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By Root 19276 0

labourers, stooping on the lorry, looked up; and he was fumbling among the scantlings. He tried to take one up, had misjudged its size, abandoned it, Shama saying from the verandah, ‘No, no,’ picked up a large stained wet stone from the bleaching-bed and ‘Who tell you you could come and cut down my rose trees? Who?’ Scraping the words out of his throat so that they didn’t seem to come from where he stood, but from someone just behind him. A labourer jumped down from the lorry, there was surprise and even dread in Seth’s eyes. ‘Pa!’ one girl cried, and he hoisted his arm, Shama saying ‘Man, man.’ His wrist was seized, roughly, by large hot gritty fingers. The stone fell to the ground.

Disarmed, he was without words. Beside the three men he felt his frailty, his baggy linen suit beside Seth’s tight khaki clothes and the labourers’ working rags. The cuffs of his jacket bore the imprints of dirty fingers; his wrist burned where it had been held.

Seth said, ‘You see. You make your children frighten like hell’ And to the loaders, ‘All right, all right.’

The unloading continued.

‘Rose trees?’ Seth said. ‘They did just look like black sage bush to me.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Yes! I know they just look like bush to you. Tough!’ he added. ‘Tough!’ As he turned he stumbled against the bed of bleaching stones.

‘Oops!’ Seth said.

‘Tough!’ Mr Biswas repeated, walking away.

Shama followed him.

Heads were withdrawn from the fence on either side. Curtains dropped back into place.

‘Thug!’ Mr Biswas said, going up the steps.

‘Eh, eh,’ Seth said, smiling at the children. ‘Helluva temper, man. But my lorries can’t sleep in the road.’

From the verandah Mr Biswas, unseen, said, ‘This is not the end of this. The old lady will have something to say about this, I guarantee you. And Shekhar.’

Seth laughed. ‘The old hen and the big god, eh?’ He looked up at the verandah and said in Hindi, ‘Too many people have the idea that everything belongs to the Tulsis. How do you think this house was bought?’

Mr Biswas appeared at the banister of the verandah.

Anand looked away.

‘You will be hearing from my solicitor,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘And those two rakshas you have with you. They too.’ He disappeared again.

The labourers, unaware of their identification with Hindu mythological forces of evil, unloaded.

Seth winked at the children. ‘Your father is a damn funny sort of man. Behaving as though he own the place. Let me tell you that when you children born your father couldn’t feed you. Ask him. And see the gratitude I get? Everybody defying me these days. Or you don’t know?’

‘Savi! Myna! Kamla! Anand!’ Shama called.

‘You know what your father was doing when I pick him up and marry him to your mother? You know? He tell you? He wasn’t even catching crab. He was just catching flies.’

‘Savi! Anand!’

They hesitated, afraid of Seth, afraid of the house and Mr Biswas.

‘Today, look! White suit, collar and tie. And me. Still in the same dirty clothes you see me with since you born. Gratitude, eh? But I will tell you children that if I leave them today, all of them – your father, mother and all – all of them start catching crab tomorrow, I guarantee you.’

From somewhere in the house Mr Biswas’s voice came, raised, indistinct, heated.

Seth moved to the lorry.

‘Eh, Ewart?’ he said gently to one of the loaders. ‘They was nice roses, eh?’

Ewart smiled, his tongue over his top lip, and made sounds which committed him in no way.

Seth jerked his chin toward the house, still the source of angry, indistinct words. He smiled. Then he stopped smiling and said, ‘We mustn’t pay any mind to these damn jackasses.’

The children moved to the foot of the back steps, where they were hidden from Seth and the loaders.

Mr Biswas’s mutterings died away.

Suddenly an obscenity cracked out from the house. The children were quite still. There was silence, even from the lorry. Anand could have wept. Then the corrugated iron sheets