A House for Mr Biswas: Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Mr Biswas never forgot the huge trees in Green Vale, which hid the estate from the surrounding plains. In the estate’s barracks, twelve families lived in one long, divided space, and Mr Biswas moved into one of the end rooms. Its window and walls were covered in newspapers, which made him “continuously exposed to the journalism of his time.”

Mr Biswas’s family brought all their furniture: the safe, table, hatrack, bed, rocking chair, and Shama’s dressing table, in which Mr Biswas only had one drawer. The other drawers contained birth and marriage certificates as well as tokens from Shama’s past life—a Bible and letters from a British pen-pal—which, to Mr Biswas’s astonishment, demonstrated that she had once been in touch with the outside world.

Mr Biswas was employed as “a driver, or sub-overseer,” for 25 dollars each month, twice the laborers’ pay. Although he had lived around sugarcane his whole life, he knew nothing about its cultivation, and Seth had to teach him when he came for inspections and to pay his workers every Saturday. He never knew that his father so respected drivers, but his workers clearly did, especially when he handled the moneybags on Saturdays. And he wondered whether his brothers were standing in line, waiting for their pay, at other estates elsewhere in Trinidad.

But during the week, knowing that Mr Biswas was new to the job, the laborers easily deceived him and mocked his ill-fitting hat; he wished he had a horse like Seth, but once he mounted it and was promptly thrown off. Seth promised Mr Biswas a house but never followed up, and Mr Biswas grew more and more brutal, beginning to hate his workers and wonder why they earned so much as three dollars for a week’s work in the fields.

Mr Biswas blamed Shama for throwing him into such physical and uncomfortable work, and the barracks’ filthy yard made him sick, so he would eat while reading the newspapers that covered the wall. He bathed using the spouts outside and invariably had to run around in front of the building in his towel, for everyone to see; one day, his towel slipped and he became furious at Shama, who went to Hanuman House with Anand.

The following Saturday, Seth told Mr Biswas that the shop in The Chase “insuranburn now,” giving him 75 dollars, which he added to the fund for his house. He thought about the house endlessly and had it entirely planned out: wooden walls and ceilings, and a roof of galvanized iron; a drawing-room, two bedrooms, a verandah, and a kitchen in the yard; pillars so he could build an upper floor and a beautiful red and ochre paint job.

Shama did not like listening to him talk about the house and spent most of her time at Hanuman House, which was very close to Green Vale. Mr Biswas began cooking for himself and taking walks, but often he just lay in bed and read the newspapers. He grew obsessed with the headline, “AMAZING SCENES WERE WITNESSED YESTERDAY WHEN,” repeating the words and posting other lines on pieces of cardboard on the opposite wall.

As Christmas approached and Mr Biswas’s old, jovial signs hung around the area, Savi wondered whether the same father she knew could have painted them. At Christmastime the Tulsi Store was bustling and full of exciting luxuries, although the sisters tried to hide their excitement and “the elder god,” Shekhar, was particularly melancholy this year, frightened at the prospect of being married off. Everyone’s attention turned from the shop to the kitchen on Christmas Eve, and in the morning the children got balloons, apples and whistles or dolls in their pillowcases or stockings. Christmas itself “turned out to be only a series of anticipations,” with meal after meal disappointing most of those present.

In Green Vale, there were no Christmas celebrations whatsoever, besides eating and drinking and the unfortunate eventual beating of wives. Mr Biswas went to visit Bipti and Tara, then on Boxing-day, his brothers Pratap and Prasad who “had married nondescript women from nondescript families.” He went to Arwacas the next day and stopped in a store to buy Christmas gifts on sale for the children. The shopman offered him a cigarette and brought him into the store; when they reappeared outside, a boy brought a large dollhouse and balanced it on Mr Biswas’s bicycle, which they pushed together down Arwacas’s High Street.

The dollhouse was better furnished than any house Mr Biswas had ever lived in, but he soon recoiled at realizing he spent over a month’s wages on it and still bought nothing for his son. This was as usual, for he truly knew Savi but “Anand belonged completely to the Tulsis.” The Tulsis already knew about the dollhouse, and everybody fell silent when Mr Biswas brought it into the hall. “When I give, I give to all,” noted Mrs Tulsi with fury, criticizing Mr Biswas for forgetting his son. The sisters beat their children for playing with the dollhouse that was not theirs, and Shama told Savi to put it upstairs. She stared dreadfully at Mr Biswas, who said he was going home and asked Savi and Anand to follow him outside.

