A House for Mr. Biswas (63 page)

More cars came. Mr Biswas, fresh from writing up the sensational decline and fall of a destitute for the
Sunday Sentinel,
arrived on his Royal Enfield. Yielding to a habit he had formed since frequenting destitutes, he chained the bicycle to the school rails. He walked into the schoolyard with his bicycle clips still on: they gave him an urgent, athletic air.

Two more hampers came. Their carriers, one in uniform, one in a black cotton frock, stood next to the other hamper carrier.

Govind came. His mood had changed since the morning. He slammed the door of his taxi hard and paced up and down outside the school gates, smiling at the pavement, humming, his hands behind his back.

A flutter as of pigeons in the hall: papers being collected. A steady and prolonged banging of desk-lids, a shuffling and a scraping, footsteps more assertive than in the morning, a disorderly rash of white shirts, many broken lines of blue serge: as though the disciplined battalion of a few hours before had been routed and were retreating hurriedly, their equipment abandoned. And the Daddies advanced, like people welcoming a train, some purposefully, claiming their own, some getting lost in the eddies of white and dark blue, and hesitating.

Even in this disorder the hampers were noted, and two provided surprises, for their recipients were mild mannered
and insignificant; they were now being bullied by maids and led to classrooms.

Everywhere Daddies were getting reports. Question papers were displayed, inkstained fingers pointed. Already, too, backs were being turned, and brown paper parcels and white paper parcels unwrapped and furtively explored.

Mr Biswas saw Vidiadhar first: running down the steps, a lime bulging clearly in each trouser pocket, clothes a little battered, but a face as gay and as fresh and as unstained as when he went in. The little thug. He joined a group of fatherless who had gathered around the class-teacher. No longer posing for the Daddies or one another, they were anxious, excited and shrill.

Anand avoided them when he came out. The pen Mr Biswas had lent him, just in case, had leaked in his shirt pocket and left a large wet stain: it was as though his heart had bled ink. His hair was disordered, his lips black and moustached with ink, his cheeks and forehead smudged. His face was drawn; he looked dejected, exhausted and irritable.

‘Well,’ Mr Biswas said, smiling, his heart sinking. ‘It went all right?’

‘Take your bicycle clips off!’

Stunned by the boy’s vehemence, Mr Biswas obeyed.

Anand handed him the question papers, clumsily folded, already dirty. Mr Biswas began opening them.

‘Oh, put it in your pocket,’ Anand said, and Mr Biswas obeyed again.

A worried Chinese boy, looking irreparably scruffy, with over-broad and over-long serge trousers flapping below thin knees, left the group around the teacher and came up to them. In one small hand he unashamedly held a large cheese sandwich, far too thick, it would have seemed, for his narrow mouth; but one end of the sandwich was already irregularly pinked. In the other hand he had a bottle of aerated water. His shrunken face was distorted with anxiety: sandwich and aerated water were irrelevant.

‘Biswas,’ he said, paying no attention to Mr Biswas. ‘That sum about the cyclist —’

‘Oh, don’t bother me,’ Anand said.

Mr Biswas smiled apologetically at the boy, but the boy didn’t notice. Daddyless, he wandered off, alone with his anxieties, no one to assure him that his answer was right, the teacher’s wrong.

‘You shouldn’t behave like that,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘Here. Take back your pen.’

Mr Biswas took back his pen. It dripped with ink.

‘And your wrist-watch.’ Anand was anxious to get rid of every reminder of the morning’s preparations.

Govind and Vidiadhar had gone. So had the other cars. The yard was less noisy. Mr Biswas took Anand to the Dairies for lunch. Crowded with boys and their fathers, it had become an unfamiliar place. As a treat Anand had a chocolate drink instead of milk; but he didn’t enjoy that or anything else: it was only part of the day’s sacrificial ritual.

The schoolyard filled again. Cars came back, deposited boys, and left. The hampers and the maids left. When the bell rang there was not the instant and complete silence of the morning: there was chatter, shuffling and banging, dwindling to silence.

Mr Biswas opened Anand’s question papers. The arithmetic paper was filled in its margins with crabbed and frantic figures: fractions being reduced, and many little multiplications, some completed, some abandoned. Mr Biswas didn’t like the look of them. Then he saw that on the geography paper Anand had written his initials elaborately, outlining them in pencil, shading them in pencil; and this dismayed him entirely.

