House for Mister Biswas Part 4

'Tell me about Dehuti,' he said.

Bipti had little to say. No one had been to see Dehuti; Tara had vowed never to mention her name again. Bipti spoke as if she herself deserved every reproach for Dehuti's behaviour; and though she declared she could have nothing more to do with Dehuti, her manner suggested that she had to defend Dehuti not only against Tara's anger, but also Mr Biswas's.

But he felt no anger or shame. When he asked about Dehuti he was only remembering the girl who pressed his dirty clothes to her face and wept when she thought her brother was dead.

Bipti sighed. 'I don't know what Tara is going to say now. You had better go and see her yourself.'

And Tara was not angry. True to her vow, she did not mention Dehuti. Ajodha, to whom Jairam had given only a hint of Mr Biswas's misdemeanour, laughed in his high-pitched, breathless way and tried to get Mr Biswas to tell exactly what had happened. Mr Biswas's embarra.s.sment delighted Ajodha and Tara, until he was laughing too; and then, in the cosy back verandah of Tara's house though it had mud walls it stood on proper pillars, had a neat thatched roof and wooden ledges on the half-walls, and was bright with pictures of Hindu G.o.ds he told about the bananas, bl.u.s.teringly at first, but when he noticed that Tara was giving him sympathy he saw his own injury very clearly, broke down and wept, and Tara held him to her bosom and dried his tears. So that the scene he had pictured as taking place with his mother took place with Tara.

Ajodha had bought a motorbus and opened a garage, and it was in the garage that Alec worked, no longer wearing red bodices or peeing blue, but doing mysterious greasy things. Grease blackened his hairy legs; grease had turned his white canvas shoes black; grease blackened his hands even beyond the wrist; grease made his short working trousers black and stiff. Yet he had the gift, which Mr Biswas admired, of being able to hold a cigarette between greasy fingers and greasy lips without staining it. His lips still twisted easily and his small humorous eyes still squinted; but the cheeks had already sunk on his small square face and he now had a perpetual air of abstraction and debauch.

Mr Biswas did not join Alec in the garage. Tara sent him to the rumshop. This had been Ajodha's first business venture and had provided the money for some of his subsequent exploits. But, with Ajodha's growing success, the importance of the rumshop had declined and it was now run by his brother Bhandat, about whom there were unpleasant rumours: Bhandat apparently drank, beat his wife and kept a mistress of another race.

Bipti, who had not been consulted, was very grateful to Tara. And Mr Biswas was thrilled at the thought of earning money. He was not going to earn much. He was to live at the shop and be fed by Bhandat's wife; he was to be given suits of clothes every now and then; and he was to get two dollars a month.

The rumshop was a long high building of simple design, flat to the ground, with a pitched roof of corrugated iron rising from concrete walls. Swing doors exposed only the wet floor of the shop and the feet of drinkers, and, in a land where all doors are wide open, gave a touch of vice to the building. The doors were needed, for many of the people who came past them meant to drink themselves into insensibility. At any time of the day there were people who had collapsed on the wet floor, men who looked older than they were, women too; useless people crying in corners, their anguish lost in the din and press of the standing drinkers who swallowed their rum at a gulp, made a face, hastily swallowed water, and bought more rum. There was swearing, boasting, threatening; fights, broken bottles, policemen; and steadily the coppers and the silver and the notes went into the greasy drawer below the shelves.

And every evening, when the shop was emptied, when the sleepers had been put outside and the broken bottles and gla.s.ses swept up, and the floor washed down though no amount of water could get rid of the smell of raw rum the drawer was pulled out and the Petromax gas lamp, taken down from the long wire hook that hung from the ceiling, was placed next to the drawer on the counter. The money was arranged in neat piles and Bhandat noted the day's takings on a sheet of stiff brown paper, smooth on one side, rough on the other. Bhandat wrote on the smooth side with a soft pencil that smudged easily. The shop had thick edges of darkness; the smell of dirty boards and stale rum was sharp; and Bhandat made his calculation in whispers against the noise of the Petromax whose hiss, lost in the din of the evening, had now in the silence swollen into a roar.

Bhandat's voice, even when low, was a whine with a querulous edge. He was a small man, with a nose as sharp as Ajodha's and a face as thin; but this face could never express benignity; always it looked hara.s.sed and irritable, and more so than ever at the end of the evening. He was going bald and the curve of his forehead repeated the curve of his nose. His thin upper lip was heavily outlined and had two neat and equal b.u.mps in the middle which pressed in a swollen way over the lower lip and practically hid it. While Bhandat calculated Mr Biswas studied these b.u.mps.

