Disaster came when they were leaving. The rear wheels sank into the hot loose sand. They watched the wheels spinning futilely, kicking up sand, and felt that the car had been irremediably damaged. They pushed coconut branches and coconut shells and bits of driftwood under the wheels and at last got the car out. Shama said she was convinced that the car now leaned to one side; the whole body, she said, had been strained.

On Monday Anand cycled to school on the Royal Enfield, and the promise in the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare was thereby partly fulfilled. War conditions had at last permitted; in fact, the war had been over for some time.

And during all this time W. C. Tuttle had remained quiet. He had not attempted to reply to Mr. Biswas’s new suits, the new car, the holiday; so that it seemed that these reverses, coming one after the other, had been too much for him. But when the glory of the Prefect began to fade, when it was accepted that floormats became dirty, when washing the car became a chore and was delegated by the children to Shama, when the dashboard clock stopped and no one noticed the tinkle of the ashtray lid, W. C. Tuttle with one stroke wiped out all Mr. Biswas’s advantages, and killed the rivalry by rising above it.

Through Basdai, the widow, he announced that he had bought a house in Woodbrook.

Mr. Biswas took the news badly. He neglected Shama’s consolations and picked quarrels with her. “ ‘What is for you is for you’,” he mocked. “So that is your philosophy, eh? I’ll tell you what your philosophy is. Catch him. Marry him. Throw him in a coal barrel. That is the philosophy of your family. Catch him and throw him in a coal barrel.” He became acutely sensitive to criticism of the Community Welfare Department. The books on social work and juvenile delinquency gathered dust on the diningtable, and he returned to his philosophers. The Tuttles’ gramophone played with infuriating gaiety, and he banged on the partition and shouted, “Some people still living here, you know.”

Philosophically, he attempted to look on the brighter side. The garage problem would be simplified: with three vehicles the position had become impossible, and he had often had to leave his car on the road. There would be no gramophone. And he might even rent the rooms the Tuttles were vacating.

But the days passed and the Tuttles didn’t move.

“Why the hell doesn’t he take up his gramophone and naked woman and clear out?” Mr. Biswas asked Shama. “If he got this house.”

Basdai came up with fresh information. The house was full of tenants, and W. C. Tuttle, for all his calm, was at that moment engaged in tortuous litigation to get them out.

“Oh,” Mr. Biswas said. “Is that sort of house.” He imagined one of those rotting warrens he had visited when investigating destitutes. And now at one moment Mr. Biswas wished W. C. Tuttle out of the house immediately and at another moment wanted him to fail in his litigation. “Throwing those poor people out. Where they going to live, eh? But your family don’t care about things like that.”

One morning Mr. Biswas saw W. C. Tuttle leaving the house in a suit, tie and hat. And that afternoon Basdai reported that litigation had failed.

“I thought he was going to Ace Studios to take out another photo,” Mr. Biswas said.

Overjoyed, he did what he had so far resisted doing: he drove to see the house. To his disappointment he found that it was in a good area, on a whole lot: a sound, oldfashioned timber building that needed only a coat of paint.

Not long after Basdai reported that the tenants were leaving. W. C. Tuttle had persuaded the City Council that the house was dangerous and had to be repaired, if not pulled down altogether.

“Any old trick to throw the poor people out,” Mr. Biswas said. “Though I suppose with ten fat Tuttles jumping about no house could be safe. Repairs, eh? Just drive the old lorry down to Shorthills and cut down a few more trees, I suppose.”

“That is exactly what he is doing,” Shama said, affronted at the piracy.

“You want to know why I can’t get on in this place? That is why.” And even as he spoke he recognized that he was sounding like Bhandat in the concrete room.

The Tuttles left without ceremony. Only Mrs. Tuttle, braving the general antagonism, kissed her sisters and those of the children she found in the way. She was sad but stern, and her manner suggested that though she had nothing to do with it, her husband’s piracy was justified and she was ready for trouble. Cowed, the sisters could only be sad in their turn, and the leave-taking was as tearful as if Mrs. Tuttle had just been married.

Mr. Biswas’s hopes of renting the rooms the Tuttles had vacated were dashed when it was announced that Mrs. Tulsi was coming from Shorthills to take them over. The news cast a gloom over the whole house. Her daughters now accepted that Mrs. Tulsi’s active life was finished, that only death awaited her. But she still controlled them all in varying ways, and her caprices had to be endured. Miserable herself, Basdai made the readers and learners miserable by threats of what Mrs. Tulsi would do to them.

She came with Sushila, the sickroom widow, and Miss Blackie; and at once the house became quieter. The readers and learners were quelled, but Mrs. Tulsi’s presence brought them an unexpected advantage: they knew that if they howled loud enough beforehand they would be spared floggings.

Mrs. Tulsi had no precise illness. She was simply ill. Her eyes ached; her heart was bad; her head always hurt; her stomach was fastidious; her legs were unreliable; and every other day she had a temperature. Her head had continually to be soaked in bay rum; she had to be massaged once a day; she needed poultices of various sorts. Her nostrils were stuffed with soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub; she wore dark glasses; and she was seldom without a bandage around her forehead. Sushila was kept on the go all day. At Hanuman House Sushila had sought to gain power by being Mrs. Tulsi’s nurse; now that the organization of the house had been broken up, the position carried no power, but Sushila was bound to it, and she had no children to rescue her.

Time hung heavily on Mrs. Tulsi’s hands. She did not read. The radio offended her. She was never well enough to go out. She moved from her room to the lavatory to the front verandah to her room. Her only solace was talk. Daughters were always at hand, but talk with them seemed only to enrage her; and as her body decayed so her command of invective and obscenity developed. Her rages fell oftenest on Sushila, whom she ordered out of the house once a week. She cried out that her daughters were all waiting for her to die, that they were sucking her blood; she pronounced curses on them and their children, and threatened to expel them from the family.

“I have no luck with my family,” she told Miss Blackie. “I have no luck with my race.”

And it was Miss Blackie who received her confidences, Miss Blackie who reported and comforted. And there was the Jewish refugee doctor. He came once a week and listened. The house was always specially prepared for him, and Mrs. Tulsi treated him with love. He resurrected all that remained of her softness and humour. When he left, she said to Miss Blackie, “Never trust your race, Black. Never trust them.” And Miss Blackie said, “No”m.” Gifts of fruit were sent regularly to the doctor and sometimes Mrs. Tulsi would suddenly order Basdai and Sushila to prepare an elaborate meal and take it to the doctor’s house, treating the matter as one of urgency, as though she was satisfying some craving of her own.

Still her daughters came to the house. They knew they all had some small hold on her: they knew that she feared loneliness and never wished to push them beyond her reach; they knew they could hurt her by staying away. If Miss Blackie reported that one daughter had been particularly upset, then Mrs. Tulsi made overtures, and made promises. In such moods she might give a piece of jewellery, she might take off a ring or a bracelet and give it. So the daughters came, and none was willing to let Mrs. Tulsi be alone with any other. The visits of Mrs. Tuttle were especially distrusted. She bore abuse with unexampled patience and was able at the end to suggest that Mrs. Tulsi should look at plants, because green nourished the eyes and soothed the nerves.