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By Root 7570 0

examination less than two months away, Anand lived a life of pure work. Private lessons were given in the morning for half an hour before school; private lessons were given in the afternoon for an hour after school; private lessons were given for the whole of Saturday morning. Then in addition to all these private lessons from his class teacher, Anand began to take private lessons from the headmaster, at the headmaster’s house, from five to six. He went from school to the Dairies to school again; then he went to the headmaster’s, where Savi waited for him with sandwiches and lukewarm Ovaltine. Leaving home at seven in the morning, he returned at half past six. He ate. Then he did his school homework; then he prepared for all his private lessons.

All the boys in the star section of the exhibition class endured almost similar privation, but they strove to maintain the fiction that they were schoolboys given to pranks, enjoying the most carefree days of their lives. There were a few anxious boys who talked of nothing but work. But most talked of the football season just beginning, the Santa Rosa race meeting just concluded, giving one another to understand that their Daddies had taken them to the races in cars with laden hampers and that they had proceeded to bet, and lose, vast sums on the pari mutuel. They discussed the prospects of Brown Bomber and Jetsam at the Christmas meeting (the examination was in early November and this was a means of looking beyond it). Anand was not the most backward in these conversations. Though horseracing bored him to a degree, he had made it his special subject. He knew, for example, that Jetsam was by Flotsam out of Hope of the Valley; he claimed to have seen all three horses and spread a racetrack story that the young Jetsam used to eat clothes left out to dry. Retailing some more racetrack gossip, he maintained (and began to be known for this) that, in spite of a career of almost unmitigated disaster, Whitstable was the finest horse in the colony; it was a pity he was so erratic, but then these greys were temperamental.

The talk turned one Monday lunchtime to films, and it appeared that nearly every boy who lived in Port of Spain had been to see the double programme at the London Theatre over the week-end: Jesse James and The Return of Frank James.

‘What a double!’ the boys exclaimed. ‘A major double!’

Anand, whose championship of Whitstable had established him as the holder of the perverse opinion, said he didn’t care for it.

The boys rounded on him.

Anand, who had not seen the double, repeated that he didn’t care for it. ‘Give me When the Daltons Rode and The Daltons Ride Again. Any day, old man.’

It was just his luck for one boy to say then, ‘I bet you he didn’t go to see it! You could see that old crammer going to a theatre?’

‘You are a hypocritical little thug,’ Anand said, using two words he had got from his father. ‘You are a bigger crammer than me.’

The boy wished to shift the conversation: he was a tremendous crammer. He repeated, less warmly, ‘I bet you didn’t go.’ By now, however, the other boys had prepared to listen, and the accuser, gaining confidence, said, ‘All right-all right. He went. Just let him tell me what happened when Henry Fonda –’

Anand said, ‘I don’t like Henry Fonda.’

This created a minor diversion.

‘How you mean, you don’t like Fonda. Anybody would think that you never see Fonda walk.’ ‘That is walk, old man.’

‘All right-all right,’ the accuser went on. ‘What happened when Henry Fonda and Brian Donlevy –’

‘I don’t like him either,’ Anand said. And, to his great relief, the bell rang.

He could tell from the annoyance of his accuser that the cross-examination would be continued. He went straight after school to the Dairies; when he came back it was time for private lessons; and after private lessons he managed to slip away to the headmaster’s. When he got home he said he could do no work that evening and wanted to go to the London Theatre, to give his brain a rest.

‘I have no money,’ Shama said. ‘You will have to ask your father.’

Mr Biswas said,