A House for Mr Biswas: Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Mr Biswas was the college’s most enthusiastic parent; he decorated all of Anand’s books and was the only one to fill out the homework validation sheet everyone else ignored. Myna, the next in line, passed her examination but did not win the scholarship. Gradually, Mr Biswas stopped worrying about his own future and thought only of Anand’s. However, one day, he woke up and realized that he had come to see his unhappy circumstances as inevitable, and particularly that he had “lost the vision of the house.” He sank back into depression and everything continued as usual in the house: the children went to school, the parents fought and worked, the widows tried and abandoned new business ideas.

However, “suddenly, quite suddenly, [Mr Biswas] was revivified.” As the Sentinel’s resident expert on social issues, Mr Biswas was tasked with interviewing the head of the new Community Welfare Department; he walked out of the interview not with an article but with a job that paid fifty dollars more every month than the Sentinel. He found the department head, a white woman named Miss Logie, attractive and graceful, more powerful and ambitious than any Indian woman he had met. Just when he had stopped daydreaming about finding another job, one came to him. He was delighted at the job security of government work and wrote a sincere, gracious letter of resignation to the Sentinel; the paper’s reply was dictated, five lines typed by a secretary.

Mr Biswas found Miss Logie a remarkably hospitable boss but was frightened when she asked to meet his family—he said they all had mumps (some of the boarders did). She asked if he might want to bring them on a vacation to her house at Sans Souci, and he eagerly agreed, coming to see that holidays might be something more than merely “days on which he did not go to work.” Shama agreed, and they began secretly preparing for the vacation—although the rest of the household quickly found out.

Miss Logie came to pick up the Biswases in her Buick, but Mr Biswas feared that she might stumble upon the eccentrics in his family and ensured that everyone was ready to go early. The boarding children swarmed around them; fortunately, when she arrived, Miss Logie stayed in her car while the chauffeur directed the passengers and handled the luggage. Mr Biswas distracted Miss Logie with conversation; she said she felt ill and did not want to go all the way to Sans Souci, but changed her mind when Mr Biswas clarified that the other children were just orphans and not coming with them.

From Miss Logie’s Buick, the familiar landscape of North Trinidad looked better than ever, and Shama chatted endlessly with Miss Logie in the front seat; Mr Biswas was astonished that his wife “was so well-informed and had such violent prejudices.” They visited one beach and continued on to Sans Souci, where Miss Logie turned back, and the Biswases clustered in the same room of her enormous but foreboding house. The next day, the family visited beaches, picked fruit and nuts from trees, and began to enjoy the house’s solitude and comfort. But, just as soon as they arrived, the Buick came to take them back, and “they dreaded returning to what they knew.” Back in Port of Spain, the family pretended to keep up as usual before starting to interrogate the Biswases about their trip, and “the house seemed lower, darker, suffocating.”

At his new job, Mr Biswas neither helped villagers develop nor enjoyed performances of song and dance; instead, he went door-to-door conducting surveys, and could even get his expenses reimbursed after filling out a series of forms. However, he did not save as much money as he wanted to; he spent it on Savi’s schooling and better food, Anand’s asthma treatment and higher-quality suits for himself, which he quickly started obsessing about and showing off whenever possible.

One day, Mr Biswas decided to attend “an inter-colonial cricket match.” He had no interest in the game but wanted to appear with a tin of cigarettes and matchbox, as was fashionable. He came to the mostly empty stadium late, said “excuse me” in the appropriate fashion as he made his way to his seat, and sat down to thunderous applause from all sides as everyone in the stands stood up, celebrated the end of the match, and left. (He followed.)

Mr Biswas soon discovered that his data did not add up, for he was studying “a society that had no rules and patterns.” Soon, his 200 questionnaires were spread around the house, and he returned to cursing everything he could connect to his dissatisfaction. The real cause was that politicians and businessmen were penning attacks on his department, which they saw as a waste of money, and Mr Biswas had even begun to fear reading the newspapers every morning. He started visiting the Sentinel because “with every improvement in his condition, every saving, he felt more vulnerable: it was too good to last.”

Mr Biswas sent in his reports, and the government gave him a car, which he decided not to mention to anyone else in the house. Govind complained that the new “matchbox” took his parking spot while Mr Biswas read the manual. He soon took his family back to the beach at Belinda, on the way to Sans Souci, but their ride was nowhere near as satisfying as their first visit; they decided to visit Ajodha on the way, and both he and Jagdat were skeptical of the new car’s sturdiness and safety. On their way back from the beach, the car briefly got stuck in the sand and the whole family was convinced it had been ruined.