Bhandat made it clear that he regarded Mr Biswas as Tara's spy and distrusted him. And it was not long before Mr Biswas realized that Bhandat was stealing, and that these feverish nightly calculations were meant to frustrate Tara's weekly checks. He was not surprised or critical. Only, he was embarra.s.sed by some of Bhandat's methods.

'When these people have three or four drinks and want another,' Bhandat said, 'don't give them full measure.'

Mr Biswas asked no questions.

Bhandat looked away and explained, 'It is for their own good really.'

Mr Biswas got to know when Bhandat felt he had given short measure often enough to risk pocketing the price of a drink. Bhandat stared straight at the man who had paid him, talked absurdly for a moment, then began to spin the coin. Whenever Mr Biswas saw a coin rising and falling through the air he knew that it would eventually land in Bhandat's pocket.

Directly afterwards Bhandat became as gay as he could with the customers, and suspicious and irritable with Mr Biswas. 'You,' he would say to Mr Biswas. 'What the h.e.l.l are you looking at?' And sometimes he would say to people across the counter, 'Look at him. Always smiling, eh? As though he is smarter than everybody else. Look at him.'

'Yes,' the drinkers said. 'He is a real smart man. You better keep an eye on him, Bhandat.'

So to the drinkers Mr Biswas became 'smart man' or 'smart boy', someone who could be ridiculed.

He revenged himself by spitting in the rum when he bottled it, which he did early every morning. The rum was the same, but the prices and labels were different: 'Indian Maiden', 'The White c.o.c.k', 'Parakeet'. Each brand had its adherents, and to Mr Biswas this was a subsidiary revenge which gave a small but continuous pleasure.

The bottling-room was in the ancillary shop-buildings which formed a square about an unpaved yard. Bhandat lived with his family, and Mr Biswas, in two rooms. When it was dry Bhandat's wife cooked on the steps that led to one of these rooms; when it rained she cooked in a corrugated-iron shack, made by Bhandat during a period of sobriety and responsibility, in the yard. The other rooms were used as storerooms or were rented out to other families. The room in which Mr Biswas slept had no window and was perpetually dark. His clothes hung on a nail on one wall; his books occupied a small amount of floor s.p.a.ce; he slept with Bhandat's two sons on a hard, smelly coconut fibre mattress on the floor. Every morning the mattress was rolled up, leaving a deposit of coa.r.s.e fibre grit on the floor, and pushed under Bhandat's fourposter in the adjacent room. When this was done Mr Biswas felt he had no further claim to the room for the rest of the day.

On Sundays and on Thursday afternoons, when the shop was closed, he didn't know where to go. Sometimes he went to the back trace to see his mother. He was giving her a dollar a month, but she continued to make him feel helpless and unhappy, and he preferred to seek out Alec. But Alec was now seldom to be found and Mr Biswas often ended by going to Tara's. In the back verandah there the bookcase had been unexpectedly filled with twenty tall black volumes of the Book of Comprehensive Knowledge. Book of Comprehensive Knowledge. Ajodha had agreed to buy the books from an American travelling salesman; even before he had paid a deposit the books had been delivered, and then apparently forgotten. The salesman never called again, no one asked to be paid, and Ajodha said happily that the company had gone bankrupt. He had no intention of reading the books, but they were a bargain; and when Mr Biswas proved the books' usefulness by coming week after week to read them, Ajodha was delighted. Ajodha had agreed to buy the books from an American travelling salesman; even before he had paid a deposit the books had been delivered, and then apparently forgotten. The salesman never called again, no one asked to be paid, and Ajodha said happily that the company had gone bankrupt. He had no intention of reading the books, but they were a bargain; and when Mr Biswas proved the books' usefulness by coming week after week to read them, Ajodha was delighted.

Presently Mr Biswas fell into a Sunday routine. He went to Tara's in the middle of the morning, read for Ajodha all the That Body of Yours That Body of Yours columns which had been cut out during the week, got his penny, was given lunch, and was then free to explore the columns which had been cut out during the week, got his penny, was given lunch, and was then free to explore the Book of Comprehensive Knowledge. Book of Comprehensive Knowledge. He read folk tales from various lands; he read, and quickly forgot, how chocolate, matches, s.h.i.+ps, b.u.t.tons and many other things were made; he read articles which answered, with drawings that looked pretty but didn't really help, questions like: Why does ice make water cold? Why does fire burn? Why does sugar sweeten? He read folk tales from various lands; he read, and quickly forgot, how chocolate, matches, s.h.i.+ps, b.u.t.tons and many other things were made; he read articles which answered, with drawings that looked pretty but didn't really help, questions like: Why does ice make water cold? Why does fire burn? Why does sugar sweeten?

