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By Root 7628 0

attracted by this ceremony. His cousins had had their heads shaved, they were invested with the sacred thread, told the secret verses, given little bundles and sent off to Benares to study. This last was only a piece of play-acting. The attraction of the ceremony lay in the shaving of the head: no boy with a shaved head could go to a predominantly Christian school. Anand began a strong campaign for initiation. But he knew Mr Biswas’s prejudices and worked subtly. He told Mr Biswas one evening that he was unable to offer up the usual prayers with sincerity, since the words had become meaningless. He needed an original prayer, so that he could think of each word. He wanted Mr Biswas to write this prayer for him, though he made it clear that, unlike Mr Biswas, he wanted no east-west compromise: he wanted a specifically Hindu prayer. The prayer was written. And Anand got Shama to bring a coloured print of the goddess Lakshmi from Hanuman House. He hung the print on the wall above his table and objected when lights were turned on in the evening before he had said his prayer to Lakshmi. Shama was delighted at this example of blood triumphing over environment; and Mr Biswas, despite his Aryan aversion to Sanatanist, Tulsi-like idol worship, could not hide the honour he felt at being asked to write Anand’s prayer. After some time Anand complained that the whole procedure was improper, a mockery, and would continue to be so until he had been initiated.

Shama was thrilled.

But Mr Biswas said, ‘Wait till the long holidays.’

And so, during the long holidays, when Savi and Myna and Kamla were making their round of holiday visits, including a fortnight at a beach house Ajodha had rented, Anand, shaved and thoroughly brahmin, but ashamed of showing his bald head, stayed in Port of Spain and Mr Biswas gave him portions of Macdougall’s Grammar to learn and listened to him recite his geography and English notes. The evening worship of Lakshmi stopped.

Towards the end of that year a letter came to Mr Biswas from Chicago. The stamp was cancelled: REPORT OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POSTMASTER. Though the envelope was long the letter was short, a third of the paper being taken up by the florid, raised red and black letterhead of a newspaper. The letter was from Mr Burnett.

Dear Mohun, As you can see, I have left my little circus and am back in the old business. As a matter of fact I didn’t leave the circus. It left me. Perhaps fire in Trinidad is different. But when that boy from St James was given one small American fire to walk through, he just ran. Away. My guess is that he is somewhere on Ellis Island, with nobody to claim him. The snake-charmer was all right until his snake bit him. We gave him a good funeral. I hunted high and low to get a Hindu priest to say the last few words, but no luck. I was going to do the job myself, but I couldn’t dress the part, not being able to tie the headpiece or the tailpiece. Now and then I see a copy of the Sentinel. Why don’t you give America a try?

Though the letter was a joke and nothing in it was to be taken seriously, Mr Biswas was moved that Mr Burnett had written at all. He immediately began to reply, and went on for pages, writing detailed denigrations of the new members of the staff. He thought he was being light and detached, but when at lunchtime he re-read what he had written he saw how bitter he appeared, how much he had revealed of himself. He tore the letter up. From time to time, until he died, he thought of writing. But he never wrote. And Mr Burnett never wrote again.

The school term ended and the children, forgetting the disappointment of the previous year, talked excitedly of going to Hanuman House for Christmas. Shama spent hours in the back verandah sewing clothes on an old hand machine which, mysteriously, was hers, how or since when no one knew. The broken wooden handle was swathed in red cotton and looked as though it had bled profusely from a deep wound; the chest, waist, rump and hind quarters of the animal-like machine, and its wooden stall, were black with oil and smelled