Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘But, Baba—’ protested Dipankar, blinking in distress, ‘economics is the worst possible qualification for running anything. It’s the most useless, impractical subject in the world.’

‘Dipankar,’ said his father, not very pleased, ‘you have studied it for several years now, and you must have learned something — certainly more than I did as a student — about how economic affairs are handled. Even without your training I have — in earlier days with Biswas Babu’s help, and now largely without it — somehow managed to deal with our affairs. Even if, as you claim, a degree in economics doesn’t help, I do not believe it can actually be a hindrance. And it is new to my ears to hear you claim that impractical things are useless.’

Dipankar said nothing. Nor did Amit.

‘Well, Amit?’ asked Mr Justice Chatterji.

‘What should I say, Baba?’ said Amit. ‘I don’t want you to have to keep on doing this work. I suppose I hadn’t realized quite how time-consuming it must be. But, well, my literary interests aren’t just interests, they are my vocation — my obsession, almost. If it was a question of my own share of the property, I would just sell it all, put the money in a bank, and live off the interest — or, if that wasn’t enough, I’d let it run down while I kept working at my novels and my poems. But, well, that isn’t the case. We can’t jeopardize everyone’s future — Tapan’s, Kuku’s, Ma’s, to some extent Meenakshi’s as well. I suppose I’m glad that there’s at least the possibility that I might not have to do it — that is, if Dipankar—’

‘Why don’t we both do a bit, Dada?’ asked Dipankar, turning towards Amit.

Their father shook his head. ‘That would only cause confusion and difficulties within the family. One or the other.’

Both of them looked subdued. Mr Justice Chatterji turned to Dipankar and continued: ‘Now I know that you have your heart set on going to the Pul Mela, and, for all I know, after you have submerged yourself in the Ganga a few times, it might help you decide things one way or another. At any rate, I am willing to wait for a few more months, say, till the end of this year, for you to mull over matters and make up your mind. My view of it is that you should get a job in a firm — in a bank, preferably; then all of this would probably fall comfortably into the kind of work you’ll be doing anyway. But, as Amit will tell you, my views of things are not always sound — and, whether sound or not, are not always acceptable. But, well, if you don’t agree, then, Amit, it will have to be you. Your novel will take at least another year or two to complete, and I cannot wait that long. You will have to work on your literary activities on the side.’

Neither brother looked at the other.

‘Do you think I am being unjust?’ asked Mr Justice Chatterji in Bengali, with a smile.

‘No, of course not, Baba,’ said Amit, trying to smile, but only succeeding in looking deeply troubled.

Arun Mehra arrived at his office in Dalhousie Square not long after 9.30. The sky was black with clouds and the rain was coming down in sheets. The rain swept across the vast facade of the Writers’ Building, and added its direct contribution to the huge tank in the middle of the square.

‘Bloody monsoon.’

He got out of the car, leaving his briefcase inside and protecting himself with the Statesman. His peon, who had been standing in the porch of the building, started when he saw his master’s little blue car. It had been raining so hard that he had not seen it until it had almost stopped. Agitated, he opened the umbrella and rushed out to protect the sahib. He was a second or two late.

‘Bloody idiot.’

The peon, though several inches shorter than Arun Mehra, contrived to hold the umbrella over the sacred head as Arun sauntered into the building. He got into the lift, and nodded in a preoccupied manner at the lift-boy.

The peon rushed back to the car to get his master’s briefcase, and climbed the stairs to the second floor of the large building.

The head office of the managing agency, Bentsen & Pryce, more popularly known as Bentsen Pryce, occupied the entire second floor.

From these surroundings, officials of the company controlled their share of the trade and commerce of India. Though Calcutta was not what it had been before 1912—the capital of the Government of India — it was, nearly four decades later and nearly four years after Independence, indisputably the commercial capital still. More than half the exports of the country flowed down the silty Hooghly to the Bay of Bengal. The Calcutta-based managing agencies such as Bentsen Pryce managed the bulk of the foreign trade of India; they controlled, besides, a large share of the production of the goods that were processed or manufactured in the hinterland of Calcutta, and the services, such as insurance, that went into ensuring their smooth movement down the channels of commerce.

The managing agencies typically owned controlling interests in the actual manufacturing companies that operated the factories, and supervised them all from the Calcutta head office. Almost without exception these agencies were still owned by the British, and almost without exception the executive officers of the managing agencies near Dalhousie Square — the commercial heart of Calcutta — were white. Final control lay with the directors in the London office and the shareholders in England — but they were usually content to leave things to the Calcutta head office so long as the profits kept flowing in.

The web was wide and the work both interesting and substantial. Bentsen Pryce itself was involved in the following areas, as one of its advertisements stated:

Abrasives, Air Conditioning, Belting, Brushes, Building, Cement, Chemicals and Pigments, Coal, Coal Mining Machinery, Copper & Brass, Cutch & Katha, Disinfectants, Drugs & Medicines, Drums and Containers, Engineering, Handling Materials, Industrial Heating, Insurance, Jute Mills, Lead Pipes, Linen Thread, Loose Leaf Equipment, Oils inc. Linseed Oil Products, Paints, Paper, Rope, Ropeway Construction, Ropeways, Shipping, Spraying Equipment, Tea, Timber, Vertical Turbine Pumps, Wire Rope.

The young men who came out from England in their twenties, most of them from Oxford or Cambridge, fell easily into the pattern of command that was a tradition at Bentsen Pryce, Andrew Yule, Bird & Company, or any of a number of similar firms that considered themselves (and were considered by others to be) the pinnacle of the Calcutta — and therefore Indian — business establishment. They were covenanted assistants, bound by covenant or rolling contract to the company. At Bentsen Pryce, until a few years ago, there had been no place for Indians in the company’s European Covenanted Service. Indians were slotted into the Indian Covenanted Service, where the levels of both responsibility and remuneration were far lower.

Around the time of Independence, under pressure from the government and as a concession to the changing times, a few Indians had been grudgingly allowed to enter the cool sanctum of the inner offices of Bentsen Pryce. As a result, by 1951 five of the eighty executives in the firm (though so far none of the department heads, let alone directors) were what could be called brown-whites.

All of them were extraordinarily conscious of their exceptional position, and none more so than Arun Mehra. If ever there was a man enraptured by England and the English it was he. And here he was, hobnobbing with them on terms of tolerable familiarity.

The British knew how to run things, reflected Arun Mehra. They worked hard and they played hard. They believed in command, and so did he. They assumed that if you couldn’t command at twenty-five, you didn’t have it in you. Their fresh-faced young men came out to India even earlier; it was hard to restrain them from commanding at twenty-one. What was wrong with this country was a lack of initiative. All that Indians wanted was a safe job.