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And it was from the Tuttles that Anand got the only presents he had for wi
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’t see him?” the receptionist asked. “He did ask for you. Doctor feller. Rameshwar.”
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 begi
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, cricket matches and football matches. They had ceased to rouse ambition or misery. He had lost the vision of the house.
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 begi
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 di