A Suitable Boy

  Lata remembered that Amit had compared the novel to a banyan tree. Now the image seemed somewhat sinister. ‘Perhaps you’ve chosen too dark a topic,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. And perhaps too recent.’ The Bengal Famine had taken place less than a decade ago, and was a very present memory to anyone who had lived through those times. ‘But anyway, I can’t go back now,’ continued Amit. ‘Returning is as tedious as go o’er—I’m two-thirds of the way through. Two-thirds, two-thirds; the fever-birds. Now, those books I promised to show you—’ Amit stopped short suddenly. ‘You have a nice smile.’

  Lata laughed. ‘It’s a pity I can’t see it.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Amit. ‘It would be wasted on you. You wouldn’t know how to appreciate it—certainly not as much as me.’

  ‘So you’re a connoisseur of smiles,’ said Lata.

  ‘Far from it,’ said Amit, suddenly plunged into a darker mood. ‘You know, Kuku’s right; I’m too selfish. I haven’t asked you a single question about yourself, though I do want to know what’s happened since you wrote to thank me for the book. How was your play? And your studies? And singing? And you said you had written a poem “under my influence”. Well, where is it?’

  ‘I’ve brought it along,’ said Lata, opening her purse. ‘But please don’t read it now. It is very despairing, and would only embarrass me. It’s only because you’re a professional—’

  ‘All right,’ nodded Amit. He was completely tongue-tied all of a sudden. He had hoped to make some sort of declaration or indication of his affection to Lata, and he found that he did not know what to say.

  ‘Have you written any poems recently?’ asked Lata after a few seconds. They had moved away from the window.

  ‘Here’s one,’ said Amit, looking through a pile of papers. ‘One that does not bare my soul. It’s about a family friend—you might even have met him at that party the last time you were in Calcutta. Kuku asked him upstairs to see her painting, and the first two lines suddenly occurred to her. He’s rather fat. So she commissioned a poem from the resident poet.’

  Lata looked at the poem, which was titled ‘Roly Poly’:

  Roly Poly Mr Kohli

  Toiling slowly up the stairs.

  Holy souly Mrs Kohli

  Tries to catch him unawares.

  Finger-wagging, fuming, frowning:

  ‘Why you have not said your prayers?

  What means all this upping, downing?

  What is magic in the stairs?’

  Mr Kohli is Professor,

  Always doing complex sums.

  Answers mildly to aggressor,

  ‘On the stairs the theory comes.’

  ‘What a nonsense. Stop this summing.

  Come and eat. Your food is cold.’

  ‘Just now only I am coming,’

  Says her husband, meek as gold.

  Lata could not help smiling, though she thought it very silly. ‘Is his wife all that fierce?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Amit, ‘that’s just poetic licence. Poets can create wives to suit their convenience. Kuku thinks that only the first stanza has any real force, and she’s made up a second stanza of her own, which is much better than mine.’

  ‘Do you remember it?’ asked Lata.

  ‘Well—you should ask Kuku to recite it.’

  ‘It seems I won’t be able to for a while,’ said Lata. ‘She’s begun playing.’

  From below the sound of the piano floated upwards, and Hans’s baritone followed.

  ‘We’d better go and join them,’ said Amit. ‘Toiling slowly down the stairs.’

  ‘All right.’

  There was no sound from Cuddles. Music or sleep had soothed him. They entered the drawing room. Mrs Rupa Mehra noted their entrance with a frown.

  After a couple of songs, Hans and Kuku bowed, and the audience clapped.

  ‘I forgot to show you the books,’ said Amit.

  ‘I forgot about them too,’ said Lata.

  ‘Anyway, you’re here for a while. I wish you’d arrived on the 24th, as you had planned. I could have taken you to midnight mass at St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s almost like being back in England—unsettling.’

  ‘My grandfather wasn’t too well, so we postponed coming.’

  ‘Well, Lata, are you doing anything tomorrow? I promised to show you the Botanical Gardens. Come see with me—the banyan tree—if you are free—’

  ‘I don’t think I’m doing anything—’ began Lata.

