The typewriter became idle.
“It pay for itself,” Shama said. “No wonder it now have to rest.”
But soon the machine drew him again; and often, while Shama moved heavily about the back verandah and kitchen, Mr. Biswas sat before the typewriter on the green table, inserted a sheet of Sentinel paper, typed his name and address at the top righthand corner, as the Ideal School and all the books had recommended, and wrote:
Escape
by M. Biswas
At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children…
Here he often stopped. Sometimes he went on to the end of the page; sometimes, but rarely, he typed frenziedly for page after page. Sometimes his hero had a Hindi name; then he was short and unattractive and poor, and surrounded by ugliness, which was anatomized in bitter detail. Sometimes his hero had a Western name; he was then faceless, but tall and broad-shouldered; he was a reporter and moved in a world derived from the novels Mr. Biswas had read and the films he had seen. None of these stories was finished, and their theme was always the same. The hero, trapped into marriage, burdened with a family, his youth gone, meets a young girl. She is slim, almost thin, and dressed in white. She is fresh, tender, unkissed; and she is unable to bear children. Beyond the meeting the stories never went.
Sometimes these stories were inspired by an unknown girl in the advertising department of the Sentinel. She often remained unknown. Sometimes Mr. Biswas spoke; but whenever the girl accepted his invitation-to lunch, a film, the beach-his passion at once died; he withdrew the invitation and avoided the girl; thus in time creating a legend among the girls of the advertising department, all of whom knew, though he did not suspect, for he kept it as a heavy, shameful secret, that at the age of thirty-three Mohun Biswas was already the father of four children.
Still, at the typewriter, he wrote of his untouched barren heroines. He began these stories with joy; they left him dissatisfied and feeling unclean. Then he went to his room, called for Anand, and to Anand’s disgust tried to play with him as with a baby, saying, “Shompo! Gomp!”
Forgetting that in his strictness, and as part of her training, he had ordered Shama to file all his papers, he thought that these stories were as secret at home as his marriage and four children were at the office. And one Friday, when he found Shama puzzling over her accounts and had scoffed as usual, she said, “Leave me alone, Mr. John Lubbard.”
That was one of the names of his thirty-three-year-old hero.
“Go and take Sybil to the pictures.”
That was from another story. He had got the name from a novel by Warwick Deeping.
“Leave Ratni alone.”
That was the Hindi name he had given to the mother of four in another story. Ratni walked heavily, “as though perpetually pregnant”; her arms filled the sleeves of her bodice and seemed about to burst them; she sucked in her breath through her teeth while she worked at her accounts, the only reading and writing she did.
Mr. Biswas recalled with horror and shame the descriptions of the small tender breasts of his barren heroines.
Shama sucked her teeth loudly.
If she had laughed he would have hit her. But she never looked at him, only at her account books.
He ran to his room, undressed, got his own cigarettes and matches, took down Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and got into bed.
It was not long after this that Mr. Biswas, painting the kitchen safe and the green table with a tin of yellow paint, yielded to an impulse and painted the typewriter-case and parts of the typewriter as well.
For long the typewriter remained unused, until Anand and Savi began learning to type on it.
But still, in the office, whenever he had cleaned his typewriter or changed the ribbon and wished to test the machine, the sentence he always wrote was: At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four children…
So used to thinking of the house as his own, and in his new confidence, he made a garden. He planted rose-bushes at the side of the house, and at the front dug a pond for water-lilies, which spread prodigiously. He acquired more possessions, the most massive of which was a combined bookcase and desk, of such weight and sturdiness that three men were required to put it into place in his bedroom, where it stayed until they all moved from Port of Spain to Shorthills. Mice nested in the bookcase, protected and nourished by the mass of paper with which the bookcase was stuffed: newspapers (Mr. Biswas insisted that all the newspapers for a month should be kept, and there were quarrels when a particular issue could not be found); every typewritten letter Mr. Biswas had received, from the Sentinel, the Ideal School, people anxious or grateful for publicity; the rejected articles on the seasons, the unfinished Escape stories (at first shamefully glanced at, though later Mr. Biswas read them and regretted he had not taken up short story writing seriously).
Encouraged by Shama, he took an increasing interest in his personal appearance. In his silk suit and tie he had never ceased to surprise her by his elegance and respectability; and whenever she bought him anything, a shirt, cufflinks, a tiepin, he said, “Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! One of these days.” Sometimes, while he was dressing, he would make an inventory of all the things he was wearing and think, with wonder, that he was then worth one hundred and fifty dollars. Once on the bicycle, he was worth about one hundred and eighty. And so he rode to his reporter’s job and its curious status: welcomed, even fawned upon, by the greatest in the land, fed as well as anybody and sometimes even better, yet always, finally, rejected.
“A hell of a thing today,” he told Shama. “As we were leaving Government House H.E. asked me, ‘Which is your car?’ I don’t know. I suppose reporters in England must be rich like hell.”
But Shama was impressed. At Hanuman House she started dropping names, and Padma, Seth’s wife, traced a tenuous and intricate family relationship between Seth and the man who had driven the Prince of Wales during his visit to Trinidad.
On herself Shama spent little. Unable to buy the best and, like all the Tulsi sisters, having only contempt for the second-rate in cloth and jewellery, she bought nothing at all and made do with the gifts of cloth she received every Christmas from Mrs. Tulsi. Her bodices became patched on the breasts and under the arms; and the more Mr. Biswas complained the more she patched. But though her indifference to clothes seemed at times almost like inverted pride, she did not wholly lose her concern for appearances. At Hanuman House a wedding invitation to Mrs. Tulsi was meant for her daughters as well; and one large gift, invariably part of the Tulsi Store stock, went from the House. But now Shama got invitations in her own right and during the Hindu wedding season she borrowed deeply from the rent money, committing herself to almost inextricable entanglement with her accounts, to buy presents, usually water-sets.
“Forget it this time,” Mr. Biswas said. “They must be so used by now to seeing you with a water-set in your hand that I am sure they would believe that you did carry one.”
“I know what I am doing,” Shama said. “My children are going to be married one day too.”
“And when they give back all the water-sets poor Savi wouldn’t be able to walk, for all the glasses and jugs. If they remember, that is. At least leave it for a few more years.”
But weddings and funerals had become important to Shama. From weddings she returned tired, heavy-lidded and hoarse after the night-long singing, to find a house in confusion: Savi in tears, the kitchen in disorder, Mr. Biswas complaining about his indigestion. Pleased at the wedding, the gift that did not disgrace her, the singing, the return home, Shama would say, “Well, as the saying goes, you never miss the water till the well runs dry.”