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By Root 17586 0

was this, or whether a sanitary inspector had indeed made a threat, news came from Shorthills that Mrs Tulsi had decided to do something. There was talk of flooring and walling the space below the house, talk of partitions and rooms, of lattice work above brick walls. The outer pillars were linked by a half-wall of hollow clay bricks, partly plastered, never painted; there was no sign of lattice work. Instead, to screen the house, the wire fence was pulled down and replaced by a tall brick wall; and this was plastered, this was painted; and the people in the street could only make surmises about the arrangements for the feeding and lodging of the childish multitude who, in the afternoons and evenings and early mornings, buzzed like a school.

The children were divided into residents and boarders, and subdivided into family groups. Clashes were frequent. The boarders also brought quarrels from Shorthills and settled them in Port of Spain. And all evening, above the buzzing, there were sounds of flogging (Basdai had flogging powers over her boarders as well), and Basdai cried, ‘Read! Learn! Learn! Read!’

And every morning, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, his tie carefully knotted, Mr Biswas left this hell and cycled to the spacious, well-lit, well-ventilated office of the Sentinel.

Now when he said to Shama: ‘Hole! That’s what your family has got me in. This hole!’ his words had an unpleasant relevance. For whereas before he had spoken of his house in the country and his mother-in-law’s estate, now he kept his address as secret as an animal keeps its hole. And his hole was not a haven. His indigestion returned, virulently; and he saw his children increasingly riddled with nervous afflictions. Savi suffered from a skin rash, and Anand suddenly developed asthma, which laid him in bed for three days at a time, choking, having his chest scorched and peeled by the futile applications of a medicated wadding.

Still the boarders came. The education frenzy had spread to Mrs Tulsi’s friends and retainers at Arwacas. They all wanted their children to go to Port of Spain schools, and Mrs Tulsi, fulfilling a duty that had been imposed in a different age, had to take them in. And Basdai boarded them. The floggings and the rows increased. The cries of ‘Read! Learn!’ increased; and every morning, not long after the babbling children had streamed through the narrow gateway between the high walls, Mr Biswas emerged, neatly dressed, and cycled to the Sentinel.

Despite his duties and despite the fear of the sack, which he had never quite lost, even during the adventure at Shorthills, the office now became the haven to which he escaped every morning; and like Mr Burnett’s news editor, he dreaded leaving it. It was only at midday, when the readers and learners were at school and W. C. Tuttle and Govind were at work, that he found the house bearable. He gave himself a longer midday break and stayed later in the office in the afternoons.

Then once more Shama started to bring out her account books, and once more she showed how impossible it was for them to live on what he earned. Self-disgust led to anger, shouts, tears, something to add to the concentrated hubbub of the evening, the nerve-torn helplessness. In daylight, in a Sentinel motorcar and with a Sentinel photographer, he drove through the open plain to call on Indian farmers to get material for his feature on Prospects for This Year’s Rice Crop. They, illiterate, not knowing to what he would return that evening, treated him as an incredibly superior being. And these same men who, like his brothers, had started on the estates and saved and bought land of their own, were building mansions; they were sending their sons to America and Canada to become doctors and dentists. There was money in the island. It showed in the suits of Govind, who drove the Americans in his taxi; in the possessions of W. C. Tuttle, who hired out his lorry to them; in the new cars; the new buildings. And from this money, despite Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, despite Samuel Smiles, Mr Biswas found himself