  ‘Prahapore.’ It was Mrs Rupa Mehra’s voice, from behind them.

  ‘Ma?’ said Lata.

  ‘Prahapore. She is going to Prahapore tomorrow with the whole family,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, addressing Amit. Then, turning to Lata she said: ‘How can you be so thoughtless? Haresh has organized lunch for us at Prahapore, and you are thinking of gallivanting along to the Botanical Gardens.’

  ‘I forgot, Ma—the date just slipped my mind for a moment. I was thinking of something else.’

  ‘Forgot!’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘Forgot. You will forget your own name next.’

  16.8

  Much had happened in Prahapore since Haresh had got his job, indeed since his meeting with Arun and Meenakshi at the Chairman’s mansion. He had plunged himself into his work, and become as much a Prahaman in spirit as the Czechs—though there was still not much love lost between them.

  He did not mourn for his lost managerial status because he was the kind of man who preferred not to look back, and because in any case there was plenty of work to be done—and, what he liked most of all, battles to be fought, challenges to be overcome. As a foreman he had been put in charge of the Goodyear Welted line, which was the most prestigious line in the factory; Havel and Kurilla and the others knew that he could make this shoe-of-a-hundred-operations from scratch with his own rigid-thumbed hands, and would therefore be able to diagnose most problems in production and quality control.

  But Haresh ran into problems almost immediately. He was not disposed to be friendly to Bengalis in general after his experience at CLFC, and now he decided fairly quickly that Bengali workmen were worse than Bengali bosses. Their slogan, which they made no secret of, was, ‘Chakri chai, kaaj chai na’: We want employment, not work. Their daily production was abysmal compared to what should have been possible, and there was a logic to this. They were attempting to establish a low working norm of about 200 pairs a day so that they could get incentive payments beyond that—or, if nothing else, the leisure to enjoy tea and gossip and samosas and paan and snuff.

  They were also afraid, reasonably enough, of overworking themselves out of a job.

  Haresh sat at his table near the production line, and bided his time for a few weeks. He noticed that the workmen on the entire line were often standing around idle because some machine or other was not working properly—or so they claimed. As a foreman he had the right to get them to clean the conveyor belt and the machines while they were doing nothing. But after the machines were gleaming, the workmen would saunter past him insolently and stand about in groups, chatting—while Praha and production suffered. It drove Haresh crazy.

  Besides, almost all the workmen were Bengali and spoke Bengali, and he didn’t understand much of it. He certainly understood when he was being insulted, however, because swear words like ‘sala’ are common to Hindi and Bengali. Despite his quick temper, he chose not to make an issue of it.

  One day he decided that, instead of grinding his teeth with frustration and sending for someone from the machinery department to repair a malfunctioning machine on site or to forklift it out, he would visit the machinery department himself. This was the beginning of what could be called the Battle of the Goodyear Welted Line, and it was fought on many fronts, against several levels of opposition, including that of the Czechs.

  The mechanics were pleased to see Haresh. Normally foremen sent them slips asking them to repair their machines. Now a foreman, and that too the famous foreman who had got to live inside the white gates of the Czech
compound, was visiting them and chatting to them on terms of equality, and even taking snuff with them. He was prepared to sit on a stool with them and talk and joke and share experiences, and look inside machines without caring if his hands got soiled with grease. And he called them ‘Dada’ out of respect for their age and abilities.

  For once, they got the sense that they were part of the mainstream of production, not a mere auxiliary outfit in a forgotten corner of Praha. Most of the best mechanics were Muslims and spoke Urdu, so Haresh had no language problem. He was well dressed, with a set of working overalls that he had adapted—sleeveless, collarless, extending no lower than the knee—to counter the heat and yet protect the front (if nothing else) of his cream silk shirt—perhaps a foppish appurtenance on the factory floor. But he had no airs of superiority when he talked to them, and this pleased them. Through their pleasure in exchanging the expertise of their trade, Haresh himself got interested in the mechanics of machines: how they worked, how they could be kept in good condition, how he might be able to make small innovations to improve their performance.

