A Suitable Boy, Page 85

  Still, he had been stricken with leucoderma, and many people thought that this was the disfiguring mark of the indignant gods, since he had tainted his soul, however indirectly, with the taking of animal life. Others, however, flocked around him, for he was enormously successful and enormously rich. From being sole agent in the Punjab he had became sole agent for the whole of India. He moved to Kanpur, the headquarters of the group of which James Hawley was a part. He dropped many of his other lines of business in order to concentrate on this particular lucrative account. In time he not only sold their shoes, but also told them what would sell best. He suggested that they reduce their output of Gorillas and increase their output of Champions. He virtually determined their product mix. James Hawley flourished because of his acumen, and he because they had grown dependent on him.

  During the war, of course, the company had shifted its entire production to military boots. These did not go directly through Bhalla’s hands, but James Hawley—out of a combination of fair play and far-sighted interest—continued to pay Bhalla commission. Though this was a smaller percentage, it left him no worse off than before owing to the larger volumes of sales. After the war, again steered by the sales and marketing wizardry of Pyare Lal Bhalla, James Hawley had swung back into civilian lines of production. This too appealed to Haresh, since it was for this sort of production that he had been trained at the Midlands College of Technology.

  Not more than an hour after he received the bitter news that the HSH order was to be taken away from him, Haresh bicycled up to the offices of Pyare Lal Bhalla. ‘Offices’ was perhaps too elevated a word for the warren of small rooms that constituted his residence, his place of business, his showroom and his guest house, all of which occupied the first floor of a congested corner on Meston Road.

  Haresh walked up the stairs. He waved a piece of paper at the guard, and muttered, ‘James Hawley’ and a few words in English. He entered an anteroom, another room with almirahs whose purpose he could not figure out, a storeroom, a room with several clerks seated on the ground at their floor-desks and red ledgers, and finally the audience chamber—for that was its function—of Pyare Lal Bhalla himself. It was a small room, whitewashed rather than painted. The old man, energetic at the age of sixty-five, his face whitened with disease, sat on a great wooden platform covered with a spotless white sheet. He was leaning against a hard, cylindrical cotton bolster. Above him hung a garlanded photograph of his father. There were two benches along the walls contiguous to his platform. Here sat various people: hangers-on, favour-seekers, associates, employees. There were no clerks, no ledgers in this room; Pyare Lal Bhalla was himself the repository of whatever information, experience, and judgement he required for making decisions.

  Haresh entered and, lowering his head, immediately put his hands forward as if to touch Pyare Lal Bhalla’s knees. The old man raised his own hands over Haresh’s head.

  ‘Sit down, son,’ said Pyare Lal Bhalla in Punjabi.

  Haresh sat down on one of the benches.

  ‘Stand up.’

  Haresh stood up.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Haresh sat down once more.

  Pyare Lal Bhalla looked at him with such intentness that he was almost mesmerized into submission to his orders. Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized, and Haresh’s need, as he himself saw it, was great.

  Besides, Pyare Lal Bhalla expected deference as an elderly man and as a man of substance. Had not his daughter been married to the son—the eldest son—of a first-class gazetted officer—the executive engineer for the Punjab canals—in the finest wedding Lahore had known for years? It was not a question of the Services deigning to acknowledge the existence of Trade. It was an Alliance between them. It announced his arrival in a manner that the endowment of twenty temples would not have. In his usual off-hand manner he had said to the groom’s father: ‘I am, as you know, a poor man, but I’ve left word at Verma’s and Rankin’s, and they’ll take measurements for whoever you think appropriate.’ Sharkskin achkans, suits of the finest cashmere wool: the groom’s father had thought nothing of having fifty sets of clothes made for his family—and the fulfilment of this carte blanche was a drop in the ocean of the wedding expenses that Pyare Lal Bhalla proudly and cannily bore.

  ‘Get up. Show me your hand.’

