Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Mukherji sighed. ‘Khanna, you must learn to be calm.’

‘I shall go to Ghosh.’

‘This instruction has come from Mr Ghosh.’

‘It couldn’t have,’ said Haresh. ‘There wouldn’t have been time for that.’

Mukherji looked pained. Haresh looked perplexed before continuing: ‘Unless Rao himself telephoned Ghosh in Bombay. He must have. Was this Ghosh’s idea? I can’t believe it came from you.’

‘I can’t discuss this, Khanna.’

‘This won’t be the end of the matter. I won’t leave it at this.’

‘I am sorry.’ Mukherji liked Khanna.

Haresh went back to his room. It was a bitter blow. He had banked on the order. He wanted more than anything to get to grips with something substantial that he himself had brought in, to show what he and his new department could do — and, yes, to do something first-rate for the company of which he was an officer. For a while he felt as if his spirit was broken. He conjured up Rao’s contempt, Sen Gupta’s glee. He would have to break the news to his workers. It was intolerable. And he would not tolerate it.

Disheartened though he was, he refused to sit down and accept that these unfair dealings would form the future pattern of his working life. He had been ill-treated and used. It was true that Ghosh had given him his first job — and that too at short notice — and he was grateful for that. But such swift illogic and injustice shredded his sense of loyalty. It was as if he had rescued a child from a fire, and promptly been thrown into the fire himself as a reward. He would keep this job only as long as he needed to. If on a salary of three hundred and fifty rupees he had concerns about supporting a wife, with a salary of zero he could forget about it. He had heard nothing useful from anyone to whom he had applied for a job. But soon, he hoped very soon, something would come through. Something? — anything. He would take whatever came along.

He closed the door to his office, which he almost always left open, and sat down once more to think.

It took Haresh ten minutes to decide on immediate action.

He had wanted for some time to explore the possibility of a job at James Hawley. He now decided that he would try to get a job there as soon as he possibly could. He admired the establishment; and it had its headquarters in Kanpur. The James Hawley plant was mechanized and fairly modern. The shoes they produced were of better quality than those that CLFC considered adequate. If Haresh had any god, it was Quality. He also felt in his bones that James Hawley would treat his abilities with more respect and less arbitrariness.

But, as always, ingress was the problem. How could he get a foot in the door — or, to change metaphors, the ear of someone at the top. The Chairman of the Cromarty Group was Sir Neville Maclean; the Managing Director was Sir David Gower; and the manager of its subsidiary James Hawley with its large Kanpur factory (which produced as many as 30,000 pairs of shoes a day) was yet another Englishman. He could not simply march up to the headquarters of the establishment and ask to speak to someone there.

After thinking matters over, he decided he would go to the legendary Pyare Lal Bhalla, who was a fellow-khatri, one of the first khatris to have entered the shoe business. How he entered this business and how he had risen to his present eminence was a story in itself.

Pyare Lal Bhalla came from Lahore. He had originally been a sales agent for hats and children’s clothing from England, and had expanded into sportswear and paints and cloth. He was extremely good at what he did, and his business had expanded both through his own efforts and through the recommendation of satisfied principals. One could imagine someone from James Hawley, for instance, on his way out to India being told by a fellow-clubman: ‘Well, if you’re in Lahore, and you’re not happy with your chap in the Punjab, you could do worse than to look up Peary Loll Buller. I don’t think he deals in footwear, but he’s a first-rate agent, and it might very well be worth his while. And yours too of course. I’ll drop him a line to say you might be coming to see him.’

Considering that he was a vegetarian (mushrooms were the closest he approached anything even faintly resembling meat), it was interesting that Pyare Lal Bhalla had quickly agreed to act as agent for the whole of the undivided Punjab for James Hawley & Company. Leather was polluting, and, certainly, many of the animals whose skins continued their postmortem existence as an additional layer on human feet were not ‘fallen’; they had been slaughtered. Bhalla said that he had nothing to do with the killing. He was a mere agent. The line of demarcation was clear. The English did what they did, he did what he did.

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.