Mr Biswas already felt disappointed in Anand, who was small, shy, and anxious around his father. He implored Savi to let Anand play with the dolhouse too. Anand asked Mr Biswas for a car next time and began running around the yard, shouting, when his father agreed. The next week, Mr Biswas bought Anand a miniature car and took it to Hanuman House, where Savi greeted him in tears: “They break it up.” The dollhouse was not only beaten up, but also completely disassembled, turned to firewood, by Shama.

Mr Biswas called for Shama; the family retrieved his “frightened yet determined” wife before scattering upstairs. Shama confessed that she broke the dollhouse, but said she did so merely for herself. Mr Biswas asked whether she “know[s] what I think of you and your family,” but she claimed not to care; he felt powerless and speechless. He told her to dress Savi, who screamed, and the house returned to its usual activity while she brought Savi’s clothes. Mr Biswas led his daughter outside and did not even think of Anand until he got to the High Street.

Mr Biswas began to cycle toward Green Vale, with Savi balanced on the crossbar, until “a Negro policeman” stopped them on the road and gave him a summons for riding with no license and no lights. They walked the rest of the way and “spent a miserable week” in Green Vale. Savi was isolated and got lunch only because a visiting old woman pitied her—but she never ate it, for she did not trust the strangers. She waited for the days to pass as Mr Biswas read to her from his novels and philosophy books, tried to draw her, and failed entirely to break through to her. Occasionally, she heard him argue with himself on their walks; they were both excited for her return to Hanuman House on Saturday, just in time for the first day of school on Monday.

That Saturday, Shama, Anand, and Myna came with Seth to fetch Savi. While doing his usual work with Seth, Mr Biswas heard Savi chat excitedly with her mother and felt betrayed by her. While Seth went to check on the fields, Mr Biswas sat inside, ignoring his family, even when Anand came inside to ask if he wanted some tea. He realized that “they had all forgotten the doll’s house.” When Anand did bring him tea, he thought about throwing it on Shama’s “fussy embroidered dress and smiling, uncertain face.” He drank it instead.

Seth came back, remarked that Mr Biswas had “a case,” and declared that he would take care of it. Mr Biswas stayed in his rocking chair until dinnertime, when he became more jovial and Shama more morose while he ate at the table. Shama went to eat with the children on the steps outside and began crying as Mr Biswas mocked her tears.

Shama told Mr Biswas that he does not understand: he simply walked into her family, paid no attention to what people were doing around him, and then “curse[d] me upside down.” All the sisters were angry about the dollhouse, beating their children whenever they even talked to Savi. She “had to satisfy them.” He asked whether “Chinta would break up a dolly-house Govind buy?” as Shama continued to cry for the rest of the night.

Shama asked how Savi acted during her week at Green Vale and was delighted to hear that she threw away the food from the old woman. Feeling better, Mr Biswas ignored Shama and started talking about the house he wanted to build. He tried to convince Savi to stay with him, but Shama took her and Anand home on Sunday night. Mr Biswas still felt alone but took comfort in the fact that “he had claimed Savi.”

Shama revealed she was pregnant yet again, filling Mr Biswas with terror about the future as he descended into perpetual fatigue and restlessness. He no longer wanted to visit Hanuman House—sometimes he turned back once he had already reached Arwacas—and “did everything as noisily as he could” but nothing in his life changed, not even the newspaper headlines on his wall, even as he felt “an alertness, an expectancy” in the world around him.

When Seth decided to take back twenty acres of land that he had been renting to laborers, he and Mr Biswas “went from hut to hut, breaking the news.” Seth seemed bored and inconvenienced, as though he was taking the laborers’ land for their own good, and told Mr Biswas not to trust them. The workers dug up some roots and Mr Biswas and Seth agreed to hire a watchman, but they gradually became hostile, mostly to Mr Biswas.

Mr Biswas began locking himself in his room at nights, doing everything he could to “destroy the stillness” of the room and world around him. He thought about the things in his room that could destroy his body—the rocking chair that could crush his hands and feet, a nail on the wall that could pierce his eyes—and started thinking about letters and their beautiful shapes instead.

