When people stared from the road the children didn’t know whether to smile, frown or look away; those who were near the straps held on to them. Never, as from the windows of that Buick, did North Trinidad look so beautiful. They noted, as though they had never seen it before from a bus, how the landscape changed, from marsh just outside Port of Spain, to straggling suburb, to hilly country, to country village, to country town, to rice fields and sugarcane fields, with the Northern Range always on their left. They drove along the smooth new American highway, were checked on entering and leaving the American army post by soldiers with helmets and rifles. Then they drove along a winding road overarched by cool trees to Arima, which welcomed careful drivers; and on to Valencia, where the road ran straight for miles, with untouched bush on either side.
They were, Anand reflected, driving with hampers-laden hampers-to the sea. The English composition had come true.
Mr. Biswas was worried about Shama. Sitting plumply next to Miss Logie on the front seat, her elaborate georgette veil over her hair, Shama was showing herself self-possessed and even garrulous. She was throwing off opinions about the new constitution, federation, immigration, India, the future of Hinduism, the education of women. Mr. Biswas listened to the flow with surprise and acute anxiety. He had never imagined that Shama was so well-informed and had such violent prejudices; and he suffered whenever she made a grammatical mistake.
They stopped at Balandra, and walked to the dangerous part of the bay where the waves were five feet high and a sign warned against bathing. Never had water seemed so blue; never had sand shone so golden; never had bay curved so beautifully, waves broken so neatly. It was a perfect world, the curve of the coconut trees repeated in the curve of the bay, the curl of the waves, the arc of the horizon. Already they could taste the salt on their lips. The fresh wind blew; the trousers of Mr. Biswas and the chauffeur sausaged out; the women and girls held down their skirts.
They bathed where it was safe.
(And later Anand pointed out to Mr. Biswas that in spite of what she had said Miss Logie had brought her bathing suit.)
They opened the hampers and ate on the dry sand in the dangerous shade of coconut trees (“Over a million coconuts will fall on the East Coast today,” had been the hollow bright opening of a feature he had written for the Sentinel on the copra industry).
Then they drove to Sans Souci, through narrow, ill-tended roads darkened by bush on both sides. Small villages surprised them here and there, lost and lonely. And now the sea was always with them. Unseen, it thundered continuously. The wind never ceased to rage through the trees; above the swaying bush, the dancing plumes of green, the sky was high and open. From time to time they had glimpses of the sea: so near, so unending, so alive, so impersonal. What would happen if, by some accident, they should drive off the road into it?
In a dream that night this accident was to happen, and Kamla was to wake gratefully, yet to find herself in a new dread, for she had forgotten the room where they had all gone to sleep, in the large bare house at the top of the hill, impenetrably black all round, with the sea beating a little distance away and the coconut trees groaning in the perpetual wind.
They had arrived in the late afternoon and had not had much time to explore. Miss Logie, the chauffeur and the Buick had gone back; and finding themselves alone, in a large house, on holiday, they had all grown shy with one another. Night brought an additional uneasiness. In the strange, musty, blank-walled drawingroom they sat around an oil lamp, the contents of the hamper gone stale and unappetizing, the cream cheese, bought from the Dairies the day before, already gone bad. The house was large enough for them to have had one room each; but the noise, the loneliness, the unknown surrounding blackness had kept them all in one room.
Wind and sea welcomed them in the morning. Light showed them where they were. The wind and the sea raged all night, but now they were both fresh, heralds of the new day. The children walked about the shining wet grass on the top of the hill; the sea, glimpsed through the tormented coconut trees, lay below them; their hands and faces became sticky with salt.
Their shyness slowly wore away. They went to deserted beaches, where lay the partly buried wrecks of strange trees brought across the sea. Beyond the wavering tidewrack the dimpled sand was pitted with the holes of sand crabs, small, nervous creatures the colour of sand. They made excursions to the places with French names: Blanchisseuse, Matelot; and to Toco and Salybia Bay. They picked almonds, sucked them, crushed the seeds; in land so wild and remote it was inconceivable that anything was owned by anyone. From trees that bordered the road they picked bright red cashew nuts, sucked the fruit and took the nuts to the house and roasted them. The days were long. Once they came upon a group of fishermen who were talking a French patois; once they met a group of well-dressed, noisy Indian youths, one of whom asked Myna what Savi’s name was, and Mr. Biswas saw that as a father he now had fresh responsibilities. In the evenings, with the noise of sea and wind, comforting now, around them, they played cards: they had found four packs in the house.
Another discovery, in a cupboard full of tinned food, was Cerebos Salt. They had never seen salt in tins. The shop salt they knew was coarse and damp; this was fine and dry, and ran as easily as the drawing on the tin showed.
They forgot the house in Port of Spain and spread themselves about the house on the hill. It seemed there was no one in the world but themselves, nothing alive but themselves and the sea and the wind. They had been told that on a clear day they could see Tobago; but that never happened.
And then the Buick came for them.
As they drove back to Port of Spain the new shy pleasure they had found in being alone was forgotten. They were preparing for the two rooms, the city pavements, the badly concreted floor under the house, the noise, the quarrels. On the way out they had feared arrival, a casting off into the unknown; now they dreaded returning to what they knew. But they spoke of other things. Shama spoke about the evening meal, remembered she had nothing. The car stopped at a shop in the Eastern Main Road and they enjoyed a brief distinction as the occupants of a chauffeur-driven car.
There was no reception for them in Port of Spain. It was evening. The readers and learners were reading and learning. Everything was as they had left it: the weak light bulbs, the long tables, the chanting of some readers as they attempted to learn lessons by heart. Only, the house seemed lower, darker, suffocating. At first they were ignored. But presently the questioning began, the prying to see whether any disaster had befallen, for the sadness with which they had returned had already made them irritable and short-tempered.
Did the wilderness really exist? Was the house still at the top of the hill? Was the wind still making the coconut trees groan? Did the sea beat on those empty beaches? Was it at that moment of night bringing to shore those black berries, branches and strands of seaweed from miles and thoughtless miles away?
They fell asleep with the roar of wind and sea in their heads. In the morning they woke to the humming house.
Mr. Biswas did not immediately superintend lines of peasants making baskets. No one sang for him. And he encouraged no one to build better huts or to take up cottage industries. He began to survey an area, and went from house to house filling in questionnaires prepared by Miss Logie. Most of the people he interviewed were flattered. Some were puzzled: “Who send you? Government? Think they really care?” Some were more than puzzled: “You mean they paying you for this? Just to find out how we does live. But I could tell them for nothing, man.” Mr. Biswas hinted that there was more to the survey than they thought; pressed, he had to bluff. It was like interviewing destitutes; only there was no money for anyone except himself at the end. And he was doing well. In addition to his salary he could claim subsistence and travel allowances; and on many evenings he had to lay aside his books and work out his claims. He filled in a form, submitted it, and after a few days got a voucher. He took the voucher to the Treasury and exchanged it with a man behind a zoo-like cage for another voucher which was limp with handling and ticked, initialled, signed and stamped in various colours. This he exchanged at another cage, this time for real money. It took time, but these trips to the Treasury made him feel that he was at last getting at the wealth of the colony.