“I always did say that you Tulsis were a pack of financial geniuses,” he said.

She said, “I would like you to know that I used to come first in arithmetic.”

And when Savi and Anand came to her for help with their arithmetic homework she said, “Go to your father. He was the genius in arithmetic.”

“Know more than you anyway,” he said. “Savi, ought twos are how much?”

“Two.”

“You are your mother’s daughter all right. Anand?”

“One.”

“But what happening these days? They are not teaching as they used to when I was a boy.”

He found fault with all the textbooks.

“Readers by Captain Cutteridge! Listen to this. Page sixty-five, lesson nineteen. Some of Our Animal Friends.” He read in a mincing voice:” ‘What should we do without our animal friends? The cow and the goat give us milk and we eat their flesh when they are killed.’ You hear the savage? And listen. ‘Many boys and girls have to tie up their goats before going to school in the morning, and help to milk them in the afternoon.’ Anand, you tie up your goat this morning? Well, you better hurry up. Is nearly milking time. That is the sort of stuff they fulling up the children head with these days. When I was a boy it used to be the Royal Reader and Blackie’s Tropical Reader. Nesfield’s Grammar!” he exclaimed. “I used to use Macdougall’s.” And he sent Anand hunting for the Macdougall’s, a typographical antique, its battered boards hinged with strips of blue tape.

From time to time he called for their exercise books, said he was horrified, and set himself up as their teacher for a few days. He cured Anand of a leaning towards fancy lettering and got him to abridge the convolutions of his C and J and S. With Savi he could do nothing. As a teacher he was exacting and short-tempered, and when Shama went to Hanuman House she was able to tell her sisters with pride, “The children are afraid of him.”

And, partly to have peace on Sundays, and partly because the combination of the word “Sunday” with the word “school” suggested denial and a spoiling of pleasure, he sent Anand and Savi to Sunday school. They loved it. They were given cakes and soft drinks and taught hymns with catchy tunes.

At home one day Anand began singing, “Jesus loves me, yes I know.”

Mrs. Tulsi was offended. “How do you know that Jesus loves you?”

“‘Cause the Bible tells me so,” Anand said, quoting the next line of the hymn.

Mrs. Tulsi took this to mean that, without provocation, Mr. Biswas was resuming his religious war.

“Roman cat, your mother,” he told Shama. “I thought a good Christian hymn would remind her of happy childhood days as a baby Roman kitten.”

But the Sunday school stopped. In its place, and also to counter the influence of Captain Cutteridge, Mr. Biswas began reading novels to his children. Anand responded but Savi was again a disappointment.

“I can’t see Savi ever eating prunes and drinking milk from the Dairies,” Mr. Biswas said. “Let her go on. All I see her doing is fighting to make up accounts like her mother.”

Unmoved by Mr. Biswas’s insults, Shama continued to write up her accounts, continued to wrestle once a fortnight with the rent money, and continued to serve eviction notices. Unknown to her family and almost unknown to herself, Shama had become a creature of terror to Mrs. Tulsi’s tenants. To get the rents she often had to serve eviction notices, particularly on “old creole woman from 42”. It amused Mr. Biswas to read the stern, grammatical injunctions in Shama’s placid handwriting, and he said, “I don’t see how that could frighten anybody.”

Shama conducted her exciting operations without any sense that they were exciting. She was unwilling to risk serving notices personally. So late at night, when the tenant was almost certain to be in bed, Shama went out with her notice and pot of glue and pasted the notice on the two leaves of the door, so that the tenant, opening his door in the morning, would tear the notice and would not be able to claim that it had not been served.

Mr. Biswas learned shorthand, though of a purely personal sort. He read all the books he could get on journalism, and in his enthusiasm bought an expensive American volume called Newspaper Management, which turned out to be an exhortation to newspaper proprietors to invest in modern machinery. He discovered, and became addicted to, the extensive literature aimed at people who want to become writers; again and again he read how manuscripts were to be presented and was warned not to ring up the busy editors of London or New York newspapers. He bought Short Stories: How to Write Them by Cecil Hunt and How to Write a Book, by the same author.

His salary being increased about this time, he ignored Shama’s pleas and bought a secondhand portable typewriter on credit. Then, to make the typewriter pay for itself, he decided to write for English and American periodicals. But he could find nothing to write about. The books he had read didn’t help him. And then he saw an advertisement for the Ideal School of Journalism, Edgware Road, London, he filled in and cut out the coupon for the free booklet. The booklet came after two months. Printed sheets of various colours fell from it: initialled testimonials from all over the world. The booklet said that the Ideal School not only taught but also marketed; and it wondered whether Mr. Biswas might not find it worth his while to take a course in short story writing as well. The principal of the Ideal School (a bespectacled grandfatherly man, from the spotty photograph) had discovered the secret of every plot in the world and his discovery had been accepted by the British Museum in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Mr. Biswas was impressed but couldn’t spare the money. There had already been a row with Shama when he had used up the salary increase for a further three months to pay for the first two journalism lessons. In due course the first lesson came.

“Even people with outstanding writing ability say they cannot find subjects. But in reality nothing is easier. You are sitting at your desk.” (Mr. Biswas read this in bed.) “You look through your window. But wait. There is an article in that window. The various types of window, the history of the window, windows famous in history, houses without windows. And the story of glass itself can be fascinating. Already, then, you have subjects for two articles. You look through your window and you see the sky. The weather is always a subject of conversation and there is no reason why you cannot make it the subject of a lively article. The demand for such material is enormous. For your first exercise, then, I want you to write four bright articles on the seasons. You may incorporate as many of these hints as you wish:

“Summer. The crowded trains to the seaside, the chink of ice in a glass, the slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab…”

“Slap of fish on the fishmonger’s slab,” Mr. Biswas said. “The only fish I see is the fish that does come around every morning in a basket on the old fishwoman head.”

“… the tradesmen’s blinds, the crack of bat on ball on the village green, the lengthening shadows

Mr. Biswas wrote the article on summer; and with the help of the hints, wrote other articles on spring, winter and autumn.

“Autumn is with us again!” ‘Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness,’ as the celebrated poet John Keats puts it so well. We have chopped up logs for the winter. We have gathered in the corn which soon, before a blazing fire in the depths of winter, we shall enjoy, roasted or boiled on the cob…”

He received a letter of congratulation from the Ideal School and was told that the articles were being submitted without delay to the English Press. In the meantime he was asked to apply himself to the second lesson and write pieces on Guy Fawkes Night, Some Village Superstitions, The Romance of Place-Names (“Your vicar is likely to prove a mine of colourful information”), Characters at the Local.