A House for Mr. Biswas (62 page)

Anand calculated. Adult, twelve cents, children, half price. Just to make sure, however, he said, ‘Thirty-six cents.’ He would return the change afterwards.

‘Thirty-six cents. Well, boy, you clean me out. Look.’

All he saw in her purse were a few coppers. But she always managed. And pay day was the day after tomorrow.

The evening show began at half past eight. Mr Biswas and Anand left the house at about eight. Not far from the cinema there was a Chinese café. Something had to be bought there; it was part of the cinema ritual. They had eighteen cents to spend. They bought peanuts,
chauna
and some mint sweets, six cents in all.

The entrance to the London pit was through a narrow tunnel, as to a dungeon of romance. It allowed not more than one person to advance at a time and enabled the ticket-collector, who sat at the end with a stout stick laid across the arms of his chair, to repel gate-crashers. Mr Biswas and Anand arrived to find the mouth of the tunnel blocked by a turbulent, unaccommodating mob. They stood hesitantly at the edge of the mob, and in an instant, driven from behind, found themselves part of it. They lost control of their hands and feet. Anand, wedged between tall men, shut off from light and air, could only allow himself to be carried along. Cries of frustration and anguish ran through the mob: the film had started: they could hear the opening music. The pressure on Anand
increased; he feared he would be crushed against the angle of wall and tunnel; Mr Biswas called to him in a voice that seemed to come from far; he could not answer; he could not look up or down. There was only the thought that at the end of this lay Henry Fonda and Brian Donlevy and Tyrone Power, all of whom, despite what he had said at school, commanded Anand’s highest esteem. He heard men crying for tickets; they were getting near. Through a small, semicircular, lighted hole in the wall of the tunnel money was being pushed in, tickets out, and the hands of the ticketseller occasionally flashed: a woman’s hands, fat and cool.

It was Mr Biswas’s turn. Struggling to remain in front of the hole, to prevent himself being swept down, ticketless, to the ticket-collector with the stick, he placed a shilling on the smooth, shining wood. ‘One and a half.’

A woman’s voice said, ‘Half price only at matinée.’ The hands, about to tear a ticket from the reel, waited.

‘Two, then.’

Two green tickets were pushed towards him, and he and Anand yielded gratefully to the pressure at their backs.

‘Hey, you!’ the woman’s voice called from the hole.

Selling had stopped, and the clamour redoubled all down the tunnel.

‘You!’

Mr Biswas went back to the lighted hole.

‘What you mean, giving me only a shilling?’ The coin lay on her palm. ‘Two twelves.’

‘Two twenties. Sixteen cents more.’

Anand stood where he was. The turmoil and the shouting became remote.

The soundtrack indicated that a fire was in progress. People who had seen the film before recognized the sound; it wound them up to a frenzy.

How could he have forgotten that there was half price only at matinées? How could he have forgotten that on Mondays as on Saturdays and Sundays, the price was not twelve cents, but twenty?

Mr Biswas put the two green tickets down. One was torn off and given back to him, with four cents.

They stood against the wall next to the ticket-collector, while the men who had been behind them hurried past, rearranging their disordered clothes.

‘You go,’ Mr Biswas said.

Anand’s cheeks bulged over the mint sweet. He had stopped sucking it; it felt cold and wet. He shook his head. Shock had taken away all desire to see the films; if he stayed he would have to walk home alone at midnight.

They were continually jostled. They were in the way.

Mr Biswas said, ‘I’ll come back for you.’

Anand hesitated. But at that moment there was a new scramble up the tunnel; someone shouted, ‘Why the hell you don’t go if you going?’; the ticket-collector said, ‘Make up your mind. You blocking the way.’ And Anand said to Mr Biswas, ‘You go,’ and Mr Biswas, appearing to obey instantly, vanished behind many backs and was propelled into the cinema to see films he hadn’t wanted to see.

Anand stayed in the tunnel, pressed flat against the wall, while people passed inside. Presently, with the film well advanced, the tunnel was empty. The distempered ochre walls were rubbed shiny. In the lighted hole the hands were knitting.

He walked past the Woodbrook Market Square, the Chinese café, the Murray Street playground. The house, when he returned to it, was humming. But no one saw him. He went straight to the front room, took off his shoes and lay down on the Slumberking.

