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By Root 7661 0

There were also columns of fine print containing the names of the many hundred who had only passed the examination. The readers and learners searched among these for Vidiadhar’s name. They didn’t find it. Always on the winning side, the readers and learners turned over the page and pretended to look there, and then they pretended to go through the classified advertisements, which were in the same small type. Having no flogging powers over the readers and learners, and unable now to threaten them with Govind, Chinta could only abuse them. She abused them individually; she abused Shama; she abused W. C. Tuttle; she abused Anand and his sisters; she accused Mr Biswas of bribing the examiners; she brought up the theft of the eighty dollars. Her voice was a grating whine; her eyes were red, her whole face inflamed. The readers and learners giggled. Vidiadhar, enjoying the holiday granted to the school for its exhibition successes, was set to his exhibition notes again. From time to time Chinta interrupted her abuse to scream at him. ‘Watch me! Give me that knife and see if I don’t cut his little tongue.’ And: ‘You are going to live on bread and water from now on. That is the only thing that will satisfy some people in this house.’ Sometimes she fell silent and ran, literally ran, to the table where he sat and twisted his ears as if she were winding up an alarm clock, until, like an alarm, Vidiadhar went off. Then she slapped him and cuffed him, pulled his hair and pressed her fingers around his throat. Stupefied, Vidiadhar filled page after page with meaningless notes in his crapaud-foot handwriting; and his sisters and brothers scowled at everyone as though they were all responsible for Vidiadhar’s failure and punishment.

All day and all evening Chinta kept it up, her shrill voice part of the background noise of the house, until even W. C. Tuttle was driven to comment, in his pure Hindi, in a voice loud enough to penetrate the partition of Mr Biswas’s inner room, whence the comment was reported to Mr Biswas in the front room, preparing the way for a reconciliation between the two men, which was completed when W. C. Tuttle’s second eldest boy, due to write the exhibition examination next year, came down to ask Anand to be his tutor.

And it was from the Tuttles that Anand got the only presents he had for winning the exhibition: a copy of The Talisman from W. C. Tuttle, which he found unreadable, and a dollar from Mrs Tuttle, which he gave to Shama. Mr Biswas was ashamed to mention the promise in the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare, and Anand didn’t remind him: he was content to assume that war conditions did not permit the buying of a bicycle. There was no prize from the school either. Again war conditions did not permit; and as ‘a war measure’ Anand was given a certificate printed by the Government Printery at the bottom of the street, ‘in lieu of’ the leather-bound, gilt-edged book stamped with the school crest.

It had been a year of scarcity, of rising prices and fights in shops for hoarded flour. But at Christmas the pavements were crowded with overdressed shoppers from the country, the streets choked with slow but strident traffic. The stores had only clumsy local toys of wood, but the signs were bright as always with rosy-cheeked Santa Clauses, prancing reindeer, holly and berries and snow-capped letters. Never were destitutes more deserving, and Mr Biswas worked harder than ever. But everything – shops, signs, crowds, noise, busyness – generated the urgent gaiety that belonged to the season. The year was ending well.

And it was to end even better.

One morning early in Christmas week, when Mr Biswas was looking through applications in the hope of finding a destitute carpenter for Christmas Eve, a well-dressed middle-aged man whom he did not know came straight to his desk, handed him an envelope with a stiff gesture, and, without a word, turned and walked briskly out of the newsroom.

Mr Biswas opened the envelope. Then he pushed back his chair and ran outside. The man was in a car and already driving away.

‘You didn