Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘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 would 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.’

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.