At Hanuman House, a handful of the children married and moved out, including Shekhar, whose matching process was arduous and took him to live with his wife’s family. Mrs Tulsi left, too, buying three houses in Port of Spain (“one to live in, two to rent out”) while she looked after Owad there. The family fell into disarray—only Padma and Seth continued to win respect, and order only returned when Mrs Tulsi and Owad came home on the weekends. But holidays continued jovially, as before. Anand had begun going to the mission school, which he despised and feared, and his family started taunting him about it. This infuriated Mr Biswas, and he told Savi to call the rest of the Tulsis crab-catchers. Chinta and Mr Biswas argued—she wondered if he learned anything in school—until she complained to Shama, who failed to quell her husband’s temper.

One day, Mr Biswas found Anand kneeling in a corner of a room because, as Savi revealed, he was ashamed that he was too afraid to go to the “nasty, stinking” restroom at school. Everyone ridiculed him after school, and Shama beat him at home; but Mr Biswas recounted his troubles at Pundit Jairam’s house, and Anand stopped crying. Mr Biswas asked if Anand wanted to come with him—but received no reply—and told Shama to stop making him kneel.

Outside, Anand loitered next to Mr Biswas’s bicycle, saying nothing. Mr Biswas, “irritated by his shyness” but charmed by his fragility and deteriorating clothes, nevertheless cycled home alone in the dark.

The same week, Mr Biswas determined that he needed to begin working toward his house; otherwise, “nothing would arrest his descent into the void.” He picked a site nearby, behind some trees and across a ditch from the barracks, and on Sunday morning he talked to a black local builder named George Maclean (who was also a cabinet-maker, carpenter, blacksmith, painter, tin cup-maker, solderer, and egg-seller). Mr Biswas met the “eager and uncertain” Mr Maclean at his home and proposed “a little business,” slowly and carefully suggesting that he wanted a house built, for Trinidad was littered with unfinished houses and Mr Biswas could not yet afford the full cost of his.

Mr Maclean simply asked Mr Biswas if he wanted a house. Mr Biswas affirmed that he did, but only a “small and neat” two-bedroom construction. In fact, Mr Maclean predicted all the specific features that Mr Biswas would want included. Altogether, “it going to cost you about two hundred and fifty, three hundred dollars.”

A few days later, Mr Maclean came to see the proposed site and was surprised to find that it sloped. Mr Biswas fantasized about the garden he wanted to build in front and asked about making the concrete pillars “plastered and smooth.” Mr Maclean asked for 150 dollars up front, and Mr Biswas agreed to give him 100, then “a little bit more” every month, to build the house “little by little.” Mr Maclean talked about needing “good labour,” a word Mr Biswas found pleasant-sounding, and implored him to find more money as soon as possible.

Mr Biswas did not want to borrow money from Seth, Mrs Tulsi, or Misir, so he decided to try Ajodha, but found that he did not want to go, thought about going to Hanuman House, changed his mind back and forth, and took the bus to Pagotes.

Tara’s yard looked the same as ever, and although Ajodha was definitely busy milking the cows nearby, Mr Biswas wanted to speak with his aunt first. She looked ill and weakened, so Mr Biswas felt it wrong to ask directly for money. As Tara went into the kitchen, he noticed the bookcase—The Book of Comprehensive Knowledge was still there, with various magazines and catalogues littering the lower shelf.

Sitting on the verandah, Tara asked Mr Biswas to stay around for dinner and to talk about his children, and then the Tulsis, whom she and Ajodha always hated for being too devout and insufficiently modern. “In [Tara’s] clean, uncrowded, comfortable house, waiting for a meal he knew would be good,” Mr Biswas felt the same.

Rabidat, the younger of Bhandat’s sons, walked in; like his brother, Jagdat, “he was living with a woman of another race and had some children, no one knew how many.” Dressed casually in shorts and an unbuttoned shirt, with a “superb body,” he sat down, flipped through a film booklet, asked, “How is everything, Mohun?” and then shouted for food before Mr Biswas could say anything.

