A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [226]
He had returned the letter. The error had been acknowledged.
‘What about it, boy?’ he said to Anand later that day. ‘Series of letters. To a doctor. A judge. Businessman, editor. Brother-in-law, mother-in-law. Twelve Open Letters, by M. Biswas. What about it?’
5. The Void
THE COLLEGE had no keener parent than Mr Biswas. He delighted in all its rules, ceremonies and customs. He loved the textbooks it prescribed, and reserved to himself the pleasure of taking Anand’s exhibitioner’s form to Muir Marshall’s in Marine Square and bringing home a parcel of books, free. He papered the covers and lettered the spines. On the front and back endpapers of each book he wrote Anand’s name, form, the name of the college, and the date. Anand was put to much trouble to conceal this from the other boys at school who wrote their own names and were free to desecrate their books in whatever way they chose. Though it concerned neither Anand nor himself, Mr Biswas went to the college speech day. He insisted, too, on going to the Science Exhibition, and spoiled it for Anand; for while the Negro boy ran to the parentless, saying, ‘Look, man, a snail can screw itself,’ Anand had to remain with Mr Biswas who, dutifully beginning at the beginning, looked long and carefully at the electrical exhibits and got no further than the microscopes. ‘Stand up here,’ he told Anand. ‘Hide me while I pull out this slide. Just going to cough and spit on it. Then we could both have a look.’ ‘Yes, Daddy,’ Anand said. ‘Of course, Daddy.’ But they didn’t see the snails. When, as an experiment, each boy was given a homework book which parents or guardians were supposed to fill in and sign every day, Mr Biswas filled in and signed punctiliously. Few other parents did; and the homework books were soon abandoned, Mr Biswas filling in and signing to the last. He had no doubt that his interest in Anand was shared by the entire college; and when Anand went back to classes after one of his asthmatic attacks, Mr Biswas always asked in the afternoon, ‘Well, what did they say, eh?’ as though Anand’s absence had dislocated the running of the school.
In October Myna was put on milk and prunes. She had unexpectedly been chosen to sit the exhibition examination in November. Mr Biswas and Anand went with her to the examination hall, Anand condescending, revisiting the scenes of his childhood. He saw his name painted on the board in the headmaster’s room, and was touched at this effort of the school to claim him. When Myna came out at lunchtime she was very cheerful, but under Anand’s severe questioning she had grown dazed and unhappy, had admitted mistakes and tried to show how other mistakes could be construed as accurate. Then they took her to the Dairies, all three feeling that money was being wasted. When the results came out no one congratulated Mr Biswas, for Myna’s name was lost in the columns of fine print, among those who had only passed.
Change had come over him without his knowing. There had been no precise point at which the city had lost its romance and promise, no point at which he had begun to consider himself old, his career closed, and his visions of the future became only visions of Anand’s future. Each realization had been delayed and had come, not as a surprise, but as a statement of a condition long accepted.
But it was not so when, waking up one night, he saw that he had for some time grown to accept his circumstances as unalterable: the buzzing house, the kitchen downstairs, the food being brought up the front steps, the growing children and Shama and himself squeezed into two rooms. He had grown to look upon houses – the bright drawingrooms through open doors, the chink of cutlery from diningrooms at eight, when he was on the way to a cinema, the garages, the hose-sprayed gardens in the afternoons, the barelegged lounging groups in verandahs on Sunday mornings – he had grown to look upon houses as things that concerned other people, like churches, butchers’ stalls,