It was still raining when the car stopped outside the house. The fence, half concrete, with lead pipes running between square concrete pillars, was covered with the vines of the Morning Glory spattered with small red flowers drooping in the rain. The height of the house, the cream and grey walls, the white frames of doors and windows, the red brick sections with white pointing: all these things Mr. Biswas took in at once, and knew that the house was not for him.

When, racing into the house out of the rain, he met the old queen, not as old as the solicitor’s clerk had made out, he was overwhelmed by her courtesy. Continually, with his suit and tie and shining shoes and Prefect car, he felt he was deceiving the public. Here, in this house in Sikkim Street, so desirable, so inaccessible, deception was especially painful. He tried to respond to the old queen’s civility with equal civility; he tried not to think of his crowded room, his eight hundred dollars. Slowly and carefully, aware now of the lager, he sipped tea and smoked a cigarette. Hesitantly, fearing a frank appraisal would be rude, he took in the distempered walls, the washed celotex ceiling with strips of wood painted chocolate and looking brand-new, frosted-glass windows and frosted-glass doors with white woodwork, white lattice work, a polished floor, a polished morris suite. And when the solicitor’s clerk, frank and trusting, ignorant of the eight hundred dollars, insisted that Mr. Biswas should see the rooms upstairs, Mr. Biswas went round quickly, seeing a bathroom with a toilet bowl and-luxury!-a porcelain wash-basin, two bedrooms with green walls, a verandah, so cool without the sun, the Morning Glory on the fence below, his Prefect in the road, and just for a moment he thought of the house as his own, and the thought was so heady he rejected it at once and hurried downstairs.

The old queen, whose heart had not permitted her to climb the steps, greeted him as though he had returned from a long journey.

He sat in one of the morris chairs and drank more tea and took another cigarette.

Not a word had been said so far about the price. Mr. Biswas kept on fixing it in his mind at something high and impossible which would relieve him of responsibility and regret. He thought of eight thousand, nine thousand. So near the busy Main Road: an ideal site for a shop. And yet so quiet in the rain!

“Not bad for six thousand,” the solicitor’s clerk said.

Mr. Biswas smoked and said nothing.

The old queen came out from the kitchen with a plate of cakes. The solicitor’s clerk insisted that Mr. Biswas should try one. The old queen had made them herself.

Mr. Biswas took a cake. The old queen smiled at him, and he smiled back.

“Well, to be honest. We both want to make a sale in a hurry. So let’s say five five.”

Once Mr. Biswas had read a story by a French writer about a woman who worked for twenty years to pay off a debt on an imitation necklace. He had never been able to understand why it was considered a comic story. Debt was a fearful thing; and with all its it’s and might-have-beens the story came too near the truth: hope followed by blight, the passing of the years, the passing of life itself, and then the revelation of waste: Oh, my poor Matilda! But they were false! Now, sitting in the clerk’s morris chair, Mr. Biswas knew he was close to such a debt, a similar blight, a similar waste: and he was again lying awake at night, hearing the snores of the crowded house, looking through the window at the empty sky swept by silent searchlights.

“Five five and we will throw in this morris suite.” The clerk gave a little laugh. “I always hear that Indians was sharp bargainers, but I never know till now just how sharp they was.”

The old queen smiled as charitably as ever.

“I will have to think about it.”

The old queen smiled.

On the way back Mr. Biswas decided to be aggressive.

“You so anxious to sell your house I don’t understand why you don’t go to an agent.”

“Me? You mean you didn’t hear what those people was saying in the cafй. Those agents are just a bunch of crooks, man.”

He felt he had seen the last of the house. He did not know then that, in the five years of life left to him, that drive along the Western Main Road, through Woodbrook to Wrightson Road and South Quay was to become familiar and even boring.

Alone once more, his depression, his panic returned. But when he got back to the house he assumed an air of confidence and sternness and said loudly to Shama, who was surprised to see him back so soon. “Didn’t go to the country today. Been looking at some properties.”

The headache which had been nagging him, which he had put down to his uneasiness, now defined itself as the alcoholic headache he always had when he drank in the day. He went up to the room, stripped to pants and vest, tried to read Marcus Aurelius, failed, and soon fell asleep, to the astonishment of his children, who wondered how in a crisis which affected them all their father could find time for sleep so early in the afternoon.

He had seen the house like a guest under heavy obligation to his host. If it had not been raining he might have walked around the small yard and seen the absurd shape of the house. He would have seen where the celotex panels on the eaves had fallen away, providing unrestricted entry to the bats of the neighbourhood. He would have seen the staircase that hung at the back, open, with only a banister, and sheltered by unpainted corrugated iron. He would not have been deceived into cosiness by the thick curtain over the back doorway on the lower floor. He would have seen that the house had no back door at all. If he had not had to rush out of the rain he might have noticed the street lamp just outside the house; he would have known that a street lamp, so near the main road, attracted idlers like moths. But he saw none of these things. He had only a picture of a house cosy in the rain, with a polished floor, and an old lady who baked cakes in the kitchen.

If he had not been disturbed he might have queried the clerk’s eagerness more impolitely. But events were too rapid, too neat. A quarrel in the night, the offer of a house with immediate possession the very next afternoon. And before the evening was out the sum of five thousand five hundred dollars had become less inaccessible.

“Somebody come for you,” Shama was saying.

He awoke and was puzzled to find it was evening.

“Another destee?” His fame had survived his resignation from the Sentinel; destitutes still occasionally sought him out.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

He dressed, his head humming, walked through the house downstairs to the foot of the front steps and surprised the visitor, a respectably dressed Negro of the artisan class, who was waiting for him at the top of the steps.

“Good night,” the Negro said. His accent betrayed him as an illegal immigrant from one of the smaller islands. “Is about the house I come. I want to buy it.”

Everybody wanted to buy or sell houses that day. “I ain’t even pay down for it yet,” Mr. Biswas said.

“The house in Shorthills?”

“Oh, that. That. But I can’t sell that. The land isn’t mine. I don’t even rent it.”

“I know. If I buy the house I would take it away.” He went on to explain. He had bought a lot in Petit Valley. He wanted to build his own house, but building materials were scarce and expensive and he was offering to buy Mr. Biswas’s house, not as a house, but for the materials. He said he was not prepared to haggle. He had studied the building carefully and was prepared to offer four hundred dollars.

And when Mr. Biswas went back to the room with the rumpled beds, the disarrayed furniture, the chaos on Shama’s dressingtable, he had twenty twenty-dollar bills in his pocket.

“You don’t believe in God,” he said to Anand. “But look.”