A House For Mr. Biswas - pg. 45

He seldom went there except when Tara's husband, prompted by Tara, held a religious ceremony and needed Brahmins to feed. Then Mr. Biswas was treated with honour; stripped of his ragged trousers and shirt, and in a clean dhoti, he became a different person, and he never thought it unseemly that the person who served him so deferentially with food should be his own sister. In Tara's house he was respected as  a Brahmin and pampered; yet as soon as the ceremony was over and he had taken his gift of money and cloth andleft, he became once more only a labourer's child -- father's occupation: labourer was the entry in the birth certificate F. Z. Ghany had sent -- living with a penniless mother in one room of a mud hut.