This was rather too direct, but Haresh’s blood was up. ‘I cannot work if my men and my designer are pinched,’ he added.
‘Your designer?’ said Sen Gupta, staring redly at Haresh. ‘Your designer? You had no authority to hold out a job to Lee. Who were you to hire him?’
‘I did not. Mr Mukherji did, with a sanction from Mr Ghosh. I only found him. At least he’s a professional.’
‘And I am not? Before you were born I had learned how to shave,’ said Mr Sen Gupta with hot irrelevance.
‘Professional? Look at this place,’ said Haresh with barely muted scorn. ‘Compare it with Praha or James Hawley or Cooper Allen. How can we hope to keep our customers if we don’t fulfil our orders in time? Or if our quality is below par? They make better brogues in the slums of Brahmpur. The way things are run here is just not professional. You need people who know about shoes, not politics. Who work, and don’t just set up an adda wherever they are.’
‘Unprofessional?’ Sen Gupta seized on Haresh’s remark and gave it a tiny twist. ‘Mr Ghosh will hear of this! You call us unprofessional? You will see, you will see.’
Something about Sen Gupta’s bluster and patent envy made Haresh say:
‘Yes, it is unprofessional.’
‘You heard? You heard?’ Sen Gupta looked at Rao and Mukherji, then turned back to Haresh, his red tongue curled a little at the end, his mouth open. ‘You are calling us unprofessional?’ He pushed his chair not forwards but backwards with rage and puffed out his cheeks. ‘You are getting too big for your boots, yes, for your boots.’ His red eyes half popped out.
Haresh, having blundered in so far, blundered in a little further. ‘Yes, Mr Sen Gupta, that is exactly what I am saying. You are forcing me to be blunt, but it is true, certainly of you. You are unprofessional in every sense — and one of the worst manipulators I have known, not excluding Rao.’
‘Surely,’ said Mukherji, who was trying to act as peacemaker, but who was wounded by the use of the word that Sen Gupta had inveigled out of Haresh, and which he took in a sense that Haresh had not, at least in the first instance, intended. ‘Surely we must improve in any areas where we are deficient. But let us now talk calmly to one another.’ He turned to Rao. ‘You have been with the firm for many years, even before Mr Ghosh bought it and took it over. You are respected by everyone. Sen Gupta and I are comparative newcomers.’ He then said to Haresh: ‘And everyone admires the way you have obtained the HSH order.’ Finally he said to Sen Gupta: ‘Let us leave it at that.’ And he added a pacifying word or two in Bengali.
But Sen Gupta turned towards Haresh, unpacifiable: ‘You have one success,’ he shouted, ‘and you want to take over the whole place.’ He was yelling and waving his hands about, and Haresh, incensed by this ludicrous display, cut in with disgust:
‘I’d run it a good deal better than you, that’s for certain. This thing is run like a Bengali fish-market.’
The words were spoken in the heat of the moment, but were unretractable. The unsavoury Rao was furious; and he was not even a Bengali. Sen Gupta was triumphantly indignant. And the simultaneous insult to Bengal and fish did not go down well with Mukherji either.
‘You have been working too hard,’ he said to Haresh.
That afternoon Haresh was told that Mr Mukherji wanted to see him in his office. Haresh thought it might be something to do with the HSH order, and he brought along a folder containing a week’s work and plans to the office. There Mr Mukherji told him that the HSH order would be handled by Rao, not by him.
Haresh looked at him with a helpless sense of injustice. He shook his head as if to get rid of the last sentence he had heard.
‘I slogged my guts out to get that order, Mr Mukherji, and you know it. It has changed the fortunes of this factory. You virtually promised it would be handled in my department and under my supervision. I’ve told my workmen. What will I tell them now?’
‘I am sorry.’ Mr Mukherji shook his head. ‘It was felt that you had a lot on your plate. Let your new department start up slowly and iron out its problems; it will then be ready to undertake a big job like this. HSH will give us other orders. And I am impressed by the possibilities of this other scheme of yours as well. Everything in good time.’
‘The new department has no problems,’ said Haresh. ‘None. It is already running better than the others. And I’ve been working on the details of fulfilment ever since last week. Look!’ He opened the file. Mr Mukherji shook his head.
Haresh went on, anger building up under his voice: ‘They won’t give us another order if we mess this one up. Give it to Rao and he will butcher the job. I have even worked out how we can fulfil the order almost a fortnight before it is due.’
Mukherji sighed. ‘Khanna, you must learn to be calm.’
‘I shall go to Ghosh.’
‘This instruction has come from Mr Ghosh.’
‘It couldn’t have,’ said Haresh. ‘There wouldn’t have been time for that.’
Mukherji looked pained. Haresh looked perplexed before continuing: ‘Unless Rao himself telephoned Ghosh in Bombay. He must have. Was this Ghosh’s idea? I can’t believe it came from you.’
‘I can’t discuss this, Khanna.’
‘This won’t be the end of the matter. I won’t leave it at this.’
‘I am sorry.’ Mukherji liked Khanna.
Haresh went back to his room. It was a bitter blow. He had banked on the order. He wanted more than anything to get to grips with something substantial that he himself had brought in, to show what he and his new department could do — and, yes, to do something first-rate for the company of which he was an officer. For a while he felt as if his spirit was broken. He conjured up Rao’s contempt, Sen Gupta’s glee. He would have to break the news to his workers. It was intolerable. And he would not tolerate it.
Disheartened though he was, he refused to sit down and accept that these unfair dealings would form the future pattern of his working life. He had been ill-treated and used. It was true that Ghosh had given him his first job — and that too at short notice — and he was grateful for that. But such swift illogic and injustice shredded his sense of loyalty. It was as if he had rescued a child from a fire, and promptly been thrown into the fire himself as a reward. He would keep this job only as long as he needed to. If on a salary of three hundred and fifty rupees he had concerns about supporting a wife, with a salary of zero he could forget about it. He had heard nothing useful from anyone to whom he had applied for a job. But soon, he hoped very soon, something would come through. Something? — anything. He would take whatever came along.
He closed the door to his office, which he almost always left open, and sat down once more to think.
9.23
It took Haresh ten minutes to decide on immediate action.
He had wanted for some time to explore the possibility of a job at James Hawley. He now decided that he would try to get a job there as soon as he possibly could. He admired the establishment; and it had its headquarters in Kanpur. The James Hawley plant was mechanized and fairly modern. The shoes they produced were of better quality than those that CLFC considered adequate. If Haresh had any god, it was Quality. He also felt in his bones that James Hawley would treat his abilities with more respect and less arbitrariness.
But, as always, ingress was the problem. How could he get a foot in the door — or, to change metaphors, the ear of someone at the top. The Chairman of the Cromarty Group was Sir Neville Maclean; the Managing Director was Sir David Gower; and the manager of its subsidiary James Hawley with its large Kanpur factory (which produced as many as 30,000 pairs of shoes a day) was yet another Englishman. He could not simply march up to the headquarters of the establishment and ask to speak to someone there.