Ajodha walked onto the verandah, briefly exchanged words about a lorry with Rabidat, and then began chatting with Mr Biswas, who pretended he was visiting because Bipti was sick. They drank some milk from the cows, Mr Biswas said that his mother turned out to be fine, and then Ajodha asked about his job before commenting on his belly fat and making fun of Rabidat, who returned to show off his muscles. Ajodha grabbed Mr Biswas’s hand to poke himself in the stomach: “Hard as steel.” He explained that this was partially because he never used pillows.

Mr Biswas resumed talking about his steady job and future house, but Ajodha began talking about a supplement called Sanatogen. Rabidat asked Mr Biswas how he could afford the house, and Ajodha insisted that, unlike Rabidat, Mr Biswas “has been saving up.” Just like that, “Mr Biswas realized that the time to ask had gone for good.” Tara and Ajodha asked him about the house’s construction and continued to berate Rabidat, who began to cry, for not living up to Mr Biswas’s standards, then sent him away to check the takings in Ajodha’s theater.

Tara and Ajodha continued asking Mr Biswas about the house, but Bhandat’s older son, Jagdat, soon came to the verandah, dressed as usual in attire strikingly reminiscent of funeral-wear. Tara mentioned Mr Biswas’s house and, laughing, Jagdat asked he was inviting them all to the house-warming. They ate, separately, silently, and without enjoyment. Mr Biswas was optimistic that he might be able to talk with Tara alone after dinner, but Ajodha would not leave—and insisted he take a bag of oranges home for vitamin C, then added some avocado pears. Tara apologized for Ajodha’s temper, and Mr Biswas went to see him in his room, but Ajodha lay still in bed, awake, resting and unwilling to talk.

As Mr Biswas went to catch the bus on the main road, Jagdat tapped him on the shoulder and offered him a cigarette—nobody was allowed to smoke at Tara and Ajodha’s house—and explained that he and Ajodha both knew that Mr Biswas had come to “squeeze something out of the old man,” and that Ajodha “could smell a thing like that before you even start thinking about it.” Mr Biswas asked Jagdat if he was planning to build a house, too, and Jagdat reacted melodramatically, accusing Tara and Ajodha of “spreading stories about me.” Mr Biswas asked how many kids Jagdat had—“four or five,” he replied, “well, four.” He mentioned that Bhandat was living “in a ramshackle old house full of creole people” and “that son of a bitch not doing a damn thing to help him.”

Jagdat explains that Ajodha might help with vitamins but never with money—he barely paid his gardener and even docked his pay for a cup of tea. “That is the way they treat poor people,” Jagdat continues, but at least “God is good.” Mr Biswas knew it was time to leave but did not want to go, and Jagdat began talking about his children—like Mr Biswas, he “lived a divided life.” His woman was “Spanish […] but faithful.” Mr Biswas unceremoniously took the bus home.

Mr Maclean came by the barracks in the morning, explaining that he was ready to begin Mr Biswas’s house. Mr Biswas was ready to give him “a hundred” and “more at the end of the month,” but there would be “no concrete pillars.” Mr Maclean sent in the misshapen crapaud pillars that night, alongside nails and scantlings. He brought his tools and set up a rudimentary workbench, and then came his labor: “a muscular, full-blooded Negro” in tattered clothes named Edgar.

After work, Mr Biswas returned to the site to find Edgar digging holes for the pillars and Mr Maclean’s completed frame for the house nearby. Maclean explained that Edgar “does do the work of two men,” except never knows when to stop digging and likes to drink on the job. So Mr Maclean told Edgar to stop digging and sent him to buy some rum; he sprinted off to buy it and returned, still running, a few minutes later. Mr Maclean and Edgar began drinking with a toast “to you and the house, boss.”

The next day, Mr Maclean had another frame completed. Their costs puzzled Mr Biswas: their materials were 85 dollars but the remaining 15 dollars seemed insufficient to pay two men working at least eight days. After they left, Shama came to see the house and confirm her fear that Mr Biswas spent all his money on the construction. She was obviously pregnant by now and asked what this expenditure meant for the children; Mr Biswas figured that people in Hanuman House must have been worried about the possibility that he would take the children away from them, and she accused him of throwing his money away before insisting that Hari bless the house.

