A House for Mr. Biswas (65 page)

Photographers from the newspapers came. The exhibitioners straightened their ties and were photographed. Then they were free. They had ceased to be members of the school. School and teacher dwindled, and the boys were anxious to be out of the yard. None dared say he wanted to go home to break the news; besides, none wanted to put an end to the day.

The city was black and white in the sun. Trees were still, the sky high. They walked up to the Savannah, sat and looked at the people going in and out of the Queen’s Park Hotel. In the whitewashed bays on either side of the hotel entrance two doorkeepers of a rare blackness stood in stiff snow-white tunics. The effect was severe but picturesque. The boys wondered aloud what made the hotel get the blackest men in the island for that job, and what made the men take the job. Then they had a long discussion whether, given such a blackness, they would take the job themselves. The taxi-drivers, squatting on the asphalt pavement, chuckled; and the doorkeepers, compelled because of the constant coming and going to maintain their statuesque pose, could only make furtive threatening gestures and open their mouths to frame silent, hurried obscenities. The boys laughed and retreated. They walked along the Savannah, always in the shade of large trees. At Queen’s Park West they came on a mobile stall selling syrupy ice shavings in two colours. They bought; they sucked; they stained hands, faces, shirts. Then the Negro boy, anxious to regain his character, suggested that they should go to the Botanical Gardens to look for copulating couples. They went, they looked. Deployed by the Negro boy, they surprised one couple into a hasty show of decency. The second time they were chased by an enraged American sailor. They retreated to the Rock Gardens, and walked past the
architectural marvels of Maraval Road. They walked past the Scottish baronial castle, the Moorish mansion, the semi-Oriental palace, the Bishop’s Spanish Colonial residence, and came to the blue and red Italianate college, empty now, though there were two cars below a pillared and balustraded balcony. They were proud and a little frightened. Kings for half a day, they would soon be new boys here, and nothing. The clock struck three. They looked up at the tower. The dial would be seen for weeks and months and years; those chimes would become familiar. They would warn of many things; they would mark many beginnings and ends. Now they said that the half-holiday was over. ‘See you next term,’ the boys said, and went their separate ways.

That evening, while Mr Biswas and the parents of the other exhibitioners beat their way to the teacher’s door with gifts of rum and whisky, trussed fowls and hobbled goats, the Tuttle children were set to their books with a new rigidity, although Christmas was not far off and the school term nearly ended. The writer, encouraged, completed the first volume of Captain Daniel’s
West Indian History.
For Vidiadhar it was an unhappy evening. He was given no food. For he had not won an exhibition, Vidiadhar who had brought home clean question papers with ticks beside the questions he had done and a neat list of correct answers to the arithmetic sums, who had begun to learn Latin and French, who had gone to the intercollegiate football match and uttered partisan cries. Now, deprived of his Latin and French books, he was made to sit up late before his exhibition notes, and was repeatedly flogged by Chinta.

The newspapers next morning carried photographs of Anand and the other exhibitioners. There were also columns of fine print containing the names of the many hundred who had only passed the examination. The readers and learners searched among these for Vidiadhar’s name. They didn’t find it. Always on the winning side, the readers and learners turned over the page and pretended to look there, and then they pretended to go through the classified advertisements, which were in the same small type. Having no flogging
powers over the readers and learners, and unable now to threaten them with Govind, Chinta could only abuse them. She abused them individually; she abused Shama; she abused W. C. Tuttle; she abused Anand and his sisters; she accused Mr Biswas of bribing the examiners; she brought up the theft of the eighty dollars. Her voice was a grating whine; her eyes were red, her whole face inflamed. The readers and learners giggled. Vidiadhar, enjoying the holiday granted to the school for its exhibition successes, was set to his exhibition notes again. From time to time Chinta interrupted her abuse to scream at him. ‘Watch me! Give me that knife and see if I don’t cut his little tongue.’ And: ‘You are going to live on bread and water from now on. That is the only thing that will satisfy some people in this house.’ Sometimes she fell silent and ran, literally ran, to the table where he sat and twisted his ears as if she were winding up an alarm clock, until, like an alarm, Vidiadhar went off. Then she slapped him and cuffed him, pulled his hair and pressed her fingers around his throat. Stupefied, Vidiadhar filled page after page with meaningless notes in his crapaud-foot handwriting; and his sisters and brothers scowled at everyone as though they were all responsible for Vidiadhar’s failure and punishment.

