It wasn’t until four, when stores and offices closed and the cinemas opened, that he thought of making his way to the address Ramchand had given. This was in the Woodbrook area and Mr. Biswas, enchanted by the name, was disappointed to find an unfenced lot with two old unpainted wooden houses and many makeshift sheds. It was too late to turn back, to make another decision, another journey; and after making inquiries of a Negro woman who was fanning a coal-pot in one shed, he picked his way past bleaching stones, a slimy open gutter and a low open gutter and a low clothes-wire, to the back, where he saw Dehuti fanning a coal-pot in another shed, one wall of which was the corrugated iron fence of the sewer trace.
His disappointment was matched by their surprise when, after the exclamations of greeting, he made it clear that he intended to spend some time with them. But when he announced that he had left Shama, they were welcoming again, their solicitude touched not only with excitement but also with pleasure that in a time of trouble he had come to them.
“You stay here and rest as long as you want,” Ramchand said. “Look, you have a gramophone. You just stay here and play music to yourself.”
And Dehuti even dropped the sullenness with which she always greeted Mr. Biswas, a sullenness which, no longer defensive, held no meaning and was only an attitude fixed by habit, simplifying relationships.
Presently Dehuti’s younger son came back from school and Dehuti said sternly, “Take out your books and let me hear what you learn at school today.”
The boy didn’t hesitate. He took out Captain Cutteridge’s Reader, Standard Four, and read an account of an escape from a German prison camp in 1917.
Mr. Biswas congratulated the boy, Dehuti and Ramchand.
“He is a good little reader,” Ramchand said.
“And what is the meaning of ‘distribute’?” Dehuti asked, still stern.
“Share out,” the boy said.
“I didn’t know that at his age,” Mr. Biswas said to Ramchand.
“And bring out your copy book and show me what you do in arithmetic today.”
The boy took the book out to her and Dehuti said, “It look passable. But I don’t know anything about arithmetic. Take it to your uncle, let him see.”
Mr. Biswas didn’t know anything about arithmetic either, but he saw the approving red ticks and again congratulated the boy, Dehuti and Ramchand.
“This education is a helluva thing,” Ramchand said. “Any little child could pick up. And yet the blasted thing does turn out so damn important later on.”
Dehuti and Ramchand lived in two rooms. One of these Mr. Biswas shared with the boy. And though from the outside the unpainted house with its rusting roof and weatherbeaten, broken boards looked about to fall down, the wood inside had kept some of its colour, and the rooms were clean and well kept. The furniture, including the hatrack with the diamond shaped glass, was brilliantly polished. The area between the kitchen shed and the back room was roofed and partly walled; so that the open yard could be forgotten, and there was room and even privacy.
But at night gruff, intimate whispers came through the partitions, reminding Mr. Biswas that he lived in a crowded city. The other tenants were all Negroes. Mr. Biswas had never lived close to people of this race before, and their proximity added to the strangeness, the adventure of being in the city. They differed from country Negroes in accent, dress and manner. Their food had strange meaty smells, and their lives appeared less organized. Women ruled men. Children were disregarded and fed, it seemed, at random; punishments were frequent and brutal, without any of the ritual that accompanied floggings at Hanuman House. Yet the children all had fine physiques, disfigured only by projecting navels, which were invariably uncovered; for the city children wore trousers and exposed their tops, unlike country children, who wore vests and exposed their bottoms. And unlike country children, who were timid, the city children were half beggars, half bullies.
The organization of the city fascinated Mr. Biswas: the street lamps going on at the same time, the streets swept in the middle of the night, the rubbish collected by the scavenging carts early in the morning; the furtive, macabre sounds of the nightsoil removers; the newsboys, really men; the bread van, the milk that came, not from cows, but in rum bottles stopped with brown paper. Mr. Biswas was impressed when Dehuti and Ramchand spoke proprietorially of streets and shops, talking with the ease of people who knew their way about the baffling city. Even about Ramchand’s going out to work every morning there was something knowing, brave and enviable.
And with Mr. Biswas Ramchand was indeed the knowledgeable townsman. He took Mr. Biswas to the Botanical Gardens and the Rock Gardens and Government House. They went up Chancellor Hill and looked down at the ships in the harbour. For Mr. Biswas this was a moment of deep romance. He had seen the sea, but didn’t know that Port of Spain was really a port, at which ocean liners called from all parts of the world.
Mr. Biswas was amused by Ramchand’s city manners and allowed himself to be patronized by him. Ramchand had in any case always managed to do that, even when he had just stopped being a yard boy at Tara’s. Ostracized from the community into which he was born, he had shown the futility of its sanctions. He had simply gone outside it. He had acquired a loudness and heartiness which was alien and which he did not always carry off easily. He spoke English most of the time, but with a rural Indian accent which made his attempts to keep up with the ever-changing Port of Spain slang absurd. And Mr. Biswas suffered when, as sometimes happened, Ramchand was rebuffed; when, for instance, partly to impress Mr. Biswas, he overdid the heartiness in his relations with the Negroes in the yard and was met with cold surprise.
At the end of a fortnight Ramchand said, “Don’t worry about getting a job yet. You suffering from brain fag, and you got to have lots of rest.”
He spoke without irony, but Mr. Biswas, now practically without money, had begun to feel burdened by his freedom. He was no longer content to walk about the city. He wanted to be part of it, to be one of those who stood at the black and yellow busstops in the morning, one of those he saw behind the windows of offices, one of those to whom the evenings and week-ends brought relaxation. He thought of taking up sign-writing again. But how was he to go about it? Could he simply put up a sign in front of the house and wait?
Ramchand said, “Why you don’t try to get a job in the Mad House? Good pay, free uniform, and a damn good canteen. Everything there five and six cents cheaper. Ask Dehuti.”
“Yes,” she said, “Everything there much cheaper.”
Mr. Biswas saw himself in the uniform, walking alone through long rooms of howling maniacs.
“Well, why the hell not?” he said. “Is something to do.”
Ramchand looked slightly offended. He mentioned difficulties; and though he had contacts and influence, he was not sure that it would create a good impression if he made use of them. “That is the only thing that keeping me back,” he said. “The impression.”