A House for Mr Biswas: Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Mr Biswas was “released” from the Shorthills house after all the Tulsis’ transportation options deteriorated beyond repair, so he moved his family back to Mrs Tulsi’s newly-vacant house in Port of Spain. He put a “FOR RENT OR SALE” sign outside the Shorthills house. The Tuttles, Govind and Chinta’s family, and a widow named Basdai also came to Port of Spain; the Tuttles took most of the house, Govind and Chinta had a room but spent much of their money on expensive suits, and Basdai moved into the servant room, leaving two rooms for Mr Biswas and his family.

In Port of Spain, W.C. Tuttle played a gramophone incessantly and quarreled silently with Govind over parking space; Basdai started mediating the family’s arguments. Despite his brahmanic ways, “W.C. Tuttle was all for modernity,” filling his house with elegant furniture that inevitably caused more arguments still. One day, Shama ordered a glass cabinet that promptly broke on the front steps and “became another of her possessions which were regarded as jokes.”

Realizing that they could rely less and less on the Tulsis, the widows at Shorthills started sending their children to live with Basdai. The overpopulated house and quarreling children quickly infuriated Mr Biswas and his children, leading them all to various ailments, as Mrs Tulsi started sending in her friends’ children from Arwacas, too. Unable to bear the house, Mr Biswas spent as much time as possible hiding away in the office.

Shama revealed that the family was again unable to live off Mr Biswas’s salary, even though he was spending his days interviewing rural farmers who “treated him as an incredibly superior being” even though they were buying land, building mansions, and sending their children abroad to college. Govind and W.C. Tuttle continued to provide transport for the Americans and started growing wealthy. For the first time, Mr Biswas started telling his children about his own childhood, and especially the buried treasure and oil that he never got to capitalize on—he blamed everyone imaginable and wished for another job, even if it meant he had to work for the Americans. Shama mocked Mr Biswas, saying he was too unfit to do manual labor.

News even spread to Anand’s school, where he was shamed for admitting Mr Biswas’s lower-paying job, and the fact that he called his parents “Bap and Mai” and not “Mummy and Daddy,” like Vidiadhar.

Mr Biswas knew he would never leave the paper, and as it started losing readers, it appointed him the investigator for its new Deserving Destitutes Fund. He began visiting “the mutilated, the defeated, the futile and the insane” in their dilapidated houses. He imagined that he might qualify, too. People sometimes accused him of exploiting them, stole his bicycle parts, and accosted him for money (which he started to carry around and charged the paper as a business expense). Soon, he learned to “distinguish the applications of the fraudulent.” Because his superiors at the paper never interfered with him, he had absolute discretion over the fund and gained “responsibility and power.” To his delight, people even offered him bribes (which he refused out of distrust). He did, however, take a cheap dining table from one of them, which ate up the last remaining free space in his room.

One day, Shama woke Mr Biswas with the news that “some people” were visiting—he worried that they might be eager Destitutes. In fact, it was the Shorthills widows, who were wondering if he might be able to write them into his column, but he felt he had to refuse—they were family, and they were clearly not destitute enough. Soon, Bhandat also sent him a request, and Mr Biswas went to his disgusting tenement surrounded by smelly factories. Bhandat gave him a revolting kiss, and Mr Biswas recoiled, afraid and ashamed, before trying to explain that Bhandat was not destitute enough and realizing that he had fallen deaf. Bhandat’s mistress brought him tea, which he spilled on the bed, and he flew into a rage, yelling at her in Hindi (which she did not understand). Mr Biswas rushed home and read “his unfinished Escape stories” on the latrine.

Mr Biswas started taking his children to Pagotes on Sundays, and quickly struck up “an easy, relaxing relationship” with Jagdat: although they did not particularly get along or care what one another had to say, they would smoke and drink together in order to break Ajodha’s rules (and the law that closed rumshops on Sunday morning). They would always get drunk, then take one of Ajodha’s vehicles to the beach or river, although Jagdat was an “acute” drunk driver and always managed to sober up immediately upon returning to Ajodha’s house. At their lunches, Ajodha would complain about his business problems and request Mr Biswas’s help.

Shama and the children soon realized what Mr Biswas was up to, and they were often left alone to contemplate the house’s atmosphere of tension and conflict. One day, when Anand asked Ajodha to donate to his fund for Polish refugee children, Ajodha was insulted and replied, “who collecting for you?” Gradually, the family stopped visiting Pagotes.

Back in Port of Spain, Chinta and Govind were singing the Ramayana to drown out the sound of W.C. Tuttle’s gramophone. After hours of this, when Mr Biswas would bang on their doors to quiet them down, Govind occasionally shouted insults back through the door. Indeed, Govind “had become the terror of the house.” His face became contorted and he gained weight; when he wasn’t singing the Ramayana, he took to threatening people at random; whenever he set his sights on Mr Biswas, the two men’s children would fight in turn downstairs.

W.C. Tuttle was “a useful ally” in these fights, in part because, like Mr Biswas, he saw the Tulsis as “barbarians.” In fact, he saw himself as the guardian of brahmin purity and Western civilization alike, and his only fight with Mr Biswas was the quarrel about possessions, which the latter “lost by default” when he ran out of space for anything more. Their next major conflict was “the picture war;” Mr Biswas discovered he liked framing pictures, and W.C. Tuttle started posting dozens of pictures of himself, and a few of his family, all around his section of the house.

