‘Bloody monsoon.’
He got out of the car, leaving his briefcase inside and protecting himself with the Statesman. His peon, who had been standing in the porch of the building, started when he saw his master’s little blue car. It had been raining so hard that he had not seen it until it had almost stopped. Agitated, he opened the umbrella and rushed out to protect the sahib. He was a second or two late.
‘Bloody idiot.’
The peon, though several inches shorter than Arun Mehra, contrived to hold the umbrella over the sacred head as Arun sauntered into the building. He got into the lift, and nodded in a preoccupied manner at the lift-boy.
The peon rushed back to the car to get his master’s briefcase, and climbed the stairs to the second floor of the large building.
The head office of the managing agency, Bentsen & Pryce, more popularly known as Bentsen Pryce, occupied the entire second floor.
From these surroundings, officials of the company controlled their share of the trade and commerce of India. Though Calcutta was not what it had been before 1912—the capital of the Government of India — it was, nearly four decades later and nearly four years after Independence, indisputably the commercial capital still. More than half the exports of the country flowed down the silty Hooghly to the Bay of Bengal. The Calcutta-based managing agencies such as Bentsen Pryce managed the bulk of the foreign trade of India; they controlled, besides, a large share of the production of the goods that were processed or manufactured in the hinterland of Calcutta, and the services, such as insurance, that went into ensuring their smooth movement down the channels of commerce.
The managing agencies typically owned controlling interests in the actual manufacturing companies that operated the factories, and supervised them all from the Calcutta head office. Almost without exception these agencies were still owned by the British, and almost without exception the executive officers of the managing agencies near Dalhousie Square — the commercial heart of Calcutta — were white. Final control lay with the directors in the London office and the shareholders in England — but they were usually content to leave things to the Calcutta head office so long as the profits kept flowing in.
The web was wide and the work both interesting and substantial. Bentsen Pryce itself was involved in the following areas, as one of its advertisements stated:
Abrasives, Air Conditioning, Belting, Brushes, Building, Cement, Chemicals and Pigments, Coal, Coal Mining Machinery, Copper & Brass, Cutch & Katha, Disinfectants, Drugs & Medicines, Drums and Containers, Engineering, Handling Materials, Industrial Heating, Insurance, Jute Mills, Lead Pipes, Linen Thread, Loose Leaf Equipment, Oils inc. Linseed Oil Products, Paints, Paper, Rope, Ropeway Construction, Ropeways, Shipping, Spraying Equipment, Tea, Timber, Vertical Turbine Pumps, Wire Rope.
The young men who came out from England in their twenties, most of them from Oxford or Cambridge, fell easily into the pattern of command that was a tradition at Bentsen Pryce, Andrew Yule, Bird & Company, or any of a number of similar firms that considered themselves (and were considered by others to be) the pinnacle of the Calcutta — and therefore Indian — business establishment. They were covenanted assistants, bound by covenant or rolling contract to the company. At Bentsen Pryce, until a few years ago, there had been no place for Indians in the company’s European Covenanted Service. Indians were slotted into the Indian Covenanted Service, where the levels of both responsibility and remuneration were far lower.
Around the time of Independence, under pressure from the government and as a concession to the changing times, a few Indians had been grudgingly allowed to enter the cool sanctum of the inner offices of Bentsen Pryce. As a result, by 1951 five of the eighty executives in the firm (though so far none of the department heads, let alone directors) were what could be called brown-whites.
All of them were extraordinarily conscious of their exceptional position, and none more so than Arun Mehra. If ever there was a man enraptured by England and the English it was he. And here he was, hobnobbing with them on terms of tolerable familiarity.
The British knew how to run things, reflected Arun Mehra. They worked hard and they played hard. They believed in command, and so did he. They assumed that if you couldn’t command at twenty-five, you didn’t have it in you. Their fresh-faced young men came out to India even earlier; it was hard to restrain them from commanding at twenty-one. What was wrong with this country was a lack of initiative. All that Indians wanted was a safe job.
Bloody pen-pushers, the whole lot of them, Arun said to himself as he surveyed the sweltering clerical section on his way to the air-conditioned executive offices beyond.
He was in a bad mood not only because of the foul weather but because he had solved only about a third of the Statesman crossword puzzle, and James Pettigrew, a friend of his from another firm, with whom he exchanged clues and solutions by phone most mornings, would probably have solved most of them by now. Arun Mehra enjoyed explaining things, and did not like having things explained to him. He enjoyed giving the impression to others that he knew whatever was worth knowing, and he had virtually succeeded in giving himself the same impression.
7.21
The morning mail was sorted out by Arun’s department head Basil Cox with the help of a couple of his principal lieutenants. This morning about ten letters had been marked out to Arun. One of them was from the Persian Fine Teas Company, and he looked it over with particular interest.
‘Would you take down a letter, Miss Christie?’ he said to his secretary, an exceptionally discreet and cheerful young Anglo-Indian woman, who had grown accustomed to his moods. Miss Christie had at first been resentful of the fact that she had been allocated to an Indian rather than a British executive, but Arun had charmed and patronized her into accepting his authority.
‘Yes, Mr Mehra, I’m ready.’
‘The usual heading. Dear Mr Poorzahedy, We have received your description of the contents of the shipment of tea — take down the particulars from the letter, Miss Christie — to Teheran — sorry, make that Khurramshahr and Teheran — that you wish us to insure from auction in Calcutta to arrival by customs bond to consignee in Teheran. Our rates, as before, are five annas per hundred rupees for the standard policy, including SR&CC as well as TPND. The shipment is valued at six lakhs, thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy rupees, and the premium payable will be — would you work that out, Miss Christie? — thank you — yours sincerely, and so on. . Wasn’t there a claim from them about a month ago?’
‘I think so, Mr Mehra.’
‘Hmm.’ Arun pointed his hands together under his chin, then said: ‘I think I’ll have a word with the burra babu.’
Rather than call the head clerk of the department into his office, he decided to pay him a visit. The burra babu had served in the insurance department of Bentsen Pryce for twenty-five years and there was nothing about the nuts and bolts of the department that he did not know. He was something like a regimental sergeant major, and everything at the lower levels passed through his hands. The European executives never dealt with anyone but him.
When Arun wandered over to his desk, the burra babu was looking over a sheaf of cheques and duplicates of letters, and telling his underlings what to do. ‘Tridib, you handle this one,’ he was saying; ‘Sarat, you make out this invoice.’ It was a muggy day, and the ceiling fans were rustling the high piles of paper on the clerks’ desks.