“Summer. The crowded trains to the seaside, the chink of ice in a glass, the slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab…”
“Slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab,” Mr. Biswas said. “The only fish I see is the fish that does come around every morning in a basket on the old fishwoman head.”
“… the tradesmen’s blinds, the crack of bat on ball on the village green, the lengthening shadows
Mr. Biswas wrote the article on summer; and with the help of the hints, wrote other articles on spring, winter and autumn.
“Autumn is with us again!” ‘Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness,’ as the celebrated poet John Keats puts it so well. We have chopped up logs for the winter. We have gathered in the corn which soon, before a blazing fire in the depths of winter, we shall enjoy, roasted or boiled on the cob…”
He received a letter of congratulation from the Ideal School and was told that the articles were being submitted without delay to the English Press. In the meantime he was asked to apply himself to the second lesson and write pieces on Guy Fawkes Night, Some Village Superstitions, The Romance of Place-Names (“Your vicar is likely to prove a mine of colourful information”), Characters at the Local.
He was stumped. No hints were given for these exercises and he wrote nothing. He didn’t tell Shama. Not long after he received a heavy envelope from England. It contained his articles on the seasons which he had typed out neatly on Sentinel paper and in the manner prescribed by the Ideal School. A printed letter was attached.
“We regret to inform you that your articles have been submitted without success to: Evening Standard, Evening News, The Times, The Tatler, London Opinion, Geographical Magazine, The Field, Country Life. At least two editors spoke highly of the work but were forced to reject it through lack of space. We ourselves feel that work of such quality should not be consigned to oblivion. Why not try your local newspaper? That could very well be the beginning of a regular Nature column. Editors are always looking for new ideas, new material, new writers. At any rate let us know what happens. We at the Ideal like to hear of our pupils’ successes. In the meantime continue with your exercises.”
“Continue with your exercises!” Mr. Biswas said. He thankfully abandoned Guy Fawkes and Characters at the Local, and ignored the expostulations which reached him at regular intervals for the next two years from the Edgware Road.
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).