The afternoon session was shorter, and at the end of it few Daddies were in the schoolyard. Only one car came. The drama of the day was over. There was no rush out of the hall. The boys took off their ties, folded them and put them in their shirt pockets with the broad end hanging out (a recent fashion). An invigilator, in a dingy jacket and bicycle clips, brought his rickety bicycle down the steps: no longer remote and awesome, only a man going home after work.

Anand, his tie in his shirt pocket, his collar turned up, ran smiling to Mr Biswas. ‘Look!’ he said, showing the English paper.

One of the essay subjects was the Grow More Food Campaign.

They smiled at each other, conspirators.

‘Biswas!’ a boy called. ‘You coming to the Savannah?’

‘Yes, man!’

He ran to join the boys; and Mr Biswas, loaded with the pen and pencils, the ruler and erasers and bottle of ink, cycled home.

It was strange that, having talked about football and racing all through the term, the boys should now, watching an important football match, talk about nothing but the examination.

Anand returned home shortly after nightfall. His serge trousers were dusty, his shirt wet with perspiration, and he was very gloomy.

‘I’ve failed,’ he said.

‘What happened?’ Mr Biswas asked.

‘In the spelling paper. The synonyms and homonyms. They were so easy I thought I’d leave them for last. Then I just didn’t do them.’

‘You mean you left out a whole question?’

‘I realized it in the Savannah.’

The gloom spread to Savi and Myna and Kamla and Shama, and was deepened by the joy of Vidiadhar’s brothers and sisters. Vidiadhar had been untouched by the day’s events, and was at that moment in the Roxy Theatre, seeing the complete serial of
Daredevils of the Red Circle.
He had brought home question papers that were quite clean except for gay ticks at the side of those questions he had answered. His arithmetic answers, neatly written on a strip of paper, were all correct. He had known the meanings of all the difficult words; he had spotted the synonyms and had not been fooled by one homonym. And he had not had private lessons. He had not had private lessons after private lessons. No one had taken him Ovaltine and sandwiches at five. He had not been going for very long to a Port of Spain school; he had drunk little milk and eaten few prunes.

‘I always say,’ Shama said, though she had never said anything of the sort, ‘I always say that carelessness was going to be your downfall.’

‘In a few years you will look back on this and laugh,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘You did your best. And no true effort is ever wasted. Remember that.’

‘What about you?’ Anand said.

And though they slept on the same bed, neither spoke to the other for the rest of the evening.

Anand had no more work to do that year and no more milk to drink, but on Monday he went to school. All Saturday’s candidates were there. They had become a superior, leisured caste. A few boys did spend the day writing the examination as nearly as possible as they had done on Saturday. (The Chinese boy, with a mortification that amounted almost to terror, got the correct answer to the sum about the cyclist.) The others flaunted their idleness. At first they were content to be in the classroom and not of the class, seeing the exhibition discipline enforced on next year’s candidates. But this soon palled, and they wandered out into the yard. Their attitude to the examination had changed since Saturday afternoon: they all now had tales of disaster. Anand, believing none of them, magnified his own blunder. In the end they were all boasting of how badly they had done; and apparently none of them really cared. Time hung heavily on their hands, and the afternoon was only partially enlivened by a packet of cigarettes: disappointing, but a prank, at last. For the first time for many years Anand was free to go home as soon as the afternoon bell rang. Up to last week this had seemed the supreme freedom. But now he dreaded leaving the boys, dreaded going back to the house. He did not get home till six.

Unusually, Mr Biswas was below the house, in that section of it which Shama used as a kitchen. He was in his working clothes, and tired, but very gay.

‘Ah, the young man himself,’ he greeted Anand. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve got something for you, young man.’ He took out an envelope from his jacket pocket.

It was a letter from an English judge. He said he had been following Mr Biswas’s work in the
Sentinel,
admired it, and would like to meet Mr Biswas, to try and persuade him to join a literary group he had formed.

‘What about me, eh. What about me. I tell you, man, no true effort is wasted. Not that I expect to get anything from that blasted paper. Or from you.’

