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 clothes-making 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.