A House for Mr. Biswas (49 page)

‘Write?’ he said to Shama. ‘I don’t call that writing. Is more like filling up a form. X, aged so much, was yesterday fined so much by Mr Y at this court for doing that. The prosecution alleged. Electing to conduct his own defence, X said. The magistrate, passing sentence, said.’

But Shama approved of the new régime. She said, ‘It will teach you to have some respect for people and the truth.’

‘Hear you. Hear you! But you don’t surprise me. I
expect
you to talk like that. But let them wait. New régime, eh. Just see the circulation drop now.’

It was only to Shama that Mr Biswas spoke about the changes. At the office the subject was never mentioned. Mr Burnett’s favourites avoided one another and, fearing intrigue, mixed with no one else. Apart from the posters there had been no directive, but they had all, so far as their new duties permitted writing, changed their styles. They wrote longer paragraphs of complete sentences with bigger words.

Presently the directives came, in a booklet called
Rules for Reporters;
and it was in keeping with the aloof severity of the new authorities that the booklets should have appeared on every desk one morning without explanation, with only the name of the reporter, preceded by a ‘Mr’, in the top righthand corner.

‘He must have got up early this morning,’ Mr Biswas said to Shama.

The booklet contained rules about language, dress, behaviour, and at the bottom of every page there was a slogan. On the front cover was printed ‘
THE RIGHTEST NEWS IS THE BRIGHTEST NEWS
’, the inverted commas suggesting that the statement was historical, witty and wise. The back cover said:
REPORT NOT DISTORT.

‘Report not distort,’ Mr Biswas said to Shama. ‘That is all the son of a bitch doing now, you know, and drawing a fat salary for it too. Making up those slogans. Rules for Reporters.
Rules!
’

A few days later he came home and said, ‘Guess what? Editor peeing in a special place now, you know. “Excuse me. But I must go and pee – alone.” Everybody peeing in the same place for years. What happen? He taking a course of Dodd’s Kidney Pills and peeing blue or something?’

In Shama’s accounts Maclean’s Brand Stomach Powder appeared more often, always written out in full.

‘Just watch and see,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Everybody going to leave. People not going to put up with this sort of treatment, I tell you.’

‘When you leaving?’ Shama asked.

And worse was to come.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose they just want to frighten me. I will henceforward – henceforward: you hear the sort of words that son of a bitch using – I will henceforward spend my afternoons at the cemeteries of Port of Spain. Just hand me that yellow book. Rules for Reporters! Let me see. Anything about funerals? By God! They damn well have it in! “The
Sentinel
reporter should be soberly dressed on these occasions, that is, in a dark suit.” Dark suit! The man must think I haven’t got a wife and four children. He must think he paying me a fortune every fortnight. “Neither by his demeanour nor by his dress should the reporter offend the mourners, since this will certainly lose the paper much goodwill. The
Sentinel
reporter should remember that he represents the
Sentinel.
He should encourage trust. It cannot be stressed too often that the reporter should get every
name right. A name incorrectly spelt is offensive. All orders and decorations should be mentioned, but the reporter should use his discretion in making inquiries about these. To be ignorant of an individual’s decorations is almost certain to offend him. To ask an
OBE
whether he is an
MBE
is equally likely to offend. Far better, in this hypothetical case, to make inquiries on the assumption that the individual is a
CBE
. After the immediate family, the names of all mourners should be set out in alphabetical order.”

‘God!
God!
Isn’t this just the sort of arseness to make you go and dance on the grave afterwards? You know, I could turn the funeral column into a bright little feature. Yesterday’s Undertakings. By Gravedigger. Just next to Today’s Arrangements. Or set it next to Invalids. Heading: Going Going, Gone. How about this? Photo of weeping widow at graveside. Later, photo of widow hearing about will and laughing. Caption: “Smiling, Mrs X? We thought so. Where there’s a will there
is a
way.” Two photos side by side.’

