There was no reply.
“Anyway, when you see your sister-in-law, I want you to give her a message. I want you”-and here Lai seized the boy and started to use the tamarind rod-“I want you to tell her that ought twos don’t make four. I want you to tell her that ought oughts are ought, ought twos are ought, one twos are two, and two twos are four.”
Mr. Biswas was taught other things. He learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in Hindi from the King George V Hindi Reader, and he learned many English poems by heart from the Royal Reader. At Lai’s dictation he made copious notes, which he never seriously believed, about geysers, rift valleys, watersheds, currents, the Gulf Stream, and a number of deserts. He learned about oases, which Lai taught him to pronounce “osis”, and ever afterwards an oasis meant for him nothing more than four or five date trees around a narrow pool of fresh water, surrounded for unending miles by white sand and hot sun. He learned about igloos. In arithmetic he got as far as simple interest and learned to turn dollars and cents into pounds, shilling and pence. The history Lai taught he regarded as simply a school subject, a discipline, as unreal as the geography; and it was from the boy in the red bodice that he first heard, with disbelief, about the Great War.
With this boy, whose name was Alec, Mr. Biswas became friendly. The colours of Alec’s clothes were a continual surprise, and one day he scandalized the school by peeing blue, a clear, light turquoise. To excited inquiry Alec replied, “I don’t know, boy. I suppose is because I is a Portuguese or something.” And for days he gave solemn demonstrations which filled most boys with disgust at their race.
It was to Mr. Biswas that Alec first revealed his secret, and one morning recess, after Alec had given his demonstration, Mr. Biswas dramatically unbuttoned and gave his. There was a clamour and Alec was forced to take out the bottle of Dodd’s Kidney Pills. In no time the bottle was empty, except for some half a dozen pills which Alec said he had to keep. The pills, like the red bodice, belonged to his sister-in-law. “I don’t know what she going to do when she find out,” Alec said, and to those boys who still begged, he said, “Buy your own. The drugstore full of them.” And many of them did buy their own, and for a week the school’s urinals ran turquoise; and the druggist attributed the sudden rise in sales to the success of the Dodd’s Kidney Pills Almanac which, in addition to jokes, carried story after story of the rapid cures the pills had effected on Trinidadians, all of whom had written the makers profusely grateful letters of the utmost articulateness, and been photographed.
With Alec Mr. Biswas laid six-inch nails on the railway track at the back of the Main Road and had them flattened to make knives and bayonets. Together they went to Pagotes River and smoked their first cigarettes. They tore off their shirt buttons, exchanged them for marbles and with these Alec won more, struggling continually to repair the depredations of Lai, who considered the game low and had forbidden it in the school grounds. They sat at the same desk, talked, were flogged and separated, but always came together again.
And it was through this association that Mr. Biswas discovered his gift for lettering. When Alec tired of doing inaccurate erotic drawings he designed letters. Mr. Biswas imitated these with pleasure and growing success. During an arithmetic test one day, finding himself with an astronomical number of hours in answer to a problem about cisterns, he wrote CANCELLED very neatly across the page and became absorbed in blocking the letters and shadowing them. When the period was over he had done nothing else.
Lai, who had noted Mr. Biswas’s industry with approval, flew into a rage. “Ah! Sign-painter. Come up.”
He didn’t flog Mr. Biswas. He ordered him to write I AM AN ASS on the blackboard. Mr. Biswas outlined stylish, contemptuous letters, and the class tittered approvingly. Lai, racing about the classroom, waving his tamarind rod for silence, brushed Mr. Biswas’s elbow and a stroke was spoilt. Mr. Biswas turned this into an additional decoration which pleased him and impressed the class. It was too late for Lai to flog Mr. Biswas or order him to clean the blackboard. Angrily he pushed him away, and Mr. Biswas went back to his desk, smiling, a hero.
Mr. Biswas went to Lai’s school for nearly six years and for all that time he was friendly with Alec. Yet he knew little about Alec’s home life. Alec never spoke about his mother or father and Mr. Biswas knew only that he lived with his sister-in-law, the owner of the red bodice, an unphotographed user of Dodd’s Kidney Pills, and, according to Alec, a great beater. Mr. Biswas never saw this woman. He never went to Alec’s home and Alec never came to his. There was a tacit agreement between them that they would keep their homes secret.
It would have pained Mr. Biswas if anyone from the school saw where he lived, in one room of a mud hut in the back trace. He was not happy there and even after five years considered it a temporary arrangement. Most of the people in the hut remained strangers, and his relations with.Bipti were unsatisfying because she was shy of showing him affection in a house of strangers. More and more, too, she bewailed her Fate; when she did this he felt useless and dispirited and, instead of comforting her, went out to look for Alec. Occasionally she had ineffectual fits of temper, quarrelled with Tara and muttered for days, threatening, whenever there was anyone to hear, that she would leave and get a job with the road-gang, where women were needed to carry stones in baskets on their heads. Continually, when he was with her, Mr. Biswas had to struggle against anger and depression.
At Christmas Pratap and Prasad came from Felicity, grown men now, with moustaches; in their best clothes, their pressed khaki trousers, unpolished brown shoes, blue shirts buttoned at the collar, and brown hats, they too were like strangers. Their hands were as hard as their rough, sunburnt faces, and they had little to say. When Pratap, with many self-deprecating sighs, half-laughs and pauses which enabled him to deliver a short sentence in easy instalments without in any way damaging its structure, when Pratap told about the donkey he had bought and the current lengths of tasks, Mr. Biswas was not really interested. The buying of a donkey seemed to him an act of pure comedy, and it was hard to believe that the dour Pratap was the frantic boy who had rushed about the room in the hut threatening to kill the men in the garden.
As for Dehuti, he hardly saw her, though she lived close, at Tara’s. He seldom went there except when Tara’s husband, prompted by Tara, held a religious ceremony and needed Brahmins to feed. Then Mr. Biswas was treated with honour; stripped of his ragged trousers and shirt, and in a clean dhoti, he became a different person, and he never thought it unseemly that the person who served him so deferentially with food should be his own sister. In Tara’s house he was respected as a Brahmin and pampered; yet as soon as the ceremony was over and he had taken his gift of money and cloth and left, he became once more only a labourer’s child -father’s occupation: labourer was the entry in the birth certificate F. Z. Ghany had sent-living with a penniless mother in one room of a mud hut. And throughout life his position was like that. As one of the Tulsi sons-in-law and as a journalist he found himself among people with money and sometimes with graces; with them his manner was unforcedly easy and he could summon up luxurious instincts; but always, at the end, he returned to his crowded, shabby room.
Tara’s husband, Ajodha, was a thin man with a thin, petulant face which could express benignity rather than warmth, and Mr. Biswas was not comfortable with him. Ajodha could read but thought it more dignified to be read to, and Mr. Biswas was sometimes called to the house to read, for a penny, a newspaper column of which Ajodha was particularly fond. This was a syndicated American column called That Body of Yours which dealt every day with a different danger to the human body. Ajodha listened with gravity, concern, alarm. It puzzled Mr. Biswas that he should subject himself to this torment, and it amazed him that the writer, Dr. Samuel S. Pitkin, could keep the column going with such regularity. But the doctor never flagged; twenty years later the column was still going, Ajodha had not lost his taste for it, and occasionally Mr. Biswas’s son read it to him, for six cents.