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By Root 7490 0

the muddy colour of their water lost in the flawless reflections of the blue sky; there were more trees; and instead of mud huts there were wooden houses, small and old, but finished, painted and jalousied, with fretwork, frequently broken, along the eaves, above doors and windows and around fern-smothered verandahs. The plain fell behind, the mountains grew nearer; but the doll’s house remained as small as ever and when the bus turned into the Eastern Main Road Mr Biswas lost sight of it. The road was strung with many wires and looked important; the bus moved westwards through thickening traffic and increasing noise, past one huddled red and ochre settlement after another, until the hills rose directly from the road on the right, and from the left came a smell of swamp and sea, which presently appeared, level, grey and hazy, and they were in Port of Spain, where the stale salt smell of the sea mixed with the sharp sweet smells of cocoa and sugar from the warehouses.

He had feared the moment of arrival and wished that the bus would go on and never stop, but when he got down into the yard next to the railway station his uncertainty at once fell away, and he felt free and excited. It was a day of freedom such as he had had only once before, when one of Ajodha’s relations had died and the rumshop had been closed and everybody had gone away. He drank a coconut from a cart in Marine Square. How wonderful to be able to do that in the middle of the morning! He walked on crowded pavements beside the slow, continuous motor traffic, noted the size and number of the stores and cafés and restaurants, the trams, the high standard of the shop signs, the huge cinemas, closed after the pleasures of last night (which he had spent dully at Arwacas), but with posters, still wet with paste, promising fresh gaieties for that afternoon and evening. He comprehended the city whole; he did not isolate the individual, see the man behind the desk or counter, behind the pushcart or the steering-wheel of the bus; he saw only the activity, felt the call to the senses, and knew that below it all there was an excitement, which was hidden, but waiting to be grasped.

It wasn’t until four, when stores and offices closed and the cinemas opened, that he thought of making his way to the address Ramchand had given. This was in the Woodbrook area and Mr Biswas, enchanted by the name, was disappointed to find an unfenced lot with two old unpainted wooden houses and many makeshift sheds. It was too late to turn back, to make another decision, another journey; and after making inquiries of a Negro woman who was fanning a coal-pot in one shed, he picked his way past bleaching stones, a slimy open gutter and a low open gutter and a low clothes-wire, to the back, where he saw Dehuti fanning a coal-pot in another shed, one wall of which was the corrugated iron fence of the sewer trace.

His disappointment was matched by their surprise when, after the exclamations of greeting, he made it clear that he intended to spend some time with them. But when he announced that he had left Shama, they were welcoming again, their solicitude touched not only with excitement but also with pleasure that in a time of trouble he had come to them.

‘You stay here and rest as long as you want,’ Ramchand said. ‘Look, you have a gramophone. You just stay here and play music to yourself.’

And Dehuti even dropped the sullenness with which she always greeted Mr Biswas, a sullenness which, no longer defensive, held no meaning and was only an attitude fixed by habit, simplifying relationships.

Presently Dehuti’s younger son came back from school and Dehuti said sternly, ‘Take out your books and let me hear what you learn at school today.’

The boy didn’t hesitate. He took out Captain Cutteridge’s Reader, Standard Four, and read an account of an escape from a German prison camp in 1917.

Mr Biswas congratulated the boy, Dehuti and Ramchand.

‘He is a good little reader,’ Ramchand said.

‘And what is the meaning of “distribute”?’ Dehuti asked, still stern.

‘Share out,’ the boy said.

‘I didn