A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [227]
He sank into despair as into the void which, in his imagining, had always stood for the life he had yet to live. Night after night he sank. But there was now no quickening panic, no knot of anguish. He discovered in himself only a great unwillingness, and that part of his mind which feared the consequences of such a withdrawal was increasingly stilled.
Destitutes were investigated and the deserving written about. The truce with W. C. Tuttle was broken, patched up and broken again. The readers and learners read and learned. Anand and Vidiadhar continued not to speak, and this silence between the cousins was beginning to be known at the college, which Vidiadhar had also managed to enter, though at a suitably low form. Govind beat Chinta, wore his threepiece suits and drove his taxi. The widows stopped taking sewing lessons at the Royal Victoria Institute, gave up the clothesmaking scheme and all other schemes. One came and camped, roomless, under the house, threatened to take a stall in the George Street Market, was dissuaded, and returned to Shorthills. W. C. Tuttle acquired a gramophone record of a fifteen-year-old American called Gloria Warren singing ‘You Are Always in My Heart’. And every morning, after the readers and learners had streamed out of the house, Mr Biswas escaped to the Sentinel office.
Suddenly, quite suddenly, he was revivified.
It happened during Anand’s second year at the college. Because of his unrivalled experience of destitutes Mr Biswas had become the Sentinel’s expert on matters of social welfare. His subsidiary duties had included interviewing the organizers of charities and eating many dinners. One morning he found a note on his desk requesting him to interview the newly arrived head of the Community Welfare Department. This was a government department that had not yet begun to function. Mr Biswas knew that it was part of the plan for postwar development, but he did not know what the department intended to do. He sent for the file. It was not helpful. Most of it he had written himself, and forgotten. He telephoned, arranged for an interview that morning, and went. When, an hour later, he walked down the Red House steps into the asphalt court, he was thinking, not of his copy, but of his letter of resignation to the Sentinel. He had been offered, and had accepted, a job as Community Welfare Officer, at a salary fifty dollars a month higher than the one he was getting from the Sentinel. And he still had no clear idea of the aims of the department. He believed it was to organize village life; why and how village life was to be organized he didn’t know.
He had been immediately attracted by Miss Logie, the head of the department. She was a tall, energetic woman in late middle age. She was not pompous or aggressive, as he had found women in authority inclined to be. She had the graces, and even before there was talk of the job he had found himself attempting to please. She also had the attraction of novelty. He had known no Indian woman of her age as alert and intelligent and inquiring. And when the matter of the job was raised he had no hesitation. He rejected Miss Logie’s offer of time to think it over; he feared all delay.
He walked light-heartedly down St Vincent Street back to the office. What had just happened was unexpected in every way. He had stopped thinking of a new job. He had paid no more than a journalist’s attention to all the talk of postwar development, since he did not see how it involved him and his family. And now, on a Monday morning, he had walked into a new job, and his job made him part of the new era. And it was a job with the government! He thought with pleasure of all the jokes he had heard about civil servants, and felt the full weight of the fears that had been with him since Mr Burnett had left. He could have been sacked from the Sentinel at any moment; there was nothing or no one to protect him. But in the Service no one could be sacked just like