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

With Owad gone, Mrs Tulsi moved back to Arwacas; Mr Biswas fixed up his garden and wondered how long he would be able to stay at the house. He no longer had an audience to whom he could address his stories, and Shama seldom cared about his work. They heard that Hanuman House was falling into disarray, with Mrs Tulsi losing her authority and no longer interested in the family. Seth’s power was too superficial to fix the family’s conflicts, and particularly the sisters’ distrust of Shekhar. They even heard that Seth was looking to buy property.

When Shama and the children went to Hanuman House for Christmas, they felt like “complete strangers.” The Tulsi Store and people of Arwacas felt strangely provincial, and there were no gifts or festivities, just Chinta’s “tasteless and rust-rippled” ice cream. The next morning, Shekhar came with sweets, but the sisters felt abandoned by him and blamed his Christian wife, who was educated and modern, calling herself Dorothy and outshining them all in housekeeping and child-rearing. In fact, they all pitied Shekhar for having married her, but Mr Biswas always got along with her. Savi no longer wanted to return to Hanuman House for Christmas.

The Sentinel had gone from Port of Spain’s third most popular newspaper to the second, after only the Guardian, which led its owners to feel embarrassed at its frivolity. Mr Burnett became more and more stressed until he was sacked, which he revealed to Mr Biswas over Chinese food. When Mr Biswas returned to work, he was agitated and worried about his own role in the Sentinel’s frivolity, expecting to be sacked after more than four years. His fears multiplied: if he lost his job, would his children have to return to Hanuman House? Where might he live? But Mr Burnett came and went, and Mr Biswas stayed.

Soon thereafter, “the new régime started at the Sentinel.” Facts and seriousness took precedence, and Mr Biswas was transferred to the Court Shorts page, tasked with writing formulaic reports on what the prosecution, defense, and magistrate said in court. Everyone’s writing style changed, and the department’s new Rules for Reporters, full of banal slogans like “REPORT NOT DISTORT,” instructed them exactly how to behave and what to wear, even at funerals, about which Mr Biswas claimed he could write a much better “bright little feature.” He called it all “just another capitalist rag,” and he was glad that his name was no longer printed.

Mr Biswas had to report the scores of a series of cricket matches, which he did not care about and ruined his weekends. He thought about starting his own magazine, rambled at length about people from work, and took as many days off as he could without raising suspicion, although he claimed he wanted to be fired. He harassed the boys who played cricket in the street and read books about political injustices until he found Dickens, which “ridiculed and diminished” all his own problems and gave him the strength to continue plodding along. He told Anand, “I don’t want you to be like me,” and they saw the vulnerability in one another and felt a mutual responsibility.

Soon, Mr Biswas was assigned to write weekly features—serious ones, in which he had to “look beyond the facts to the official figures” and ignore suffering to praise the powerful. He lost all sense of feeling and enjoyment in his writing, avoided reading his work on Sundays, continued to expect a sacking, and barely interacted with his aloof bosses.

The garden began to deteriorate and prices began to rise because of the war; Mr Biswas’s wages increases barely covered the difference, and food, in short supply, got worse. He and Shama started arguing, as much as they had at The Chase, and the city began to feel monotonous on the midnight walks he took to avoid her.

One day, Anand came into Mr Biswas’s room and stuttered his way through a story: “Once upon a time there was a man who […] Who, whatever you do for him, wasn’t satisfied.” Mr Biswas laughed and Anand, humiliated, refused to speak to him for days. He would not eat or leave his room and complained that other boys made fun of him—and his father—at school. Mr Biswas promised that they could return to Hanuman House whenever they wanted.

Mr Biswas started taking the kids to Tara and Ajodha’s beautiful new house, but they returned weekend after weekend to their dull and gloomy lives in Port of Spain. Shama only went once, and she was morose there, feeling that Mr Biswas’s family did not like or care about her. The children never wanted to visit her family, and she started going less and less. But she was too shy to make new friends, so she became close with the woman who now occupied Owad’s old room and soon “the house became Shama’s.”

Anand was miserable during the week, occupied with tedious memorization for the “exhibition class, where no learning mattered except that which led to good examination results.” He and his fellow exhibition pupils lived more through compositions than their daily lives. He started avoiding school and giving up on his private lessons, while his cousins were taking their brahmin initiations, and he adamantly but subtly fought to join them. He began performing prayers and got himself initiated during the holidays, then quickly shed his devotion.

Near the end of the year, Mr Biswas received a letter from Mr Burnett, in Chicago, trying to convince him to “give America a try.” He dismissed it as a joke but felt honored that Mr Burnett had written him, began drafting a lengthy reply, tore it up when he realized “how bitter he appeared” in it, and never did end up writing or hearing again from Mr Burnett.

After the school term, the children were suddenly excited to go to Hanuman House. Shama sewed everyone new clothes, which never made it to a visit. Mr Biswas came home from work one day to see his roses destroyed. Seth was standing outside with two black workers, and Mr Biswas nearly threw a rock at them until “large hot gritty fingers” grabbed his wrist and stopped him. Seth accused him of scaring the children and said he did not even realize that these were rose trees.

In fact, Seth owned the house, and after he and Mr Biswas exchanged some more insults, Mr Biswas went inside and started breaking things. Seth’s workers started building a shed for his lorries in the yard; Anand refused his father’s offer of a walk and went upstairs to find much of the furniture slightly damaged. Soon thereafter, the furniture company came and replaced it all—it fell under the warranty—and Seth’s lorries began occupying the shed.