Govind was unfazed by the other goings-on in the house and kept up his threats, which led “the readers and learners” to hope he might die in a car crash—he won a driver’s safety award instead. But soon, he started taking out all his anger on Chinta, whom he beat often and mercilessly. This led the family to respect Chinta, who gained “a matriarchal dignity” from the beatings.

Chinta and Govind’s son Vidiadhar began a rivalry with Anand at school, where they were both in the exhibition class. One day, they ran into one another while they were getting their milk at the Dairies and refused to talk—Anand was delighted that Vidiadhar did not know how to order properly. They both thought the other cut them in line, so they never spoke again until adulthood. Their siblings started arguing over who had read more books.

Meanwhile, “Anand lived a life of pure work,” taking private lessons before and after school and doing homework whenever he was not in lessons. So did the rest of the exhibition class, although they all pretended they had other interests and parroted their fathers’ opinions on horseracing or films. One day, he wanted to go to the theater after school instead of doing his homework and managed to convince Shama to give him the requisite change.

Anand brought Mr Biswas to the London Theatre, where a mob pushed them through the entrance, and they realized they were short money for the tickets—there were no half-price tickets on Mondays—and both insisted that the other should go inside with their lone ticket. Mr Biswas went inside; Anand ran home and lay in bed, Shama yelled at him, and Mr Biswas inexplicably walked inside shortly after, writing in his Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare book that he would buy Anand a bicycle if he won the exhibition. The next morning, Mr Biswas awoke in an anxious fit before sunrise, and Anand told his schoolmates that he “hated [the film] so much I left it before it began.”

On the Saturday morning of the exhibition exam, Anand crammed while Vidiadhar did puja; the family gave each boy various accessories and pens, good-luck charms and fresh formal clothes. The boys and their fathers chatted outside the school—the others noticed the “H” on Govind’s license plate, which revealed that his car was a taxi; seeking to save face, Anand forced the anxious Mr Biswas to leave. After the three-hour exam and the ceremonious collection of papers, Vidiadhar looked delighted and proud, but Anand was “dejected, exhausted and irritable.” He and Mr Biswas went to the Dairies, which he did not enjoy, and returned for the afternoon session of the exam. Mr Biswas worried about Anand’s scribblings on the question papers.

That night, when Anand returned home from watching a football match with his classmates, he was sure he had failed the exam—he realized he forgot to answer the easy question on homonyms and synonyms that he was saving for last. The Biswas children despaired; Govind and Chinta’s rejoiced at Vidiadhar’s apparent success, despite his lack of private lessons. The next Monday, all the boys had similar tales of disastrous mistakes.

At home, Mr Biswas produced a letter from an English judge who had read his Sentinel articles and wanted him to join a literary club. He went on Friday evenings, when the rest of the widows from Shorthills came to Port of Spain. Mr Biswas felt “a little out of his depth” at the club, but at least he drank well. He needed to read a work of his own and started another short story—but, as usual, never finished it, for news came that his mother, Bipti, had died.

Mr Biswas brought Shama and the children to Pratap’s house, where he was surprised at the huge crowd of relatives he had never met. He felt jealousy, not grief. Shama dutifully wept, Dehuti grasped at the other mourners’ clothes in a sort of penance for her illegitimate marriage, and Ramchand helped plan the funeral arrangements. Mr Biswas glanced at Bipti’s body and then wandered around, wishing he could be alone, feeling that he had lost something from the past and resenting his wife and children as “alien affectations.”

At home, Mr Biswas withdrew from his family and began writing incessantly. Shama tried to comfort him and finally learned he was writing to Doctor Rameshwar, who signed Bipti’s death certificate after cursing and berating the family. Realizing his family would offer him comfort and support rather than ridicule and shame, he began drafting and redrafting the letter with Anand’s help, turning it into “a broad philosophical essay on the nature of man” that quoted liberally from Shakespeare, the New Testament, and the Bhagavad Gita.

Mr Biswas still felt the pain of having failed to know, honor, or love Bipti; soon, he started another letter, this time addressed to her, remembering her clearing the brush in Shorthills and welcoming him home in his childhood. He felt that “he was whole again” and read his letter to the Friday literary group. During his reading he grew emotional and then ashamed; he came home and was “noisily sick” in the latrine outside.

Mr Biswas and Shama decided that, regardless of his examination results, Anand must go to college—for one, Vidiadhar was already studying college subjects—but worried about how to find the money. One day, as Mr Biswas tried to catch up on his Destitutes column at the office, a reporter brought him the exhibition results: Anand was third in all of Trinidad; he won the scholarship. Mr Biswas gloated for the rest of the day.

In fact, seven of the twelve scholarships went to boys from Anand’s school; everyone was surprised that the overall winner was “a Negro boy of astonishing size” from the same school, who seldom crammed and preferred to brag about his sexual exploits with older women. All twelve boys assembled for a photograph and spent the rest of the day wandering around town, taunting “copulating couples” in the gardens and visiting the college they would attend the next term.

Soon thereafter, the Tuttle children stepped up their own studying, and Vidiadhar was demoralized to learn that he did not even pass the exam. Distraught, Chinta stopped feeding Vidiadhar and started threatening everyone in the household. The Tuttles asked Anand to tutor them and gave him “the only presents he had for winning the exhibition”—a dollar and an “unreadable” W.C. Tuttle book. Nobody mentioned the bicycle, and the school did not even deliver its promised prize: both were blamed on the war. Despite the scarcity, Christmastime was still busy and cheerful. Best of all, the maligned Doctor Rameshwar returned Mr Biswas’s letter to his office, and Mr Biswas compiled his booklet of Twelve Open Letters.