“He was frightened,” Savi said.
“To do what?”
“Frightened to ask Teacher permission to leave the room. And when he leave the room he was frightened again. Frightened to use the school we.”
“Is a nasty, stinking place,” Anand burst out, getting off his knees and turning to face them.
“It really is,” Savi said. “And then-well-”
Anand cried.
“He went back to the classroom and Teacher ask him to leave.”
Anand looked down at the floor, sniffing and running his fingers along the grooves between the floorboards.
“Well, just then school was over and everybody walk behind Anand. Everybody was laughing.”
“And when I come home Ma beat me,” Anand said. He wasn’t complaining. He was angry. “Ma beat me. She beat me.” Repeated, the words lost their anger and became pleas for sympathy.
Mr. Biswas became the buffoon. He told about his own misadventure at Pundit Jairam’s, caricaturing himself, and ridiculing Anand’s shame.
Anand didn’t look up or smile. But he had ceased to cry. He said, “I don’t want to go back to that school.”
“You want to come with me?”
Anand didn’t reply.
They all went down to the hall.
Mr. Biswas said, “Look, Shama, don’t make this boy kneel down again, you hear.”
Sushila, the widow, said, “When we were small Mai used to make us kneel on graters for a thing like that.”
“Well, I don’t want my children to grow up like you, that is all.”
Sushila, childless, husbandless and now without the protection of Mrs. Tulsi, swept upstairs, complaining that advantage was being taken of her situation.
Chinta said, “You are taking your son home with you, brother-in-law?”
Shama, noting Mr. Biswas’s serene mood, said sternly, “Anand not going anywhere. He got to stay here and go to school.”
“Why?” Chinta asked. “Brother-in-law could teach him. I sure he know the ABC.”
“A for apple, B for bat, C for crab,” Mr. Biswas said.
Anand followed Mr. Biswas outside and seemed unwilling to let him leave. He said nothing; he simply hung around the bicycle, occasionally rubbing up against it. Mr. Biswas was irritated by his shyness, but he was again touched by the boy’s fragility and the carefully ragged “home clothes” which Anand, like the other children, wore the minute he came from school. Anand’s washed-out khaki shorts were spectacularly patched, had slits but no pockets and a gaping empty fob. His shirt was darned and frayed and the collar was chewed; from the crooked stitches, the irregular cut, the weak and absurd decoration on the pocket Mr. Biswas could tell that the shirt had been made by Shama.
He asked, “You want to come with me?”
Anand only smiled and looked down and spun the bicycle pedal with his big toe.
It would soon be dark. Mr. Biswas had no lamp (every bicycle lamp and every bicycle pump he bought was promptly stolen) and he could never contrive, as some cyclists did, less to light their way than to appease the police, to ride with a lighted candle in an open paper-bag in one hand.
He cycled down the High Street. Just past the shop with the Red Rose Tea Is Good Tea sign, he looked back. Anand was still under the arcade, next to one of the thick white pillars with the lotus-shaped base; standing and staring like that other boy Mr. Biswas had seen outside a low hut at dusk.
When he got to Green Vale it was dark. Under the trees it was night. The sounds from the barracks were assertive and isolated one from the other: snatches of talk, the sound of frying, a shout, the cry of a child: sounds thrown up at the starlit sky from a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world. The dead trees ringed the barracks, a wall of flawless black.
He locked himself in his room.
That week he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. Unless he started his house now he never would. His children would stay at Hanuman House, he would remain in the barrack-room, and nothing would arrest his descent into the void. Every night he wound himself up to a panic at his inaction, every morning he reaffirmed his decision, and on Saturday he spoke to Seth about a site.
“Rent you land?” Seth said. “Rent? Look, man, there is the land. Why don’t you just choose a site and build? Don’t talk to me about renting.”
The site Mr. Biswas had in mind was about two hundred yards from the barracks, screened from it by the trees and separated from it by a shallow damp depression which ran with muddy water after rain. Trees also screened the road. But when he thought of the land as the site of his house, the trees did not seem unfriendly; and he liked to think of the spot as a “bower”, a word that had come to him from Wordsworth by way of the Royal Reader.
On Sunday morning, after he had had some cocoa, shop bread and red butter, he went to see the builder. The builder lived in a crumbling wooden house in a small Negro settlement not far from Arwacas. Just over the gutter a badly-written notice board announced that George Maclean was a carpenter and cabinet-maker; this announcement was choked by much subsidiary information scattered all over the board in small and wavering letters; Mr. Maclean was also a blacksmith and a painter; he made tin cups and he soldered; he sold fresh eggs; he had a ram for service; and all his prices were keen.
Mr. Biswas called, “Morning!”
From the shack in the hard yellow yard a Negro woman came out, a large calabash full of corn in one hand. Her tight cotton dress imperfectly covered her big body and her kinky hair was in curlers and twists of newspaper.
“The carpenter home?” Mr. Biswas asked.
The woman called, “Georgie!” For a fat woman her voice was surprisingly thin.
Mr. Maclean appeared above the half-door at the side of the house. He looked at Mr. Biswas suspiciously.
The woman walked to the far end of the yard, scattering corn and clucking loudly, calling the poultry to feed.
Mr. Biswas didn’t know how to begin. He couldn’t just say, “I want to build a house.” He didn’t have all the necessary money and he didn’t want to deceive Mr. Maclean or expose himself to his scorn. He said shyly, “I have a little business I want to talk to you about.”
Mr. Maclean pushed open the lower half of the door and came down the concrete steps. He was middle-aged, tall and thin; he looked as eager and uncertain as his board. His profession was a frustrating one. The county abounded in work he had not been allowed to finish: exposed and rotting house-frames, houses that had begun with concrete and dressed wood and ended with mud walls and tree branches. Evidence of his compensating activities lay about the yard. In an open shed at the back a half-finished wheel stood amid shavings. Here and there Mr. Biswas saw goat droppings.
“What sort of business?” Mr. Maclean asked. He reached up and pulled a window open. It rattled and glittered; it was hung on the inside with strings of tin cups.
“Is about a house.”
“Oh. Repairs?”
“Not exactly. It ain’t build yet. As a matter of fact-”
“Georgie!” Mrs. Maclean shouted. “Come and see what that damn mongoose do again.”
Mr. Maclean went to the back of the house. Mr. Biswas heard him mumbling evenly. “Damn nuisance,” he said, coming back, striking his trousers with a switch. “So, you want me to build a house for you?”
Mr. Biswas mistook his wariness for sarcasm and said defensively, “Is not a mansion.”
“That is a blessing. Too much people putting up mansion these days. You ever had a close look at the County Road?” He paused. “Upstairs house?”