‘Oh. Ghosh,’ interrupted Pyare Lal Bhalla somewhat slightingly. ‘He was here the other day. He wanted me to sell some of his lines for him. Yes, yes, he said something about this civilian idea.’
Considering that Ghosh ran one of the biggest construction companies in the country, Pyare Lal Bhalla’s dismissive tone might have seemed a little incongruous. The fact, however, was that in the shoe line he was small fry compared to the plump carp of James Hawley.
‘You know how things run there,’ said Haresh. Having felt too often — but most painfully today — CLFC’s inefficiency and arbitrariness, he did not feel that he was in any sense letting down his firm by speaking thus. He had worked his hardest for them. It was they who had let him down.
‘Yes. I do. So you have come to me for a job.’
‘You honour me, Bhalla Sahib. But actually I have come for a job with James Hawley — which is almost the same thing.’
For a minute or so, while Haresh remained standing, cogs clicked in Pyare Lal Bhalla’s business brain. Then he summoned a clerk from the next room and said:
‘Write him a letter for Gower and sign it for me.’
Pyare Lal Bhalla then put up his right hand towards Haresh in a combined gesture of assurance, blessing, commiseration and dismissal.
My foot’s in the door, thought Haresh, elated.
He took this note and cycled off to the grand four-storey edifice of Cromarty House, the headquarters of the group of which James Hawley was a part. He planned to make an appointment with Sir David Gower, if possible this week or the coming week. It was five thirty, the end of the working day. He entered the imposing portals. When he presented his note at the front office, he was asked to wait. Half an hour passed. Then he was told: ‘Kindly continue to wait here, Mr Khanna. Sir David will see you in twenty minutes.’
Still sweaty from bicycling, dressed in nothing better than his silk shirt and fawn trousers — no jacket, not even a tie! — Haresh started at this sudden intimation. But he had no choice except to wait. He didn’t even have his precious certificates with him. Luckily, and characteristically, he carried a comb in his pocket, and he used it when he went to the bathroom to freshen up. He passed through his mind what he needed to say to Sir David and the order in which it would be most effective to say it. But when he was escorted up the great, ornamented lift and into the vast office of the Managing Director of the Cromarty Group he forgot his script entirely. Here was a durbar of an entirely different kind from the small whitewashed room in which he had been sitting (and standing) an hour earlier.
The cream-painted walls must have been twenty feet high, and the distance from the door to the massive mahogany table at the end at least forty. As Haresh walked across the deep red carpet towards the grand desk he was aware that behind that desk sat a well-built man — as tall as Ghosh and bulkier — who was looking at him through his spectacles. He sensed that, short as he was, he must look even shorter in these gigantic surroundings. Presumably any interviewee, anyone who was received in this office, was expected to quail with trepidation as he traversed the room under such intent inspection. Though Haresh had stood up and sat down for Pyare Lal Bhalla as unresistingly as a child would before his teacher, he refused to display any nervousness before Gower. Sir David had been kind enough to see him at such short notice; he would have to make allowances for his dress.
‘Yes, young man, what can I do for you?’ said Sir David Gower, neither getting up nor beckoning Haresh to a chair.
‘Quite frankly, Sir David,’ said Haresh, ‘I am looking for a job. I believe I am qualified for it, and I hope you will give me one.’
Part Ten
10.1
A few days after the storm, there was something of an exodus from the village of Debaria. For a variety of reasons several people left within a few hours for the subdivisional town of Salimpur, the closest railway station for the branch line.
Rasheed left in order to catch the train to go to his wife’s village; he planned to get his wife and two children back to Debaria, where they would remain until his studies called him back to Brahmpur.
Maan was to accompany Rasheed. He was not at all keen to do so. To visit the village where Rasheed’s wife lived with her father, to travel back without being able to speak a word to her, to see her covered from head to foot in a black burqa, to spend his time imagining what she looked like, to sense Rasheed’s discomfort as he attempted to keep two separate two-way conversations going, to exert himself in any way in this terrible heat, none of these struck Maan as being in the least enjoyable. Rasheed, however, had invited him; he had presumably felt that it would be inhospitable not to do so: Maan was, after all, his personal guest before he was his family’s. Maan had found it difficult to refuse without a reasonable excuse, and there were none at hand. Besides, to remain in the village was driving him crazy. He was seized with frustration against his life in Debaria and all its discomforts and boredoms.
The Bear and his companion the guppi had completed whatever business they had in Debaria, and were headed somewhere else.
Netaji was going because he had ‘some business in the subdivisional courts’, but really because he wanted to hobnob with the local administrative functionaries and small-time politicians in Salimpur.
Finally, there was the eminent archaeologist, Vilayat Sahib, of whom Maan had not yet caught a glimpse. He was to return to Brahmpur on his way back to Delhi. Characteristically, he disappeared from Debaria on his own on a bullock-cart before anyone could make the friendly gesture of offering to share their rickshaw with him.
It’s as if he didn’t exist, thought Maan — as if he’s in purdah. I’ve heard of him but I’ve never seen him — like the women of the family. I suppose they exist as well. Or perhaps they don’t. Perhaps all women are just a rumour. He was beginning to feel immensely restless.
Netaji, very dashing and mustachioed, had insisted that Maan ride into Salimpur on the back of his Harley Davidson. ‘Why would you want to ride for an hour in a ramshackle cycle rickshaw in this heat?’ he had asked. ‘As a Brahmpur-wallah, you’re accustomed to luxury, you couldn’t be used to having your brains baked. Anyway, I want to talk to you.’ Maan had acquiesced, and was now bouncing up and down along the pitted country road on the motorcycle, having his brains vibrated rather than baked.
Rasheed had warned Maan about Netaji and his attempt to extract personal advantage from every possible situation, so Maan was not surprised at the turn their conversation took.
‘How are you enjoying yourself? Can you hear me?’ asked Netaji.
‘Oh, yes,’ Maan replied.
‘I said, how are you enjoying yourself?’
‘Very much. Where did you get this motorcycle?’
‘I meant, are you enjoying yourself in our village?’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not? That means you aren’t.’
‘No, no — I’m enjoying myself very much.’
‘Well, what do you enjoy about it?’
‘Er, there’s a lot of fresh air in the country,’ said Maan.
‘Well, I hate it,’ shouted Netaji.
‘What was that?’
‘I hate it. There’s nothing to do here. There isn’t even any proper politics. That’s why if I don’t leave the village and visit Salimpur at least twice a week, I fall ill.’
‘Ill?’ asked Maan.
‘Yes, ill. Everyone in the village makes me ill. And the village louts are the worst. That Moazzam for instance, he has no respect for other people’s property. . You aren’t holding on tight. You’ll fall off. Hold close to me for balance.’