  It was Haresh’s fourth tense encounter of the day. He breathed deeply, then put his right hand forward. Pyare Lal Bhalla pressed it in a few places, especially the side of the hand just below the little finger. Then, giving no indication of whether he was satisfied or not, he said:

  ‘Sit down.’

  Haresh obediently sat down.

  Pyare Lal Bhalla turned his attention to someone else for the next ten minutes.

  Reverting to Haresh he said, ‘Get up.’

  Haresh rose.

  ‘Yes, son? Who are you?’

  ‘I am Haresh Khanna, the son of Amarnath Khanna.’

  ‘Which Amarnath Khanna? The Banaras-wallah? Or the Neel Darvaza-wallah?’

  ‘Neel Darvaza.’

  This established a connection of sorts, for Haresh’s foster-father was very indirectly related to the executive engineer, Pyare Lal Bhalla’s son-in-law.

  ‘Hmm. Speak. What can I do for you?’

  Haresh said: ‘I’m working in the shoe line. I returned from Middlehampton last year. From the Midlands College of Technology.’

  ‘Middlehampton. I see. I see.’ Pyare Lal Bhalla was obviously somewhat intrigued.

  ‘Go on,’ he said after a while.

  ‘I’m working at CLFC. But they make mainly ammunition boots, and my experience is mainly civilian. I have started a new department, though, for civilian—’

  ‘Oh. Ghosh,’ interrupted Pyare Lal Bhalla somewhat slightingly. ‘He was here the other day. He wanted me to sell some of his lines for him. Yes, yes, he said something about this civilian idea.’

  Considering that Ghosh ran one of the biggest construction companies in the country, Pyare Lal Bhalla’s dismissive tone might have seemed a little incongruous. The fact, however, was that in the shoe line he was small fry compared to the plump carp of James Hawley.

  ‘You know how things run there,’ said Haresh. Having felt too often—but most painfully today—CLFC’s inefficiency and arbitrariness, he did not feel that he was in any sense letting down his firm by speaking thus. He had worked his hardest for them. It was they who had let him down.

  ‘Yes. I do. So you have come to me for a job.’

  ‘You honour me, Bhalla Sahib. But actually I have come for a job with James Hawley—which is almost the same thing.’

  For a minute or so, while Haresh remained standing, cogs clicked in Pyare Lal Bhalla’s business brain. Then he summoned a clerk from the next room and said:

  ‘Write him a letter for Gower and sign it for me.’

  Pyare Lal Bhalla then put up his right hand towards Haresh in a combined gesture of assurance, blessing, commiseration and dismissal.

  My foot’s in the door, thought Haresh, elated.

  He took this note and cycled off to the grand four-storey edifice of Cromarty House, the headquarters of the group of which James Hawley was a part. He planned to make an appointment with Sir David Gower, if possible this week or the coming week. It was five thirty, the end of the working day. He entered the imposing portals. When he presented his note at the front office, he was asked to wait. Half an hour passed. Then he was told: ‘Kindly continue to wait here, Mr Khanna. Sir David will see you in twenty minutes.’

  Still sweaty from bicycling, dressed in nothing better than his silk shirt and fawn trousers—no jacket, not even a tie!—Haresh started at this sudden intimation. But he had no choice except to wait. He didn’t even have his precious certificates with him. Luckily, and characteristically, he carried a comb in his pocket, and he used it when he went to the bathroom to freshen up. He passed through his mind what he needed to say to Sir David and the order in which it wo
uld be most effective to say it. But when he was escorted up the great, ornamented lift and into the vast office of the Managing Director of the Cromarty Group he forgot his script entirely. Here was a durbar of an entirely different kind from the small whitewashed room in which he had been sitting (and standing) an hour earlier.

  The cream-painted walls must have been twenty feet high, and the distance from the door to the massive mahogany table at the end at least forty. As Haresh walked across the deep red carpet towards the grand desk he was aware that behind that desk sat a well-built man—as tall as Ghosh and bulkier—who was looking at him through his spectacles. He sensed that, short as he was, he must look even shorter in these gigantic surroundings. Presumably any interviewee, anyone who was received in this office, was expected to quail with trepidation as he traversed the room under such intent inspection. Though Haresh had stood up and sat down for Pyare Lal Bhalla as unresistingly as a child would before his teacher, he refused to display any nervousness before Gower. Sir David had been kind enough to see him at such short notice; he would have to make allowances for his dress.