There Shama found him when she came upstairs and turned on the light.

‘Boy! You had me frightened. You didn’t go to the theatre?’

‘Yes. But I had a headache.’

‘And your father?’

‘He is there.’

The front gate clicked, and someone came up the concrete steps. The door opened and they saw Mr Biswas. ‘Well!’ Shama said. ‘You had a headache too?’

He didn’t answer. He worked his way between table and bed, and sat on the bed.

‘I can’t understand the pair of you,’ Shama said. She went into the inner room, came out with some sewing and went downstairs.

Mr Biswas said, ‘Boy, get me the
Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare.
And my pen.’

Anand climbed over the head of the bed and got the book and the pen.

For some time Mr Biswas wrote.

‘Blasted thing blot like hell. But, still, read it.’

On the fly-leaf, below the four masculine names that had been chosen for Savi before she was born, Anand read: ‘
I, Mohun Biswas, do hereby promise my son Anand Biswas that in the event of his winning a College Exhibition, I will buy him a bicycle.
’ Signature and date followed.

Mr Biswas said, ‘I think you’d better witness it.’

Anand wrote the latest version of his signature and added ‘witness’ in brackets.

‘All fair and square now,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Just a minute though. Let me see the book again. I think I left out something.’

He took the
Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare,
changed the full stop of his declaration into a comma and added,
war conditions permitting.

In the house the eruptions of sound had ceased. The humming had subsided to a low, steady burr. It was late. Shama and Savi came up and went to the inner room, where Myna and Kamla were already asleep. Anand lay down on the Slumberking, separated from Mr Biswas by a bank of pillows. He pulled the cotton sheet over his face to keep out the light, and soon fell asleep. Mr Biswas stayed awake for some time, reading. Then he got up, turned off the light, and felt his way back to the bed.

He awoke, as nearly always now, when it was still night. He never wished to know the time: it would be too early or too late. The house was full of sound: with renters, readers and learners upstairs and downstairs, the house snored. The world was without colour; it awaited no one’s awakening. Through the open window, above the silhouette of trees and
the roof of the house next door, he could see the deep starlit sky. It magnified his distress. Anguish quickened to panic, the familiar knot in his stomach.

He slept late next morning; bathed in the open-air bathroom, ate in the sunny front room, put on yesterday’s shirt (he wore one shirt for two days), wrist-watch, tie, jacket, hat; and, respectably attired, cycled out to interview destitutes.

And at school, when confronted by his accuser, Anand said, ‘Of course I went. But I hated it so much I left before it began.’

It was agreed that it was a characteristic remark.

Anand’s attacks of asthma occurred at intervals of four weeks or less, and Mr Biswas and Shama feared that he might get one during the week of the exhibition examination. But the attack came in the week before, ran for its three days, and then, his chest discoloured and peeling from the medicated wadding, Anand was free to attend to his last, intensive private lessons. His labours were increased when Mr Biswas, determined to leave as little as possible to chance, wrote essays on the Grow More Food Campaign and the Red Cross and made Anand commit them to memory, Mr Biswas flattering himself that he had concealed his own personality in these essays and made them the work, not of a dissident adult, but of a brilliant and loyal schoolboy. They were as full of noble sentiments as a
Sentinel
leader; they appealed urgently for support for campaign and society; they said that the war had to be won, to preserve those free institutions which Anand dearly loved.

The examination was on a Saturday. On Friday evening Shama laid out Anand’s speechday clothes and all his equipment. Anand, objecting to the clothes, said it was like preparing for a
puja.
And Chinta, who had kept her plans secret, did have a little
puja
for Vidiadhar. A pundit came up from Arwacas on his motorbike on Friday evening and spent the night among the readers and learners below the house. On Saturday morning, while Anand was doing a last-minute revision, Vidiadhar bathed in consecrated water, put on a dhoti and faced the pundit across a sacrificial fire. He listened to the
pundit’s prayers, burned some ghee and chipped coconut and brown sugar, and the readers and learners rang bells and struck gongs.