Mr Biswas’s elation was extravagant. Anand thought he knew why. But he was in no mood to give comfort, to associate himself with weakness. He handed back the letter to Mr Biswas without a word.

Mr Biswas took the letter absently, told Shama to send up his food, and went to the front room. He was alone, too, when he awoke in the night to the snoring house, Anand asleep beside him, and looked through the window at the clear, dead sky.

He saw the judge the next day, and went to the meeting of the literary group on Friday evening. He was especially glad to be out of the house then, for on Friday evenings the widows came up from Shorthills and spent the night below the house. Encouraged by the success of Indian shirtmakers, the widows had decided to go into the clothesmaking business. Since none of the five could sew at all well, they had decided to learn, and every Friday they went to the sewing classes at the Royal Victoria Institute, each widow specializing in a different aspect of the craft. They came in the late afternoon, they were rapturously welcomed by the readers and learners, and Basdai fed them. The readers and learners, not subject to Basdai’s floggings while their mothers were present, were unusually vociferous; there was an air of festival.

Mr Biswas found himself a little out of his depth in the literary group. Apart from the poems in the
Royal Reader
and
Bell’s Standard Elocutionist,
the only poems he knew were those of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Edward Carpenter; and at the judge’s the emphasis was on poetry. But there was much to drink, and it was late when Mr Biswas came back and wheeled his bicycle below the house, his head ringing with the names of Lorca and Eliot and Auden. The readers and
learners were asleep on benches and tables. The widows, dressed in white and singing softly, sat below a weak bulb, playing cards, drinking coffee, and handling pieces of sewing which had grown grubby over the weeks of tuition. He went up the dark front stairs and turned the light on in his room. Anand sprawled on the bed behind the bank of pillows. He undressed and squeezed himself between the diningtable and the bed. Shama came from the inner room, in answer to the light, and noted those symptoms, of slowness, precision and silence, which she associated with his Sunday excursions to Pagotes.

As a condition of his acceptance by the group he had to read something of his own. He didn’t know what to offer them. He couldn’t write poetry, and he had thrown away the ‘Escape’ stories. He knew that story well, however; it could be written again. He still could think of no satisfactory end, but he had read enough of modern prose to know that a neat end might offend the group. He couldn’t make his hero the faceless ‘John Lubbard’, who was ‘tall, broad-shouldered, handsome’; he would be laughed down. He had to be ruthless. His hero would be Gopi, a country shopkeeper, ‘small, spare and shrunken’. He took a
Sentinel
pad, got into bed and, neatly, began to write the familiar words:
At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children …

Those words were never read to the group. This story, like the others, was never finished. For, even before Gopi could meet his barren heroine, news came that Bipti, Mr Biswas’s mother, had died.

He called the children away from school and they went with Shama to Pratap’s. From the road the open verandah and steps, thick with mourners, appeared to be draped with white. He had not expected such a crowd. Tara was there, and Ajodha, looking annoyed. But most of the mourners he didn’t know: the families of his sister-in-law, his brother’s friends, Bipti’s friends. He might have been attending the funeral of a stranger. The body laid out in a coffin on the verandah belonged more to them. He longed to feel grief. He was surprised only by jealousy.

Shama did her duty and wept. Dehuti, who had been ostracized since her marriage, sat halfway up the steps, shrieking at new mourners and grabbing at their feet, as if anxious to trip them up, to prevent them going any further. The mourners, finding their trousers or skirts clutched to a wet face, stroked Dehuti’s covered head and at the same time tried to shake their garments free. No one made any effort to move Dehuti. Her story was known, and it was felt that she was doing a penance which it would have been improper to interrupt. Ramchand was more controlled but equally impressive. He occupied himself with the funeral arrangements, and behaved with such authority that no one would have guessed that he had not spoken to Bipti or Mr Biswas’s brothers.

Mr Biswas went past Dehuti to look at the body. Then he did not wish to see it again. But always, as he wandered about the yard among the mourners, he was aware of the body. He was oppressed by a sense of loss: not of present loss, but of something missed in the past. He would have liked to be alone, to commune with this feeling. But time was short, and always there was the sight of Shama and the children, alien growths, alien affections, which fed on him and called him away from that part of him which yet remained purely himself, that part which had for long been submerged and was now to disappear.