A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [220]
Anand wanted Mr Biswas to go at once. Not that Mr Biswas couldn’t withstand scrutiny; but no boy with an anxious father at his side could pretend that he didn’t care about the examination, and Anand wanted passionately to give that impression. Mr Biswas submitted and left, thinking about the ingratitude and callousness of children. Anand joined the fatherless boys who, for the benefit of the Daddies, were making an exaggerated show of being schoolboys: they shouted, bullied the bullied, called each other by nicknames, and laughed noisily at stale, but private, classroom jokes. Loudly they discussed the football match that was to take place that afternoon in the Savannah, just at the end of the street; many said they were going to watch it. One brave soul talked about the film he had seen the night before. They talked, their sweating hands staining blotters, rulers, and slipping over ink-bottles; and they waited.
When the bell rang the schoolyard was instantly stilled. Shouts were suspended, sentences hung unfinished. The traffic on Tragarete Road could be heard, the din from the kitchens of the Queen’s Park Hotel. A fluttering of white shirts; newly polished shoes pattering on the asphalt quadrangle and grating up the concrete steps; a wavering line of blue serge at every door; unemphatic footsteps in the hall; here and there a defiant banging of a desk-lid. Then silence. And the Daddies, alone in the schoolyard, looked at the hall doors.
Slowly they dispersed. Three hours later they began to reassemble, their clothes hanging a little more loosely, their faces shining. Many carried oilstained paper parcels. They stood in the shade of buildings and trees and stared at the hall doors. A self-possessed invigilator in shirtsleeves walked slowly up and down, sheets of paper in his hand; from time to time he coughed noiselessly into a loosely-clenched fist. A car stopped not far from the school gates; the middle-aged driver lounged in the angle of seat and door, rested a newspaper on the steering-wheel and read, picking his nose.
Then a hamper appeared. A wicker basket with the edges of an ironed white napkin peeping out below the flaps. A uniformed maid held the hamper in the crook of her arm and waited in the shade of the tree next to the caretaker’s house, ignoring the glances of the Daddies with oilstained paper parcels.
More cars came. Mr Biswas, fresh from writing up the sensational decline and fall of a destitute for the Sunday Sentinel, arrived on his Royal Enfield. Yielding to a habit he had formed since frequenting destitutes, he chained the bicycle to the school rails. He walked into the schoolyard with his bicycle clips still on: they gave him an urgent, athletic air.
Two more hampers came. Their carriers, one in uniform, one in a black cotton frock, stood next to the other hamper carrier.
Govind came. His mood had changed since the morning. He slammed the door of his taxi hard and paced up and down outside the school gates, smiling at the pavement, humming, his hands behind his back.
A flutter as of pigeons in the hall: papers being collected. A steady and prolonged banging of desk-lids, a shuffling and a scraping, footsteps more assertive than in the morning, a disorderly rash of white shirts, many broken lines of blue serge: as though the disciplined battalion of a few hours before had been routed and were retreating hurriedly, their equipment abandoned. And the Daddies advanced, like people welcoming a train, some purposefully, claiming their own, some getting lost in the eddies of white and dark blue, and hesitating.
Even in this disorder the hampers were noted, and two provided surprises, for their recipients were mild mannered and insignificant; they were now being bullied by maids and led to classrooms.
Everywhere Daddies were getting reports. Question papers were displayed, inkstained fingers pointed. Already, too, backs were being turned, and brown paper parcels