  ‘Yes, young man, what can I do for you?’ said Sir David Gower, neither getting up nor beckoning Haresh to a chair.

  ‘Quite frankly, Sir David,’ said Haresh, ‘I am looking for a job. I believe I am qualified for it, and I hope you will give me one.’

  Part Ten

  10.1

  A few days after the storm, there was something of an exodus from the village of Debaria. For a variety of reasons several people left within a few hours for the subdivisional town of Salimpur, the closest railway station for the branch line.

  Rasheed left in order to catch the train to go to his wife’s village; he planned to get his wife and two children back to Debaria, where they would remain until his studies called him back to Brahmpur.

  Maan was to accompany Rasheed. He was not at all keen to do so. To visit the village where Rasheed’s wife lived with her father, to travel back without being able to speak a word to her, to see her covered from head to foot in a black burqa, to spend his time imagining what she looked like, to sense Rasheed’s discomfort as he attempted to keep two separate two-way conversations going, to exert himself in any way in this terrible heat, none of these struck Maan as being in the least enjoyable. Rasheed, however, had invited him; he had presumably felt that it would be inhospitable not to do so: Maan was, after all, his personal guest before he was his family’s. Maan had found it difficult to refuse without a reasonable excuse, and there were none at hand. Besides, to remain in the village was driving him crazy. He was seized with frustration against his life in Debaria and all its discomforts and boredoms.

  The Bear and his companion the guppi had completed whatever business they had in Debaria, and were headed somewhere else.

  Netaji was going because he had ‘some business in the subdivisional courts’, but really because he wanted to hobnob with the local administrative functionaries and small-time politicians in Salimpur.

  Finally, there was the eminent archaeologist, Vilayat Sahib, of whom Maan had not yet caught a glimpse. He was to return to Brahmpur on his way back to Delhi. Characteristically, he disappeared from Debaria on his own on a bullock-cart before anyone could make the friendly gesture of offering to share their rickshaw with him.

  It’s as if he didn’t exist, thought Maan—as if he’s in purdah. I’ve heard of him but I’ve never seen him—like the women of the family. I suppose they exist as well. Or perhaps they don’t. Perhaps all women are just a rumour. He was beginning to feel immensely restless.

  Netaji, very dashing and mustachioed, had insisted that Maan ride into Salimpur on the back of his Harley Davidson. ‘Why would you want to ride for an hour in a ramshackle cycle rickshaw in this heat?’ he had asked. ‘As a Brahmpur-wallah, you’re accustomed to luxury, you couldn’t be used to having your brains baked. Anyway, I want to talk to you.’ Maan had acquiesced, and was now bouncing up and down along the pitted country road on the motorcycle, having his brains vibrated rather than baked.

  Rasheed had warned Maan about Netaji and his attempt to extract personal advantage from every possible situation, so Maan was not surprised at the turn their conversation took.

  ‘How are you enjoying yourself? Can you hear me?’ asked Netaji.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Maan replied.

  ‘I said, how are you enjoying yourself?’

  ‘Very much. Where did you get this motorcycle?’

  ‘I meant, are you enjoying yourself in our village?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not? That means you aren’t.’

  ‘No, no—I’m enjoying myself very much.’

  ‘Well, what do you enjoy about it?’

  ‘Er, there’s a lot of fresh air in the country,’ said Maan.

  ‘Well, I hate it,’ shouted Netaji.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I hate it. There’s nothing to do here. There isn’t even any proper politics. That’s why if I don’t leave the village and visit Salimpur at least twice a week, I fall ill.’

  ‘Ill?’ asked Maan.

