In the end the futility of lying on the bed caused him to rise and make another of those decisions he had been making all day: decisions to ignore, to behave normally, little decisions, little gestures of defiance that were soon forgotten.

He decided to cycle to Hanuman House.

Every man and woman he saw, even at a distance, gave him a twist of panic. But he had already grown used to that; it had become part of the pain of living. Then, as he cycled, he discovered a new depth to this pain. Every object he had not seen for twenty-four hours was part of his whole and happy past. Everything he now saw became sullied by his fear, every field, every house, every tree, every turn in the road, every bump and subsidence. So that, by merely looking at the world, he was progressively destroying his present and his past.

And there were some things he wanted to leave untouched. It was bad enough to deceive Tarzan. He didn’t want to deceive Anand and Savi. He turned and cycled back, past the fields whose terror was already familiar, to Green Vale.

It occurred to him that by repeating as far as he could all his actions of the previous night he might somehow exorcize the thing that had fallen on him. So, with a deliberation that was like the deliberation of the day before, he bathed, cooked, ate, then sat down and opened Notre Dame.

But the reading only brought back the memory of the previous night, the discovery of fear, and left his hands dusted with gilt.

Every morning the period of lucidity lessened. The bed-sheet, examined every morning, always testified to a tormented night. Between the beginning of a routine action and the questioning the time of calm grew less. Between the meeting of a familiar person and the questioning there was less and less of ease. Until there was no lucidity at all, and all action was irrelevant and futile.

But it was always better to be out among real people than to be in his room with the newspapers and his imaginings. And though he continued to solace himself with visions of deserted landscapes of sand and snow, his anguish became especially acute on Sunday afternoons, when fields and roads were empty and everything was still.

Continually he looked for some sign that the corruption which had come without warning upon him had secretly gone away again. Examining the bedsheet was one thing. Looking at his fingernails was the other. They were invariably bitten down; but sometimes he saw a thin white rim on one nail, and though these rims never lasted, he took their appearance to mean that release was near.

Then, biting his nails one evening, he broke off a piece of a tooth. He took the piece out of his mouth and placed it on his palm. It was yellow and quite dead, quite unimportant: he could hardly recognize it as part of a tooth: if it were dropped on the ground it would never be found: a part of himself that would never grow again. He thought he would keep it. Then he walked to the window and threw it out.

One Saturday Seth said, while they were by the unfinished house, “What’s the matter, Mohun? You are the colour of this.” He placed his large hand on one of the grey uprights.

And Mr. Maclean called. Someone he knew had offered him some timber at a bargain price. It would be enough to wall one room.

They went to look at the house. Mr. Maclean saw the asphalt hanging from the roof but said nothing about it. The floorboards in the back bedroom had begun to shrink, cracking and cambering. Mr. Maclean said, “The man did say that the wood was cured. But cedar is a damn funny wood. It does never cure at all.”

The new timber was bought. It was cedar.

“No tongue-and-groove,” Mr. Maclean said.

Mr. Biswas said nothing.

Mr. Maclean understood. He had seen this apathy overcome the builders of houses again and again.

The back bedroom was walled. The door to the partially floored drawingroom was built and hung. The door to the non-existent front bedroom was built and nailed into the doorway: “To prevent accident,” Mr. Maclean said, “in case you want to move in right away.” Mr. Biswas had wanted doors with panels; he got planks of cedar nailed to two cross bars. The window was built in the same fashion and hung; the new black bolts gleamed on the new wood.

“It coming along nice,” Mr. Maclean said.

Into Mr. Biswas’s busy, exhausted mind came the thought: “Hari blessed it. Shama made him bless it. They gave the galvanized iron and they blessed it.”

His sleep was broken by dreams. He was in the Tulsi Store. There were crowds everywhere. Two thick black threads were chasing him. As he cycled to Green Vale the threads lengthened. One thread turned pure white; the black thread became thicker and thicker, purple-black and monstrously long. It was a rubbery black snake; it developed a comic face; it found the chase funny and said so to the white thread, now also a snake.

When he passed the house and saw the black snakes hanging from the roof, he touched a crapaud pillar and said, “Hari blessed it.” He remembered the suitcase, the whining prayers, the sprinkling with the mango leaf, the dropping of the penny. “Hari blessed it.”

He was on a hill, a bare, brown-green hill. It was hot but the wind was cool and blew his hair. A woman was at the foot of the hill. She was crying and coming to him for help. He felt her pain but didn’t want to be seen. What help could he give? And the woman-Shama, Anand, Savi, his mother-kept coming up the hill. He heard her sobs and wanted to cry to her to go away.

Tarzan was whining outside his door.

One of his paws had been damaged.

“You like eggs too much.”

Then he remembered the dispossessed labourers.

Some nights later he was awakened by barking and shouts.

“Driver! Driver!”

He opened the top half of the door.

“They set fire to Dookinan land,” the watchman said.

He put on his clothes and hurried to the spot, followed by excited labourers.

There was no great danger or damage. Dookinan’s plot was small and was separated from the other fields by a trace and a ditch. Mr. Biswas ordered the boundary canes of the adjoining fields to be cut, and the labourers, though disappointed at the blaze, which from a distance had promised much, worked with zest. The firelight lit up their bodies and kept away the chill.

The tall red and yellow flames shrank; the trash smouldered, red and black, crackled and collapsed, uncovering the red heart of the fire, quickly cooling to black and grey. Glowing scraps rose, twinkling redly, blackened and diminished. At the roots the canes glowed like charcoal; in places it was as if the earth itself had caught fire. The labourers beat the roots and the trash with sticks; ash floated up; smoke turned from grey to white, and thinned.

Only then, when the danger had disappeared, Mr. Biswas realized that for more than an hour he had not questioned himself.

Instantly the questionings, the fear, came.

When the labourers returned to the barracks their chatter lasted a short time, and he was left alone.

But the hour had proved one thing. He was going to get better soon.

It was the first of many disappointments. In time he came to disregard these periods of freedom, just as he no longer expected to wake up one morning and find himself whole again.

At the beginning of the Christmas school holidays, when the sugarcane was in arrow once more and the Christmas shop-signs were going up at Arwacas, Shama sent word by Seth that she was bringing the children to Green Vale for a few days.

Mr. Biswas waited for them with dread. On the day they were to arrive he began to wish for some accident that would prevent their coming. But he knew there would be no accident. If anything was to happen he had to act. He decided that he had to get rid of Anand and Savi and himself, in such a way that the children would never know who had killed them. All morning he was possessed of visions in which he cutlassed, poisoned, strangled, burned, Anand and Savi; so that even before they came his relationship with them had been perverted. About Myna and Shama he didn’t care; he didn’t want to kill them.