Untended, the rose trees grew straggly and hard. A blight made their stems white and gave them sickly, ill-formed leaves. The buds opened slowly to reveal blanched, tattered blooms covered with minute insects; other insects built bright brown domes on the stems. The lily-pond collapsed again and the lily-roots rose brown and shaggy out of the thick, muddy water, which was white with bubbles. The children’s interest in the garden was spasmodic, and Shama, claiming that she had learned not to interfere with anything of Mr. Biswas’s, planted some zinnias and marigolds of her own, the only things, apart from an oleander tree and some cactus, that had flourished in the garden of Hanuman House.

The war was beginning to have its effects. Prices were rising everywhere. Mr. Biswas’s salary was increased, but the increases were promptly absorbed. And when his salary reached thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents a fortnight the Sentinel started giving COLA, a cost-of-living allowance. Henceforth it was COLA that went up; the salary remained stationary.

“Psychology,” Mr. Biswas said. They make it sound like a tea party at the orphanage, eh?” He raised his voice. “All right, kiddies? Got your cake? Got your icecream? Got your cola?”

The shorter the money became, the worse the food, the more meticulously Shama kept her accounts, filling reporter’s notebook after reporter’s notebook. These she never threw away; they lay in a swollen, grubby pile on the kitchen shelf.

There were fights in shops for hoarded, weevil-ridden flour. The police kept a sharp eye on stall holders in markets, and a number of vegetable growers and small farmers were fined and imprisoned for selling above the scheduled price. Flour continued to be scarce and full of weevils; and Shama’s food became worse.

To Mr. Biswas’s complaints she said, “I walk miles every Saturday to save a cent here and a cent there.”

And soon, food forgotten, they were quarrelling. Their quarrels lasted from day to day, from week to week, quarrels differing only in words from those they had had at The Chase.

“Trapped!” Mr. Biswas would say. “You and your family have got me trapped in this hole.”

“Yes,” Shama would say. “I suppose if it wasn’t for my family you would have a grass roof over your head.”

“Family! Family! Put me in one poky little barrackroom and pay me twenty dollars a month. Don’t talk to me about your family.”

“I tell you, if it wasn’t for the children-”

And often, in the end, Mr. Biswas would leave the house and go for a long night walk through the city, stopping at some empty shack of a cafй to eat a tin of salmon, trying to stifle the pain in his stomach and only making it worse; while below the weak electric bulb the sleepy-eyed Chinese shopkeeper picked and sucked his teeth, his slack, bare arms resting on a glasscase in which flies slept on stale cakes. Up to this time the city had been new and held an expectation which not even the deadest two o”clock sun could destroy. Anything could happen: he might meet his barren heroine, the past could be undone, he would be remade. But now not even the thought of the Sentinel’s presses, rolling out at that moment reports of speeches, banquets, funerals (with all names and decorations carefully checked), could keep him from seeing that the city was no more than a repetition of this: this dark, dingy cafй, the chipped counter, the flies thick on the electric flex, the empty Coca Cola cases stacked in a corner, the cracked glasscase, the shopkeeper picking his teeth, waiting to close.

And in the house, while he was out, the children would come out of bed and go to Shama. She would take down her bloated reporter’s notebooks and try to explain how she had spent the money given her.

At school one day Anand asked the boy who shared his desk, “Your father and mother does quarrel?”

“What about?”

“Oh, about anything. About food, for instance.”

“Nah. But suppose he ask her to go to town and buy something. And suppose she don’t buy it. Boy!”

One evening, after a quarrel had flared up and died without being concluded, Anand went to Mr. Biswas’s room and said, “I have a story to tell you.”

Something in his manner warned Mr. Biswas. He put down his book, settled a pillow against the head of the bed and smiled.

“Once upon a time there was a man-” Anand’s voice broke.

“Yes?” Mr. Biswas said, in a mocking friendly voice, still smiling, scraping his lower lip with his teeth.

“Once upon a time there was a man who-” His voice broke again, his father’s smile confused him, he forgot what he had planned to say and abandoning grammar, added quickly, “Who, whatever you do for him, wasn’t satisfied.”

Mr. Biswas burst out laughing, and Anand ran out of the room, trembling with rage and humiliation, to the kitchen, where Shama comforted him.

For many days Anand didn’t speak to Mr. Biswas and, in secret revenge, didn’t drink milk at the Dairies, but iced coffee. Mr. Biswas was effusive towards Savi and Myna and Kamla, and relaxed with Shama. The atmosphere in the house was less heavy and Shama, now Anand’s defender, took much pleasure in urging Anand to speak to his father.

“Leave him, leave him,” Mr. Biswas said. “Leave the storyteller.”

Anand became steadily more morose. When he came home after private lessons one afternoon he refused to eat or talk. He went to his room, lay down on the bed and, despite Shama’s coaxings, stayed there.

Mr. Biswas came in and presently walked into the room, saying in his rallying voice, “Well, well. What happen to our Hans Andersen?”

“Eat some prunes, son,” Shama said, taking out the little brown paper-bag from the table drawer.

Mr. Biswas saw the distress on Anand’s face and his manner changed. “What’s the matter?”

Anand said, “The boys laugh at me.”

“He who laughs last laughs best,” Shama said.

“Lawrence say that his father is your boss.”

There was silence.

Mr. Biswas sat on the bed and said, “Lawrence is the night editor. Nothing to do with me.”

“He say they have you like an office boy in the office.”

“You know I write features.”

“And he say that when you go to his father house you have to go to the back door.”

Mr. Biswas stood up. His linen suit was crumpled, the jacket pulled out of shape by the notebooks in the pockets, the tops of which were dirty and a little frayed.

“You never went to his father house?”

“Why should he go to Lawrence’s house?” Shama said.

“And you never went to the back door?”

Mr. Biswas walked to the window. It was dark; his back was to them.

“Let me put on the light,” Shama said briskly. Her footsteps were heavy. The light went on. Anand covered his face with his arm. “Is that all that’s been upsetting you?” Shama asked. “Your father has nothing to do with Lawrence. You heard what he said. “

Mr. Biswas went out of the room.

Shama said, “You shouldn’t have told him that, you know, son.”

For the rest of that evening Shama walked and talked and did everything as noisily as she could.

The next morning, with his books and lunch parcel in his bag and the six cents for milk in his pocket, Anand was kissing Shama in the back verandah when Mr. Biswas came to him and said, “I don’t depend on them for a job. You know that. We could go back any time to Hanuman House. All of us. You know that.”

On Saturday he took the children on a surprise visit to Ajodha’s. Tara and Ajodha were as delighted as the children, and the visit lasted till Sunday. There was much to look at in the new house. It was a grand two-storeyed concrete house built and decorated and furnished in the modern manner. The concrete blocks looked like rough-hewn stone; there was no dust-collecting fretwork hanging from the eaves; doors and windows were varnished, not painted, and closed and opened in interesting ways; chairs were upholstered and vast, not small and cane-bottomed; floors were stained and polished; the lavatory flushes were chainless. In the drawing-room they studied Tara’s photographs of the dead; they saw Raghu in his flower-strewn coffin surrounded by his thin, big-eyed children. The kitchen was enormous and abounded in modern contrivances; Tara, old, slow and oldfashioned, seemed out of place in it. When they were tired of the house they wandered about the yard, which had not changed. They talked to the cowman and the gardener, examined the various people who called, and played among the abandoned frames of motor vehicles. After lunch on Saturday they went to the cinema, and on Sunday Ajodha arranged an excursion.