A Suitable Boy, Page 31

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘You just try to run a country. Try to feed the people, for a start. Keep the Hindus from slaughtering the Muslims—’

  ‘Or vice versa.’

  ‘All right, or vice versa. And try to abolish the zamindars’ estates when they fight you every inch of the way.’

  ‘He isn’t doing that as PM—land revenue isn’t a Central subject—it’s a state subject. Nehru will make his vague speeches, but you ask Pran who’s the real brains behind our Zamindari Abolition Bill.’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Pran, ‘it’s my father. At any rate, my mother says he works terribly late and sometimes comes back home from the Secretariat after midnight, dog-tired, then reads through the night to prepare for the next day’s arguments in the Assembly.’ He laughed shortly and shook his head. ‘My mother’s worried because he’s ruining his health. Two hundred clauses, two hundred ulcers, she thinks. And now that the Zamindari Act in Bihar has been declared unconstitutional, everyone’s in a panic. As if there’s not enough to panic about anyway, what with the trouble in Chowk.’

  ‘What trouble in Chowk?’ asked someone, thinking Pran was referring to something that might have happened that day.

  ‘The Raja of Marh and his damned Shiva Temple,’ said Haresh promptly. Though he was the only one from out of town, he had just been filled in on the facts by Kedarnath, and had made them his own.

  ‘Don’t call it a damned Shiva Temple,’ said the historian.

  ‘It is a damned Shiva Temple, it’s caused enough deaths already.’

  ‘You’re a Hindu, and you call it a damned temple—you should look at yourself in the mirror. The British have left, in case you need reminding, so don’t put on their airs. Damned temple, damned natives—’

  ‘Oh God! I’ll have another drink after all,’ said Haresh to Sunil.

  As the discussion rose and subsided over dinner and afterwards, and people formed themselves into small knots or tied themselves into worse ones, Pran drew Sunil aside and inquired casually, ‘Is that fellow Haresh married or engaged or anything?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘What?’ said Pran, frowning.

  ‘He’s not married or engaged,’ said Sunil, ‘but he’s certainly “anything”.’

  ‘Sunil, don’t talk in riddles. It’s midnight.’

  ‘This is what comes of turning up late for my party. Before you came we were talking at length about him and that sardarni, Simran Kaur, whom he’s still infatuated with. Now why didn’t I remember her name an hour ago? There was a couplet about him at college:

  Chased by Gaur and chasing Kaur;

  Chaste before but chaste no more!

  I can’t vouch for the facts of the second line. But, anyway, it was clear from his face today that he’s still in love with her. And I can’t blame him. I met her once and she was a real beauty.’

  Sunil Patwardhan recited a couplet in Urdu about the black monsoon clouds of her hair.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said Pran.

  ‘But why do you want to know?’

  ‘Nothing,’ shrugged Pran. ‘I think he’s a man who knows his own mind, and I was curious.’

  A little later the guests started taking their leave. Sunil suggested that they all visit Old Brahmpur ‘to see if anything’s going on’.

  ‘Tonight at the midnight hour,’ he intoned in a sing-song, Nehruvian voice, ‘while the world sleeps, Brahmpur will awake to life and freedom.’

  As Sunil saw his guests to the door he suddenly became depressed. ‘Good night,’ he said gently; then in a more melancholy tone: ‘Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.’ And a little later, as he closed the door, more to himself than anyone else, he mumbled, in the liltingly incomplete cadence with which Nehru ended his Hindi speeches: ‘Brothers and sisters—Jai Hind!’

  But Pran walked home in high spirits. He had enjoyed the party, had enjoyed getting away both from work and—he had to admit it—the family circle of wife, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law.

  What a pity, he thought, that Haresh was already spoken for. Despite his misquotations, Pran had liked him, and wondered if he might be a possible ‘prospect’ for Lata. Pran was concerned about her. Ever since she had received a phone call at dinner a few days ago, she had not been herself. But it had become difficult to talk even to Savita about her sister. Sometimes, thought Pran, I feel they all see me as an interloper—a mere meddler among Mehras.