  The mechanics told him, laughing, that the workmen on his conveyor belt were leading him a dance. Nine times out of ten, there wasn’t even anything wrong with the machines.

  This did not altogether surprise Haresh. But what could he do about it, he asked them. Because by this time they were friends, they said that they would tell him when something was really wrong—and they would repair his machines first when this was the case.

  Now that the machines were out of action for shorter periods, production increased from 180 pairs a day to about 250, but this was still far below the 600 that was possible—or the 400 that Haresh was aiming for—as a realistic norm. Even 400 would have drawn cries of astonishment from his bosses; Haresh was convinced that it was doable, and that he was the man to do it.

  The workmen, however, were not at all happy with 250 pairs, and found a new method to stop the conveyor belt. Men were allowed off the belt for five minutes at a time to answer a ‘call of nature’. Now they staggered their calls of nature, and went off calmly to the bathroom by organized rotation—so that the conveyor belt was sometimes immobilized for half an hour at a time. By this time, Haresh had worked out who the gang leaders were—they were usually the men doing the most cushy jobs. Despite his short temper, he did not behave in an unfriendly manner towards them, but a line had been clearly drawn, and each side was sizing up the other’s strengths. A couple of months after he began his job, when production had plummeted to 160, Haresh decided that the time had come to play his hand.

  He called the workmen into conference one morning, and explained to them in a mixture of Hindi and rudimentary Bengali what had been simmering within him for a couple of months.

  ‘I can tell you both from theory and from working with these machines that production should not be less than 400 pairs a day. That is what I would like to see from this line.’

  ‘Oh?’ said the man who pasted soles on to shoes—the easiest job on the line—‘Do show us, Sir.’ And he nudged the operator to his left—a strapping fellow from Bihar who worked on the toughest job, the stitching of the welt to the lasted shoe.

  ‘Yes, do show us, Sir,’ said several other workmen, taking their cue from the sole-paster. ‘Show us that it can be done.’

  ‘Myself?’

  ‘How else, Sir?’

  Haresh fumed for a while, then thought that before any such demonstration, he needed to be certain that the workmen would not try to wriggle out of increasing production. He called together a few of the gang leaders and said:

  ‘What is it that you have against productivity? Are you really afraid that you will be thrown out if you increase production?’

  One of them smiled and said: ‘“Productivity” is a word that management is very fond of. We are not so fond of it. Do you know that before the labour laws came into force last year, Novak would sometimes call people into his office, tell them they were fired and simply tear up their punch-in cards? That was that. And his reason used to be very simple: “We can do the same work with fewer people. We don’t need you any more.”’

  ‘Don’t talk about things that happened long before my time,’ said Haresh impatiently. ‘Now you have the new labour laws, and you’re still deliberately keeping production down.’

  ‘It will take time to build trust,’ said the sole-paster philosophically and maddeningly.

  ‘Well, what would induce you to produce more?’ asked Haresh.

  ‘Ah.’ The man looked at his fellow-operators.

  After a great deal of indirect discussion, Haresh came out of the meeting with the sense that if the workmen could get two assurances—that no one would be thrown out and that they would earn considerably more money than they were earning—they would not be averse to increasing production.

  He next visited Novak, his old adversary, the fox-like head of Personnel. Would it be possible, he asked, for the workmen on his line to be rewarded with a higher grade—and thus a higher income—if they increased production to 400? Novak looked at him coldly and said, ‘Praha cannot up grades for a particular line.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Haresh.

  ‘It would cause resentment among the other ten thousand workers. It cannot be done.’

  Haresh had learned about the elaborate, sanctified hierarchy of Praha—it was worse than the civil service: there were eighteen different grades for workmen. But he felt that it could, without unhinging the universe, be given a tiny nudge here and there.

