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By Root 19269 0

would have seen where the celotex panels on the eaves had fallen away, providing unrestricted entry to the bats of the neighbourhood. He would have seen the staircase that hung at the back, open, with only a banister, and sheltered by unpainted corrugated iron. He would not have been deceived into cosiness by the thick curtain over the back doorway on the lower floor. He would have seen that the house had no back door at all. If he had not had to rush out of the rain he might have noticed the street lamp just outside the house; he would have known that a street lamp, so near the main road, attracted idlers like moths. But he saw none of these things. He had only a picture of a house cosy in the rain, with a polished floor, and an old lady who baked cakes in the kitchen.

If he had not been disturbed he might have queried the clerk’s eagerness more impolitely. But events were too rapid, too neat. A quarrel in the night, the offer of a house with immediate possession the very next afternoon. And before the evening was out the sum of five thousand five hundred dollars had become less inaccessible.

‘Somebody come for you,’ Shama was saying. He awoke and was puzzled to find it was evening. ‘Another destee?’ His fame had survived his resignation from the Sentinel; destitutes still occasionally sought him out. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

He dressed, his head humming, walked through the house downstairs to the foot of the front steps and surprised the visitor, a respectably dressed Negro of the artisan class, who was waiting for him at the top of the steps.

‘Good night,’ the Negro said. His accent betrayed him as an illegal immigrant from one of the smaller islands. ‘Is about the house I come. I want to buy it.’

Everybody wanted to buy or sell houses that day. ‘I ain’t even pay down for it yet,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘The house in Shorthills?’

‘Oh, that. That. But I can’t sell that. The land isn’t mine. I don’t even rent it.’

‘I know. If I buy the house I would take it away.’ He went on to explain. He had bought a lot in Petit Valley. He wanted to build his own house, but building materials were scarce and expensive and he was offering to buy Mr Biswas’s house, not as a house, but for the materials. He said he was not prepared to haggle. He had studied the building carefully and was prepared to offer four hundred dollars.

And when Mr Biswas went back to the room with the rumpled beds, the disarrayed furniture, the chaos on Shama’s dressingtable, he had twenty twenty-dollar bills in his pocket.

‘You don’t believe in God,’ he said to Anand. ‘But look.’

Between eight hundred dollars and one thousand two hundred dollars there is a great difference. Eight hundred dollars are petty savings. One thousand two hundred dollars stand for real money. The difference between eight hundred and five thousand is immense. The difference between one thousand two hundred and five thousand is negotiable.

A week before Mr Biswas would have dismissed any thought of buying a house for five thousand dollars. He wanted one at three thousand or three thousand five hundred; he never looked at any above four thousand. And the strange thing now was that, having raised his sights, it did not occur to him to look at other five-thousand-dollar houses.

He sought out the solicitor’s clerk the next day, paid him a deposit of one hundred dollars, and was shrewd enough to ask for a stamped receipt.

‘I going to take this money and pay down right away on the house I want to buy,’ the solicitor’s clerk said. ‘Wait until the old queen hear. She going to be so glad.’

When Shama heard she burst into tears.

‘Ah!’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Swelling up. Vexed. You could only be happy if we just keep on living with your mother and the rest of your big, happy family, eh?’

‘I don’t think anything. You have the money, you want to buy house, and I don’t have to think anything.’

And that was when Shama, leaving the room, encountered Suniti, and Suniti said, ‘I hear that you come like