“His way lay along the Country Road and the Eastern Main Road. Both were lined for stretches with houses that were ambitious, incomplete, unpainted, often skeletal, with wooden frames that had grown grey and mildewed while their owners lived in one or two imperfectly enclosed rooms. Through unfinished partitions, patched up with box-boards, tin and canvas, the family clothing could be seen on lengths of string stretched across the inhabited rooms like bunting; no beds were to be seen, only a table and a chair perhaps, and many boxes. Twice a day he cycled past these houses, but that evening he saw them as for the first time.” V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas, . p. 92