Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Have you written any poems recently?’ asked Lata after a few seconds. They had moved away from the window.

‘Here’s one,’ said Amit, looking through a pile of papers. ‘One that does not bare my soul. It’s about a family friend — you might even have met him at that party the last time you were in Calcutta. Kuku asked him upstairs to see her painting, and the first two lines suddenly occurred to her. He’s rather fat. So she commissioned a poem from the resident poet.’

Lata looked at the poem, which was titled ‘Roly Poly’:

Roly Poly Mr Kohli

Toiling slowly up the stairs.

Holy souly Mrs Kohli

Tries to catch him unawares.

Finger-wagging, fuming, frowning:

‘Why you have not said your prayers?

What means all this upping, downing?

What is magic in the stairs?’

Mr Kohli is Professor,

Always doing complex sums.

Answers mildly to aggressor,

‘On the stairs the theory comes.’

‘What a nonsense. Stop this summing.

Come and eat. Your food is cold.’

‘Just now only I am coming,’

Says her husband, meek as gold.

Lata could not help smiling, though she thought it very silly. ‘Is his wife all that fierce?’ she asked.

‘Oh, no,’ said Amit, ‘that’s just poetic licence. Poets can create wives to suit their convenience. Kuku thinks that only the first stanza has any real force, and she’s made up a second stanza of her own, which is much better than mine.’

‘Do you remember it?’ asked Lata.

‘Well — you should ask Kuku to recite it.’

‘It seems I won’t be able to for a while,’ said Lata. ‘She’s begun playing.’

From below the sound of the piano floated upwards, and Hans’s baritone followed.

‘We’d better go and join them,’ said Amit. ‘Toiling slowly down the stairs.’

‘All right.’

There was no sound from Cuddles. Music or sleep had soothed him. They entered the drawing room. Mrs Rupa Mehra noted their entrance with a frown.

After a couple of songs, Hans and Kuku bowed, and the audience clapped.

‘I forgot to show you the books,’ said Amit.

‘I forgot about them too,’ said Lata.

‘Anyway, you’re here for a while. I wish you’d arrived on the 24th, as you had planned. I could have taken you to midnight mass at St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s almost like being back in England — unsettling.’

‘My grandfather wasn’t too well, so we postponed coming.’

‘Well, Lata, are you doing anything tomorrow? I promised to show you the Botanical Gardens. Come see with me — the banyan tree — if you are free—’

‘I don’t think I’m doing anything—’ began Lata.

‘Prahapore.’ It was Mrs Rupa Mehra’s voice, from behind them.

‘Ma?’ said Lata.

‘Prahapore. She is going to Prahapore tomorrow with the whole family,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, addressing Amit. Then, turning to Lata she said: ‘How can you be so thoughtless? Haresh has organized lunch for us at Prahapore, and you are thinking of gallivanting along to the Botanical Gardens.’

‘I forgot, Ma — the date just slipped my mind for a moment. I was thinking of something else.’

‘Forgot!’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘Forgot. You will forget your own name next.’

Much had happened in Prahapore since Haresh had got his job, indeed since his meeting with Arun and Meenakshi at the Chairman’s mansion. He had plunged himself into his work, and become as much a Prahaman in spirit as the Czechs — though there was still not much love lost between them.

He did not mourn for his lost managerial status because he was the kind of man who preferred not to look back, and because in any case there was plenty of work to be done — and, what he liked most of all, battles to be fought, challenges to be overcome. As a foreman he had been put in charge of the Goodyear Welted line, which was the most prestigious line in the factory; Havel and Kurilla and the others knew that he could make this shoe-of-a-hundred-operations from scratch with his own rigid-thumbed hands, and would therefore be able to diagnose most problems in production and quality control.

But Haresh ran into problems almost immediately. He was not disposed to be friendly to Bengalis in general after his experience at CLFC, and now he decided fairly quickly that Bengali workmen were worse than Bengali bosses. Their slogan, which they made no secret of, was, ‘Chakri chai, kaaj chai na’: We want employment, not work. Their daily production was abysmal compared to what should have been possible, and there was a logic to this. They were attempting to establish a low working norm of about 200 pairs a day so that they could get incentive payments beyond that — or, if nothing else, the leisure to enjoy tea and gossip and samosas and paan and snuff.

They were also afraid, reasonably enough, of overworking themselves out of a job.

Haresh sat at his table near the production line, and bided his time for a few weeks. He noticed that the workmen on the entire line were often standing around idle because some machine or other was not working properly — or so they claimed. As a foreman he had the right to get them to clean the conveyor belt and the machines while they were doing nothing. But after the machines were gleaming, the workmen would saunter past him insolently and stand about in groups, chatting — while Praha and production suffered. It drove Haresh crazy.

Besides, almost all the workmen were Bengali and spoke Bengali, and he didn’t understand much of it. He certainly understood when he was being insulted, however, because swear words like ‘sala’ are common to Hindi and Bengali. Despite his quick temper, he chose not to make an issue of it.

One day he decided that, instead of grinding his teeth with frustration and sending for someone from the machinery department to repair a malfunctioning machine on site or to forklift it out, he would visit the machinery department himself. This was the beginning of what could be called the Battle of the Goodyear Welted Line, and it was fought on many fronts, against several levels of opposition, including that of the Czechs.

The mechanics were pleased to see Haresh. Normally foremen sent them slips asking them to repair their machines. Now a foreman, and that too the famous foreman who had got to live inside the white gates of the Czech compound, was visiting them and chatting to them on terms of equality, and even taking snuff with them. He was prepared to sit on a stool with them and talk and joke and share experiences, and look inside machines without caring if his hands got soiled with grease. And he called them ‘Dada’ out of respect for their age and abilities.

For once, they got the sense that they were part of the mainstream of production, not a mere auxiliary outfit in a forgotten corner of Praha. Most of the best mechanics were Muslims and spoke Urdu, so Haresh had no language problem. He was well dressed, with a set of working overalls that he had adapted — sleeveless, collarless, extending no lower than the knee — to counter the heat and yet protect the front (if nothing else) of his cream silk shirt — perhaps a foppish appurtenance on the factory floor. But he had no airs of superiority when he talked to them, and this pleased them. Through their pleasure in exchanging the expertise of their trade, Haresh himself got interested in the mechanics of machines: how they worked, how they could be kept in good condition, how he might be able to make small innovations to improve their performance.

The mechanics told him, laughing, that the workmen on his conveyor belt were leading him a dance. Nine times out of ten, there wasn’t even anything wrong with the machines.

This did not altogether surprise Haresh. But what could he do about it, he asked them. Because by this time they were friends, they said that they would tell him when something was really wrong — and they would repair his machines first when this was the case.