He found that the extra money could be spent in any of a number of new ways, and he did not save as much as he had hoped. Savi had to be sent to a better school; their food had to be improved; something had to be done about Anand’s asthma. And he decided, and Shama agreed, that it was time he got himself some new suits, to go with his new job.
Apart from the serge suit in which he had gone to funerals, he had never had a proper suit, only cheap things of silk and linen; and he ordered his new suits with love. He discovered he was a dandy. He fussed about the quality and tone of the cloth, the cut of the suits. He enjoyed fittings: the baked smell of the white-tacked cloth, the tailor’s continual reverential destruction of his own work. When the first suit was ready he decided to wear it right away. It pricked his calves unpleasantly; it had a new smell; and when he looked down at himself the cascade of brown appeared grotesque and alarming. But the mirror reassured him, and he felt the need to show off the suit without delay. There was an inter-colonial cricket match at the Oval. He did not understand the game, but he knew that there was always a crowd at these matches, that shops and schools closed for them.
It was the fashion at the time for men to appear on sporting occasions with a round tin of fifty English cigarettes and a plain box of matches held in one hand, the forefinger pressing the matchbox to the top of the tin. Mr. Biswas had the matches; he used half a day’s subsistence allowance to buy the cigarettes. Not wishing to derange the hang of his jacket, he cycled to the Oval with the tin in his hand.
As he came along Tragarete Road he heard faint scattered applause. It was just before lunch, too early for the crowds; it would have been better after tea. Nevertheless he cycled round to the stands side of the Oval, leaned his bicycle against the peeling corrugated iron fence, chained it, removed the clips from his carefully folded trousers, shook down the trousers, smoothed out the pleats, straightened the prickly jacket over his shoulders. There was no queue. He paid a dollar for his ticket and, holding his tin of cigarettes and box of matches, walked up the stairs to the stand. It was less than a quarter full. Most of the people were at the front. He spied an empty seat in the middle of one of the few packed rows.
“Excuse me,” he said, and started on a slow progress down the row, people rising before him, people rising in the row behind, people settling down again in his wake, and “Excuse me,” he kept on saying, quite urbane, unaware of the disturbance. At last he came to his seat, dusted it with a handkerchief, stooping slightly in response to a request from someone behind. While he unbuttoned his jacket a burst of applause came from all. Absently casting a glance at the cricket field, Mr. Biswas applauded. He sat down, hitched up his trousers, crossed his legs, operated the cutter on the lid of the cigarette tin, extracted a cigarette and lit it. There was a tremendous burst of applause. Everyone in the stand stood up. Chairs scraped backwards, some overturned. Mr. Biswas rose and clapped with the others. What crowd there was had advanced on to the field; the cricketers were racing away, flitting blobs of white. The stumps had disappeared; the umpires, separated by the crowd, were walking sedately to the pavilion. The match was over. Mr. Biswas did not inspect the pitch. He went outside, unlocked his bicycle and cycled home, holding the tin of cigarettes in his hand.
His one suit, hanging out to sun on Shama’s line in the backyard, did not make much of a showing against Govind’s five threepiece suits on Chinta’s line, which had to be supported by two pronged poles. But it was a beginning.
The interviews completed, it was Mr. Biswas’s duty to analyze the information he had gathered. And here he floundered. He had investigated two hundred households; but after every classification he could never, on adding, get two hundred, and then he had to go through all the questionnaires again. He was dealing with a society that had no rules and patterns, and classifications were a chaotic business. He covered many sheets with long, snakelike addition sums, and the Slumberking was spread with his questionnaires. He pressed Shama and the children into service, damned them for their incompetence, dismissed them, and worked late into the night, squatting on a chair before the diningtable. The table was too high; sitting on pillows had proved unsatisfactory; so he squatted. Sometimes he threatened to cut down the legs of the diningtable by half and cursed the destitute who had made it.
“This blasted thing is getting me sick,” he shouted, whenever Shama and Anand tried to get him to go to bed. “Getting me sick, I tell you. Sick. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t stay with my little destitutes.”
“Everywhere you go, is the same,” Shama said.
He did not tell her of his deeper fears. Already the department was under attack. Citizen, Taxpayer, Pro Bono Publico and others had written to the newspapers to ask exactly what the department was doing and to protest against the waste of taxpayers’ money. The party of Southern businessmen to which Shekhar belonged had started a campaign for the abolition of the department: a distinguishing cause, long sought, for no party had a programme, though all had the same objective: to make everyone in the colony rich and equal.
This was Mr. Biswas’s first experience of public attack, and it did not console him that such letters had always been written, that the government in all its departments was being continually criticized by all the island’s parties. He dreaded opening the newspapers. Pro Bono Publico had been particularly nasty: he had written the same letter to all three papers, and there was a whole fortnight between the letter’s first appearance and its last. Nor did it console Mr. Biswas that no one else appeared to be worried. Shama considered the government unshakable; but she was Shama. Miss Logie could always go back to where she came from. The other officers had been seconded from various government departments and they could go back to where they came from. He could only go back to the Sentinel and fifty dollars a month less.
He was glad he had written a mild letter of resignation. And, preparing for misfortune, he took to dropping in at the Sentinel office. The newspaper atmosphere never failed to excite him, and the welcome he received stilled his fears: he was regarded as one who had escaped and made good. Yet with every improvement in his condition, every saving, he felt more vulnerable: it was too good to last.
In time he completed his charts (to display the classifications clearly he joined three double foolscap sheets and produced a scroll nearly five feet long, which made Miss Logie roar with laughter); and he wrote his report. Charts and report were typed and duplicated and, he was told, sent to various parts of the world. Then he was at last free to get villagers to sing or to take up cottage industries. He was given an area. And a memorandum informed him that, to enable him to move easily about his area, he was to be given a car, on a painless government loan.