‘Once a week?’ said Lata.
Haresh could sense the apprehension behind her words. He was sitting in the front with the driver. Now he turned around and said, in a slightly troubled voice: ‘I am proud of the shoes I make. I don’t like sitting in an office giving orders and expecting miracles. If this means that I have to stand in a pit and soak a buffalo’s hide myself, I’ll do it. People who work in managing agencies, for instance, are perfectly happy to deal in commodities but don’t like smudging their fingers with anything except ink. If that. And they care less for quality than for profits.’
After a few seconds, in which no one spoke, he added:
‘If you have to do something, you should do it without making a fuss. An uncle of mine in Delhi thinks that I have become polluted, that I have lost caste by working with leather. Caste! I think he is a fool, and he thinks that I’m one. I’ve come close to telling him what I think of him. But I’m sure he knows. People can always tell if you like or dislike them.’
There was another pause. Then Haresh, thrown off a little by his own unexpected profession of faith, said, ‘I would like to invite you to dinner. We have very little time to get to know each other. I hope that Mr Kakkar won’t mind.’
He had simply assumed that for their part the Mehras wouldn’t. Mother and daughter looked at each other in the back seat of the car, neither able to anticipate the other. After five seconds or so, Haresh took their silence for consent.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ll come to fetch you at seven thirty. And I will be smelling as sweet as a violet.’
‘A violet?’ cried Mrs Rupa Mehra in sudden alarm. ‘Why a violet?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Haresh. ‘A rose, if you like, Mrs Mehra. At any rate, better than wet-blue.’
9.12
Dinner was at the railway restaurant, which provided an excellent five-course meal. Lata was dressed in a pale green chanderi sari with little white flowers and a white border. She wore the same pearl ear-tops as before; they were virtually her only item of jewellery, and since she had not known she was going to be on display she had not bothered to borrow anything from Meenakshi. Mr Kakkar had taken a champa out of a vase and put it in her hair. It was a warm night, and she looked lively and fresh in green and white.
Haresh was wearing an off-white Irish linen suit and a cream tie with brown polka dots. Lata disliked these expensive, over-smart clothes and wondered what Arun would have thought of them. Calcutta tastes were quieter. As for a silk shirt, sure enough, it was there too. Haresh even brought his shirts into the conversation: they were made of the finest silk, the only silk he deigned to have made into shirts — not the silk poplin that was so popular these days, but the kind that had the brand-mark of two horses at the base of the bale. All this meant no more to Lata than did wet-blue, samming and splitting. Luckily Haresh’s co-respondent shoes were hidden beneath the table.
The meal was excellent; none of them drank anything alcoholic. The conversation ranged from politics (Haresh thought that Nehru was ruining the country with all his socialist waffle) to English literature (where, with a few misquotations, Haresh asserted that Shakespeare had been written by Shakespeare) to the cinema (Haresh, it seemed, had seen about four films a week while in England).
Lata wondered how he had found the time and energy to do so well in his course and earn a living simultaneously. His accent continued to put her off. She recalled that, by way of overcompensation, he had called daal ‘doll’ at lunch. And Kanpur ‘Cawnpore’. But when she compared his company with that of the polished and covenanted Bishwanath Bhaduri that evening at Firpo’s not so long ago, she realized how very much she preferred it. He was lively (even if he repeated himself) and optimistic (even if overconfident of his own abilities), and he appeared to like her.
She reflected that Haresh was not westernized in the proper sense: she sensed that in his manners and style he was a bit half-baked (at least by Calcutta standards), and that consequently he sometimes put on airs. But though he wished to be liked by her, he did not ingratiate himself by attempting to anticipate her opinions before putting forward his own. If anything, he was too certain about the correctness of his views. Nor did he lay on the odious, insincere charm that she had got used to with Arun’s young Calcutta friends. Amit, of course, was different; but he was Meenakshi’s brother rather than Arun’s friend.
Haresh found Mrs Rupa Mehra affectionate as well as good-looking. He had tried to maintain a respectful distance by calling her Mrs Mehra throughout, but she had eventually insisted on him calling her Ma. ‘Everyone else does so after five minutes, so you must as well,’ she told Haresh. She waxed voluble about her late husband and her coming grandson. She had already forgotten her afternoon’s trauma and had appended her future son-in-law to the family.
Over ice-cream, Lata decided she liked his eyes. They were lovely, she thought, and surprisingly so; they were small and lively, did not spoil his good looks, and when he was amused they disappeared completely! It was fascinating. Then, for no accountable reason, she began to dread the thought that after dinner, while driving her back, he would offer to stop for paan — unconscious of how horribly it would jar with the spirit of the evening, the linen, the silverware, the china, how it would undo the threads of her goodwill with the blind torque of distaste, how it would sandwich the entire day with the image of a red mouth stained with betel juice.
Haresh’s thoughts were not complicated. He said to himself: This girl is intelligent without arrogance, and attractive without vanity. She does not reveal her thoughts easily, but I like that. And then he thought of Simran, and the old, not entirely appeasable pain came over his heart.
But sometimes, for a few minutes at a time, Haresh forgot about Simran. And, for a few minutes at a time, Lata forgot about Kabir. And sometimes both of them forgot that what they were undergoing amid the clink of cutlery and crockery was a mutual interview that might decide whether or not they would own a common set of those items sometime in the whimsical future.
9.13
The car (with Haresh and driver) picked up Mrs Rupa Mehra and Lata and took them to the railway station early the next morning. They arrived, they thought, just in time. The timing of the Kanpur-Lucknow train, however, had been changed, and they missed it. The bus they attempted to take was full. There was nothing for it but to wait for the 9.42 train. Meanwhile they returned to Elm Villa.
Mrs Rupa Mehra said that nothing like this would have happened in her husband’s time. Then the trains ran like clockwork, and changes in train timings were like changes in dynasties: momentous and rare. Now everything was being changed at random: road names, train schedules, prices, mores. Cawnpore and Cashmere were yielding to unfamiliar spellings. It would be Dilli and Kolkota and Mumbai next. And now, shockingly, they were threatening to go metric with the currency — and even with weights and measures.
‘Don’t worry, Ma,’ said Haresh with a smile. ‘We’ve tried to introduce the kilogram since 1870, and it probably won’t be brought in for another hundred years.’
‘Do you think so?’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, pleased. Seers meant something exact to her, pounds something vague, and kilograms nothing at all.
‘Yes,’ said Haresh. ‘We have no sense of order or logic or discipline. No wonder we let the British rule us. What do you think, Lata?’ he added in an artless attempt to draw her in.
But Lata had no opinion handy. She was thinking of other matters. What was foremost on her mind was Haresh’s panama hat, which (though he had doffed it) she thought exceptionally stupid. This morning too he had on his Irish linen suit.