'You must get Bhandat's boys to read these books too,' Ajodha said enthusiastically.

But Bhandat's boys refused to be enticed. They were learning to smoke; they were full of scandalous and incredible revelations about s.e.x; and at night, in whispers, they wove lurid s.e.xual fantasies. Mr Biswas had tried to contribute to these, but could never strike the correct note. He was either so tame or so ill-informed that they laughed, or so revolting that they threatened to tell. For weeks they tormented him with a particular indecency he had spoken until, in exasperation, he told them to go and tell and found, to his surprise, that he had put an end to their threats. And one night when he asked Bhandat's eldest boy how he had come by all his knowledge about s.e.x, the boy said, 'Well, I have a mother, not so?'

Bhandat was spending more week-ends away from the shop. His sons talked openly of his mistress, at first with excitement and a little pride; later, when the rows between Bhandat and his wife grew more frequent, with fear. There were moments of shock and humiliation when Bhandat shouted obscenities which his sons casually whispered at night. The silence of Bhandat's wife then was terrible. Occasionally things were thrown and the boys and Mr Biswas burst out screaming. Bhandat's wife would come, very calm, and try to quieten them. They wanted her to stay, but she always went back to Bhandat in the next room.

In the shop Bhandat was spinning more coins every day, and there were often scenes on Friday evening when Tara came to examine the accounts.

Then one week-end Mr Biswas had the two rooms to himself. One of Ajodha's relations died in another part of the island. The shop was not opened on Sat.u.r.day and early that morning Bhandat and his family went to the funeral, with Ajodha and Tara. The empty rooms, usually oppressive, now held unlimited prospects of freedom and vice; but Mr Biswas could think of nothing vicious and satisfying. He smoked but that gave little pleasure. And gradually the rooms lost their thrill. Alec had given up his job in the garage, or had been sacked, and was not in Pagotes; Tara's house was closed; and Mr Biswas did not want to go to the back trace. But the feeling of freedom and urgency remained. He walked aimlessly, along the main road and down side streets he had never taken. He stopped buses and went for short rides. He had innumerable soft drinks and hard cakes at roadside shacks. The afternoon wore on. Groups of men, their week's work over, stood in week-end clothes at street corners, outside shops, around coconut-carts. As fatigue overcame him he began to long for the day to end, to relieve him of his freedom. He went back to the dark rooms tired, empty, miserable, yet still excited, still unwilling to sleep.

He awoke to find Bhandat standing over his mattress on the floor. Above red eyes Bhandat's lids were swollen, the way they became after he had been drinking. Mr Biswas had not expected anyone to return before evening; he had lost a whole day's freedom.

'Come on. Stop pretending. Where have you put it?' The b.u.mps on Bhandat's top lip were quivering with anger.

'Put what?'

'Oh yes. Smart man. So you don't know?' And Bhandat pulled Mr Biswas off the mattress, grabbed him by the back of his trousers and lifted him to his toes. With this hold, widely known in Lal's school as the policeman's hold, Bhandat led Mr Biswas to the next room. No one else was there; Bhandat's wife and children had not come back from the funeral. A s.h.i.+rt hung on the back of a chair over a pair of neatly folded trousers. On the seat of the chair there were coins, keys and a number of crumpled dollar-notes.

'Last night I had twenty-six dollars in notes. This morning I have twenty-five. Eh?'

'I don't know. I didn't even know when you came in. I was sleeping all the time.'

'Sleeping. Yes, sleeping like the snake. With both eyes open. Big eyes and long tongue. Tongue wagging all the time to Tara and Ajodha. Do you think that has done you any good? You expect them to give you a pound and a crown for that?' He was shouting now, and pulling out his leather belt through the loops of his trousers. 'Eh? You will tell them you stole my dollar?' He raised his arm and brought the belt down on Mr Biswas's head. Whenever the buckle struck a bone it made a sharp sound.

Suddenly Mr Biswas howled. 'O G.o.d! O G.o.d! My eye! My eye!'

Bhandat stopped.

Mr Biswas had been cut on the cheek-bone and the blood had run below his eye.

