“He wanted to go to Cambridge.”
“Cambridge!” Mr. Biswas exclaimed, startled by the word, starded to hear it coming so easily from Shama. “Cambridge, eh? Well, why the hell he didn’t go? Why the hell the whole pack of you didn’t go to Cambridge? Frighten of the bad food?”
“Seth was against it.” Shama’s tone was injured and conspiratorial.
Mr. Biswas paused. “Well, you don’t say. You don’t say!”
“I glad it please somebody.”
She could give no more information, and at last said impatiently, “You getting like a woman.”
She clearly felt that an injustice had been done. And he knew the Tulsis too well to be surprised that the sisters, who never questioned their own neglected education, cat-in-bag marriage and precarious position, should yet feel concerned that Shekhar, whose marriage was happy and whose business was nourishing, had not had all that he might.
Shekhar was coming to spend a week-end in Port of Spain. His family would not be with him and old Mrs. Tulsi would be in Arwacas: the brothers were to be boys together for one last week-end. Mr. Biswas waited for Shekhar with interest. He came early on Friday evening. The taxi hooted; Shama switched on the lights in the verandah and the porch; Shekhar ran up the front steps in his white linen suit and breezed through the house on his leather-heeled shoes, charging it with excitement, depositing on the diningtable a bottle of wine, a tin of peanuts, a packet of biscuits, two copies of Life and a paper-backed volume of Halevy’s History of the English People. Shama greeted him with sadness, Mr. Biswas with a solemnity which he hoped could be mistaken for sympathy. Shekhar responded with geniality: the absent geniality of the businessman sparing time from his business, the family man away from his family.
Owad’s expensive new suitcases were in the back verandah and Mr. Biswas was painting Owad’s name on them.
“Sort of thing to make you feel you want to go away,” Mr. Biswas said.
Shekhar wasn’t drawn. After the wine and peanuts and biscuits had been shared he showed himself almost paternally preoccupied with the arrangements for Owad’s journey, and in spite of Mr. Biswas’s coaxings never once mentioned Cambridge.
“You and your mouth,” Mr. Biswas told Shama.
She had no time for argument. She felt honoured at having to entertain her two brothers at once, on such an important occasion, and was determined to do it well. She had prepared all week for the week-end, and shortly after breakfast that morning had begun to cook.
From time to time Mr. Biswas went into the kitchen and whispered, “Who paying for all this? The old she-fox or you? Not me, you hear. Nobody sending me to Cambridge. Next week, when I eating dry ice, nobody sending me food by parcel post from Hanuman House, you hear.”
It was a Hanuman House festival in miniature, and to the children almost like a game of makebelieve. They had the freedom of the kitchen and nibbled and tasted whenever they could. Shekhar bought sweets for them and on Sunday sent them to the one-thirty children’s show at the Roxy. And Mr. Biswas got on so well with the brothers that he was invaded by the holiday feeling that they were all men together, and he thought himself privileged to be host to the two sons of the family, one of whom was going abroad to become a doctor. He attempted genuinely to contribute to the enthusiasm, talking again about shipping lines and ships as though he had travelled in them all; he hinted at the write-up he was going to give Owad and flattered him by asking him to refuse to see reporters from the other newspapers; he spoke deprecatingly about Anand’s achievements and obtained compliments from Shekhar.
Sunday brought the Sunday Sentinel and Mr. Biswas’s scandalous feature, “I Am Trinidad’s Most Evil Man”, one of a series of interviews with Trinidad’s richest, poorest, tallest, fattest, thinnest, fastest, strongest men; which was following a series on men with unusual callings: thief, beggar, night-soil remover, mosquito-killer, undertaker, birth-certificate searcher, lunatic-asylum warden; which had followed a series on one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed men; which had come about when, after an M. Biswas interview with a man who had been shot years before in the neck and had to cover up the hole in order to speak, the Sentinel office had been crowded with men with interesting mutilations, offering to sell their story.
Mr. Biswas’s article was hilariously received by Owad and Shekhar, particularly as the most evil man was a wellknown Arwacas character. He had committed one murder under great provocation and after his acquittal had developed into a genial bore. The title of the interview promised for the following week, with Trinidad’s maddest man, aroused further laughter.
After breakfast all the men-and this included Anand-went for a bathe at the harbour extension at Docksite. The dredging was incomplete, but the sea-wall had been built and in the early morning parts of the sea provided safe, clean bathing, though at every footstep the mud rose, clouding the water. The reclaimed land, raised to the level of the sea-wall, was not as yet real land, only crusted mud, sharp along the cracks which patterned it like a coral fan.
The sun was not out and the high, stationary clouds were touched with red. Ships were blurred in the distance; the level sea was like dark glass. Anand was left at the edge of the water, near the wall, and the men went ahead, their voices and splashings carrying far in the stillness. All at once the sun came out, the water blazed, and sounds were subdued.
Aware of his unimpressive physique, Mr. Biswas began to clown; and, as he did more and more now, he tried to extend his clowning to Anand.
“Duck, boy!” he called. “Duck and let us see how long you can stay under water.”
“No!” Anand shouted back.
This abrupt denial of his father’s authority had become part of the clowning.
“You hear the boy?” Mr. Biswas said to Owad and Shekhar. He spoke an obscene Hindi epigram which had always amused them and which they now associated with him.
“You know what I feel like doing?” he said a little later. “See that rowingboat there, by the wall? Let us untie it. By tomorrow morning it will be in Venezuela.”
“And let us throw you in it,” Shekhar said.
They chased Mr. Biswas, caught him, held him above the water while he laughed and squirmed, his calves swinging like hammocks.
“One,” they counted, swinging him. “Two-”
Suddenly he became affronted and angry.
“Three!”
The smooth water slapped his belly and chest and forehead like something hard and hot. Surfacing, his back to them, he took some time to rearrange his hair, in reality wiping away the tears that had come to his eyes. The pause was long enough to tell Owad and Shekhar that he was angry. They were embarrassed; and he was recognizing the unreasonableness of his anger when Shekhar said, “Where is Anand?”
Mr. Biswas didn’t turn. “The boy is all right. Ducking. His grandfather was a champion diver.”
Owad laughed.
“Ducking, hell!” Shekhar said, and began swimming towards the wall.
There was no sign of Anand. In the shadow of the wall the rowingboat barely rocked above its reflection.
Silently Mr. Biswas and Owad watched Shekhar. He dived. Mr. Biswas scooped up a handful of water and let it fall on his head. Some of it ran down his face; some of it sprinkled the sea.
Shekhar reappeared near the sea-wall, shook the water from his head and dived again.
Mr. Biswas began to wade towards the wall. Owad began to swim. Mr. Biswas began to swim.
Shekhar surfaced again, near the rowingboat. There was alarm on his face. He was holding Anand under his left arm and was pulling strongly with his right.
Owad and Mr. Biswas moved towards him. He shouted to them to keep away. All at once he stopped pulling with his right hand, stood up, and was only waist-high in water. Behind him, in shadow, the rowingboat barely moved.