All day and all evening Chinta kept it up, her shrill voice part of the background noise of the house, until even W. C. Tuttle was driven to comment, in his pure Hindi, in a voice loud enough to penetrate the partition of Mr Biswas’s inner room, whence the comment was reported to Mr Biswas in the front room, preparing the way for a reconciliation between the two men, which was completed when W. C. Tuttle’s second eldest boy, due to write the exhibition examination next year, came down to ask Anand to be his tutor.

And it was from the Tuttles that Anand got the only presents he had for winning the exhibition: a copy of
The Talisman
from W. C. Tuttle, which he found unreadable, and a dollar from Mrs Tuttle, which he gave to Shama. Mr Biswas was ashamed to mention the promise in the
Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare,
and Anand didn’t remind him: he was content to assume that war conditions did not permit the buying of a bicycle. There was no prize from the school either. Again war
conditions did not permit; and as ‘a war measure’ Anand was given a certificate printed by the Government Printery at the bottom of the street, ‘in lieu of’ the leather-bound, gilt-edged book stamped with the school crest.

It had been a year of scarcity, of rising prices and fights in shops for hoarded flour. But at Christmas the pavements were crowded with overdressed shoppers from the country, the streets choked with slow but strident traffic. The stores had only clumsy local toys of wood, but the signs were bright as always with rosy-cheeked Santa Clauses, prancing reindeer, holly and berries and snow-capped letters. Never were destitutes more deserving, and Mr Biswas worked harder than ever. But everything – shops, signs, crowds, noise, busyness – generated the urgent gaiety that belonged to the season. The year was ending well.

And it was to end even better.

One morning early in Christmas week, when Mr Biswas was looking through applications in the hope of finding a destitute carpenter for Christmas Eve, a well-dressed middle-aged man whom he did not know came straight to his desk, handed him an envelope with a stiff gesture, and, without a word, turned and walked briskly out of the newsroom.

Mr Biswas opened the envelope. Then he pushed back his chair and ran outside. The man was in a car and already driving away.

‘You didn’t see him?’ the receptionist asked. ‘He did ask for you. Doctor feller. Rameshwar.’

He had returned the letter. The error had been acknowledged.

‘What about it, boy?’ he said to Anand later that day. ‘Series of letters. To a doctor. A judge. Businessman, editor. Brother-in-law, mother-in-law.
Twelve Open Letters,
by M. Biswas. What about it?’

THE COLLEGE
had no keener parent than Mr Biswas. He delighted in all its rules, ceremonies and customs. He loved the textbooks it prescribed, and reserved to himself the pleasure of taking Anand’s exhibitioner’s form to Muir Marshall’s in Marine Square and bringing home a parcel of books, free. He papered the covers and lettered the spines. On the front and back endpapers of each book he wrote Anand’s name, form, the name of the college, and the date. Anand was put to much trouble to conceal this from the other boys at school who wrote their own names and were free to desecrate their books in whatever way they chose. Though it concerned neither Anand nor himself, Mr Biswas went to the college speech day. He insisted, too, on going to the Science Exhibition, and spoiled it for Anand; for while the Negro boy ran to the parentless, saying, ‘Look, man, a snail can screw itself,’ Anand had to remain with Mr Biswas who, dutifully beginning at the beginning, looked long and carefully at the electrical exhibits and got no further than the microscopes. ‘Stand up here,’ he told Anand. ‘Hide me while I pull out this slide. Just going to cough and spit on it. Then we could both have a look.’ ‘Yes,
Daddy,’
Anand said. ‘Of course,
Daddy.’
But they didn’t see the snails. When, as an experiment, each boy was given a homework book which parents or guardians were supposed to fill in and sign every day, Mr Biswas filled in and signed punctiliously. Few other parents did; and the homework books were soon abandoned, Mr Biswas filling in and signing to the last. He had no doubt that his interest in Anand was shared by the entire college; and when Anand went back to classes after one of his asthmatic attacks, Mr Biswas always asked in the afternoon, ‘Well, what did they say, eh?’ as though Anand’s absence had dislocated the running of the school.

