• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7502 0

nothing to him, but he was made to understand that the assignment was part of his retraining and he cycled from fourth-class match to fourth-class match, copying symbols and scores he did not understand, enjoying only the brief esteem of surprised and thrilled players under trees. Most of the matches finished at half past five and it was impossible to be at all the grounds at the same time. It sometimes happened that when he got to a ground there was no one there. Then secretaries had to be hunted out and there was more cycling. In this way those Saturday afternoons and evenings were ruined, and often Sunday as well, for many of the scores he had gathered were not printed.

He began to echo phrases from the prospectus of the Ideal School of Journalism. ‘I can make a living by my pen,’ he said. ‘Let them go ahead. Just let them push me too far.’ At this period one-man magazines, nearly all run by Indians, were continually springing up. ‘Start my own magazine,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Go around like Bissessar, selling them myself. He tell me he does sell his paper like hot cakes. Like hot cakes, man!’

He abandoned his own régime of strictness at home and instead spoke so long of various members of the Sentinel staff that Shama and the children got to feel that they knew them well. From time to time he indulged in a tiny rebellion.

‘Anand, on your way to school stop at the café and telephone the Sentinel. Tell them I don’t feel like coming to work today.’

‘Why you don’t telephone them yourself? You know I don’t like telephoning.’

‘We can’t always do what we like, boy.’

‘And you want me to say that you just don’t feel like going out to work today.’

‘Tell them I’m sick. Cold, headache, fever. You know.’

When Anand left, Mr Biswas would say, ‘Let them sack me. Let them sack me like hell. Think I care? I want them to sack me.’

‘Yes,’ Shama said. ‘You want them to sack you.’

But he was careful to space out these days.

He made himself unpopular among the boys and young men of the street who played cricket on the pavement in the afternoons and chattered under the lamp-post at night. He shouted at them from his window and, because of his suit, his job, the house he lived in, his connexion with Owad, his influence with the police, they were cowed. Sometimes he ostentatiously went to the café and telephoned the local police sergeant, whom he had known well in happier days. And he rejoiced in the glares and the mutterings of the players when, soberly dressed, unlikely to offend mourners, he cycled out to his funerals in the afternoon.

He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear with the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times was for him almost like an act of sacrifice. He shared his discovery with Anand; and though he abstracted some of the pleasure of Dickens by making Anand write out and learn the meanings of difficult words, he did this not out of his strictness or as part of Anand’s training. He said, ‘I don’t want you to be like me.’

Anand understood. Father and son, each saw the other as weak and vulnerable, and each felt a responsibility for the other, a responsibility which, in times of particular pain, was disguised by exaggerated authority on the one side, exaggerated respect on the other.

Suddenly the pressure ceased at the Sentinel. Mr Biswas was taken off court shorts, funerals and cricket matches, and put into the Sunday Magazine, to do a weekly feature.

‘If they did just push me so much farther,’ he told Shama, ‘I would have