  4.9

  Haresh, with an effort, woke up early despite a heavy head, and took a rickshaw to Ravidaspur. He had with him the lasts, the other materials he had promised, and Sunil’s shoes. People in rags were moving about the lanes among the thatched mud huts. A boy was dragging a piece of wood with a string and another boy was trying to hit it with a stick. As he walked across the unstable bridge, he noticed that a thick, whitish vapour lay over the black water of the open sewer, where people were performing their morning ablutions. How can they live like this? he thought to himself.

  A couple of electric wires hung casually from poles or were tangled among the branches of a dusty tree. A few houses tapped illegally into this meagre source by slinging a wire over the main line. From the dark interiors of the other huts came the flicker of makeshift lamps: tins filled with kerosene, whose smoke filled the huts. It was easy for a child or a dog or a calf to knock these over, and fires sometimes started this way, spreading from hut to hut and burning everything hidden in the thatch for safe-keeping, including the precious ration-cards. Haresh shook his head at the waste of it all.

  He got to the workshop and found Jagat Ram sitting on the step by himself, watched only by his small daughter. But to Haresh’s annoyance he found that what he was working on was not the brogues but a wooden toy: a cat, it appeared. He was whittling away at it with great concentration, and looked surprised to see Haresh. He set the unfinished cat down on the step and stood up.

  ‘You’ve come early,’ he said.

  ‘I have,’ said Haresh brusquely. ‘And I find you are working on something else. I am making every effort on my part to supply you with materials as quickly as possible, but I have no intention of working with someone who is unreliable.’

  Jagat Ram touched his moustache. His eyes took on a dull glow, and his speech became staccato:

  ‘What I mean to say—’ he began, ‘—have you even asked? What I mean to say is—do you think I am not a man of my word?’

  He stood up, went inside, and fetched the pieces he had cut according to the patterns Haresh had given him from the handsome maroon leather that he had fetched the previous night. While Haresh was examining them, he said:

  ‘I haven’t punched them with the brogue design yet—but I thought I’d do the cutting myself, not leave it to my cutter. I’ve been up since dawn.’

  ‘Good, good,’ said Haresh, nodding his head and in a kinder tone. ‘Let’s see the piece of leather I left for you.’

  Jagat Ram rather reluctantly took it out from one of the brick shelves embedded in the wall of the small room. Quite a lot of it was still unused. Haresh examined it carefully, and handed it back. Jagat Ram looked relieved. He moved his hand to his greying moustache and rubbed it meditatively, saying nothing.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Haresh with generous enthusiasm. Jagat Ram’s cutting had been both surprisingly swift and extremely economical of the leather. In fact, he appeared to have an intuitive spatial mastery that was very rare even among trained shoemakers of many years’ standing. It had been hinted at yesterday in his comments when he had constructed the shoe in his mind’s eye after just a brief glance at the components of the pattern.

  ‘Where’s your daughter disappeared to?’

  Jagat Ram permitted himself a slight smile. ‘She was late for school,’ he said.

  ‘Did the people from the Lovely Shoe Shop turn up yesterday?’ asked Haresh.

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ said Jagat Ram and did not elaborate further.
<
br />   Since Haresh had no direct interest in the Lovely people, he did not press the question. He thought that perhaps Jagat Ram did not want to talk about one of Kedarnath’s competitors in front of Kedarnath’s friend.

  ‘Well,’ said Haresh. ‘Here is all the other stuff you need.’ He opened his briefcase and took out the thread and the components, the lasts and the shoes. As Jagat Ram turned the lasts around appreciatively in his hands, Haresh continued: ‘I will see you three days from today at two o’clock in the afternoon, and I will expect the brogues to be ready by then. I have bought my ticket for the six-thirty train back to Kanpur that evening. If the shoes are well made, I expect I will be able to get you an order. If they are not, I’m not going to delay my journey back.’

  ‘I will hope to work directly with you if things work out,’ said Jagat Ram.

  Haresh shook his head. ‘I met you through Kedarnath and I’ll deal with you through Kedarnath,’ he replied.

  Jagat Ram nodded a little grimly, and saw Haresh to the door. There seemed to be no getting away from these bloodsucking middlemen. First the Muslims, now these Punjabis who had taken their place. Kedarnath, however, had given him his first break, and was not such a bad man—as such things went. Perhaps he was merely blood-sipping.