  ‘Yes, ill. Everyone in the village makes me ill. And the village louts are the worst. That Moazzam for instance, he has no respect for other people’s property. . . . You aren’t holding on tight. You’ll fall off. Hold close to me for balance.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I can’t even keep my motorcycle safe from them. I have to keep it in an open courtyard, and they damage it out of spite. Now Brahmpur, there’s a city!’

  ‘You’ve been to Brahmpur then?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Netaji impatiently. ‘You know what I like about Brahmpur?’

  ‘What?’ asked Maan.

  ‘You can eat out in hotels.’

  ‘In hotels?’ Maan frowned.

  ‘In small hotels.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Now this is a bad patch. Hold on tight. I’ll go slow. That way, if we slip, we’ll be all right.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘How about the flies?’

  ‘No, you’re my shield.’

  After a pause, Netaji said, ‘You must have a lot of contacts.’

  ‘Contacts?’

  ‘Yes, contacts, contacts, you know what I mean.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You should use your contacts to help us,’ said Netaji bluntly. ‘I’m sure you could get me a kerosene dealer’s licence. That should be easy enough for the Revenue Minister’s son.’

  ‘Actually, all that is under a different ministry,’ said Maan, unoffended. ‘Civil Supplies, I think.’

  ‘Come on, come on, that doesn’t matter. I know how it works.’

  ‘I really can’t,’ said Maan. ‘My father would kill me if I suggested it.’

  ‘No harm in asking. Anyway, your father is very well respected here. . . . Why doesn’t he find you a comfortable job?’

  ‘A job . . . er, why do people respect my father here? After all, he’ll take away your land, won’t he?’

  ‘Well . . .’ began Netaji, then stopped. He wondered whether he should confide in Maan that the village record-keeper had cooked the records to suit the family interests. Neither Netaji nor anyone else in the family had so far come to know of Rasheed’s visit to the patwari. It was unimaginable that he could have asked him to uncook them on Kachheru’s behalf.

  ‘Was that your son who saw us off?’ asked Maan.

  ‘Yes. He’s just over two, and he’s in a bad mood these days.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, he’s returned from his grandmother’s place, where he was spoilt. Now nothing we do pleases him, and he’s acting as contrary as possible.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the heat.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Netaji agreed. ‘Have you ever been in love?’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said, have you ever been in love?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Maan.
‘Tell me, what’s that building we just passed?’

  In a while they reached Salimpur. They had agreed to meet the others at a cloth and general merchandise shop. But the narrow, crowded streets of Salimpur were completely packed. It was the day of the weekly market. Hawkers, peddlers, vendors of every kind, snake charmers with their torpid cobras, quacks, tinkers, fruit sellers with baskets of mangoes and lichis on their heads, sweetsellers, their barfis and laddus and jalebis encrusted with flies, and a great part of the population not only of Salimpur but of many of the surrounding villages, had managed to squeeze into the centre of the town.

  There was a tremendous din. Above the babble of the customers and the shouts of the hawkers came the conflicting sounds of two screeching loudspeakers, one blaring out the current broadcast from All India Radio Brahmpur, the other interspersing its medley of film songs with advertisements for Raahat-e-Rooh or Ease-for-the-Soul Hair Oil.

  Electricity! thought Maan, with a sudden leap of joy. Maybe there’ll even be a fan around somewhere.

  Netaji, with impatient curses and prolonged beeps of his horn, was hardly able to move a hundred yards in fifteen minutes.

  ‘They’ll miss their train,’ he said of the others, who were coming by rickshaw and were half an hour behind them. But since the train was already three hours late, this was in fact unlikely.

  By the time Netaji got to his friend’s shop (which, sadly, was not equipped with a fan) he had such a bad headache that, after introducing Maan, he immediately lay down on a bench and closed his eyes. The shopkeeper ordered a few cups of tea. Several other friends had gathered in the shop, which was a sort of den for political and other gossip. One of them was reading an Urdu newspaper, another—the goldsmith from next door—was picking his nose thoroughly and thoughtfully. Soon the Bear and guppi arrived.