'Get out, you nasty tale-carrying lout. Get out of here at once before I peel the skin off your back.' The b.u.mps on Bhandat's lip were trembling again and his arm, when he raised it, was quivering.

The sun had not risen and the back trace was still and empty when Mr Biswas roused Bipti.

'Mohun! What has happened?'

'I fell down. Don't ask ask me.' me.'

'Come, tell me. What's the matter?'

'Why do you keep on sending me to stay with other people?'

'Who beat you?' She pressed a finger under the cut on the cheek-bone and he winced. 'Bhandat beat you?' She undid his s.h.i.+rt and saw the weals on his back. 'He beat you? He beat you?'

She made him lie face down on the bed in her room, and, for the first time since he was a baby, rubbed his body down with oil. She gave him a cup of hot milk sweetened with brown sugar.

'I am never going back there,' Mr Biswas said.

Instead of giving the consolation he expected, Bipti said, as though arguing with him, 'Where will you go then?'

He became impatient. 'You have never done a thing for me. You are a pauper.'

He had meant to hurt her, but she was not hurt. 'It is my fate. I have had no luck with my children. And with you, Mohun, I have the least luck of all. Everything Sitaram said about you was true.'

'I have heard you and everybody else talking a lot about this Sitaram. What exactly did he say?'

'That you were going to be a spendthrift and a liar and that you were going to be lecherous.'

'Oh yes. Spendthrift with two dollars a month. Two whole dollars. Two hundred cents. Very heavy if you put that in a bag. And lecherous?'

'Leading a bad life. With women. But you are too small.'

'Bhandat's children are more lecherous than me. And with their mother too.'

'Mohun!' Then Bipti said, 'I don't know what Tara is going to say.'

'Again! Why do you keep on caring what Tara says? I don't want you to go and see Tara. I don't want anything from her. And Ajodha can keep that body of his. Let Bhandat's boys read to him. I am finished with that.'

But Bipti went to see Tara, and that afternoon Tara, still in her mourning clothes and her jewellery, fresh from her funeral duties and her struggles with the funeral photographer, came to the back trace.

'Poor Mohun,' Tara said. 'He's shameless, that Bhandat.'

'I am sure he stole the money himself,' Mr Biswas said. 'He's got a lot of practice. He steals all the time. And I can always tell when he is stealing. He spins the coin.'

'Mohun!' Bipti said.

'He's the lecher, spendthrift and liar. Not me.'

'Mohun!'

'And I know all about that other woman. His sons know about her too. They boast about it. He quarrels with his wife and beats her. I am not going back to that shop if he comes and asks me on bended knee.'

'I can't see Bhandat doing that,' Tara said. 'But he is sorry. The dollar wasn't missing. It was at the bottom of his trouser pocket and he didn't notice it.'

'He was too drunk, if you ask me.' Then the humiliation hurt afresh and he began to cry. 'You see, Ma. I have no father to look after me and people can treat me how they want.'

Tara became coaxing.

Mr Biswas, enjoying the coaxing and his misery, still spoke angrily. 'Dehuti was quite right to run away from you. I am sure you treated her badly.'

By mentioning Dehuti's name he had gone too far. Tara at once stiffened and, without saying more, left, her long skirt billowing about her, the silver bracelets on her arm clanking.

Bipti ran out after her to the yard. 'You mustn't mind the boy, Tara. He is young.'

'I don't mind, Bipti.'

'Oh Mohun,' Bipti said, when she came back to the room, 'you will reduce us all to pauperdom. You will see me spending the rest of my days in the Poor House.'

'I am going to get a job on my own. And I am going to get my own house too. I am finished with this.' He waved his aching arm about the mud walls and the low, sooty thatch.

On Monday morning he set about looking for a job. How did one look for a job? He supposed that one looked. He walked up and down the Main Road, looking.

He pa.s.sed a tailor and tried to picture himself cutting khaki cloth, tacking, and operating a sewingmachine. He pa.s.sed a barber and tried to picture himself stropping a razor; his mind wandered off to devise elaborate protections for his left thumb. But he didn't like the tailor he saw, a fat man sulkily sewing in a dingy shop; and as for barbers, he had never liked those who cut his own hair; he thought too how it would disgust Pundit Jairam to learn that his former pupil had taken up barbering, a profession immemorially low. He walked on.