In October Myna was put on milk and prunes. She had unexpectedly been chosen to sit the exhibition examination in November. Mr Biswas and Anand went with her to the examination hall, Anand condescending, revisiting the scenes of his childhood. He saw his name painted on the board in the headmaster’s room, and was touched at this effort of the school to claim him. When Myna came out at lunchtime she was very cheerful, but under Anand’s severe questioning she had grown dazed and unhappy, had admitted mistakes and tried to show how other mistakes could be construed as accurate. Then they took her to the Dairies, all three feeling that money was being wasted. When the results came out no one congratulated Mr Biswas, for Myna’s name was lost in the columns of fine print, among those who had only passed.

Change had come over him without his knowing. There had been no precise point at which the city had lost its romance and promise, no point at which he had begun to consider himself old, his career closed, and his visions of the future became only visions of Anand’s future. Each realization had been delayed and had come, not as a surprise, but as a statement of a condition long accepted.

But it was not so when, waking up one night, he saw that he had for some time grown to accept his circumstances as unalterable: the buzzing house, the kitchen downstairs, the food being brought up the front steps, the growing children and Shama and himself squeezed into two rooms. He had grown to look upon houses – the bright drawingrooms through open doors, the chink of cutlery from diningrooms at eight, when he was on the way to a cinema, the garages, the hose-sprayed gardens in the afternoons, the barelegged lounging groups in verandahs on Sunday mornings – he had grown to look upon houses as things that concerned other people, like churches, butchers’ stalls, cricket matches and football matches. They had ceased to rouse ambition or misery. He had lost the vision of the house.

He sank into despair as into the void which, in his imagining, had always stood for the life he had yet to live. Night after night he sank. But there was now no quickening panic,
no knot of anguish. He discovered in himself only a great unwillingness, and that part of his mind which feared the consequences of such a withdrawal was increasingly stilled.

Destitutes were investigated and the deserving written about. The truce with W. C. Tuttle was broken, patched up and broken again. The readers and learners read and learned. Anand and Vidiadhar continued not to speak, and this silence between the cousins was beginning to be known at the college, which Vidiadhar had also managed to enter, though at a suitably low form. Govind beat Chinta, wore his threepiece suits and drove his taxi. The widows stopped taking sewing lessons at the Royal Victoria Institute, gave up the clothesmaking scheme and all other schemes. One came and camped, roomless, under the house, threatened to take a stall in the George Street Market, was dissuaded, and returned to Shorthills. W. C. Tuttle acquired a gramophone record of a fifteen-year-old American called Gloria Warren singing ‘You Are Always in My Heart’. And every morning, after the readers and learners had streamed out of the house, Mr Biswas escaped to the
Sentinel
office.

Suddenly, quite suddenly, he was revivified.

It happened during Anand’s second year at the college. Because of his unrivalled experience of destitutes Mr Biswas had become the
Sentinel’s
expert on matters of social welfare. His subsidiary duties had included interviewing the organizers of charities and eating many dinners. One morning he found a note on his desk requesting him to interview the newly arrived head of the Community Welfare Department. This was a government department that had not yet begun to function. Mr Biswas knew that it was part of the plan for postwar development, but he did not know what the department intended to do. He sent for the file. It was not helpful. Most of it he had written himself, and forgotten. He telephoned, arranged for an interview that morning, and went. When, an hour later, he walked down the Red House steps into the asphalt court, he was thinking, not of his copy, but of his letter of resignation to the
Sentinel.
He had been offered, and had accepted, a job as Community Welfare
Officer, at a salary fifty dollars a month higher than the one he was getting from the
Sentinel.
And he still had no clear idea of the aims of the department. He believed it was to organize village life; why and how village life was to be organized he didn’t know.

He had been immediately attracted by Miss Logie, the head of the department. She was a tall, energetic woman in late middle age. She was not pompous or aggressive, as he had found women in authority inclined to be. She had the graces, and even before there was talk of the job he had found himself attempting to please. She also had the attraction of novelty. He had known no Indian woman of her age as alert and intelligent and inquiring. And when the matter of the job was raised he had no hesitation. He rejected Miss Logie’s offer of time to think it over; he feared all delay.