Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

In a few minutes Haresh was ushered into the office of the General Manager of Prahapore.

Pavel Havel — so named by playfully idiotic parents, who had no conception of how he would be teased at school — was a short man like Haresh, but almost as broad as he was tall.

‘Sit, sit, sit—’ he said to Haresh.

Haresh sat down.

‘Show me your hands,’ he said.

Haresh offered Mr Havel his hands, palms upwards.

‘Bend your thumb.’

Haresh bent it as much as possible.

Mr Havel laughed in a not unfriendly but rather final way.

‘You are not a shoemaker,’ he said.

‘I am,’ said Haresh.

‘No, no, no—’ Mr Havel laughed. ‘Some other line, some other job is best for you. Join some other company. What do you want to do in Praha?’

‘I want to sit on the other side of this desk,’ said Haresh.

Mr Havel stopped smiling.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That high?’

‘Eventually,’ said Haresh.

‘We all start on the shop floor,’ explained Mr Havel, feeling sorry for this rather incapable but ambitious young man who would never make a shoemaker. It was perfectly obvious the moment he had tried to bend his thumb. The way shoes were made in Czechoslovakia required bending the thumb. This young man had no more future with Praha than a one-armed man in a wrestling pit. ‘Myself, Mr Novak, Mr Janacek, Mr Kurilla, all of us, we all started on the shop floor. If you cannot make shoes,’ he continued, ‘what hope is there for you in this company?’

‘None,’ said Haresh.

‘So you see—’ said Pavel Havel.

‘You have not even seen me trying to make a shoe,’ said Haresh. ‘How would you know what I can or can’t do?’

Pavel Havel got slightly irked. He had a great deal of work to do today, and endless empty talk bothered him. Indians always talked big and performed miserably. He looked slightly weary. Gazing out of his window at the bright — too-bright — greenery outside, he wondered if the communists would ever leave Czechoslovakia, and if he and his family would ever get the chance in his lifetime to see his hometown of Bratislava again.

The young man was saying something about being able to make a shoe.

Pavel Havel stared at the lapel of his fancy suit and said rather brutally: ‘You will never make a shoe.’

Haresh could not understand Havel’s sudden change of tone, but he was not cowed by it. ‘I think I can make a shoe right from the design pattern to the finished product,’ he said.

‘All right,’ said Pavel Havel. ‘You make a shoe. You make a shoe, and I will give you a foreman’s job at eighty rupees a week.’ No one had ever started as a foreman at Praha, but Pavel Havel was sure that this was a riskless bet. Paper qualifications were one thing, rigid thumbs and a flaccid national spirit another.

But Haresh was willing to try for something better. He said: ‘I have a letter of appointment here from James Hawley offering me a job at seven hundred and fifty rupees. If I make a shoe to your satisfaction, not just an ordinary shoe, but the most difficult one on your production line, will you match their offer?’

Pavel Havel looked at the young man, disconcerted by his confidence, and put a finger to his lips, as if reconsidering his calculated likelihoods. ‘No,’ he said, slowly. ‘That would put you in the managerial grade and cause a revolution at Praha. It is impossible. As it is, if you can make a pair of shoes — of a kind I will choose — if you can make it — you will become a foreman, and that in itself is half a revolution.’ Pavel Havel, having suffered from one in Czechoslovakia, did not approve of revolutions.

He phoned Kurilla, the head of the Leather Footwear Division, and asked him to come to his office for a few minutes.

‘What do you think, Kurilla?’ he said. ‘Khanna wants to make a shoe. What should we give him to make?’

‘Goodyear Welted,’ said Kurilla cruelly.

Pavel Havel smiled broadly. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Go and make a pair of Goodyear Welted shoes according to our ready-made pattern.’

This was the most difficult type of shoe to make, and involved over a hundred different operations. Havel frowned, looked at his own thumbs, and dismissed Haresh.

No poet ever worked harder or more inspiredly to craft a poem than Haresh worked for the next three days on his pair of shoes. He was supplied the materials, and told where the various machines were, and he set to work amid the heat and din of the factory.

He examined and selected fine pieces of upper and lining leather, measured them for thickness, cut, skived, cemented and folded the components, stamped the lining for size and style, fitted the upper and lining components together and carefully stitched them to each other.

He inserted and shaped the counter and toe-puff in the upper, and attached the insole to the last.

Then he mounted the upper to the wooden last and attached it to the insole by toe-lasting, heel-lasting and side-lasting, and checked with satisfaction that the upper was truly down to the last without a wrinkle, that it clung as tightly as a skin.

He stitched a welt all around. He trimmed the surplus material, and bottom-filled the gap with a mixture of cork and adhesive.

He hardly ate. On the way back to Calcutta each night he dreamed of the finished pair of shoes and how they would transform his life.

He cut the sole leather and split it to the correct thickness. He layed it, stitched it through, and attached the heel. Then he trimmed the heel and the sole. He paused for a few minutes before starting this difficult and delicate operation; trimming was like cutting hair — a mistake would be critical and irretrievable. A pair of shoes had to be completely symmetrical, left and right absolutely in proportion to each other. He paused for a few minutes afterwards as well. He knew from experience that after performing a difficult job well he was prone to the kind of relief and overconfidence that led to botching something simple.

After trimming, he fine-scoured the heel, and indented the welt to make it look good. When he had finished, he allowed himself to think that things were going well. He coloured the edges, and hot-waxed and ironed them to make them impermeable to water.

Mr Novak, the cold fox, came around at one stage to see how he was progressing. Haresh was taking his post-trimming breather. Mr Novak nodded but did not greet him, Haresh nodded but did not greet him, and Mr Novak went wordlessly away.

The shoes were now practically ready except that the soles, where stitched, looked a little crude. So Haresh fine-buffed the soles, waxed them and shone them. And lastly he fudged the bottom edges against a hot revolving wheel that hid the ugly stitches under a fine decorative pattern.

That, thought Haresh, carries a lesson for me. If James Hawley hadn’t retracted their offer I would still be stuck in the same city. Now perhaps I’ll get a job near Calcutta. And in terms of quality, Praha footwear is the best in India.

Appropriately enough, his next operation was to brand-stamp the sole with the name of Praha. He removed the wooden last. He attached the heel (which was attached only temporarily before) with nails. With gold foil he brand-stamped the inside sock with the Praha name and pasted it and cemented it inside the shoe. It was done!

He was halfway to Havel’s office when he turned back, shaking his head and smiling at himself.

‘What now?’ said the man who had been designated to police him while he worked.

‘A pair of laces,’ said Haresh. ‘I must be exhausted.’

The General Manager, the head of Leather, and the head of Personnel gathered together to look at Haresh’s pair of shoes, to twist them and turn them, to prod them and peer at them. They spoke in Czech.