The gully grew shallower and shallower, and then it was only a depression carpeted with a soft vine of a tender green. Mrs. Tulsi bent down and disturbed it. A vine hung from her fingers; it had a faint smell of mint.

“Old man’s beard,” she said. “In Arwacas they grow it in baskets.”

The house was partly hidden by a large, branching, towering saman tree. Swollen parasite vines veined its branches and massive trunk; wild pines sprouted like coarse hair from every crotch; and it was hung with lianas. Below the tree, beside the gully, there was a short walk lined with orange trees, and around the trunk there was a clump of wild tannia, pale green, four feet tall, nothing but stem and giant heart-shaped leaves, cool with quick beads of dew.

An old signpost stood slightly askew in the gully. The letters were bleached and faint: Christopher Columbus Road. It was fitting. The land, though fruitful from a former cultivation, felt new.

“This used to be the old road,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

And Mr. Biswas found it easy to imagine the other race of Indians moving about this road before the world grew dark for them.

Nothing in Shama’s accounts had prepared him for the view of the house from the gully, at the end of the tree-lined drive. It was a two-storeyed house with a long verandah on the lower floor; it stood far from the road on an escarpment on the hill, above a broad flight of concrete steps, white against the surrounding green.

And everything was as Shama had said. On one side of the drive there was a cricket field; the pitch was red and broken: obviously the village team did not use matting. On the other side, beyond the saman tree, the lianas, the wild tannia, there was a swimming pool, empty, cracked, sandy, plants pushing up through the concrete, but it was easy to see it mended and filled with clear water; and beyond that, on an artificial mound, a cherry tree, its thick branches trimmed level at the bottom above a wrought-iron seat. And in the drive the gri-gri palms, with their white trunks, red berries and dark green leaves; though they were perhaps too old: they had grown so tall they could not be seen whole, and could even be missed.

Then at the far end of the cricket ground Mr. Biswas saw a mule. It looked old and dispirited. Untethered, it remained still, against a camouflage of cocoa-trees.

“Ah!” Mr. Biswas said, breaking the silence. “Horses.”

“That’s not a horse,” Mrs. Tulsi said.

They left the drive and stood among the wild tannia under the saman tree. Mrs. Tulsi held a liana and offered it to Mr. Biswas. While he felt it, she held a thinner liana and pulled it down. “As strong as rope,” she said. “The children could skip with this.”

They walked along the weed-ridden drive. The narrow canal at one side was silted with fine, rippled sand. “You could just sell the sand from this place,” Mrs. Tulsi said. They came to the broad flight of shallow concrete steps. Mr. Biswas went up slowly: impossible not to feel regal ascending steps like these.

On either side of the house there was an abandoned garden, flowerless except for some stray marigolds; but through the bush it was possible to see the pattern of the beds, edged with concrete and the stunted shrubs called “green tea” and “red tea”. At the end of one garden a Julie mango tree stood on a concrete-walled circular bed more than three feet high.

“Just the spot for a temple,” Mrs. Tulsi whispered.

The house was of timber, but the timber had been painted to look like blocks of granite: grey, flecked with black, red, white and blue, and marked with thin white lines. A folding screen separated the regal drawingroom from the regal diningroom; and there was a multiplicity of rooms whose purposes were uncertain. The house had its own electricity plant; not working at the moment, Mrs. Tulsi said, but it could be fixed. There was a garage, servants’ quarters, an outdoor bathroom with a deep concrete tub. The kitchen, linked to the house by a roofed way, was vast, with a brick oven. The hill rose directly behind the kitchen; the view through the back window was of the green hillside just a few feet away. And tonka beans grew on the hill.

“Who owned the house before?” Mr. Biswas asked.

“Some French people.”

This, allied to a brief acquaintance during his Aryan days with the writings of Remain Rolland, gave Mr. Biswas a respect for the French.

They walked and looked. The silence, the solitude, the fruitful bush in a broken landscape: it was an enchantment.

They heard the bus in the distance.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose it is time to go home now.”

“Home?” said Mrs. Tulsi. “Isn’t this your home now?”

So the Tulsis left Arwacas. The lands were rented out and it fell to the tenants to contend with Seth’s claims. The Tulsi Store was leased to a firm of Port of Spain merchants. At Port of Spain one of the tenements was sold and Shama relieved of her rent-collecting duties. It was only then that Shama, still sulking after her victory, disclosed that Mrs. Tulsi had decided to raise the rent of the Port of Spain house. Mr. Biswas was shocked, and to shock him further Shama brought down her account books and showed how his salary went to the grocer almost as soon as it came, how her debts were rising.

The solitude and silence of Shorthills was violated. The villagers bore the invasion without protest and almost with indifference. They were an attractive mixture of French and Spanish and Negro and, though they lived so near to Port of Spain, formed a closed, distinctive community. They had a rural slowness and civility, and spoke English with an accent derived from the French patois they spoke among themselves. They appeared to exercise some rights on the grounds of the house. They played cricket on the cricket field most afternoons and there was a match every Sunday, when the grounds were virtually taken over by the villagers. For some time after the coming of the Tulsis courting couples strolled about the orange walks and the drive in the afternoon, disappearing from time to time into the cocoa woods. But this custom soon ceased. The couples, finding themselves surprised at every turn by a Tulsi, moved further up the gully.

Mr. Biswas’s first impression on moving to Shorthills was that the Tulsi family had increased. Seth and his family were absent; but those sisters who for one reason and another had lived away from Hanuman House had brought their families; and there were many married grandchildren as well, and their families.

Mr. Biswas was given a room on the upper floor, one of six rooms of equal size about a central corridor. It was a hotel-like arrangement, with a couple in each room, and widows and children moving about the common area downstairs. Mr. Biswas’s room became the headquarters of his family; it was there that Anand did his homework, there that the children came to complain, there that Mr. Biswas gave them delicacies to eat in private. The fourposter, Shama’s dressingtable, the bookcase and desk and the table were in this room; the rest of his furniture, rockingchair, hatrack, kitchen safe, was disposed, like his children at night, about the house.

The drawingroom furnishings of Hanuman House had been similarly scattered. There could be no division of this house into the used and the unused, and the thronelike chairs, the statuary and the vases were left in the drawingroom, which in appearance and purpose presently became the equivalent of the Hanuman House hall.

A certain unpleasantness was added to Mr. Biswas’s situation by the presence directly across the corridor of a brother-in-law he had never seen at Hanuman House, a tall, contemptuous man who had taken an immediate dislike to him and expressed this dislike by a quivering of the nostrils.

Anand said, “Prakash say his pappa got more books than you.”