He was treated with respect by most of the DDS or Deserving Destees, as, in order to lessen the dread they inspired, he had begun to call them. But sometimes a destitute turned sullen and, suddenly annoyed by Mr. Biswas’s probings, refused to divulge the harrowing details Mr. Biswas needed for his copy. On these occasions Mr. Biswas was accused of being in league with the rich, the laughing, the government. Sometimes he was threatened with violence. Then forgetting shoes and trouser turn-ups, he retreated hastily to the street, pursued by words, his undignified movements followed with idle interest by several dozen people, all destitute, all perhaps deserving. “Deserving Destitute Turns Desperate,” he thought, visualizing the morning’s headline. (Though that would never have done: the Sentinel wanted only the harrowing details, the grovelling gratitude.)

His bicycle suffered. First the valve-caps were stolen; then the rubber handlegrips; then the bell; then the saddlebag in which he had transported his plunder from Shorthills; and one day the saddle itself. It was a pre-war Brooks saddle, highly desirable, new ones being unobtainable. Cycling that afternoon from the east end of the city to the west end, continually bobbing up and down, unable to sit, had been fatiguing and, judging by the stares, spectacular.

There were other dangers. He was sometimes accosted by burly Negroes, pictures of health and strength; “Indian, give me some money.” Occasionally exact sums were demanded: “Indian, give me a shilling.” He had been used to such threatening requests from healthy Negroes outside the larger cinemas, but there the bright lights and the watchful police had given him the confidence to refuse. In the east end the lights were not bright and there were few policemen; and, not wishing to antagonize destitutes any more than was necessary, he took the precaution of going on his investigations with coppers distributed about his pockets. These he gave, and later recovered from the Sentinel as expenses.

And other dangers. Once, climbing up a short flight of steps and pushing past the obstructing lace curtain in a room of exceptional cleanliness, he found himself confronted by a woman of robust appearance. Her large lips were grotesquely painted; rouge flared on her black cheeks. “You from the paper?” she asked. He nodded. “Give me some money,” she said, as roughly as any man. He gave her a penny. His promptness surprised her. She gazed at the coin with awe, then kissed it. “You don’t know what a thing it is, when a man give you money.” His experience on “Court Shorts” enabling him to recognize a piece of the prostitute’s lore, he made perfunctory inquiries and prepared to go. “Where my money?” the woman said. She followed him to the door, shouting, “The man-me right here, behind this curtain, and now he don’t want to pay.” She called the women and children of the yard and the yards on either side to witness her injury; and Mr. Biswas, feeling that his suit, his air of respectability, and the time of day gave some weight to the accusation, hurried guiltily away.

It was some time before he could distinguish the applications of the fraudulent: people who merely wanted the publicity, those who wanted to work off grudges, those who had wanted merely to write, and an astonishing number of well-to-do shopkeepers, clerks and taxi-drivers who wanted money and publicity, and offered to share what money they got with Mr. Biswas. Many of his early visits were wasted, and since he had to provide a convincing destitute every morning he had sometimes had to take a mediocre destitute and exaggerate his situation.

The authorities at the Sentinel continued neither to comment on his work nor to interfere; and this policy, which he had at first regarded as sinister, now made his position one of responsibility and power. His recommendations were the only things that mattered; his decision was final. He was given a by-line and described as “Our Special Investigator”, which won Anand some respect at school. And for the first time in his life Mr. Biswas was offered bribes. It was a mark of status. But, largely through a distrust of the Deserving Destees, he accepted nothing, though he did allow a crippled Negro joiner to make him a diningtable at a low price.

He wished he hadn’t, for when the table came it made the congestion in his rooms absolute. Shama’s glass cabinet was taken to the inner room, and the table placed in his, parallel to the bed and separated from it by a way so narrow that, after bending down to put on his shoes, for instance, he often knocked his head when he straightened up; and if, having put his shoes on, he stood up too quickly, he struck the top of his hip-bone against the table. The generous joiner had made the table six feet long and nearly four feet wide, wide enough to make shutting and opening the side window possible only if you climbed on to the table. On his restless nights Mr. Biswas had been in the habit of relegating Anand to the foot of the Slumberking; now when this happened Anand left the bed in a huff and spent the rest of the night on the table, an arrangement Mr. Biswas tried to make permanent. The window had to remain open: the room would have been stifling otherwise. The afternoon rain came swiftly and violently. Shama could never mount the table quickly enough; and presently that part of the table directly below the window acquired a grey, black-spotted bloom which defied all Shama’s stainings, varnishings and polishings. “First and last diningtable I buy,” Mr. Biswas said.

He was lying in vest and pants on the Slumberking one evening, reading, trying to ignore the buzzing and shrieks of the readers and learners, and W. C. Tuttle’s new gramophone record of a boy American called Bobby Breen singing “When There’s a Rainbow on the River”. Someone came into the room and Mr. Biswas, his back to the door, added to the pandemonium by wondering aloud who the hell was standing in his light.

It was Shama. “Hurry up and get some clothes on,” she said excitedly. “Some people have come to see you.”

He had a moment of panic. He had kept his address secret, yet since he had become investigator of destitutes he had been repeatedly traced. Once, indeed, he had been accosted by a destitute just as he was wheeling his bicycle between the high walls. He had pretended that he was investigating a deserving case, and as this had looked likely, he had managed to get rid of the man by taking down his particulars there and then, standing on the pavement, and promising to investigate him as soon as possible.

Now he twisted his head and saw that Shama was smiling. Her excitement contained much self-satisfaction.

“Who?” he asked, jumping out of bed, striking the top of his hip-bone against the diningtable. Standing between the table and the bed, it was impossible for him to bend down to get his shoes. He sat down carefully on the bed again and fished out a shoe.

Shama said it was the widows from Shorthills.

He relaxed. “I can’t see them outside?”

“Is private.”

“But how the hell I can see them inside here?” It was a problem. The widows would have to stand just inside the door, in the narrow area between the bed and the partition; and he would have to stand between the bed and the table. However, it was evening. He took the cotton sheet from below the pillow and threw it over himself.

Shama went out to summon the widows, and the five widows entered almost at once, in their best white clothes and veils, their faces roughened by sun and rain, their demeanour grave and conspiratorial as it always was whenever they were hatching one of their disastrous schemes: poultry farming, dairy farming, sheep raising, vegetable growing.

Mr. Biswas, the sheet pulled halfway up his chest, scratched his bare, slack arms. “Can’t ask you to sit down,” he said. “Nowhere to sit down. Except the table.”