The next morning, a “constipatedly apathetic” Hari came to bless the house, “whining” his way through the prayers and offerings. Soon, “the house had begun to take shape,” but Mr Maclean said Mr Biswas needed to buy more materials before he could return.

Mr Biswas would go and look at the house’s skeleton every day, glad that it was not as crooked as he had anticipated. He wanted pitchpine floorboards, broad wall boards, and corrugated iron for the roof. But after two months, he only had 18 dollars more for the house, and Seth proposed that Mr Biswas buy cheap galvanized iron from their old brick-factory behind Hanuman House. So he went there, only to see that the iron in question was rusted and misshapen. Savi and Anand questioned whether it would suffice, but Seth lowered the price from five to three dollars, and Mr Biswas could not resist.

When he returned to Green Vale, Mr Biswas encountered Mr Maclean, who promised that the iron would be easy to fix up and paint. However, his tone was different. He suggested that pitchpine might burn easily and said a man has offered to sell him some cedar for just seven dollars; Mr Biswas hated cedar but agreed.

Anand, Savi, and Shama came on a lorry with the corrugated iron that weekend; none of the pieces fit together, but Mr Maclean promised to fix them and asked whether it might make sense to make rafters out of tree branches, since they would be invisible from the outside.

Mr Maclean started working, and Edgar was never to be seen again. Although the branches reminded Mr Biswas of a hut and the corrugated iron dropped rust all around the house, Mr Biswas was delighted to have a roof, which nearly covered the house and made it look habitable, although all its holes were obvious. Mr Maclean filled them with stones and pitch, which ran all over the roof in confused patterns. But it worked to keep the rain out, and nearby chickens started taking shelter in the empty house. Mr Maclean put in the floorboards and then again took leave until new materials arrived, having worked two weeks for eight dollars, which Mr Biswas found astonishing. Local children started playing in the house, leaving nails and footprints around it.

Mr Biswas also started getting threats from the dispossessed workers and started sleeping with a sword and a stick for protection. He also got a puppy, which he named Tarzan, and which immediately began terrorizing the local chickens (and eating their eggs). One day, in response, the poultry owners sent Tarzan home covered in chicken droppings.

Mr Biswas kept painting placards and started buying up cheap novels, but he could not bear to open their badly made covers, which reminded him of death. One night, Mr Biswas heard noises outside and waited by the door with his cutlass, only to find Tarzan damp and covered in egg outside. He started leaving his oil lamp on at night and worrying that someone might burn his house down; Shama and Seth said not to worry, but the house slowly “became greyer.”

One evening, tired of seeing everything as temporary, Mr Biswas decided to treat all his time as meaningful. After his evening bath and dinner, he took The Hunchback of Notre Dame off the shelf, broke its spine, and started reading, forgetting everything but the novel, imagining a clearing in the forest—and then “a billowing black cloud,” which startled him and made him wonder what he truly feared.

It was people that Mr Biswas feared, the people who filled every corner of the world, and he wondered why he managed to realize this so suddenly. Once “his whole past became a miracle of calm and courage,” the black cloud came rushing back, filling his mind, showing him that his life had been perfectly fine thus far, but he “spoiled it all by worry and fear.” And “now he would never more be able to go among people,” so “he surrendered to the darkness.”

In the morning, Mr Biswas soon remembered his fear and decided that it must not have left him. The world outside had people. He recited the newspapers and prayed, but could not escape people, and opened the door to greet Tarzan, to whom he explained his fear and confessed, “I am not whole.” He pet Tarzan and remembered enjoying it in the past, when he was whole. But now, he was overcome with fear and “grief for a happy life never enjoyed and now lost.”

The next day, Mr Biswas found a momentary respite from his despair as he started each element of his daily routine. The laborers were somehow no longer “negligible, non-descript people” but full individuals. Speaking with them, he initially forgot his fear but quickly discovered “another relationship spoiled, another piece of the present destroyed.” In the afternoon, he realized that he did not fear children, but only felt grief at the fact that they would experience “good and beautiful” things he never had. When he returned to his room, he got into bed “and forced himself to cry for all his lost happiness.”

