Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘That’s indeed what they claim,’ he agreed. ‘But it is also their own expansion, the expansion of the whole market, that they are financing,’ he said. ‘And, besides, it is only a portion of their payment that is made by post-dated chits. Most of it is still made by cash. I’m afraid that everyone has begun to see matters in black and white, with the traders usually being the ones who are painted black. It’s a good thing that the Home Minister, L.N. Agarwal, comes from a trading community. He’s the MLA for a part of this area, and he does at least see our side of the matter. My wife’s father doesn’t get along well with him at all politically — or even personally, really — but, as I tell Veena when she’s in a mood to listen, Agarwal understands the ways of business better than her father does.’

‘Well, do you think that you could take me around Misri Mandi in the afternoon?’ asked Haresh. ‘I’ll get a more informed perspective that way.’

It was interesting, thought Haresh, that the two powerful — and rival — Ministers should represent contiguous constituencies.

Kedarnath was in two minds as to whether to agree, and Haresh must have seen this in his face. Kedarnath had been impressed by Haresh’s technical knowledge of shoe manufacture, and by his enterprising spirit, and was thinking of proposing a business connection. Perhaps, he thought, the Cawnpore Leather & Footwear Company would be interested in buying shoes directly from him. After all, it sometimes happened that companies like CLFC received small orders from shoe stores, perhaps for 5,000 pairs of a particular kind of shoe, and it was not worth their while to retool their own plant to fulfil such orders. In such a case, if Kedarnath could ensure that he got shoes from local Brahmpur shoemakers that fulfilled CLFC’s quality requirements, and shipped them to Kanpur, it might work out well both for him and for Haresh’s employers.

However, these were disturbed days, everyone was under great financial pressure, and the impression that Haresh might obtain of the reliability or efficiency of the shoe trade in Brahmpur would not be a favourable one.

But Haresh’s small kindness to his son and his respectful attitude to his mother tilted the balance. ‘All right, we’ll go,’ he said. ‘But the market will really only open later, towards the evening — even at the level to which the strike has reduced it. The Brahmpur Shoe Mart, where I have my stall, opens at six. But I have a suggestion in the meanwhile. I’ll take you to see a few places where shoes are actually made. It’ll be a change for you from the conditions of manufacture that you’ve seen in England — or at your Kanpur factory.’

Haresh agreed readily.

As they walked downstairs, with the afternoon sunlight falling on them from above through the layers of grating, Haresh thought how similar in design this house was to his foster-father’s house in Neel Darvaza — though of course, much smaller.

At the corner of the alley, where it opened out into a slightly broader and more crowded lane, there was a paan stand. They stopped. ‘Plain or sweet?’ asked Kedarnath.

‘Plain, with tobacco.’

For the next five minutes, as they walked along together, Haresh did not say anything because he kept the paan in his mouth without swallowing it. He would spit it out later into an opening in the small drain that ran along the side of the alley. But for the moment, under the pleasant intoxication of the tobacco, amid the bustle all around him, the shouts and chatter and the sound of bicycle-bells, cow-bells, and bells from the Radhakrishna Temple, he was again reminded of the alley near his foster-father’s house in Old Delhi where he had been brought up after his parents died.

As for Kedarnath, though he had got a plain paan for himself, he did not speak much either. He would be taking this silk-shirted young man to one of the poorest parts of the city, where the jatav shoemakers lived and worked in conditions of wretched squalor, and he wondered how he would react. He thought of his own sudden fall from wealth in Lahore to the virtual destitution of 1947; the hard-won security he had obtained for Veena and Bhaskar over the last few years; the problems of the present strike and the dangers it would mean for them. That there was some special spark of genius in his son he believed with utter conviction. He dreamed of sending him to a school like Doon, and perhaps later even to Oxford or Cambridge. But times were hard, and whether Bhaskar would obtain the special education he deserved, whether Veena could keep up with the music she craved, whether they could even continue to afford their modest rent, were questions that troubled and aged him.

But these are the hostages of love, he said to himself, and it is meaningless to ask myself whether I would exchange a head of unworried hair for my wife and child.

They emerged on to a yet broader alley, and then on to a hot, dusty street not far from the high ground of the Chowk. One of the two great landmarks of this crowded area was a huge, pink three-storey building. This was the kotwali or city police station, the largest in Purva Pradesh. The other landmark, a hundred yards away, was the beautiful and austere Alamgiri Mosque, ordered by the Emperor Aurangzeb to be built in the heart of the city upon the ruins of a great temple.

Late Mughal and British records attest to a series of Hindu-Muslim riots around this spot. It is not clear what exactly incurred the wrath of the emperor. He was the least tolerant of the great emperors of his dynasty, true, but the area around Brahmpur had been spared his worst excesses. The reimposition of the poll-tax on unbelievers, a tax rescinded by his great-grandfather Akbar, affected the citizens of Brahmpur as it did those throughout the empire. But the razing of temples usually required some extraordinary impetus, such as the indication that it was being used as a centre for armed or political resistance. Apologists for Aurangzeb were apt to claim that he had a worse reputation for intolerance than he deserved and that he was as harsh with Shias as he was with Hindus. But for the more orthodox Hindu citizenry of Brahmpur, the previous 250 years of history had not dimmed their loathing for a man who had dared to destroy one of the holiest temples of the great destroyer Shiva himself.

The great Shiva-linga of the inner sanctum of the temple was rumoured to have been preserved by the priests of the so-called Chandrachur Temple on the night before it was reduced to rubble. They sank it not in a deep well as was often the case in those days, but in the shallows and sands near the cremation ground by the Ganga. How the huge stone object was carried there is not known. Apparently the knowledge of its location was secretly maintained and passed on for more than ten generations from head-priest to head-priest in hereditary succession. Of all the common images of Hindu worship it was probably the sacred phallus, the Shiva-linga, which was most despised by the orthodox theologians of Islam. Where they could destroy it, they did so with a particular sense of righteous disgust. While there was any chance that the Muslim peril might resurface, the priests did not act upon their family knowledge. But after Independence and the Partition of Pakistan and India, the priest of the long-since-destroyed Chandrachur Temple — who lived in poverty in a shack near the cremation ghat — felt that it was safe to emerge and identify himself. He tried to get his temple rebuilt and the Shiva-linga excavated and reinstalled. At first the Archaeological Survey had refused to believe the particulars he gave of the location of the linga. The rumour of its preservation was unsupported by other records. And even if it were true, the Ganga had changed course, the sands and shallows had shifted, and the unwritten verses or mantras describing its location could themselves have grown inaccurate through repeated transmission. It is also possible that officers of the Archaeological Survey were aware or had been apprised of the possible effects of unearthing the linga and had decided that for the sake of public peace it was safer horizontal under the sand than vertical in a sanctum. At any rate, the priest obtained no help from them.