A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [154]
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