He had no wish to enter any of the shops he saw and ask for a job. So he imposed difficult conditions on himself. He tried, for example, to walk a certain distance in twenty paces, and interpreted failure as a bad sign. For a moment he was perversely tempted by an undertaker's, a plain corrugated iron shed that made no concession to grief, smelling of new wood, fish-glue and french polish, with coffins lying on the floor among sawdust, shavings and unfas.h.i.+oned planks. Cheap coffins and raw wood stood in rows against one wall; expensive polished coffins rested on shelves; there were unfinished coffins around a work-bench and pieces of coffin everywhere else; in one corner there was a tottering stack of cheap toy coffins for babies. Mr Biswas had often seen babies' funerals; one in particular he remembered, where the coffin was carried under the arm of a man who rode slowly on a bicycle. 'Get a job there,' he thought, 'and help to bury Bhandat.' He pa.s.sed dry goods shops strange name: dry goods and the rickety little rooms bulged with dry goods, things like pans and plates and bolts of cloth and cards of bright pins and boxes of thread and s.h.i.+rts on hangers and brand-new oil lamps and hammers and saws and clothes-pegs and everything else, the wreckage of a turbulent flood which appeared to have forced the doors of the shops open and left deposits of dry goods on tables and on the ground outside. The owners remained in their shops, lost in the gloom and wedged between dry goods. The a.s.sistants stood outside with pencils behind their ears or pencils tapping bill-pads with the funereally-coloured carbon paper peeping out from under the first sheet. Grocers' shops, smelling damply of oil, sugar and salted fish. Vegetable stalls, damp but fresh, and smelling of earth. Grocers' wives and children stood oily and confident behind counters. The women behind the vegetable stalls were old and correct with thin mournful faces; or they were young and plump with challenging and quarrelsome stares; with a big-eyed child or two hanging about behind the purple sweet potatoes to which dirt still clung; and babies in the background lying in condensed milk boxes. And all the time donkey-carts, horse-carts and ox-carts rumbled and jangled in the roadway, the heavy iron-rimmed wheels grating over gravel and sand and wobbling over the b.u.mpy road. Continually long whips with knotted ends whistled and cracked, arousing brief enthusiasm in the animals. The men drivers sat on their carts; the boy drivers stood, shouting and whistling at their animals and their rivals; half a dozen races were always in progress.

Mr Biswas returned to the back trace, his resolution shaken. 'I am not going to take any job at all,' he told Bipti.

'Why don't you go and make it up with Tara?'

'I don't want to see Tara. I am going to kill myself.'

'That would be the best thing for you. And for me.'

'Good. Good. Good. I don't want any food.' And in a great rage he left the hut. I don't want any food.' And in a great rage he left the hut.

Anger gave him energy, and he determined to walk until he was tired. On the Main Road he took the other direction now and went past the office of F. Z. Ghany, dingier but still intact, closed because it wasn't market day; past the same array of shops, it seemed, the same owners, the same goods, the same a.s.sistants; and it all filled him with the same depression.

Late in the afternoon, when he was some miles out of Pagotes, a slender young man with s.h.i.+ning eyes and a thick s.h.i.+ning moustache came up to Mr Biswas and tapped him on the shoulder. He was embarra.s.sed to recognize Ramchand, Tara's delinquent yard boy, now Dehuti's husband. He had sometimes seen him at Tara's, but they had not spoken.

Ramchand, so far from showing embarra.s.sment, behaved as though he had known Mr Biswas well for years. He asked so many questions so quickly that Mr Biswas had time only to nod. 'How is everything? It is good to see you. And your mother? Well? Nice to hear. And the shop? A funny thing. You know Parakeet and Indian Maiden and The White c.o.c.k? I make that rum now. They are the same, you know.'

'I know.'

'No future working for Tara, I can tell you. As you know, I am working at this rum place now, and do you know how much I am getting? Come on. Guess.'

'Ten dollars.'

'Twelve. With a bonus every Christmas. And rum at the wholesale price into the bargain. Not bad, eh?'

Mr Biswas was impressed.

'Dehuti talks about you all the time. At one time everybody thought you were drowned, remember?' Then, as though this knowledge had removed whatever unfamiliarity remained between them, Ramchand added, 'Why don't you come and see Dehuti? She was talking about you only last night.' He paused. 'And perhaps you could eat something as well.'

Mr Biswas noticed the pause. It reminded him that Ramchand was of a low caste; and though it was absurd in the Main Road to think that of a man earning twelve dollars a month in addition to bonuses and other advantages, Mr Biswas was flattered that Ramchand looked upon him as someone to be flattered and conciliated. He agreed to go to see Dehuti. Ramchand, delighted, talked on, revealing much knowledge of other members of the family. He told Mr Biswas that Ajodha's finances were not as sound as they appeared, and that Tara was offending too many people. Tara may have vowed never to mention Ramchand's name again; he appeared anxious to mention hers as often as possible.