In the meantime he bought a dark serge suit on credit. And while Anand walked beside the wall of Lapeyrouse Cemetery on his way to the Dairies in the afternoon, Mr Biswas was often inside the cemetery, moving solemnly among the tombstones and making discreet inquiries about names and decorations. He came home tired, complaining of headaches, his stomach rising.

‘A capitalist rag,’ he began to say. ‘Just another capitalist rag.’

Anand remarked that his name no longer appeared in it.

‘Glad like hell,’ Mr Biswas said.

And on four Saturdays in succession he was sent to unimportant cricket matches, just to get the scores. The game of cricket meant nothing to him, but he was made to understand that the assignment was part of his retraining and he cycled from fourth-class match to fourth-class match, copying symbols and scores he did not understand, enjoying only the brief esteem of surprised and thrilled players under trees. Most of the matches finished at half past five and it was impossible to be at all the grounds at the same time. It sometimes happened that when he got to a ground there was no one there. Then
secretaries had to be hunted out and there was more cycling. In this way those Saturday afternoons and evenings were ruined, and often Sunday as well, for many of the scores he had gathered were not printed.

He began to echo phrases from the prospectus of the Ideal School of Journalism. ‘I can make a living by my pen,’ he said. ‘Let them go ahead. Just let them push me too far.’ At this period one-man magazines, nearly all run by Indians, were continually springing up. ‘Start my own magazine,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Go around like Bissessar, selling them myself. He tell me he does sell his paper like hot cakes. Like hot cakes, man!’

He abandoned his own régime of strictness at home and instead spoke so long of various members of the
Sentinel
staff that Shama and the children got to feel that they knew them well. From time to time he indulged in a tiny rebellion.

‘Anand, on your way to school stop at the café and telephone the
Sentinel.
Tell them I don’t feel like coming to work today.’

‘Why you don’t telephone them yourself? You know I don’t like telephoning.’

‘We can’t always do what we like, boy.’

‘And you want me to say that you just don’t feel like going out to work today.’

‘Tell them I’m sick. Cold, headache, fever. You know.’

When Anand left, Mr Biswas would say, ‘Let them sack me. Let them sack me like hell. Think I care? I
want
them to sack me.’

‘Yes,’ Shama said. ‘You want them to sack you.’

But he was careful to space out these days.

He made himself unpopular among the boys and young men of the street who played cricket on the pavement in the afternoons and chattered under the lamp-post at night. He shouted at them from his window and, because of his suit, his job, the house he lived in, his connexion with Owad, his influence with the police, they were cowed. Sometimes he ostentatiously went to the café and telephoned the local police sergeant, whom he had known well in happier days. And he rejoiced in the glares and the mutterings of the players
when, soberly dressed, unlikely to offend mourners, he cycled out to his funerals in the afternoon.

He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear with the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times was for him almost like an act of sacrifice. He shared his discovery with Anand; and though he abstracted some of the pleasure of Dickens by making Anand write out and learn the meanings of difficult words, he did this not out of his strictness or as part of Anand’s training. He said, ‘I don’t want you to be like me.’

Anand understood. Father and son, each saw the other as weak and vulnerable, and each felt a responsibility for the other, a responsibility which, in times of particular pain, was disguised by exaggerated authority on the one side, exaggerated respect on the other.

Suddenly the pressure ceased at the
Sentinel.
Mr Biswas was taken off court shorts, funerals and cricket matches, and put into the Sunday Magazine, to do a weekly feature.

‘If they did just push me so much farther,’ he told Shama, ‘I would have resigned.’

‘Yes. You would have resigned.’

‘Sometimes I don’t know why the hell I ever bother to talk to you.’

He had in fact mentally composed many sonorous letters of resignation, varying from the abusive to the dignified to the humorous and even to the charitable (these ended with his best wishes for the continued success of the
Sentinel).

