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?’
5. The Void
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.
He walked light-heartedly down St Vincent Street back to the office. What had just happened was unexpected in every way. He had stopped thinking of a new job. He had paid no more than a journalist’s attention to all the talk of postwar development, since he did not see how it involved him and his family. And now, on a Monday morning, he had walked into a new job, and his job made him part of the new era. And it was a job with the government! He thought with pleasure of all the jokes he had heard about civil servants, and felt the full weight of the fears that had been with him since Mr Burnett had left. He could have been sacked from the Sentinel at any moment; there was nothing or no one to protect him. But in the Service no one could be sacked just like that. There were things like Whitley Councils, he believed. The matter would have to go through all sorts of channels – that was the delicious word – and this, he understood, was such a complicated proceeding that few civil servants ever did get the sack. What was that story about the messenger who had stolen and sold all a department’s typewriters? Didn’t they just say, ‘Put that man in a department where there are no typewriters’?
How many letters of resignation he had mentally addressed to the Sentinel! Yet when, letters having passed between the Secretariat and himself, the moment came and he sat up in the Slumberking to write to the Sentinel, he used none of the phrases and sentences he had polished over the years. Instead, to his surprise, he found himself grateful to the paper for employing him for so long, for giving him a start in the city, equipping him for the Service.
He felt a fool when he received the editor’s reply. In five lines he was thanked for his letter, his services were acknowledged, regret was expressed, and he was wished luck in his new job. The letter was typed by a secretary, whose smart lowercase initials were in the bottom left corner.
Working out his notice, he let the Destees slide, and prepared zestfully for his new job. He borrowed books from the Central Library and from the department’s small collection. He began with books on sociology and immediately came to grief: he could not understand their charts or their language. He moved on to simpler paperbacked books about village reconstruction in India. These were more amusing: they gave pictures of village drains before and after, showed how chimneys could be built at no cost, how wells could be dug. They stimulated Mr Biswas to such a degree that for a few days he wondered whether he oughtn’t to practise on the little community in his own house. A number of books laid a puzzling stress on the need for folk dances and folk singing during the carrying out of cooperative undertakings; some gave examples of songs. Mr Biswas saw himself leading a singing village as they cooperatively mended roads, cooperatively put up superhuts, cooperatively dug wells; singing, they harvested one another’s fields. The picture didn’t convince: he knew Indian villagers too well. Govind, for instance, sang, and W. C. Tuttle liked music; but Mr Biswas couldn’t see himself leading them and the singing readers and learners to re-concrete the floor under the house, to plaster the half-walls, to build another bathroom or lavatory. He doubted whether he could even get them to sing. He read of cottage industries: romantic words, suggesting neatly clad peasants with grave classical features sitting at spinning wheels in cooperatively built superhuts and turning out yards and yards of cloth before going on to the folk singing and dancing under the village tree in the evening, by the light of flambeaux. But he knew what the villages were by night, when the rumshop emptied. He saw himself instead in a large timbered hall, walking up and down between lines of disciplined peasants making baskets. From cottage industries he was diverted by juvenile delinquency, which he found more appealing than adult delinquency. He particularly liked the photographs of the hardened delinquents: stunted, smoking, supercilious, and very attractive. He saw himself winning their confidence and then their eternal devotion. He read books on psychology and learned some technical words for the behaviour of Chinta when she flogged Vidiadhar.
Miss Logie, who had at first encouraged his enthusiasm, now attempted to control it. He saw her often during the month, and their relationship grew even better. Whenever she introduced him to anyone she spoke of him as her colleague, a graciousness he had never before experienced; and from being relaxed with her he became debonair.
Then he had a fright.
Miss Logie said she would like to meet his family.
Readers! Learners! Govind! Chinta! The Slumberking bed and the destitute’s diningtable! And perhaps some widow might want to try again, and there would be a little tray of oranges or avocado pears outside the gate.
‘Mumps,’ he said.
It was partly true. The contagion had struck down Basdai’s readers and learners wholesale, had attacked a little Tuttle; but it had not yet got to Mr Biswas’s children.
‘They are all down with mumps, I fear.’
And when later Miss Logie asked after the children, Mr Biswas had to say they had recovered, though they had in fact just succumbed.
Promptly at the end of the month the free delivery of the Sentinel stopped.
‘Don’t you think a little holiday before you begin would be refreshing?’ Miss Logie said.
‘I was thinking of that.’ The words came out easily; they were in keeping with his new manner. And he saw himself condemned to a pay-less week
among the readers and learners. ‘Yes, a little holiday would be most refreshing.’
‘Sans Souci would be very nice.’
Sans Souci was in the northeast of the island. Miss Logie, a newcomer, had been there; he had not.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sans Souci would be nice. Or Mayaro,’ he added, trying to take an independent line by mentioning a resort in the southeast.
‘I am sure your family would enjoy it.’
‘You know, I believe they would.’ Family again! He waited. And it came. She still wanted to meet them.
Poise deserted him. What could he suggest? Bringing them to the Red House one by one?
Miss Logie came to his rescue. She wondered whether they couldn’t all go to Sans Souci on Sunday.
That at least was safer. ‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘My wife can cook something. Where shall we meet?’
‘I’ll come and pick you up.’
He was caught.
‘As a matter of fact I have taken a house in Sans Souci,’ Miss Logie said. And then her plan came out. She wanted Mr Biswas to take his family there for a week. Transport was difficult, but the car would come for them at the end of the week. If Mr Biswas didn’t go, the house would be empty, and that would be a waste.