But the wound was still there, too deep for anger or thoughts of retribution. What had happened was locked away in time. But it was an error, not a part of truth. He wished this stated; and he wanted to do something that would be a defiance of what had happened. The body, lying in earth, was unhallowed, and he owed it honour: the mother who had remained unknown and whom he had never loved. Waking in the night, he felt exposed and vulnerable. He longed for hands to cover him all over, and he could only fall asleep again with his hands over his navel, unable to bear the feel of any alien object, however slight, on that part of his body.
To do honour he had no gifts. He had no words to say what he wanted to say, the poet’s words, which held more than the sum of their meanings. But awake one night, looking at the sky through the window, he got out of bed, worked his way to the light switch, turned it on, got paper and pencil, and began to write. He addressed his mother. He did not think of rhythm; he used no cheating abstract words. He wrote of coming up to the brow of the hill, seeing the black, forked earth, the marks of the spade, the indentations of the fork prongs. He wrote of a journey he had made a long time before. He was tired; she made him rest. He was hungry; she gave him food. He had nowhere to go; she welcomed him. The writing excited, relieved him; so much so that he was able to look at Anand, asleep beside him, and think, “Poor boy. Failed his exam.”
The poem written, his selfconsciousness violated, he was whole again. And when on Friday the five widows arrived in Port of Spain for their sewing lessons at the Royal Victoria Institute, and the house resounded with clatter and chatter and shrieks and singing and the radio and the gramophone, Mr. Biswas went to the meeting of his literary group and announced that he was going to read his offering at last.
“It is a poem,” he said. “In prose.”
Everything glowed richly in the judge’s dimly-lit verandah. On the table there were bottles of whisky and rum, ginger and soda water, and a bowl of crushed ice.
Mr. Biswas sat in the chair below the reading light and sipped his whisky and soda. “There is no title,” he said. And, as he had expected, this was received with satisfaction.
Then he disgraced himself. Thinking himself free of what he had written, he ventured on his poem boldly, and even with a touch of selfmockery. But as he read, his hands began to shake, the paper rustled; and when he spoke of the journey his voice failed. It cracked and kept on cracking; his eyes tickled. But he went on, and his emotion was such that at the end no one said a word. He folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket. Someone filled his glass. He stared down at his lap, as if angry, as if he had been completely alone. He said nothing for the rest of the evening, and in his shame and confusion drank much. When he went home the widows were singing softly, the children were asleep, and he shamed Shama by being noisily sick in the outdoor lavatory.
Whatever happened, Anand would go to college. So Mr. Biswas and Shama decided. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be cruel and foolish to give the boy nothing more than an elementary school education. The girls agreed. They had not had any milk and prunes, and their chances of going to high schools were slight; but they did badly in their classes and did not consider themselves worthy. Myna and Kamla insisted that Mr. Biswas should make a public declaration that Anand was going to the college, for Vidiadhar was behaving as though he had already won the exhibition and was openly learning Latin and French and algebra and geometry, the wonderful subjects taught at the college.
The declaration was made, though neither Mr. Biswas nor Shama could say where the money was going to come from.
Shama talked of recovering her cow Mutri from Shorthills.
“Where you going to keep it?” Mr. Biswas asked. “With the boarders downstairs?”
“Milk selling at ten and twelve cents a bottle,” Shama said.
“What about grass, eh? You think you could just tie out Mutri in Adam Smith Square or the Murray Street playground? You’ve been reading too much Captain Cutteridge. And how much milk you think poor old Mutri going to give after living all those years with your family?”
Commercial ventures were running high in Shama’s mind since one of the widows, despairing of any but long-term returns from the clothesmaking scheme, had brought up a bag of oranges from Shorthills one Friday. She was exceptionally grave. She called one of her sons aside and ordered him to place the oranges on a tray, the tray on a box, and the box on the pavement. Then she went to the Royal Victoria Institute. The widow’s idea was simplicity itself: it required little effort and no outlay. There was much agitated discussion among the sisters that evening; many plans were adumbrated, and futures tremulously envisaged. The widow herself said nothing, and continued as grave and mournful as before, sucking thread, threading needles, and sewing.
The appearance of a shallow heap of oranges on a tray outside the tall blank walls of the house created a small sensation in the residential street. And it increased Mr. Biswas’s dread of being traced to his home by impatient destitutes.
With the exhibition examination and the death of his mother he had been neglecting the destitutes. Correspondence had accumulated, and as he was sitting in the Sentinel office one morning and typing for the tenth time, Dear Sir, Your letter awaited me on my return from holiday…, a reporter came to his desk and said, “Congrats, old man.”
It was the Sentinel’s education correspondent. He held some typewritten sheets. They were the exhibition results.
In a page of names the name stood out.
Anand had been placed third, had got one of the twelve exhibitions.
As bewitching as the news was the generosity with which it was welcomed by the older members of the staff. The very young, who had sat the examination not many years before, were aloof and unimpressed.
But third! Third in the island! It was fantastic. Only two boys more intelligent! It couldn’t be grasped right away.
Recovering, Mr. Biswas attempted to deflect some of the praise. “Mark you, the teacher knows his stuff.” But he couldn’t keep this up. “Careless boy, too, you know. Left out one whole question. In the spelling paper. Synonyms and homonyms.”
He began to lose his audience.
“He knew them. Thought they were easy.”
Reporters returned to their desks.
“And then didn’t do them at all. Left them out. A whole question.”
After a light-hearted morning in which he investigated the circumstances of two destitutes with a good humour which offended those people, he returned to the office and invited the education correspondent and Mr. Burnett’s news editor to have beers with him at the cafй on the corner. There, surrounded by flamboyant murals of revelry on tropical beaches, they drank: three men, none over forty, who considered their careers closed and rested their ambitions on the achievements of their children. The success of the son of one gave the others hope. They shared Mr. Biswas’s joy; they could not achieve his delirium.
“You could leave old Mutri to die in peace,” he said to Shama when he got back to the quiet house at midday; and his gaiety had her guessing. “What about oranges? Want to go in the selling business? Join the widows? The five financial wizards.”