The house was never quiet, and became almost unbearable when W. C. Tuttle bought a gramophone. He played one record over and over:

One night when the moon was so mellow

Rosita met young man Wellow.

He held her like this, his loveliness,

And stole a kiss, this fellow.

Tippy-tippy-tum tippy-tum

– and here W. C. Tuttle always joined in, whistling, singing, drumming; so that whenever the record came on, Mr. Biswas was compelled to listen, waiting for W. C. Tuttle’s accompaniment to:

Tippy-tippy-tum tippy-tum

Tippy-tippy-teeeee pi-tum-tum tum

A dispute also arose between W. C. Tuttle and Govind. They both parked their vehicles in the garage at the side of the house, and in the morning one was invariably in the way of the other. They conducted this quarrel without ever speaking to one another. W. C. Tuttle told Mrs. Tuttle that her brothers-in-law were unlettered, Govind grunted at Chinta, and both wives listened penitentially. And now, away from Mrs. Tulsi, the sisters also had daily squabbles of their own, about whose children had dirtied the washing, whose children had left the we filthy. Basdai, the widow, often mediated, and sometimes there were maudlin reconciliations in the Tuttles’ back verandah. It was Chinta who remarked that these reconciliations had the habit of taking place after the Tuttles had acquired some new item of furniture or clothing.

Despite the strict brahminical regime of his household, W. C. Tuttle was all for modernity. In addition to the gramophone he possessed a radio, a number of dainty tables, a morris suite; and he created a sensation when he bought a four foot high statue of a naked woman holding a torch. An especially long truce followed the arrival of the torchbearer, and Myna, wandering about the Tuttles’ establishment one day, accidentally broke off the torchbearing arm. The Tuttles sealed their frontiers again. Myna, in response to wordless pressure, was flogged, and a frostiness came once more into the relations between the Tuttles and the Biswases. Matters were not helped when Shama announced that she had ordered a glass cabinet from the joiner in the next street.

The glass cabinet came.

Chinta shouted to her children in English. “Vidiadhar and Shivadhar! Stay away from the front gate. I don’t want you to go breaking other people things and have other people saying that is because I jealous.”

As the elegant cabinet was being taken up the front steps one of the glass doors swung open, struck the steps and broke. This was observed by the Tuttles, imperfectly concealed behind the jalousies on either side of the drawingroom door.

“Oh! Oh!” Mr. Biswas said that evening. “Glass cabinet come, Shama. Glass cabinet come, girl. The only thing you have to do now is to get something to put inside it.”

She spread out the Japanese coffee-set on one shelf. The other shelves remained empty, and the glass cabinet, for which she had committed herself to many months of debt, became another of her possessions which were regarded as jokes, like her sewingmachine, her cow, the coffee-set. It was placed in the front room, which was already choked with the Slumberking, Theophile’s bookcase, the hatrack, the kitchen table and the rockingchair. Mr. Biswas said, “You know, Shama girl, what we want to put these rooms really straight is another bed.”

In the house the crowding became worse. Basdai, the widow, who had occupied the servantroom as a base for a financial assault on the city, gave up that plan and decided instead to take in boarders and lodgers from Shorthills. The widows were now almost frantic to have their children educated. There was no longer a Hanuman House to protect them; everyone had to fight for himself in a new world, the world Owad and Shekhar had entered, where education was the only protection. As fast as the children graduated from the infant school at Shorthills they were sent to Port of Spain. Basdai boarded them.

Between her small servantroom and the back fence Basdai built an additional room of galvanized iron. Here she cooked. The boarders ate on the steps of the servantroom, in the yard, and below the main house. The girls slept in the servantroom with Basdai; the boys slept below the house, with Govind’s children.

Sometimes, driven out by the crowd and the noise, Mr. Biswas took Anand for long night walks in the quieter districts of Port of Spain. “Even the streets here are cleaner than that house,” he said. “Let the sanitary inspector pay just one visit there, and everybody going to land up in jail. Boarders, lodgers and all. I mad to lay a report myself

The house, pouring out a stream of scholars every morning and receiving a returning stream in the afternoon, soon attracted the attention of the street. And whether it was this, or whether a sanitary inspector had indeed made a threat, news came from Shorthills that Mrs. Tulsi had decided to do something. There was talk of flooring and walling the space below the house, talk of partitions and rooms, of lattice work above brick walls. The outer pillars were linked by a half-wall of hollow clay bricks, partly plastered, never painted; there was no sign of lattice work. Instead, to screen the house, the wire fence was pulled down and replaced by a tall brick wall; and this was plastered, this was painted; and the people in the street could only make surmises about the arrangements for the feeding and lodging of the childish multitude who, in the afternoons and evenings and early mornings, buzzed like a school.

The children were divided into residents and boarders, and subdivided into family groups. Clashes were frequent. The boarders also brought quarrels from Shorthills and settled them in Port of Spain. And all evening, above the buzzing, there were sounds of flogging (Basdai had flogging powers over her boarders as well), and Basdai cried, “Read! Learn! Learn! Read!”

And every morning, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, his tie carefully knotted, Mr. Biswas left this hell and cycled to the spacious, well-lit, well-ventilated office of the Sentinel.

Now when he said to Shama: “Hole! That’s what your family has got me in. This hole!” his words had an unpleasant relevance. For whereas before he had spoken of his house in the country and his mother-in-law’s estate, now he kept his address as secret as an animal keeps its hole. And his hole was not a haven. His indigestion returned, virulently; and he saw his children increasingly riddled with nervous afflictions. Savi suffered from a skin rash, and Anand suddenly developed asthma, which laid him in bed for three days at a time, choking, having his chest scorched and peeled by the futile applications of a medicated wadding.

Still the boarders came. The education frenzy had spread to Mrs. Tulsi’s friends and retainers at Arwacas. They all wanted their children to go to Port of Spain schools, and Mrs. Tulsi, fulfilling a duty that had been imposed in a different age, had to take them in. And Basdai boarded them. The floggings and the rows increased. The cries of “Read! Learn!” increased; and every morning, not long after the babbling children had streamed through the narrow gateway between the high walls, Mr. Biswas emerged, neatly dressed, and cycled to the Sentinel.

Despite his duties and despite the fear of the sack, which he had never quite lost, even during the adventure at Shorthills, the office now became the haven to which he escaped every morning; and like Mr. Burnett’s news editor, he dreaded leaving it. It was only at midday, when the readers and learners were at school and W. C. Tuttle and Govind were at work, that he found the house bearable. He gave himself a longer midday break and stayed later in the office in the afternoons.