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By Root 19244 0

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.

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