A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [222]
The poem written, his selfconsciousness violated, he was whole again. And when on Friday the five widows arrived in Port of Spain for their sewing lessons at the Royal Victoria Institute, and the house resounded with clatter and chatter and shrieks and singing and the radio and the gramophone, Mr Biswas went to the meeting of his literary group and announced that he was going to read his offering at last.
‘It is a poem,’ he said. ‘In prose.’
Everything glowed richly in the judge’s dimly-lit verandah. On the table there were bottles of whisky and rum, ginger and soda water, and a bowl of crushed ice.
Mr Biswas sat in the chair below the reading light and sipped his whisky and soda. ‘There is no title,’ he said. And, as he had expected, this was received with satisfaction.
Then he disgraced himself. Thinking himself free of what he had written, he ventured on his poem boldly, and even with a touch of selfmockery. But as he read, his hands began to shake, the paper rustled; and when he spoke of the journey his voice failed. It cracked and kept on cracking; his eyes tickled. But he went on, and his emotion was such that at the end no one said a word. He folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket. Someone filled his glass. He stared down at his lap, as if angry, as if he had been completely alone. He said nothing for the rest of the evening, and in his shame and confusion drank much. When he went home the widows were singing softly, the children were asleep, and he shamed Shama by being noisily sick in the outdoor lavatory.
Whatever happened, Anand would go to college. So Mr Biswas and Shama decided. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be cruel and foolish to give the boy nothing more than an elementary school education. The girls agreed. They had not had any milk and prunes, and their chances of going to high schools were slight; but they did badly in their classes and did not consider themselves worthy. Myna and Kamla insisted that Mr Biswas should make a public declaration that Anand was going to the college, for Vidiadhar was behaving as though he had already won the exhibition and was openly learning Latin and French and algebra and geometry, the wonderful subjects taught at the college.
The declaration was made, though neither Mr Biswas nor Shama could say where the money was going to come from.
Shama talked of recovering her cow Mutri from Shorthills.
‘Where you going to keep it?’ Mr Biswas asked. ‘With the boarders downstairs?’
‘Milk selling at ten and twelve cents a bottle,’ Shama said.
‘What about grass, eh? You think you could just tie out Mutri in Adam Smith Square or the Murray Street playground? You’ve been reading too much Captain Cutteridge. And how much milk you think poor old Mutri going to give after living all those years with your family?’
Commercial ventures were running high in Shama’s mind since one of the widows, despairing of any but long-term returns from the clothesmaking scheme, had brought up a bag of oranges from Shorthills one Friday. She was exceptionally grave. She called one of her sons aside and ordered him to place the oranges on a tray, the tray on a box, and the box on the pavement. Then she went to the Royal Victoria Institute. The widow’s idea was simplicity itself: it required little effort and no outlay. There was much agitated discussion among the sisters that evening; many plans were adumbrated, and futures tremulously envisaged. The widow herself said nothing, and continued as grave and mournful as before, sucking thread, threading needles, and sewing.
The appearance of a shallow heap of oranges on a tray outside the tall blank walls of the house created a small sensation in the residential street. And it increased Mr Biswas’s dread of being traced to his home by impatient destitutes.
With the exhibition examination and the death of his mother he had been neglecting the destitutes. Correspondence had accumulated, and as he was sitting in the Sentinel office one morning and typing for the tenth time, Dear Sir, Your letter awaited me on my return