Mr. Biswas sent Anand to find out what books Prakash’s father had.

Anand reported, “All the books exactly the same size. On the cover they have a green shield marked ‘Boots’. And they are all by a man called W. C. Tuttle.”

“Trash,” Mr. Biswas said.

“Trash,” Anand told Prakash.

“You call my books trash?” Prakash’s father asked Mr. Biswas some mornings later, when they opened their doors at the same time.

“I didn’t call your books trash.”

The nostrils quivered. “What about your Epictetus and Manxman and Samuel Smiles?”

“How do you know about my Epictetus?”

“How do you know about my books?”

Thereafter Mr. Biswas locked his room whenever he left it. The news spread and there were comments.

“So you start up already?” Shama said.

And having got to Shorthills, everyone waited, for the sheep, the horses, for the swimming pool to be repaired, the drive weeded, the gardens cleaned, the electricity plant fixed, the house repainted.

Waiting, the children stripped the saman tree of its lianas. But there was no use to which they could put these improbable and pleasing growths; they were not good for skipping, as Mrs. Tulsi had said: the thin ones frayed easily, the fat ones were unwieldy. Hari cut down the Julie mango tree on the raised bed at the end of the garden and built a small, kennel-like box-board hut; this was the temple. The reader of W. C. Tuttle put up a large framed print of the goddess Lakshmi in the drawingroom and offered up his own prayers before it every evening; Prakash said his father knew more of these matters than Hari. The brick oven in the kitchen was levelled; the roofed way between the house and kitchen was pulled down and the open area roofed with old corrugated iron and tree-branches from the hillside at the back.

Anand’s patience broke. Spreading a rumour among the children that the house was going to be repainted right away but that the old paint had to be scraped off first, he soon had more than a dozen helpers working on the granite blocks. They made many pink and cream scars on the grey verandah walls before they were noticed; and this effort to force improvements ended in a mass flogging.

Mr. Biswas, too, was waiting for improvements. But he did not greatly care about them. For him Shorthills was an adventure, an interlude. His job made him independent of the Tulsis; and Shorthills was an insurance against the sack. It also provided an opportunity to save, an opportunity to plunder. And secretly he was plundering: half a dozen oranges at a time, half a dozen avocado pears or grapefruit or lemons, sold to a cafй keeper in St. Vincent Street with some story about the variety of fruit trees he had in his backyard. The money was little but regular, the thrill of plundering delicious. Plunder! The very sound of the word excited Mr. Biswas. Cycling to work in the cool of the morning and whistling in his way, he would suddenly jump off his bicycle, look right, look left, pull down oranges or avocado pears, drop them into his saddlebag, hop on to his saddle and cycle measuredly away, whistling.

He came back one afternoon to find the cherry tree cut down, the artificial mound partly dug up, the swimming pool partly filled in. By the end of the week the mound was a flat black patch and the swimming pool did not exist. A tent was put up over the area occupied by the pool and sisters and husbands remarked again and again that it was wonderful not only to have so much bamboo so near but not to have to pay for it either, as they had had to at Arwacas.

The tent was for wedding guests. It appeared that a whole wave of Shama’s nieces was to be married off. One marriage had been arranged before the move, and during the idle weeks at Shorthills the idea had grown. Action was swift and sudden. Details-the bridegrooms and dowries-had been easily settled, and now the puzzling estate was forgotten and all energy went to preparing for the weddings. Days before the ceremony guests and retainers and dancers, singers and musicians came from Arwacas. They slept in the tent, the verandah, the garage, the covered space between the kitchen and house, and by day wandered through the grounds and woods, plundering.

Much bamboo was used in the decorations. The drive and walks were lined with bamboo poles placed horizontally on vertical bamboo poles; every horizontal section was filled with oil and fitted with a wick. On the night of the weddings many small flickering flames seemed to be suspended in the darkness; trees, outlined, not illuminated, looked solid; and the grounds felt protected, a warm cave in the night. The seven bridegrooms came in seven cavalcades with seven teams of drummers, followed by the stupefied villagers. At the foot of the concrete steps there were seven ceremonies of welcome, and in the wedding-tent, built over one of the gardens flattened for the purpose, the seven wedding ceremonies went on all night, while in the tent over the swimming pool there was singing, dancing and feasting.

When the weddings were over, the population of the house temporarily reduced by seven, the guests gone away, and the tents over the ruined garden and swimming pool taken down, everyone began waiting again, for the small cricket pavilion to be restored, the drive cleaned, its culverts mended, the canal cleared of silt, for the evergreen hedges at the bottom of the hill to be trimmed, for the unruined garden to be replanted. Unasked, the children did what they could, but their scattered efforts made no impression on the grounds. They collected tonka beans from the hillside and, not knowing what to do with them, left them in the garage, where they presently rotted and smelled.

Then suddenly some sheep appeared. Half a dozen scraggy, bare, bewildered sheep. The children had been promised sheep, but they had expected fleecy things, and there was no rush to claim these. The sheep remained nibbling in the cricket field, offending the children and the cricketers.

Nothing was done to the cocoa trees or the orange trees. Week by week the bush advanced and the estate, from looking neglected, began to look abandoned. There was still no one to plan or direct. As suddenly as she had emerged from her sickroom to supervise the move, so Mrs. Tulsi had now withdrawn. She had a small room on the lower floor, overlooking the ruined garden and Hari’s box-board temple. But her window was closed, the room was sealed against light and air, and there, in an ammoniac darkness, she spent much of the day, looked after by Sushila and Miss Blackie. It was as though her energy had been stimulated only by the quarrel with Seth and, ebbing, had depressed her further into exhaustion and grief.

Govind tore down the cricket pavilion one day. A rough cowshed went up in its place, and Mr. Biswas heard, with astonishment, that his cow was to be stabled there.

“Cow? My cow?”

It turned out that the cow, whose name was Mutri, was one of Shama’s secret possessions, like her sewingmachine. Mutri had been kept on the estate at Arwacas with all the other Tulsi cows. She was an old black cow, tired, with short bruised horns.

“What about the milk?” Mr. Biswas asked. “The calves?”

“What about the grass?” Shama replied. “The water? The feed?”

Govind looked after the cows and for that reason alone Mr. Biswas made no further inquiries. Govind was becoming increasingly surly. He scarcely spoke to anyone, and worked off his rages on the cows. He beat them with thick lengths of wood and at milking time the slightest misdemeanour threw him into a rage. The animals didn’t moan or wince or show anger; they only tried to move away. No one protested; there was no one to complain to.

Mr. Biswas said, “Poor Mutri.”

Before cows and sheep the cricketers retreated. The cricket field turned to mud and manure, and someone planted a pumpkin vine at the edge of it.