  ‘Good,’ said Haresh. ‘Excellent. Well, I have a lot of things to do. I must be off.’

  And he walked off with his usual high energy through the dirty paths of Ravidaspur. Today he was wearing ordinary black Oxfords. In an open but filthy space near a little white shrine he saw a group of small boys gambling with a tattered pack of cards—one of them was Jagat Ram’s youngest son—and he clicked his tongue, not so much from moral disapproval as from a feeling of annoyance that this should be the state of things. Illiteracy, poverty, indiscipline, dirt! It wasn’t as if people here didn’t have potential. If he had his way and was given funds and labour, he would have this neighbourhood on its feet in six months. Sanitation, drinking water, electricity, paving, civic sense—it was simply a question of making sensible decisions and having the requisite facilities to implement them. Haresh was as keen on ‘requisite facilities’ as he was on his ‘To Do’ list. He was impatient with himself if anything was lacking in the former or undone in the latter. He also believed in ‘following things through’.

  Oh yes; Kedarnath’s son, what’s his name now, Bhaskar! he said to himself. I should have got Dr Durrani’s address from Sunil last night. He frowned at his own lack of foresight.

  But after lunch he collected Bhaskar anyway and took a tonga to Sunil’s. Dr Durrani looked as if he had walked to Sunil’s house, reflected Haresh, so he couldn’t live all that far away.

  Bhaskar accompanied Haresh in silence, and Haresh, for his own part, was happy not to say anything other than where they were going.

  Sunil’s faithful, lazy servant pointed out Dr Durrani’s house, which was a few doors away. Haresh paid off the tonga, and walked over with Bhaskar.

  4.10

  A tall, good-looking fellow in cricket whites opened the door.

  ‘We’ve come to see Dr Durrani,’ said Haresh. ‘Do you think he might be free?’

  ‘I’ll just see what my father is doing,’ said the young man in a low, pleasant, slightly rough-edged voice. ‘Please come in.’

  A minute or two later he emerged and said, ‘My father will be out in a minute. He asked me who you were, and I realized I hadn’t asked. I’m sorry, I should introduce myself first. My name’s Kabir.’

  Haresh, impressed by the young man’s looks and manner, held out his hand, smiled in a clipped sort of way, and introduced himself. ‘And this is Bhaskar, a friend’s son.’

  The young man seemed a bit troubled about something, but did his best to make conversation.

  ‘Hello, Bhaskar,’ said Kabir. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nine,’ said Bhaskar, not objecting to this least original of questions. He was pondering what all this was about.

  After a while Kabir said, ‘I wonder what’s keeping my father,’ and went back in.

  When Dr Durrani finally came into the drawing room, he was quite surprised to see his visitors. Noticing Bhaskar, he asked Haresh:

  ‘Have you come to see one of my, er, sons?’

  Bhaskar’s eyes lit up at this unusual adult behaviour. He liked Dr Durrani’s strong, square face, and in particular the balance and symmetry of his magnificent white moustache. Haresh, who had stood up, said:

  ‘No indeed, Dr Durrani, it’s you we’ve come to see. I don’t know if you remember me—we met at Sunil’s party. . . .’

  ‘Sunil?’ said Dr Durrani, his eyes scrunched up in utter perplexity, his eyebrows working up and down. ‘Sunil . . . Sunil . . .’ He seemed to be weighing something up with great seriousness, and coming closer and closer to a conclusion. ‘Patwardhan,’ he said, with the air of having arrived at a considerable insight. He appraised this new premise from several angles in silence.

  Haresh decided to speed up the process. He said, rather briskly:

  ‘Dr Durrani, you said that we could drop in to see you. This is my young friend Bhaskar, whom I told you about. I think his interest in mathematics is remarkable, and I felt he should meet you.’

  Dr Durrani looked quite pleased, and asked Bhaskar what two plus two was.

  Haresh was taken aback, but Bhaskar—though he normally rejected considerably more complex sums as unworthy of his attention—was not, apparently, insulted. In a very tentative voice he replied:

  ‘Four?’

