biswas realized that he never had taken his caste status as a Brahmin seriously—and it felt like even more of a joke at Ramchand’s well-decorated hut, even though Dehuti seemed unhappy with him and particularly with their possessions.

In fact, Dehuti barely spoke or interacted with either of them; she brought out her baby but seemed entirely “untouched by her husband’s bubbling desire to please.” She was “frankly ugly,” too, sitting in the astonishingly mature manner of an old woman and seemingly unlike the sister Mr Biswas used to know. Ramchand asked Mr Biswas to read the writing on his walls—calendars and cards from Sunday school—and declared that he would be “a great man. Reading like that at your age.”

Ramchand felt sorry for Ajodha (who was “just asking” to “fall really sick”), Pratap (whose donkeys kept dying), Prasad (who could not find a wife), and Bhandat (because of his mistress). He obviously “thought his own condition perfect, and this perfection delighted him.” Ramchand showed Mr Biswas the extra room they were building and suggested that he might be able to stay there, which depressed him even more. Dehuti claimed to lack “modern ambitions” and thought herself hideous, in response to which Ramchand smiled.

Mr Biswas’s stomach began to swell, preventing him from eating despite his hunger, because “their happiness, which he couldn’t share, had upset him.” He left and promised to return, although he knew that he never would because his ties to Dehuti had been broken. He resolved to stop looking for a job and just ask Tara.

Alec returned to Pagotes, now covered in paint instead of grease. Mr Biswas watched him paint a sign for the Humming Bird Café and outlined his predicament before joining him as an assistant. The Café’s proprietor asked if Mr Biswas could paint birds, so his sign would look just like that of the Keskidee Café across the street. They explained that the “modern thing is to have lots of words,” like the signs in Port of Spain, and ran through a number of possibilities before settling on “Idlers keep out by order.” And “so Mr Biswas became a sign-writer,” learning to control a paintbrush and finishing “IDLERS KEEP OUT BY ORDER” before moving on to cigarette advertisements.

Soon, Mr Biswas returned to Tara’s house, but was disappointed to discover that one of Bhandat’s sons had taken over his old job reading to Ajodha. Bhandat had run off with his mistress after his wife died in childbirth; Tara took in his boys and refused to speak his name ever again. His sons enjoyed their newfound comfort.

Sign-painting was satisfying but inconsistent; Alec traveled around looking for work, and Mr Biswas spent much of his time practicing. “Work, when it came, came in a rush,” and a rush of sign-writers followed to appease the competing shopkeepers, who always wanted more elaborate signs than the competition. Mr Biswas read foreign magazines for lettering inspiration and quickly took a liking to the stories in them, before turning to novels whose rich descriptions of “intoxicating worlds” excited him. He grew restless and wanted to move, but Bipti thought herself too old to live among strangers.

Bipti also promised to marry off the reluctant Mr Biswas, which would complete her life’s work. Pratap and Prasad were already married, but Mr Biswas preferred to read, soon finding himself “addicted” to books by Samuel Smiles and then elementary science manuals. Still, he occasionally mustered a belief in romance, like when he worked on signs through the night or hung out the doors of Ajodha’s buses as their conductor, shouting the “glorious Amerindian names” of faraway places.

Alec and Bhandat’s boys sometimes came and “took Mr Biswas to certain houses which terrified, then attracted, and finally only amused him.” But also exciting were the occasional “glimpse of a face, a smile, a laugh,” even though girls no longer represented “painful loveliness” to him and he only secretly considered love. He waited and yearned “for the world to yield its sweetness and romance,” and first saw Shama at Hanuman House in Arwacas “in this mood of expectation.”