A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [223]
It was the Sentinel’s education correspondent. He held some typewritten sheets. They were the exhibition results.
In a page of names the name stood out.
Anand had been placed third, had got one of the twelve exhibitions.
As bewitching as the news was the generosity with which it was welcomed by the older members of the staff. The very young, who had sat the examination not many years before, were aloof and unimpressed.
But third! Third in the island! It was fantastic. Only two boys more intelligent! It couldn’t be grasped right away.
Recovering, Mr Biswas attempted to deflect some of the praise. ‘Mark you, the teacher knows his stuff.’ But he couldn’t keep this up. ‘Careless boy, too, you know. Left out one whole question. In the spelling paper. Synonyms and homonyms.’
He began to lose his audience.
‘He knew them. Thought they were easy.’
Reporters returned to their desks.
‘And then didn’t do them at all. Left them out. A whole question.’
After a light-hearted morning in which he investigated the circumstances of two destitutes with a good humour which offended those people, he returned to the office and invited the education correspondent and Mr Burnett’s news editor to have beers with him at the café on the corner. There, surrounded by flamboyant murals of revelry on tropical beaches, they drank: three men, none over forty, who considered their careers closed and rested their ambitions on the achievements of their children. The success of the son of one gave the others hope. They shared Mr Biswas’s joy; they could not achieve his delirium.
‘You could leave old Mutri to die in peace,’ he said to Shama when he got back to the quiet house at midday; and his gaiety had her guessing. ‘What about oranges? Want to go in the selling business? Join the widows? The five financial wizards.’
The orange venture had in fact failed. Three oranges had been sold to a stray American soldier for a penny; the others had gone bad in the sun. The failure was put down to the unsuitability of the site and the snobbishness and jealousy of the neighbours who, to spite the widow, had preferred to go all the way to the city market to buy their oranges at a higher price. The widow’s son was also blamed for his lack of enthusiasm and his false pride: he had stood some distance from the tray of oranges and tried to pretend that they had nothing to do with him.
When Mr Biswas broke the news of the exhibition, Shama set about defending the widows, and she and Mr Biswas had a long and friendly squabble about the Tulsi family. It was like old times, and Mr Biswas, the victor as always, solaced Shama by saying, what he had forgotten for some time, ‘Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl! One of these days.’
‘I suppose it would look nice in my coffin.’
The school had taken the first four places and won seven of the twelve exhibitions. The teacher’s notes and private lessons, legendarily virtuous, had triumphed once again. Five of the exhibitions went to known crammers like Anand and the Chinese boy and aroused little comment. The sixth went to one of the mild, hamper-fed boys; he was now considered sly. But the biggest surprise was provided by the boy who had come first. He was a Negro boy of astonishing size. He was a year younger than Anand but looked incomparably older. His forearms were already veined, and his chin and cheeks were dotted with little springs of hair. He had been loud in his denunciation of crammers; he had taken a leading part in discussions about films and sport; he had a phenomenal knowledge of English county cricket scores throughout the nineteen-thirties; and he had introduced the topic of sex. He claimed to have had many sexual encounters and his talk encouraged the belief that when he left school after private lessons, his satchel bouncing off his high bottom, it was not to do homework but to indulge in sexual intrigue and, joyously, to be pursued by older women. He displayed a convincing knowledge of the female body and its functions;