  He decided to write a note to Khandelwal explaining his plan and asking for his approval. The plan had four elements. The workers would increase production to at least 400 pairs a day on the Goodyear Welted line. The management would raise the grades of these particular workmen by one level and thereby increase their weekly pay-packet. Beyond the figure of 400 pairs, incentives would be paid in proportion to any extra production. And instead of sacking anyone, a couple of new workmen would be hired at points where it was genuinely difficult to operate at the 400-pair level.

  As it happened, about a month earlier, Khandelwal had sent Haresh on a two-day visit to Kanpur to help solve a labour reconciliation matter. An uneconomical depot was to be reduced in size and some workers laid off and though Praha was acting strictly according to the new Labour Manual, they had run into trouble; all the workmen had gone on strike. Khandelwal knew that Khanna had been at CLFC and was acquainted with affairs in Kanpur. He therefore sent him to help sort things out; and he had been pleased with the final result. Haresh had told the workmen who were to be laid off that they should accept Praha’s offer. He had said, in effect: ‘You idiots, you’re getting good money by way of a settlement; take it and start your lives over again. No one is trying to con you.’ The CLFC workers, who trusted Haresh and had been sorry to see him go, talked to the workers at the Praha depot; and matters had been settled amicably.

  Haresh knew that he had won access to the Chairman’s ear, and he decided to use his access immediately. He went to Calcutta one morning (before Khandelwal had had time to get to his whisky at the club) and placed a single sheet of paper in front of him. Khandelwal looked it over, followed the pricings, the costings, the benefits of the scheme, the loss of customers if production did not increase, the necessity of giving the workmen a higher grade. At the end of two minutes he said to Haresh:

  ‘You mean to say you can actually double production?’

  Haresh nodded. ‘I believe so. Anyway, with your permission, I can try.’

  Khandelwal wrote two words across the top of the paper—‘Yes. Try.’—and handed it back to Haresh.

  16.9

  He said nothing to anyone; in particular he avoided the Czechs—especially Novak. Bypassing him—a step for which he was later to pay—he made a surprise move: he went to the union office and met the top union leaders of Prahapore. ‘There is a problem in my department,’ he said to them, ‘and I want your help in solving it.’ The Secretary-General of the
union, Milon Basu, a man who was corrupt but very intelligent, looked at Haresh suspiciously.

  ‘What do you propose?’ he said.

  Haresh told him only that he proposed a meeting the next day with his own workmen in the union offices. But it was not necessary to mention the matter to Novak until something had been worked out.

  The next day was Saturday, a holiday. The workmen assembled in the union office.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Haresh, ‘I am convinced that you can make 600 pairs a day. It is certainly within the capacity of your machines. I concede that you might need a couple of extra men at crucial points. Now tell me—which man here says that he cannot make 600 pairs?’

  The sole-paster, who was the professional speaker, said belligerently: ‘Oh, Ram Lakhan cannot do it.’ He pointed to the strapping, mustachioed, good-natured Bihari who did the welt-stitching. All the toughest jobs on the conveyor, as well as elsewhere, were performed by Biharis. They stoked the furnaces; they were the policemen on night duty.

  Haresh turned to Milon Basu and said: ‘I am not asking for the opinion of a professional speaker. The man who has just spoken pastes the sock to the sole—in every other department his norm is 900 pairs a day. All he has to do is cement them and put them in. Let the man who is affected speak. If Ram Lakhan can’t make 600 pairs a day, it’s for him to speak out now.’

  Ram Lakhan laughed and said: ‘Sahib, you’re talking about 600 pairs. I say that even 400 is impossible.’

  Haresh said: ‘Anyone else?’

  Someone said: ‘The capacity of the outsole stitcher isn’t high enough.’

  Haresh said, ‘I have already conceded that. We’ll put an extra man there. Anyone else?’

  After a few seconds’ silence, Haresh said to Ram Lakhan, who towered about a foot above him: ‘Well, Ram Lakhan—if I make 400 pairs myself, how many will you make?’

  Ram Lakhan shook his head. ‘You will never be able to make 400 pairs, Sahib.’