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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; and the conception of his life away from school as one of indifference to books and notes and homework was reinforced by his passionate devotion to the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, whose style he successfully imitated in his English compositions. His popularity was at its lowest that morning; his success cast doubt on all his tales of sexual adventure. He protested that he had not worked, that he had done no more than a hasty last-minute revision, and that the result had surprised him more than anyone else. But he protested in vain.
Photographers from the newspapers came. The exhibitioners straightened their ties and were photographed. Then they were free. They had ceased to be members of the school. School and teacher dwindled, and the boys were anxious to be out of the yard. None dared say he wanted to go home to break the news; besides, none wanted to put an end to the day.
The city was black and white in the sun. Trees were still, the sky high. They walked up to the Sava
That evening, while Mr. Biswas and the parents of the other exhibitioners beat their way to the teacher’s door with gifts of rum and whisky, trussed fowls and hobbled goats, the Tuttle children were set to their books with a new rigidity, although Christmas was not far off and the school term nearly ended. The writer, encouraged, completed the first volume of Captain Daniel’s West Indian History. For Vidiadhar it was an unhappy evening. He was given no food. For he had not won an exhibition, Vidiadhar who had brought home clean question papers with ticks beside the questions he had done and a neat list of correct answers to the arithmetic sums, who had begun to learn Latin and French, who had gone to the intercollegiate football match and uttered partisan cries. Now, deprived of his Latin and French books, he was made to sit up late before his exhibition notes, and was repeatedly flogged by Chinta.
The newspapers next morning carried photographs of Anand and the other exhibitioners. 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 wi
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 i