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By Root 19128 0

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.

To Mr Biswas’s complaints she said, ‘I walk miles every Saturday to save a cent here and a cent there.’

And soon, food forgotten, they were quarrelling. Their quarrels lasted from day to day, from week to week, quarrels differing only in words from those they had had at The Chase.

‘Trapped!’ Mr Biswas would say. ‘You and your family have got me trapped in this hole.’

‘Yes,’ Shama would say. ‘I suppose if it wasn’t for my family you would have a grass roof over your head.’

‘Family! Family! Put me in one poky little barrackroom and pay me twenty dollars a month. Don’t talk to me about your family.’

‘I tell you, if it wasn’t for the children –’

And often, in the end, Mr Biswas would leave the house and go for a long night walk through the city, stopping at some empty shack of a café to eat a tin of salmon, trying to stifle the pain in his stomach and only making it worse; while below the weak electric bulb the sleepy-eyed Chinese shopkeeper picked and sucked his teeth, his slack, bare arms resting on a glasscase in which flies slept on stale cakes. Up to this time the city had been new and held an expectation which not even the deadest two o’clock sun could destroy. Anything could happen: he might meet his barren heroine,