Mr Biswas was powerless to stop his questioning; even the newspapers made him afraid. Eventually, he decided he had to ignore it and decided to go to Hanuman House. Everyone he passed on his way filled him with panic, which was normal, already “part of the pain of living.” But every single thing in his path that used to make him happy now led him to fear, and he felt he was destroying the present and past alike by merely looking at them. Afraid of deceiving his children, he returned to Green Vale.

Mr Biswas thought that, if he repeated the night before, he might banish his unhappiness. So after his bath and dinner, he sat down to read The Hunchback of Notre Dame—but kept remembering his fear. His “period of lucidity” diminished every morning, the calm before the questioning diminished every time he encountered anything at all, and ultimately any delay vanished, “and all action was irrelevant and futile.” He still found it better to be out in the world than alone, and he began to hate the emptiness of Sunday afternoons.

Mr Biswas looked for signs that his sudden “corruption” might dissipate—perhaps his bedsheets were not scattered in the mornings, or his fingernails were not bitten—but these occasional good signs never persisted. One night, while he was biting his nails, a part of one of his teeth broke off, and he threw it out the window.

Visiting one Mr Biswas Saturday, Seth asked what was wrong. Later, Mr Maclean called to say that he had found some more bargain wood for a wall. Asphalt was falling from the roof and the cedar floorboards were shrinking—the new boards were also cedar—but Mr Maclean was unsurprised at Mr Biswas’s apathy. He built a bedroom wall, two doors (cedar planks instead of the panels Mr Biswas wanted), and a window.

Mr Biswas awoke from his dreams throughout the night. In the first, black threads chased him from the Tulsi Store to Green Vale—the same threads of asphalt that fell down from the house’s roof, and he could not help remembering that “Hari blessed it.” In the next, from atop a hill, he saw a crying woman—who was “Shama, Anand, Savi, his mother [Bipti]”—seeking help but wanted her to go away. Tarzan was outside the door with an injured paw, and Mr Biswas remarked, “you like eggs too much.”

A few nights later, Mr Biswas awoke to the watchman reporting that “they set fire to Dookinan land,” a small plot across a ditch from the rest of the fields. Mr Biswas made the laborers cut the cane separating his land from the rest, and they did before putting out the fire. Afterward, “Mr Biswas realized that for more than an hour he had not questioned himself,” but the fear immediately came back—still, this proved to him that “he was going to get better soon.” Yet this “was the first of many disappointments,” moments of freedom that he eventually learned to stop counting.

Shama brought the children to Green Vale that Christmas; Mr Biswas dreaded their arrival, hoped that an accident would stop them and started plotting to kill them and himself. When they arrived, his plans suddenly seemed absurd, and he resigned himself to “the deception and especial pain” he would inevitably suffer at their presence. He envied and soon began hating Shama: her pregnancy, her noises, her care for the children, and her clothes. In the bed, Mr Biswas separated himself from Anand with a wall of pillows.

Mr Biswas barely left bed the next day, wanting to do nothing and feigning malaria. All that week he remained fatigued, did not want to leave his room, became constipated, and could only relax in bed. He watched Shama “closely, with suspicion, hatred and nausea,” never speaking to her directly.

One morning, Shama checked Mr Biswas for fever—he had none and hated that her hands smelled of vegetables. She asked if there was “something on [his] mind,” and he said there were “lots of little black clouds.” They argued and he started relishing it before recoiling out of fear and realizing that “he was dying” because of his family. He yelled at them to “get out!” and never come back inside the room or touch him.

Shama stood in front of the door; Mr Biswas opened the window, and he screamed and cried as he tried to push himself through it. With Tarzan, Savi, and Anand right below him, he tried to kick Shama and struck her in the stomach. Women from the barracks came to help Shama, and one of them, who “had often been beaten and had witnessed many wife-beatings,” told the family to pack up and go.

As his family packed, for some reason, Mr Biswas insisted that Anand stay. Anand pet Tarzan in silence, while each of his parents asked him to go with them; when Mr Biswas held out a box of crayons, Anand said he would stay, and then nothing more. Holding Myna, Shama walked to the road with Savi. Mr Biswas offered to give the crayons to Anand, who refused. When Mr Biswas asked why Anand chose to say, he replied, “because they was going to leave you alone.” They barely spoke for the rest of the day.