But the features he now wrote were not the features he wrote for Mr Burnett. He didn’t write scandalous interviews
with one-eyed men: he wrote serious surveys of the work done by the Institute for the Blind. He didn’t write ‘I Am Trinidad’s Maddest Man’: he wrote about the splendid work of the Lunatic Asylum. It was his duty to praise, to look always beyond the facts to the official figures; for it was part of the
Sentinel’s
new policy of sobriety that this was the best of all worlds and Trinidad’s official institutions its most magnificent aspects. He had not so much to distort as to ignore: to forget the bare, toughened feet of the children in an orphanage, the sullen looks of dread, the shameful uniforms; to accept a temporary shaming eminence and walk through workshops and vegetable gardens, noting industry, rehabilitation and discipline; to have lemonade and a cigarette in the director’s office, and get the figures; to put himself on the side of the grotesques.

These features were not easy to write. In the days of Mr Burnett once he had got a slant and an opening sentence, everything followed. Sentence generated sentence, paragraph led to paragraph, and his articles had a flow and a unity. Now, writing words he did not feel, he was cramped, and the time came when he was not sure what he did feel. He had to note down ideas and juggle them into place. He wrote and rewrote, working extremely slowly, nagged by continual headaches, completing his articles only to meet the Thursday dead-line. The results were laboured, dead, incapable of giving pleasure except to the people written about. He didn’t look forward to Sunday. He was up early as usual, but the paper remained on the front steps until Shama or one of the children brought it in. He avoided turning to his article for as long as possible. It was always a surprise, when he did turn to it, to see how photographs and lay-out concealed the dullness of the matter. Even then he did not read through what he had written, but glanced at odd paragraphs, looking for cuts and changes that would indicate editorial disapproval. He said nothing to Shama, but he lived now in constant expectation of the sack. He knew his work was not good.

At the office the authorities remained aloof. There was no criticism, but no reassurance. The new régime was still a forbidden subject and reporters still did not mix easily. Of Mr
Burnett’s favourites only the former news editor was generally accepted; he had, indeed, become an office character. He had grown haggard with worry. He lived in Barataria and came up every morning by bus through the packed, narrow and dangerous Eastern Main Road. He had developed a fear that he would die in a road accident and leave his wife and baby daughter unprovided for. All travel terrified him; morning and evening he had to travel; and every day he laid out stories of accidents, with photographs of ‘the twisted wreckage’. He spoke continually of his fear, ridiculed it and allowed himself to be ridiculed. But as the afternoon wore on his agitation became more marked, and at the end he was quite frantic, anxious to go home, yet fearing to leave the office, the only place where he felt safe.

Untended, the rose trees grew straggly and hard. A blight made their stems white and gave them sickly, ill-formed leaves. The buds opened slowly to reveal blanched, tattered blooms covered with minute insects; other insects built bright brown domes on the stems. The lily-pond collapsed again and the lily-roots rose brown and shaggy out of the thick, muddy water, which was white with bubbles. The children’s interest in the garden was spasmodic, and Shama, claiming that she had learned not to interfere with anything of Mr Biswas’s, planted some zinnias and marigolds of her own, the only things, apart from an oleander tree and some cactus, that had flourished in the garden of Hanuman House.

The war was beginning to have its effects. Prices were rising everywhere. Mr Biswas’s salary was increased, but the increases were promptly absorbed. And when his salary reached thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents a fortnight the
Sentinel
started giving
COLA
, a cost-of-living allowance. Henceforth it was
COLA
that went up; the salary remained stationary.

‘Psychology,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘They make it sound like a tea party at the orphanage, eh?’ He raised his voice. ‘All right, kiddies? Got your cake? Got your icecream? Got your cola?’

The shorter the money became, the worse the food, the more meticulously Shama kept her accounts, filling reporter’s
notebook after reporter’s notebook. These she never threw away; they lay in a swollen, grubby pile on the kitchen shelf.

There were fights in shops for hoarded, weevil-ridden flour. The police kept a sharp eye on stall holders in markets, and a number of vegetable growers and small farmers were fined and imprisoned for selling above the scheduled price. Flour continued to be scarce and full of weevils; and Shama’s food became worse.