W.C. Tuttle never mentioned Mr Biswas’s suits, car, or holiday, but after the Biswases had settled into their new lifestyle, he “with one stroke wiped out all Mr Biswas’s advantages” by having Basdai inform them that he bought his own house in Port of Spain. Mr Biswas became irritable and combative, failing to comfort himself with the knowledge that they would reclaim space in the house and garage. But, in fact, the Tuttles did not plan to leave yet—they had to evict the tenants living in their other house, so Mr Biswas started hoping at the same time that W.C. Tuttle would fail in his case, which he did until he convinced the City Council to force repairs and moved his family out with little fanfare.

Soon, Mrs Tulsi announced that she was moving into the spare rooms, and everyone fell into misery, anticipating her illnesses and arbitrary orders. She brought Miss Blackie, Sushila, and of course the expected, ambiguous ailments that left her mostly bedridden, in need of attention, and profoundly bored. Sushila was charged with caring for Mrs Tulsi and bearing the brunt of her wrath; Miss Blackie and a visiting Jewish doctor were her confidants, and the other sisters visited periodically out of obligation. She was much nicer to the sons-in-law and ordered the children around, making them perform for her enjoyment and insisting that they take her favorite remedies. Old friends visited from Arwacas and pundits—a different one every time—came to perform pujas until she tired of Hinduism and switched to Catholic rituals.

Soon, absorbed in her illness, Mrs Tulsi started insisting that Myna pick out and kill her imaginary lice; Myna did this reluctantly, pretending to find one every so often, and soon became her grandmother’s favorite. When the newly wealthy Shekhar visited with Dorothy, his Presbyterian wife, the family recoiled and blamed her for his modern dress and pretensions. After going on vacations to Venezuela and Colombia for some time, Dorothy insisted on speaking Spanish whenever the Tulsis were around so they could not understand her. And Shekhar, who was busy campaigning against the Community Welfare Department, would always ridicule and provoke Mr Biswas on his way out.

It was finally time for Owad to return from England, and everyone was thrilled to see him, for “absence had turned him into a legend.” While Mr Biswas was also excited to see him, he also felt vaguely threatened, as though he would have to leave. He had about 700 dollars by the end of the year—more then ever but not enough to get a loan for a real house. He combed through listings and even went to an auction, to no avail, until one day Shama affirmed that Mrs Tulsi was kicking them out and would allow them to live in one of her decrepit, roofless tenements. He resolved to never speak to her again.

One evening, Mrs Tulsi stopped Mr Biswas on the verandah to ask about Anand’s health before mentioning Owad’s flowery letters about England and affection for Mr Biswas. To his surprise, she asked whether he was planning to come back to the house, and he eagerly agreed. This pleased him and Shama, although he was angry to have “fallen into Mrs Tulsi’s trap and shown himself grateful to her.” He recognized that she was manipulating him, as she had since the day they met in the Tulsi Store; he grew even angrier than before, and occasionally violent, making him as much an outsider as Govind and leading everyone to yearn even more for Owad’s return.

The Biswases moved their furniture into the tenement and spent some of their time there, the rest in the house that was now Mrs Tulsi’s. Mr Biswas coordinated politics in whole villages during the day, only to return to his rotting tenement at night. One of his assignments was running a “‘leadership’ course” in Arwacas, where he stayed at Hanuman House with its sole inhabitant, a widow Seth never found out about. In fact, “Seth had acted wildly” since Padma’s death, losing his esteem from the townspeople and getting caught in another “insuranburn” scam before giving up on his dreams of power. Because of this, the Tulsis no longer mattered in Arwacas.

With Hanuman House silent and decaying, Mr Biswas made an office out of his old room and remembered his past agony there, as well as the lack of belonging that allowed him to be independent; this freedom was replaced with an encumbering dependence on others who were also dependent on him.

Mrs Tulsi’s renovations in Port of Spain went slowly, as she underpaid and “regularly abused and dismissed” various contractors, while Miss Blackie comforted her by affirming how unreliable “my people” were. After three months, the work was done, and Mr Biswas was allowed to return; he was confined to a single room as the whole family shuffled to provide space for Owad, but he was still relieved. He thought about his children’s futures and particularly lamented his neglect of Savi, who “had grown reserved and grave.” He realized that he “missed their childhoods.”