A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [204]
It was at one of these sessions that Anand told how at school boys were being challenged to say what their fathers did. This, a new school game, had spread even to the exhibition class. The most assiduous challengers came from the most harassed and insecure strata, and their aggressive manner suggested that they were neither harassed nor insecure themselves. Anand, who had read in an American newspaper that ‘journalist’ was a pompous word, had said that his father was a reporter; which, though not grand, was unimpeachable. Vidiadhar, Govind’s son, had said that his father worked for the Americans. ‘That is what all of them are saying these days,’ Anand said. ‘Why didn’t Vidiadhar say that his father was a taxi-driver?’
Mr Biswas didn’t smile. Govind had six suits, Govind was making money, Govind would soon have his own house. Vidiadhar would be sent abroad to get a profession. And what awaited Anand? A job in the customs, a clerkship in the civil service: intrigue, humiliation, dependence.
Anand felt his joke going bad. And a few days later, when a new quiz was going round the school – what did the boys call their parents? – Anand, wishing only to debase himself, lied and said, ‘Bap and Mai,’ and was duly derided; while Vidiadhar, shrewd despite his short stay at the school, unhesitatingly said, ‘Mummy and Daddy.’ For these boys, who called their parents Ma and Pa, who all came from homes where the sudden flow of American dollars had unleashed ambition, push and uncertainty, these boys had begun to take their English compositions very seriously: their Daddies worked in offices, and at week-ends Daddy and Mummy took them in cars to the seaside, with laden hampers.
Mr Biswas knew that for all his talk he would never leave the Sentinel to go to work for the Americans as labourer, clerk or taxi-driver. He lacked the taxi-driver’s personality, the labourer’s muscles; and he was frightened of throwing up his job: the Americans would not be in the island forever. But as a gesture of protest against the Sentinel, he enrolled all his children in the Tinymites League of the Guardian, the rival paper; and in the Junior Guardian, for years thereafter, Mr Biswas’s children were greeted on their birthdays. The pleasure he got from this was enhanced when W. C. Tuttle, imitating, enrolled his children among the Tinymites as well.
The Sentinel had its revenge. A small but steady decline in circulation hinted to the directors that there might be something wrong with their policy that conditions in the colony could not be better; they began to admit that readers might occasionally want views instead of news, and that news was not necessarily bright if right. For not only was the Guardian winning over Sentinel readers, the Guardian was also getting people who had never read newspapers. So the Sentinel started the Deserving Destitutes Fund, the name suggesting that there was not a necessary inconsistency between the fund and the leaders which spoke of the unemployed as the unemployable. The Deserving Destitutes Fund was an answer to the Guardians Neediest Cases Fund; but while the Neediest Cases Fund was a Christmas affair, the Deserving Destitutes Fund was to be permanent.
Mr Biswas was appointed investigator. It was his duty to read the applications from destitutes, reject the undeserving, visit the others to see how deserving or desperate they were, and then, if the circumstances warranted it, to write harrowing accounts of their plight, harrowing enough to encourage contributions for the fund. He had to find one deserving destitute