The widows didn’t smile. Their solemnity affected Mr. Biswas. He stopped scratching his arms and pulled the sheet up to his armpits. Only Shama, already conspicuous in her patched and dirty home-clothes, continued to smile.

Sushila, the senior widow, came to the foot of the bed and spoke.

Could they be considered Deserving Destitutes?

She spoke in a steady, considered way.

Mr. Biswas was too embarrassed to reply.

Of course, Sushila said, they couldn’t all be Deserving Destitutes. But couldn’t one?

It was impossible. However destitute they might be, they were relations. But they had put on their best clothes and jewellery and come all the way from Shorthills, and he could not reject them at once. “What about the name?” he asked.

That had occurred to them. The Tulsi name need not be mentioned. Their husbands’ names could be used.

Mr. Biswas thought rapidly. “But what about the children at school?”

They had thought of that too. Sushila had no children. And as for the photograph: with veil, glasses and a few pieces of facial jewellery she could be effectively disguised.

Mr. Biswas could think of no other delaying objection. He scratched his arms slowly.

The widows gazed solemnly, then accusingly at him. As his silence lengthened, Shama’s smile turned to a look of annoyance; in the end she, too, was accusing.

Mr. Biswas slapped his left arm. “I would lose my job.”

“But that time,” Sushila said, “when you were the Scarlet Pimpernel, you went around dropping tokens-okens to your mother, your brothers and all the children.”

“That was different,” Mr. Biswas said. “I am sorry. Really.”

The five widows were silent. For some time they remained immobile, staring at Mr. Biswas until their eyes went blank. He avoided their eyes, felt for cigarettes, and patted the bed until the matchbox rattled.

Sushila started on a deep sigh, and one by one the widows, staring at Mr. Biswas’s forehead, sighed and shook their heads. Shama gave Mr. Biswas a look of perfect fury. Then she and the widows trooped out of the door.

A child was being flogged downstairs. W. C. Tuttle’s gramophone was playing “One Night When the Moon Was so Mellow”.

“I am sorry,” Mr. Biswas said, to the back of the last widow. “But I would lose my job. Sorry.”

And really he was sorry. But even if they were not relations, he could not have made their case convincing. How could one speak of a woman as destitute when she lived on her mother’s estate, in one of her mother’s three houses; when her brother was studying medicine in the United Kingdom; and when another brother was a figure of growing importance in the South, his name all over the paper, in the gossip columns, in the news columns for his business deals and political statements, in his own stylish advertisements (“Tulsi Theatres Trinidad proudly present…”)?

It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas had another request which disturbed him. It came from Bhandat, Ajodha’s ostracized brother. Mr. Biswas had never seen Bhandat since Bhandat had left the rumshop in Pagotes for his Chinese mistress in Port of Spain; he had only heard from Jagdat, Bhandat’s son, that Bhandat was living in a poverty which he bore with fortitude. Mr. Biswas could do nothing for Bhandat. They were related, and again it would have been impossible to make a case for a man whose brother was known to be one of the wealthiest men in the colony.

Bhandat had given an address in the city centre which might have led someone without a knowledge of the city’s slums to believe that Bhandat was a dealer in cocoa or sugar, an import-and-export king. In fact he lived in a tenement that lay between an importer of eastern goods and an exporter of sugar and copra. It was an old, Spanish style building. The flat faзade, diversified by irregular areas of missing plaster, small windows with broken shutters, and two rusty iron balconies, rose directly from the pavement.

From the exporter came the rancid smell of copra and the heavy smell of sacked sugar, a smell quite different from the fetid, sweet smell of the sugar factories and buffalo ponds Mr. Biswas remembered from his boyhood. From the importer came the many-accented smell of pungent spices. From the road came the smell of dust, straw, the urine and droppings of horses, donkeys and mules. At every impediment the gutters had developed a wrinkled film of scum, as white as the skin on boiled milk, with a piercing, acrid smell, which, blended and heated by the afternoon sun, rose suffocatingly from the road and pursued Mr. Biswas as he turned off into the sudden black shadow of an archway between the tenement and the exporter’s. He leaned his bicycle against the cool wall, fought off the bees from the exporter’s sugar, and made his way down a cobbled lane along which ran a shallow green and black gutter, glittering in the gloom. The lane opened out into a paved yard which was only slightly wider. On one side was the high blank wall of the exporter’s; on the other was the wall of the tenement, with windows that gaped black above dingy curtains. A leaning standpipe dripped on a mossy base and fed the gutter; at the end of the yard, their doors open, were a newspaper-littered lavatory and a roofless bathroom. Above was the sky, bright blue. Sunlight struck diagonally across the top of the exporter’s wall.

Beyond the standpipe Mr. Biswas turned into a passage. He was passing a curtained doorway when a shrill voice cried out, almost gaily, “Mohun!”

He felt he had become a boy again. All the sense of weakness and shame returned.

It was a low, windowless room, lit only by the light from the passage. A folding screen barred off one corner. In another corner there was a bed, and from it came gurgling happy sounds. Bhandat was not decrepit. Mr. Biswas, who had feared to find him shrunken to a melodramatic Indian decrepitude, was relieved. The face was thinner; but the bumps on the top lip were the same; the eyebrows, still those of a worrying man, bunched over eyes that were still bright.

Bhandat raised thin arms. “You are my child, Mohun. Come.” The shrillness in the voice was new.

“How are you, Uncle?”

Bhandat didn’t seem to hear. “Come, come. You may think you are a big man, but to me you are still my child. Come, let me kiss you.”

Mr. Biswas stood on the sugarsack rug and bent over the stale-smelling bed. He was at once pulled vigorously down. He saw that the distempered ceiling and walls were coated with dust and soot, felt Bhandat’s unshaven chin scraping against his neck, felt Bhandat’s dry lips on his cheek. Then he cried out. Bhandat had pulled sharply at his hair. He jumped back and Bhandat hooted.

Waiting for Bhandat to calm down, Mr. Biswas looked around the room. Clothes hung on one wall from nails that had been driven into the mortar between the stones. On the gritty concrete floor what had at first looked like bundles of clothes turned out to be stacks of newspapers. Next to the screen there was a small table with more newspapers, a cheap writingpad, a bottle of ink and a chewed pen: it was at that table, no doubt, that Bhandat had written his letter.

“You are examining my mansion, Mohun?”

Mr. Biswas refused to be moved. “I don’t know. It seems to me that you are all right here. You should see how some people live.” And he nearly added, “You should see how I live.”

“I am an old man,” Bhandat said, in his new, hooting voice. His eyes became wet, and a small, unreliable smile appeared on his lips.

Mr. Biswas edged further away from the bed.

Sounds came from behind the dingy cotton-print screen: a clink of a coal-pot ring, the striking of a match, brisk fanning. The Chinese woman. A thrill of curiosity ran through Mr. Biswas. White charcoal smoke rose above the screen, coiled about the room and escaped, racing, through the door.