Anand did not escape ritual himself. He had to wear the dark-blue serge shorts, the white shirt, the unchewed school tie; and Shama, braving his anger, sprinkled his shirt with lavender water when he wasn’t looking. He said he was willing to rely on the clock in the school hall, but he was given Mr Biswas’s Cyma wrist-watch; it hung on his wrist like a loose bracelet and had to be pulled down to his forearm. He was given Mr Biswas’s pen, in case his own should fail. He was given a large new bottle of ink, in case the examiners didn’t provide enough. He was given many blotters, many
Sentinel
pencils, a pencil sharpener, a ruler, and two erasers, one for pencil, one for ink. He said, ‘Anybody would believe I am going to this place to get married.’ Lastly, Shama gave him two shillings. She didn’t say what this was a precaution against, and he didn’t ask.

Similar attentions were being bestowed on a simpering, lip-licking Vidiadhar; he was also provided by Chinta with many charms, which were put on under the pundit’s supervision and with ostentatious secrecy, after much shooing away of curious readers and learners. At last the boys left for the school, both smelling of lavender, Vidiadhar going in his father’s taxi, Anand walking, accompanied by Mr Biswas, who wheeled his Royal Enfield bicycle. Halfway down the street Anand put his hand in his trousers pocket and felt something soft, small and round. It was a dry lime. It must have been put there by Shama, to cut bad luck. He threw it into the gutter.

It was as Anand feared. The exhibition candidates, prepared for years for the sacrificial day, had all come dressed for the sacrifice. They all wore serge shorts, white shirts and school ties, and Anand could only guess at what charms these clothes concealed. Their pockets were stuffed with pens and pencils. In their hands they carried blotters, rulers, erasers and new pots of ink; some carried complete cases of mathematical instruments; many wore wrist-watches. The schoolyard was full of Daddies, the heroes of so many English compositions;
they seemed to have dressed with as much care as their sons. The boys looked at the Daddies; and the Daddies, wrist-watchless, eyed each other, breeders of rivals. There were few cars outside the school and Vidiadhar had achieved a temporary glory when he arrived in his father’s car. But Govind hadn’t left quickly enough and the boys, skilled in noticing such things, saw the H on the number plate which indicated that the car was for hire. Altogether it was a dreadful day, a day of reckoning, with Daddies exposed to scrutiny on every side, and the examination to follow.

Anand wanted Mr Biswas to go at once. Not that Mr Biswas couldn’t withstand scrutiny; but no boy with an anxious father at his side could pretend that he didn’t care about the examination, and Anand wanted passionately to give that impression. Mr Biswas submitted and left, thinking about the ingratitude and callousness of children. Anand joined the fatherless boys who, for the benefit of the Daddies, were making an exaggerated show of being schoolboys: they shouted, bullied the bullied, called each other by nicknames, and laughed noisily at stale, but private, classroom jokes. Loudly they discussed the football match that was to take place that afternoon in the Savannah, just at the end of the street; many said they were going to watch it. One brave soul talked about the film he had seen the night before. They talked, their sweating hands staining blotters, rulers, and slipping over ink-bottles; and they waited.

When the bell rang the schoolyard was instantly stilled. Shouts were suspended, sentences hung unfinished. The traffic on Tragarete Road could be heard, the din from the kitchens of the Queen’s Park Hotel. A fluttering of white shirts; newly polished shoes pattering on the asphalt quadrangle and grating up the concrete steps; a wavering line of blue serge at every door; unemphatic footsteps in the hall; here and there a defiant banging of a desk-lid. Then silence. And the Daddies, alone in the schoolyard, looked at the hall doors.

Slowly they dispersed. Three hours later they began to reassemble, their clothes hanging a little more loosely, their faces shining. Many carried oilstained paper parcels. They
stood in the shade of buildings and trees and stared at the hall doors. A self-possessed invigilator in shirtsleeves walked slowly up and down, sheets of paper in his hand; from time to time he coughed noiselessly into a loosely-clenched fist. A car stopped not far from the school gates; the middle-aged driver lounged in the angle of seat and door, rested a newspaper on the steering-wheel and read, picking his nose.

Then a hamper appeared. A wicker basket with the edges of an ironed white napkin peeping out below the flaps. A uniformed maid held the hamper in the crook of her arm and waited in the shade of the tree next to the caretaker’s house, ignoring the glances of the Daddies with oilstained paper parcels.