After Shama left, Mr Biswas reverted from fatigue to restlessness and turmoil. Anand spent one day in the fields with his father but then decided to stay home with Tarzan and the toys Mr Biswas made him, and the father and son drew pictures together at night. Mr Biswas taught Anand about God (the boy’s true father), gravity, and “people called Coppernickus and Galilyo.” On Saturday, Seth could not convince Anand to go home. At times, thinking he had ague (a fever), Mr Biswas made Anand recite hymns in Hindi, which he did in a fright. But Mr Biswas’s science lessons seemed to compensate for the boy’s suffering.

For “many reasons,” Mr Biswas left the barracks for his house’s lone finished room. He hated the noise of the others living in the barracks and wondered whether he might find a better mindset starting the new year in his new house. While “he feared solitude more than people,” he felt comfortable moving because he had Anand. He cleaned the small room, although the asphalt snakes were stuck on the floor, and almost completely filled it with his furniture. While it was inconvenient to lack a kitchen and return to the barracks for water and the latrine, “the incompleteness of the house didn’t depress him.”

Mr Biswas dreamed frequently of the asphalt snakes, and he jumped screaming from his bed one night after one actually fell on him. He cut them all down, but they grew again, and he started feeling sick. He wrapped himself in his flour sack sheets, rocked in his chair, accidentally crushing Tarzan’s tail. He made Anand repeat “Rama Rama Sita Rama” and asked whether the boy wanted to leave—which was “the most oppressive of all his fears.”

One afternoon, two men approached Anand in the yard and brought him with them to the road, claiming to be “digging for treasure” They started puling pennies out of the gravel while they waited for Mr Biswas to return. When Anand claimed that the driver was “not my father really,” the men sent him away, then almost took the cents he found on the road and tried to beat him when he refused—but Anand threatened to tell Mr Biswas, and they let him go. Anand ran home and told Mr Biswas that the fat man, Dinnoo, “was trying to thief my money.” The other man claimed that Seth promised them work, but Mr Biswas sent them away.

One morning, Anand got up—earlier than Mr Biswas, as usual—and, with a blank expression and quivering mouth, showed his father Tarzan’s dead body on the staircase. The dog’s neck and stomach were cut open; Anand screamed that he wanted to leave, and Mr Biswas promised to take him to Hanuman House the next day. Filled with anxiety at the prospect of isolation, he was trying to buy time. Both forgot the dog, Mr Biswas because of the “deeper pain” of his son’s imminent departure and Anand because he wanted to go immediately.

Mr Biswas buried Tarzan in the yard. The sky darkened, with thunderstorms looming by four in the afternoon and no time to take Anand back that day. They cooked and listened to the rain; Mr Biswas said that Anand would have to return the colored pencils if he wanted to go back to Hanuman House; the boy did not want them, and Mr Biswas tried unsuccessfully to convince him to keep them.

“The real rain” followed a roaring wind and struck the leaky roof so loudly that Mr Biswas and Anand could not hear one another. The water flowed down to the road, lightning lit up the sky, and the thunder was frightening. Anand found his father “writing with his finger on his head” in bed, then played with a winged ant, since he was “still officially annoyed.”

The rain suddenly lightened, and Mr Biswas repeated “Rama Rama Sita Rama” in bed. “A fresh cycle” of heavy rains began, and Anand noticed that the room was full of winged ants falling from the ceiling and biting black ants crawling on the walls. Mr Biswas kept asking, “you see them?” and Anand opened the door to see two men taking shelter under huge leaves outside. The biting ants carried the winged ants’ bodies away; Mr Biswas took the cutlass and Anand the walking-stick. They said “Rama Rama Sita Rama” together, then Mr Biswas started cursing people from his past (mostly the Tulsis) before the rain slowed, Anand opened the door, and the men were gone.

The heavy rain returned, and Anand started killing the ants with the walking-stick until one bit his hand—they were climbing up the stick, so he threw it away. The roof shook and lighting struck the house, breaking the window, extinguishing the oil lamp, lighting everything up, and leading Anand to shriek. The rain and wind came inside, blowing open the door and sending the room into disarray. Anand saw a man outside, holding a lamp and a cutlass “like a miracle.” The man, Ramakhilawan, who lived in the barracks, cried “my poor little calf!” as he came inside, pulled on the window (which the wind slammed shut), and relighted the oil lamp.