  Dr Durrani was silent. He appeared to be mulling over this answer. Haresh began to feel ill at ease.

  ‘Well, yes, you can, er, leave him here for a while,’ said Dr Durrani.

  ‘Shall I come back to pick him up at four o’clock?’ asked Haresh.

  ‘More or less,’ said Dr Durrani.

  When he and Bhaskar were left alone, both of them were silent. After a while, Bhaskar said:

  ‘Was that the right answer?’

  ‘More or less,’ said Dr Durrani. ‘You see,’ he said, picking up a musammi from a bowl on the dining table, ‘it’s rather, er, it’s rather like the question of the, er, sum of the angles in a—in a triangle. What have they, er, taught you that is?’

  ‘180 degrees,’ said Bhaskar.

  ‘Well, more or less,’ said Dr Durrani. ‘On the, er, surface of it, at least. But on the surface of this, er, musammi, for instance—’

  For a while he gazed at the green citrus, following a mysterious train of thought. Once it had served his purpose, he looked at it wonderingly, as if he could not figure out what it was doing in his hand. He peeled it with some difficulty because of its thick skin and began to eat it.

  ‘Would you, er, like some?’ he asked Bhaskar matter-of-factly.

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Bhaskar, and held out both hands for a segment, as if he were receiving a sanctified offering from a temple.

  An hour later, when Haresh returned, he got the sense that he was an unwelcome interruption. They were now both sitting at the dining table, on which were lying—among other things—several musammis, several peels of musammis, a large number of toothpicks in various configurations, an inverted ashtray, some strips of newspaper stuck together in odd-looking twisted loops, and a purple kite. The remaining surface of the dining room table was covered with equations in yellow chalk.

  Before Bhaskar left with Haresh, he took with him the loops of newspaper, the purple kite, and exactly sixteen toothpicks. Neither Dr Durrani nor Bhaskar thanked each other for the time they had spent together. In the tonga back to Misri Mandi, Haresh could not resist asking Bhaskar:

  ‘Did you understand all those equations?’

  ‘No,’ said Bhaskar. It was clear from the tone of his answer, however, that he did not think this mattered.

  Though Bhaskar did not say anything when he got home, his mother could tell from one glance at his face that he had had a wonderfully stimulating time. She took his various objects off him and told him to wash h
is gummy hands. Then, almost with tears in her eyes, she thanked Haresh.

  ‘It’s so kind of you to have taken this trouble, Haresh Bhai. I can tell what this has meant to him,’ Veena said.

  ‘Well,’ said Haresh with a smile, ‘that’s more than I can.’

  4.11

  Meanwhile, the brogues were sitting on their lasts in Jagat Ram’s workshop. Two days passed. On the appointed day at two o’clock, Haresh came to collect the shoes and the lasts. Jagat Ram’s little daughter recognized him, and clapped her hands at his arrival. She was entertaining herself with a song, and since he was there, she entertained him too. The song went as follows:

  Ram Ram Shah,

  Ram Ram Shah,

  Alu ka rasa,

  Gravy made from spuds,

  Mendaki ki chatni—

  Chutney made from female frog—

  Aa gaya nasha!

  Drink it, and you’re drunk!

  Haresh looked the shoes over with a practised eye. They were well made. The uppers had been stitched excellently, though on the simple sewing machine in front of him. The lasting had been carefully done—there were no bubbles or wrinkles. The finishing was fine, down to the coloration of the leather of the punched brogue. He was well pleased. He had been strict in his demands, but now he gave Jagat Ram one and a half times as much as he had promised him by way of payment.

  ‘You will be hearing from me,’ he promised.

  ‘Well, Haresh Sahib, I certainly hope so,’ said Jagat Ram. ‘You’re really leaving today? A pity.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘And you stayed on just for this?’

  ‘Yes, I would have left in two days instead of four otherwise.’

  ‘Well, I hope they like this pair at CLFC.’

  With that they parted. Haresh did a few chores, made a few small purchases, went back to Sunil’s, returned his brogues, packed, said goodbye, and took a tonga to the station to catch the evening train to Kanpur. On the way he stopped at Kedarnath’s to thank him.