Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Now that both of them were standing up, he towered over Haresh. But Haresh, who had always treated his shortness with the irritation that befitted an inconvenient but psychologically insignificant fact, was not in the least overpowered. Besides, he was the one ordering the shoes.

‘Four.’

‘Well, if you send the leather to me tonight, so that we can start with the cutting first thing tomorrow morning—’

‘Done,’ said Haresh. ‘Four days. I’ll come over personally tomorrow with the other components to see how you’re getting on. Now we’d better go.’

‘One more thing strikes me, Haresh Sahib,’ said Jagat Ram, as they were leaving. ‘Ideally I’d like to have a sample of the shoe that you want me to reproduce.’

‘Yes,’ said Kedarnath with a smile. ‘Why aren’t you wearing a pair of brogues manufactured by your own company — instead of these English shoes? Take them off immediately, and I’ll have you carried back to the rickshaw.’

‘I’m afraid my feet have got used to these,’ said Haresh, returning the smile, though he knew as well as anyone that it was more his heart than his feet. He loved good clothes and he loved good shoes, and he felt bad that CLFC products did not achieve the international standards of quality that, both by instinct and by training, he so greatly admired.

‘Well, I’ll try to get you a sample pair of those,’ he continued, pointing at the paper patterns in Jagat Ram’s hands, ‘by one means or another.’

He had given a pair of CLFC winged brogues as a present to the old college friend whom he was staying with. Now he would have to borrow his own gift back for a few days. But he had no compunction about doing that. When it came to work, he never felt awkward in the least about anything. In fact, Haresh was not given to feeling awkward in general.

As they walked back to the waiting rickshaw, Haresh felt very pleased with the way things were going. Brahmpur had got off to a sleepy start, but was proving to be very interesting, indeed, unpredictable.

He got out a small card from his pocket and noted down in English:

Action Points—

1. Misri Mandi — see trading.

2. Purchase leather.

3. Send leather to Jagat Ram.

4. Dinner at Sunil’s; recover brogues from him.

5. Tmro: Jagat Ram/Ravidaspur.

6. Telegram — late return to Cawnpore.

Having made his list, he scanned it through, and realized that it would be difficult to send the leather to Jagat Ram, because no one would be able to find his place, especially at night. He toyed with the idea of getting the rickshaw-wallah to see where Jagat Ram lived and hiring him to take the leather to him later. Then he had a better idea. He walked back to the workshop and told Jagat Ram to send someone to Kedarnath Tandon’s shop in the Brahmpur Shoe Mart in Misri Mandi at nine o’clock sharp that night. The leather would be waiting for him there. He had only to pick it up and to begin work at first light the next day.

It was ten o’clock, and Haresh and the other young men sitting and standing around Sunil Patwardhan’s room near the university were happily intoxicated on a mixture of alcohol and high spirits.

Sunil Patwardhan was a mathematics lecturer at Brahmpur University. He had been a friend of Haresh’s at St Stephen’s College in Delhi; after that, what with Haresh going to England for his footwear course, they had been out of touch for years, and had heard about each other only through mutual friends. Although he was a mathematician, Sunil had had a reputation at St Stephen’s for being one of the lads. He was big and quite plump, but filled as he was with sluggish energy and lazy wit and Urdu ghazals and Shakespearian quotations, many women found him attractive. He also enjoyed drinking, and had tried during his college days to get Haresh to drink — without success, because Haresh used to be a teetotaller then.

Sunil Patwardhan had believed as a student that to get one true mathematical insight a fortnight was enough by way of work; for the rest of the time he paid no attention to his studies, and did excellently. Now that he was teaching students he found it hard to impose an academic discipline on them that he himself had no faith in.

He was delighted to see Haresh again after several years. Haresh, true to form, had not informed him that he would be coming to Brahmpur on work but had landed on his doorstep two or three days earlier, had left his luggage in the drawing room, had talked for half an hour, and had then rushed off somewhere, saying something incomprehensible about the purchase of micro-sheets and leatherboard.

‘Here, these are for you,’ he had added in parting, depositing a cardboard shoebox on the drawing room table.

Sunil had opened it and been delighted. Haresh had said:

‘I know you never wear anything except brogues.’

‘But how did you remember my size?’

Haresh laughed and said, ‘People’s feet are like cars to me. I just remember their size — don’t ask me how I do it. And your feet are like Rolls-Royces.’

Sunil remembered the time when he and a couple of friends had challenged Haresh — who was being his usual irritatingly overconfident self — to identify from a distance each of the fifty or so cars parked outside the college on the occasion of an official function. Haresh had got every one of them right. Considering his almost perfect memory for objects, it was odd that he had emerged from his English B.A. Honours course with a third, and had messed up his Poetry paper with innumerable misquotations.

God knows, thought Sunil, how he’s wandered into the shoe trade, but it probably suits him. It would have been a tragedy for the world and for him if he had become an academic like me. What is amazing is that he should ever have chosen English as a subject in the first place.

‘Good! Now that you’re here, we’ll have a party,’ Sunil had said. ‘It’ll be like old times. I’ll get a couple of old Stephanians who are in Brahmpur to join the more lively of my academic colleagues. But if you want soft drinks you’ll have to bring your own.’

Haresh had promised to try to come, ‘work permitting’. Sunil had threatened him with excommunication if he didn’t.

Now he was here, but talking endlessly and enthusiastically about his day’s efforts.

‘Oh stop it, Haresh, don’t tell us about chamars and micro-sheets,’ said Sunil. ‘We’re not interested in all that. What happened to that Sikh girl you used to chase in your headier days?’

‘It wasn’t a sardarni, it was the inimitable Kalpana Gaur,’ said a young historian. He tilted his head to the left as wistfully as he could in exaggerated imitation of Kalpana Gaur’s adoring gaze at Haresh from the other side of the room during lectures on Byron. Kalpana had been one of the few women students at St Stephen’s.

‘Uh—’ said Sunil with dismissive authority. ‘You don’t know the true facts of the matter. Kalpana Gaur was chasing him, and he was chasing the sardarni. He used to serenade her outside the walls of her family’s house and send her letters through go-betweens. The Sikh family couldn’t bear the thought of their beloved daughter getting married to a Lala. If you want further details—’

‘He’s intoxicated with his own voice,’ said Haresh.

‘So I am,’ said Sunil. ‘But you — you misdirected yours. You should have wooed not the girl but the mother and the grandmother.’

‘Thanks,’ said Haresh.

‘So do you still keep in touch with her? What was her name—’

Haresh did not oblige with any information. He was in no mood to tell these affable idiots that he was still very much in love with her after all these years — and that, together with his toe-puffs and counters, he kept a silver framed photograph of her in his suitcase.