Mr Biswas had never questioned the deference shown him when he had gone to Tara's to be fed as a Brahmin and on his rounds with Pundit Jairam. But he had never taken it seriously; he had thought of it as one of the rules of a game that was only occasionally played. When he got to Ramchand's he thought it even more of a game. The hut indicated lowness in no way. The mud walls had been freshly whitewashed and decorated with blue and green and red palm-prints (Mr Biswas recognized Ramchand's broad palm and stubby fingers); the thatch was new and neat; the earth floor was high and had been packed hard; pictures from calendars were stuck on the walls, and in the verandah there was a hatrack. It was altogether less depressing than the crumbling, neglected hut in the back trace.

But it seemed that to Dehuti marriage had brought no joy. She was uneasy at being caught among her household possessions, and tried to hint that they had nothing to do with her. When Ramchand started to point out some attractive feature of the hut, she sucked her teeth and he desisted. Mr Biswas couldn't believe that Dehuti had ever spoken about him, as Ramchand had said. She hardly spoke, hardly looked at him. Without expression she brought out an ugly baby from an inner room, asleep, and showed it, suggesting at the same time that she had not brought it out to show it. She looked careworn and sulky, untouched by her husband's bubbling desire to please. Yet in her unhurried way she did what she could to make Mr Biswas welcome. He understood that she feared rebuff and the reports he might take back, and this made him uncomfortable.

Dehuti, never pretty, was now frankly ugly. Her Chinese eyes looked sleepy, the pupils without a light, the whites smudged. Her cheeks, red with pimples, bulged low and drooped around her mouth. Her lower lip projected, as though squashed out by the weight of her cheeks. She sat on a low bench, the back of her long skirt caught tightly between her calves and the backs of her thighs, the front draped over the knees. Mr Biswas was surprised by her adulthood. It was the way she sat, knees apart, yet so decorously covered; he had a.s.sociated that only with mature women. He tried to find in the woman the girl he had known. But seeing her growing needlessly impatient while Ramchand, at her instructions, lit the fire and prepared to boil the rice, Mr Biswas felt that this sight of Dehuti had wiped out the old picture. This was a loss; it added to the unhappiness he had begun to feel as soon as he entered the hut.

Ramchand came from the kitchen and sank in the most relaxed way on to the earth floor. He stretched out one short-trousered leg and held his hands around his upright knee. The corrugations of his thick hair glinted with oil. He smiled at Mr Biswas, smiled at the baby, smiled at Dehuti. He asked Mr Biswas to read the writing on the calendar pictures and the Sunday school cards on the walls, and listened in pure pleasure while Mr Biswas did so.

'You are going to be a great man,' Ramchand said. 'A great man. Reading like that at your age. Used to hear you reading those things to Ajodha. Never known a healthier man in all my life. But one day he is going to fall really sick, let him watch out. He's just asking for it. I feel sorry for him, to tell you the truth. I feel sorry for all these rich fellows.' It turned out that Ramchand felt sorry for many other people as well. 'Pratap now. He's got himself into a mess because of these donkeys he keeps on buying, heaven knows why. The last two died. Did you hear about it?' Mr Biswas hadn't, and Ramchand told of the b.l.o.o.d.y end of the donkeys; one had speared itself on a bamboo stake. He also spoke of Prasad and his search for a wife; with tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt he mentioned Bhandat and his mistress. He became increasingly avuncular; it was clear he thought his own condition perfect, and this perfection delighted him. 'Not finished with these decorations,' he said, pointing to the walls. 'Getting some more of those Sunday school pictures. Jesus and Mary. Eh, Dehuti?' Laughingly he flung the matchstick he had been chewing at the baby.

Dehuti closed her eyes in annoyance, puffed out her pimply cheeks a little more and turned her face away. The matchstick fell harmlessly on the baby.

'Making some improvements too,' Ramchand said. 'Come.'

This time Dehuti did not suck her teeth. They went to the back and Mr Biswas saw another room being added to the hut. Trimmed tree-branches had been buried in the earth; the rafters, of lesser boughs, were in place; between the uprights the bamboo had been plaited; the earth floor was raised but not yet packed. 'Extra room,' Ramchand said. 'When it is finished you can come and stay with us.'

Mr Biswas's depression deepened.