A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [172]
Shama went on only one of these visits, and that she almost ruined. The old, unspoken antagonism between the families still existed and she was not eager to go. There had been a minor quarrel just before they went through the gate, and Shama was sullen when she stepped into Tara’s house. Then, either from pride, or because she was made uneasy by the grandeur of the house, or because she was unable to make the effort, she remained sullen throughout the week-end. She said afterwards that she had known all along that Ajodha and Tara did not care for her; and she never went again.
She was often alone in Port of Spain. The children were not anxious to go with her to Hanuman House, and as dissension there increased she went less often herself, regretting the old warmth, fearing to be involved in new quarrels. She had hardly moved outside her own family and did not know how to get on with strangers. She was shy of people of another race, religion or way of life. Her shyness had got her a reputation for hardness among the tenants, and she had done little to get to know the woman who lived in Owad’s old room. But now, alone at the week-ends, she felt the need of company and sought out the woman, who not only responded, but showed herself exceedingly curious. And Shama took down her account books and explained.
So the house became Shama’s, the place where she stayed, the place to which Mr Biswas and the children returned with sadness after the week-end.
And during the week Anand’s life was a misery. While Mr Biswas struggled with features on the splendid work of the Chacachacare Leper Settlement (with a photograph of lepers at prayer) and the Young Offenders’ Detention Institution (with a photograph of young offenders at prayer), Anand wrote down and learned by heart copious notes on geography and English. Textbooks were discarded; only the notes of the teacher mattered; any deviation was instantly and severely punished; and there was not a day when some boy was not flogged and put to stand behind the blackboard. For this was the exhibition class, where no learning mattered except that which led to good examination results; and the teacher knew his job. At home Mr Biswas read Anand Self-Help and on his birthday gave him Duty, adding as a pure frivolity a school edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Childhood, as a time of gaiety and irresponsibility, was for these exhibition pupils only one of the myths of English Composition. Only in compositions did they give delirious shouts of joy and their spirits overflowed into song; only there did they indulge in what the composition notes called ‘schoolboy’s pranks’.
Anand, following the example of those Samuel Smiles heroes who had in youth concealed the brilliance of their later years, did what he could to avoid school. He pretended to be ill; he played truant, forged excuses, was found out and flogged; he destroyed his shoes. He abandoned private lessons one afternoon, telling the teacher that he was wanted at home for a Hindu prayer ceremony which could take place only at half past three that afternoon, and telling his parents that the teacher’s mother had died and the teacher had gone to the funeral. Mr Biswas, anxious to remain in the teacher’s favour, cycled to the school the next day to offer his condolences. Anand was called a young scamp (the teacher sank in his estimation for using a word that sounded so slangy), flogged and left behind the blackboard. At home Mr Biswas said, ‘Those private lessons are costing me money, you know.’ ‘Pranks’ were permitted only in English Composition.
Most of his male cousins had undergone the brahminical initiation, and though Anand shared Mr Biswas’s distaste for religious ritual, he was immediately