Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Lata looked at the lean, exhausted, bearded man who was squeezing the water out of the wet-blue leather with the help of a roller press, then at Mr Lee, who had gone over to have a word with him.

Mr Lee’s Hindi was unusual, and Lata, the rebellion of her nose and eyes notwithstanding, could not help listening to him with interest. He appeared to be knowledgeable not only about shoe design and manufacture but about tanning as well. Soon Haresh had joined them, and they were talking about the reduced volume of hides that went through the tannery during the monsoon weeks, when air-drying was difficult and tunnel-drying had to be resorted to.

Suddenly remembering something, Haresh said, ‘Mr Lee, I recall some Chinese tanners from Calcutta telling me that in Chinese there is a word, a special word for ten thousand. Is that so?’

‘Oh yes, in proper Peking Chinese it is called “wan”.’

‘And a wan of wans?’

Mr Lee looked at Haresh in surprise, and, scribbling with the index finger of his right hand on the palm of his left he drew an imaginary character and said something like ‘ee’—to rhyme with his own name.

‘Ee?’ said Haresh.

Mr Lee repeated the word.

‘Why do you have such words?’ asked Haresh.

Mr Lee smiled sweetly. ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you?’

By now Mrs Rupa Mehra was feeling so weak that she had to ask Haresh to take her out of the tannery.

‘Do you want to go to the factory then, where I work?’

‘No, Haresh, thank you, that’s very sweet of you, but we should go home now. Mr Kakkar will be waiting for us.’

‘It will just take twenty minutes, and you can meet Mr Mukherji, my boss. Really, we are doing wonderful work there. And I’ll show you the set-up for the new department.’

‘Some other time. Actually, I am feeling the heat a little—’

Haresh turned to Lata. Though she was putting on a brave front, her nose was crinkling upwards.

Haresh, suddenly realizing what the matter was, said: ‘The smell — the smell. Oh — but you should have told me. I’m sorry — you see, I hardly give it a thought.’

‘No, no,’ said Lata, a bit ashamed of herself. Somewhere within her had risen an atavistic revulsion against the whole polluting business of hides and carrion and everything associated with leather.

But Haresh was very apologetic. While taking them back to the car he explained that this was a comparatively odourless tannery! Not far away, there was a whole locality with tanneries on both sides of the road, whose wastes and effluents were left in the open to dry or stagnate. At one time there had been a drain that took the stuff to the river, the holy Ganga itself, but there had been objections, and now there was no outlet at all. And people were very funny, said Haresh — they accepted what they had seen since childhood — shavings of leather and other offal strewn all around — they took it all for granted. (Haresh waved his arms to support his contention.) Sometimes he saw cartloads of hides coming in from villages or marketplaces being pulled by buffaloes who were almost dead themselves. ‘And of course in a week or two, when the monsoons come, it won’t be worth drying these shavings, so they’ll just let them lie and rot. And with the heat and the rain — well, you can imagine what the smell is like. It’s as bad as the tanning pits on the way to Ravidaspur — in your own city of Brahmpur. There even I had to hold my nose.’

The allusion was lost on Lata and Mrs Rupa Mehra, who would no more have dreamed of going to Ravidaspur than to Orion.

Mrs Rupa Mehra was about to ask Haresh when he had been to Brahmpur when the stench once more overpowered her.

‘I’m going to take you back at once,’ said Haresh decisively.

He sent a message that he would be back a little late at the factory and summoned the car. On the way back to Mr Kakkar’s house he said, a little humbly: ‘Well, someone has to make shoes.’

Mrs Rupa Mehra said: ‘But you don’t work in the tannery, do you, Haresh?’

‘Oh, no!’ said Haresh. ‘Normally I only visit it about once a week. I work in the main factory.’

‘Once a week?’ said Lata.

Haresh could sense the apprehension behind her words. He was sitting in the front with the driver. Now he turned around and said, in a slightly troubled voice: ‘I am proud of the shoes I make. I don’t like sitting in an office giving orders and expecting miracles. If this means that I have to stand in a pit and soak a buffalo’s hide myself, I’ll do it. People who work in managing agencies, for instance, are perfectly happy to deal in commodities but don’t like smudging their fingers with anything except ink. If that. And they care less for quality than for profits.’

After a few seconds, in which no one spoke, he added:

‘If you have to do something, you should do it without making a fuss. An uncle of mine in Delhi thinks that I have become polluted, that I have lost caste by working with leather. Caste! I think he is a fool, and he thinks that I’m one. I’ve come close to telling him what I think of him. But I’m sure he knows. People can always tell if you like or dislike them.’

There was another pause. Then Haresh, thrown off a little by his own unexpected profession of faith, said, ‘I would like to invite you to dinner. We have very little time to get to know each other. I hope that Mr Kakkar won’t mind.’

He had simply assumed that for their part the Mehras wouldn’t. Mother and daughter looked at each other in the back seat of the car, neither able to anticipate the other. After five seconds or so, Haresh took their silence for consent.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ll come to fetch you at seven thirty. And I will be smelling as sweet as a violet.’

‘A violet?’ cried Mrs Rupa Mehra in sudden alarm. ‘Why a violet?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Haresh. ‘A rose, if you like, Mrs Mehra. At any rate, better than wet-blue.’

Dinner was at the railway restaurant, which provided an excellent five-course meal. Lata was dressed in a pale green chanderi sari with little white flowers and a white border. She wore the same pearl ear-tops as before; they were virtually her only item of jewellery, and since she had not known she was going to be on display she had not bothered to borrow anything from Meenakshi. Mr Kakkar had taken a champa out of a vase and put it in her hair. It was a warm night, and she looked lively and fresh in green and white.

Haresh was wearing an off-white Irish linen suit and a cream tie with brown polka dots. Lata disliked these expensive, over-smart clothes and wondered what Arun would have thought of them. Calcutta tastes were quieter. As for a silk shirt, sure enough, it was there too. Haresh even brought his shirts into the conversation: they were made of the finest silk, the only silk he deigned to have made into shirts — not the silk poplin that was so popular these days, but the kind that had the brand-mark of two horses at the base of the bale. All this meant no more to Lata than did wet-blue, samming and splitting. Luckily Haresh’s co-respondent shoes were hidden beneath the table.

The meal was excellent; none of them drank anything alcoholic. The conversation ranged from politics (Haresh thought that Nehru was ruining the country with all his socialist waffle) to English literature (where, with a few misquotations, Haresh asserted that Shakespeare had been written by Shakespeare) to the cinema (Haresh, it seemed, had seen about four films a week while in England).

Lata wondered how he had found the time and energy to do so well in his course and earn a living simultaneously. His accent continued to put her off. She recalled that, by way of overcompensation, he had called daal ‘doll’ at lunch. And Kanpur ‘Cawnpore’. But when she compared his company with that of the polished and covenanted Bishwanath Bhaduri that evening at Firpo’s not so long ago, she realized how very much she preferred it. He was lively (even if he repeated himself) and optimistic (even if overconfident of his own abilities), and he appeared to like her.