“God! God! Isn’t this just the sort of arseness to make you go and dance on the grave afterwards? You know, I could turn the funeral column into a bright little feature. Yesterday’s Undertakings. By Gravedigger. Just next to Today’s Arrangements. Or set it next to Invalids. Heading: Going Going, Gone. How about this? Photo of weeping widow at graveside. Later, photo of widow hearing about will and laughing. Caption: ‘Smiling, Mrs. X? We thought so. Where there’s a will there is a way.’ Two photos side by side.”
In the meantime he bought a dark serge suit on credit. And while Anand walked beside the wall of Lapeyrouse Cemetery on his way to the Dairies in the afternoon, Mr. Biswas was often inside the cemetery, moving solemnly among the tombstones and making discreet inquiries about names and decorations. He came home tired, complaining of headaches, his stomach rising.
“A capitalist rag,” he began to say. “Just another capitalist rag.”
Anand remarked that his name no longer appeared in it.
“Glad like hell,” Mr. Biswas said.
And on four Saturdays in succession he was sent to unimportant cricket matches, just to get the scores. The game of cricket meant nothing to him, but he was made to understand that the assignment was part of his retraining and he cycled from fourth-class match to fourth-class match, copying symbols and scores he did not understand, enjoying only the brief esteem of surprised and thrilled players under trees. Most of the matches finished at half past five and it was impossible to be at all the grounds at the same time. It sometimes happened that when he got to a ground there was no one there. Then secretaries had to be hunted out and there was more cycling. In this way those Saturday afternoons and evenings were ruined, and often Sunday as well, for many of the scores he had gathered were not printed.
He began to echo phrases from the prospectus of the Ideal School of Journalism. “I can make a living by my pen,” he said. “Let them go ahead. Just let them push me too far.” At this period one-man magazines, nearly all run by Indians, were continually springing up. “Start my own magazine,” Mr. Biswas said. “Go around like Bissessar, selling them myself. He tell me he does sell his paper like hot cakes. Like hot cakes, man!”
He abandoned his own regime of strictness at home and instead spoke so long of various members of the Sentinel staff that Shama and the children got to feel that they knew them well. From time to time he indulged in a tiny rebellion.
“Anand, on your way to school stop at the cafй and telephone the Sentinel. Tell them I don’t feel like coming to work today.”
“Why you don’t telephone them yourself? You know I don’t like telephoning.”
“We can’t always do what we like, boy.”
“And you want me to say that you just don’t feel like going out to work today.”
“Tell them I’m sick. Cold, headache, fever. You know.”
When Anand left, Mr. Biswas would say, “Let them sack me. Let them sack me like hell. Think I care? I want them to sack me.”
“Yes,” Shama said. “You want them to sack you.”
But he was careful to space out these days.
He made himself unpopular among the boys and young men of the street who played cricket on the pavement in the afternoons and chattered under the lamp-post at night. He shouted at them from his window and, because of his suit, his job, the house he lived in, his connexion with Owad, his influence with the police, they were cowed. Sometimes he ostentatiously went to the cafй and telephoned the local police sergeant, whom he had known well in happier days. And he rejoiced in the glares and the mutterings of the players when, soberly dressed, unlikely to offend mourners, he cycled out to his funerals in the afternoon.
He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear with the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times was for him almost like an act of sacrifice. He shared his discovery with Anand; and though he abstracted some of the pleasure of Dickens by making Anand write out and learn the meanings of difficult words, he did this not out of his strictness or as part of Anand’s training. He said, “I don’t want you to be like me.”
Anand understood. Father and son, each saw the other as weak and vulnerable, and each felt a responsibility for the other, a responsibility which, in times of particular pain, was disguised by exaggerated authority on the one side, exaggerated respect on the other.
Suddenly the pressure ceased at the Sentinel. Mr. Biswas was taken off court shorts, funerals and cricket matches, and put into the Sunday Magazine, to do a weekly feature.
“If they did just push me so much farther,” he told Shama, “I would have resigned.”
“Yes. You would have resigned.”
“Sometimes I don’t know why the hell I ever bother to talk to you.”
He had in fact mentally composed many sonorous letters of resignation, varying from the abusive to the dignified to the humorous and even to the charitable (these ended with his best wishes for the continued success of the Sentinel).
But the features he now wrote were not the features he wrote for Mr. Burnett. He didn’t write scandalous interviews with one-eyed men: he wrote serious surveys of the work done by the Institute for the Blind. He didn’t write “I Am Trinidad’s Maddest Man”: he wrote about the splendid work of the Lunatic Asylum. It was his duty to praise, to look always beyond the facts to the official figures; for it was part of the Sentinel’s new policy of sobriety that this was the best of all worlds and Trinidad’s official institutions its most magnificent aspects. He had not so much to distort as to ignore: to forget the bare, toughened feet of the children in an orphanage, the sullen looks of dread, the shameful uniforms; to accept a temporary shaming eminence and walk through workshops and vegetable gardens, noting industry, rehabilitation and discipline; to have lemonade and a cigarette in the director’s office, and get the figures; to put himself on the side of the grotesques.
These features were not easy to write. In the days of Mr. Burnett once he had got a slant and an opening sentence, everything followed. Sentence generated sentence, paragraph led to paragraph, and his articles had a flow and a unity. Now, writing words he did not feel, he was cramped, and the time came when he was not sure what he did feel. He had to note down ideas and juggle them into place. He wrote and rewrote, working extremely slowly, nagged by continual headaches, completing his articles only to meet the Thursday deadline. The results were laboured, dead, incapable of giving pleasure except to the people written about. He didn’t look forward to Sunday. He was up early as usual, but the paper remained on the front steps until Shama or one of the children brought it in. He avoided turning to his article for as long as possible. It was always a surprise, when he did turn to it, to see how photographs and layout concealed the dullness of the matter. Even then he did not read through what he had written, but glanced at odd paragraphs, looking for cuts and changes that would indicate editorial disapproval. He said nothing to Shama, but he lived now in constant expectation of the sack. He knew his work was not good.