And when Mr. Maclean set to work, he worked alone. Mr. Biswas never saw Edgar again and never asked about him.

Mr. Maclean went to a “‘bandon”, brought back tree-branches and trimmed them into rafters. He cut notches in the rafters wherever they were to rest on the main frame, and nailed them on. They looked solid. He used thinner branches, limber, irregular and recalcitrant, for cross-rafters. They looked shaky and reminded Mr. Biswas of the rafters of a dirt-and-grass hut.

Then the corrugated iron was nailed on. The sheets were dangerous to handle and the rafters shook under Mr. Maclean’s weight and the blows of his hammer. The weeds below and the frame became covered with rust. When Mr. Maclean had packed his tools into his wooden suitcase and gone home for the day, it was a pleasure to Mr. Biswas to stand below the roof and be in shade where only the day before, only that morning, there had been openness.

As the sheets went up, and they were enough to cover all the rooms except the gallery, the house no longer looked so drab and un-begun. Mr. Maclean was right: the sheets did hide the branch-rafters. But every hole in the roof glittered like a star.

Mr. Maclean said, “I did mention a thing called mastic cement. But that was before I did see the galvanize. You would spend as much on mastic cement as on five-six sheets of new galvanize.”

“So what? I just got to sit down in my new house and get wet?”

“Where there’s a will there’s a way, as the people does say. Pitch. You did think about that? A lot of people does use pitch.”

They got the pitch free, from a neglected part of the road where asphalt was laid on, without gravel, in lavish lumps. Mr. Maclean put small stones over the holes in the roof and sealed them down with pitch. He ran sealings of pitch along the edges of the sheets and down the cracks. It was a slow, long job, and when he was finished the roof was curiously patterned in black with many rough lines, straight down, angularly jagged across, and freaked and blobbed and gouted all over with pitch, above the confused red, rust, brown, saffron, grey and silver of the old sheets.

But it worked. When it rained, as it was beginning to do now every afternoon, the ground below the roof remained dry. Poultry from the barrackyard and other places came to shelter and stayed to dig the earth into dust.

The cedar floorboards came, rough and brisdy, and impregnated the site with their smell. When Mr. Maclean planed them they seemed to acquire a richer colour. He fitted them together as neatly as he had said, nailing them down with headless nails and filling in the holes at the top with wax mixed with sawdust which dried hard and could scarcely be distinguished from the wood. The back bedroom was floored, and part of the drawingroom, so that, with care, it was possible to walk straight up to the bedroom.

Then Mr. Maclean said, “When you get more materials you must let me know.”

He had worked for a fortnight for eight dollars.

Perhaps he didn’t pay seven dollars for the cedar, Mr. Biswas thought. Only five or six.

The house now became a playground for the children of the barracks. They climbed and they jumped; many took serious falls but, being barrack children, came to little harm. They nailed nails into the crapaud pillars and the cedar floor; they bent nails for no purpose; they flattened them to make knives. They left small muddy footprints on the floor and on the crossbars of the frame; the mud dried and the floor became dusty. The children drove out the poultry and Mr. Biswas tried to drive out the children.

“You blasted little bitches! Let me catch one of you and see if I don’t cut his foot off.”

As the sugarcane grew taller the dispossessed labourers grew surlier, and Mr. Biswas began to receive threats, delivered as friendly warnings.

Seth, who had often spoken of the treachery and dangerousness of the labourers, now only said, “Don’t let them frighten you.”

But Mr. Biswas knew of the many killings in Indian districts, so well planned that few reached the courts. He knew of the feuds between villages and between families, conducted with courage, ingenuity and loyalty by those same labourers who, as wage-earners, were obsequious and negligible.

He decided to take precautions. He slept with a cutlass and a poui stick, one of his father’s, at the side of his bed. And from Mrs. Seeung, the Chinese cafй-owner at Arwacas, he got a puppy, a hairy brown and white thing of indeterminate breed. The first night at the barracks the puppy whined at being left outside, scratched at the door, fell off the step and whined until he was taken in. When Mr. Biswas woke up next morning he found the puppy in bed beside him, lying quite still, its eyes open. At Mr. Biswas’s first gesture, which was one of surprise, the puppy jumped to the floor.

He called the puppy Tarzan, to prepare it for its duties. But Tarzan turned out to be friendly and inquisitive, and a terror only to the poultry. “The hens stop laying because of your dog,” the poultry owners complained, and it looked true enough, for Tarzan often had pieces of feather stuck in the corners of his mouth, and he was continually bringing trophies of feathers to the room. Then one day Tarzan ate an egg and immediately developed a taste for eggs. The hens laid their eggs in bush, in places which they thought were secret. Tarzan soon got to know these places as well as the owners of the hens and he often came back to the barracks with his mouth yellow and sticky with egg. The owners of the hens took their revenge. One afternoon Mr. Biswas found Tarzan’s muzzle smeared with fowl droppings, and Tarzan in great misery at this novel and continuing discomfort.

The placards in Mr. Biswas’s room increased. He worked more slowly on them now, using black and red estate ink and pencils of many colours. He filled the blank space with difficult decorations and his letters became intricate and ornamented.

Thinking it would help him if he read novels, he bought a number of the cheap Reader’s Library editions. The covers were dark purple with gold lettering and decorations. In the stall at Arwacas they had looked attractive, but in his room he could scarcely bear to touch them. The gilt stuck to his fingers and the covers reminded him of funeral palls and of those undertakers’ horses that were draped with the colours of death every day.

The sun shone and the rain fell. The roof didn’t leak. But the asphalt began to melt and hung limply down: a legion of slim, black, growing snakes. Occasionally they fell, and, falling, curled and died.

Late one night, when he had put out the oil lamp and was in bed, he heard footsteps outside his room.

He lay still, listening. Then he jumped out of bed, grabbed his stick and deliberately knocked against the kitchen safe and table and Shama’s dressingtable. He stood at the side of the door and violently pushed out the top half, his body protected by the lower half.

He saw nothing but the night, the still, colourless barrack-yard, the dead trees black against the moonlit sky. Two rooms away a light was burning: someone was out, or a child was ill.

Then, making a lapping, happy sound, Tarzan was on the step, wagging his tail so hard it struck against the lower half of the door.

He let him in and stroked him. His coat was damp.

Tarzan, overjoyed at the attention, stuck his muzzle against Mr. Biswas’s face.

“Egg!”

For a second Tarzan hesitated. No threat appearing, he redoubled his tail-wagging, continually shifting his hind legs.

Mr. Biswas embraced him.

After that he always slept with his oil lamp on.

He began to fear that his house might be burned down. He went to bed with an added anxiety; every morning he opened his side window as soon as he got up, looking past the trees for signs of destruction; in the fields he worried about it. But the house always stood: the variegated roof, the frames, the crapaud pillars, the wooden staircase.