...to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.
The lines mark the end of prologue describing the circumstances surrounding the death of Mr. Biswas. The lines describe the major conflict of the protagonist Mr. Biswas in the book in the simplest way: to own a house of his own. Mr. Biswas often suffers over the way he has to live—in other people's houses. He was even born in his grandparents' house, and many claimed his birth was marked was inauspicious and unnecessary. For most people, he was just a hindrance, and he reflects that people would hardly miss him if he were gone. For him, the ultimate goal of life is to have his own house so he can at least die in a way that no one can lay claim on his place.
This house is like a Republic already.
Seth says this to Mr. Biswas on his mention that the Tulsis have defrauded him by marrying him with their daughter without providing a dowry. These lines are reminiscent of the feelings that the house is a nation on its own, with so many people living. Mr. Biswas reflects on multiple occasions that he felt that the house was always vibrant with the movement of so many people. However, Seth means this as a sarcastic comment: he feels that so many people living without gratitude under a roof that is being provided for by Seth.
And the house did not fall.
These lines denote the importance of a place where one can live with respect and without any dependence on anyone. Mohun Biswas kept trying to get a place of his own all his life; he stayed at numerous places, sometimes employed and sometimes at mercy of other people. But he had high self-esteem and wanted to have a place where his wife and children could live peacefully and that could continue to shelter them after he was gone. The house he buys in the end, though full of numerous faults, becomes such a place.
Only then, when the danger had disappeared, Mr. Biswas realized that for more than an hour he had not questioned himself.
The quote describes the time when Mohin Biswas is riddled with anxieties as a result of psychological manipulation and gaslighting by the Tulsis and the sugarcane workers. He begins to question his existence and enters a mid-life crisis. He had three children with no steady income, nor any house. He had begun to hate his work and his family, and he had internal discussions with himself. During this time, he learns of a fire in the sugarcane fields. Distracted by a crisis, he realizes that his thoughts and anxieties are psychological and that he can get better by keeping himself occupied.
One child claimed; one still hostile; one unknown. And, now another. Trap!
Mohun Biswas thinks along these lines when he learns that Shama is pregnant for the fourth time. He is familiar and liked only by Savi, his eldest daughter. Anand was still hostile. Muna was still a baby, and he hadn't even held her. He believed that the Tulsi were trapping him by providing him with one child after another.
How often did Mr. Biswas regret his weakness, his inarticulateness, that evening!
Mr. Biswas, who has not been particularly strong-willed or clear to himself about his own ambitions or intentions, is coaxed by Mrs. Tulsi into marrying her daughter, Shama, even though he does not know what he is getting himself. Thus begins his nearly lifelong attachment to the Tulsi family.
He had lived in many houses. And how easy it was to think of those houses without him!
Mr. Biswas' main concern regarding houses is that he never seems to own the one he lives in; which is to say, he is never entirely in charge of his, and his family's, own lives, instead being forced to depend upon other people.
But life is like that. Is not a fairy story.
Misir, Mr. Biswas' journalist friend, tells him a story of a man who was run over by a car that did not stop for him; Mr. Biswas assumes it to be an amusing piece of fiction, but Misir explains that it really happened. This is a brief but pithy suggestion that Mr. Biswas' views of the world may not always align with the realities he encounters.
Ostracized from the community into which he was born, he had shown the futility of its sanctions. He had simply gone outside it.
When Mr. Biswas visits Ramchand, Tara's former house boy, in Port of Spain, he is impressed with how the man has made a life for himself by striking out independently. Mr. Biswas, in comparison, is at once shackled to his wife's family and unwilling to risk leaving it.
His freedom was over, and it had been false. The past could not be ignored; it was never counterfeit; he carried it within himself. If there was a place for him, it was one that had already been hollowed out by time, by everything he had lived through, however imperfect, makeshift and cheating.
Leaving for a doctor's office in Port of Spain, Mr. Biswas realizes that the freedom he felt from leaving Hanuman House is illusory and that he must face his past problems in trying to make a new life in the city.
