Haresh knew that he had won access to the Chairman’s ear, and he decided to use his access immediately. He went to Calcutta one morning (before Khandelwal had had time to get to his whisky at the club) and placed a single sheet of paper in front of him. Khandelwal looked it over, followed the pricings, the costings, the benefits of the scheme, the loss of customers if production did not increase, the necessity of giving the workmen a higher grade. At the end of two minutes he said to Haresh:
‘You mean to say you can actually double production?’
Haresh nodded. ‘I believe so. Anyway, with your permission, I can try.’
Khandelwal wrote two words across the top of the paper—‘Yes. Try.’—and handed it back to Haresh.
16.9
He said nothing to anyone; in particular he avoided the Czechs — especially Novak. Bypassing him — a step for which he was later to pay — he made a surprise move: he went to the union office and met the top union leaders of Prahapore. ‘There is a problem in my department,’ he said to them, ‘and I want your help in solving it.’ The Secretary-General of the union, Milon Basu, a man who was corrupt but very intelligent, looked at Haresh suspiciously.
‘What do you propose?’ he said.
Haresh told him only that he proposed a meeting the next day with his own workmen in the union offices. But it was not necessary to mention the matter to Novak until something had been worked out.
The next day was Saturday, a holiday. The workmen assembled in the union office.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Haresh, ‘I am convinced that you can make 600 pairs a day. It is certainly within the capacity of your machines. I concede that you might need a couple of extra men at crucial points. Now tell me — which man here says that he cannot make 600 pairs?’
The sole-paster, who was the professional speaker, said belligerently: ‘Oh, Ram Lakhan cannot do it.’ He pointed to the strapping, mustachioed, good-natured Bihari who did the welt-stitching. All the toughest jobs on the conveyor, as well as elsewhere, were performed by Biharis. They stoked the furnaces; they were the policemen on night duty.
Haresh turned to Milon Basu and said: ‘I am not asking for the opinion of a professional speaker. The man who has just spoken pastes the sock to the sole — in every other department his norm is 900 pairs a day. All he has to do is cement them and put them in. Let the man who is affected speak. If Ram Lakhan can’t make 600 pairs a day, it’s for him to speak out now.’
Ram Lakhan laughed and said: ‘Sahib, you’re talking about 600 pairs. I say that even 400 is impossible.’
Haresh said: ‘Anyone else?’
Someone said: ‘The capacity of the outsole stitcher isn’t high enough.’
Haresh said, ‘I have already conceded that. We’ll put an extra man there. Anyone else?’
After a few seconds’ silence, Haresh said to Ram Lakhan, who towered about a foot above him: ‘Well, Ram Lakhan — if I make 400 pairs myself, how many will you make?’
Ram Lakhan shook his head. ‘You will never be able to make 400 pairs, Sahib.’
‘But if I do?’
‘If you do — I’ll make 450.’
‘And if I make 500?’
‘I’ll make 550.’ There was a recklessness in his answer and, indeed, a kind of intoxication to the challenge. Everyone was quiet.
‘And if I make 600?’
‘650.’
Haresh put up his hand and said—‘All right! It’s done! Let’s go into the battlefield!’ There was no rationality to this exchange, merely a sense of drama, but it had been very impressive, and the issue had in effect been clinched.
‘The matter has been decided,’ said Haresh. ‘On Monday morning I will don my overalls and show you what can be done. But let us talk for the moment of a mere 400. I am prepared to stand and tell you here and now that if our production rises to that level, not a single man will be fired. And the week that you regularly make 400 pairs a day I will fight for all of you to be promoted by one grade. And if this does not happen I am prepared to resign.’
There was a buzz of disbelief. Even Milon Basu thought that Haresh was a real fool. But he did not know of the two reassuring words—‘Yes. Try.’—scrawled in the Chairman’s hand on the sheet of paper in Haresh’s pocket.
16.10
The next Monday, Haresh donned his full overalls, not the natty, abridged ones he usually wore with his cream silk shirt, and told the workmen on his line to pile up the lasted shoes for welt-stitching. Six hundred shoes for an eight-hour day came to about ninety shoes an hour and still left an hour to spare. Each conveyor-rack contained five pairs of shoes. That meant eighteen racks an hour. The workmen gathered around, and those from other lines too could not resist betting on the odds of his succeeding.
Ninety pairs came and went before the hour struck. When it was over, Haresh wiped the sweat from his forehead and said to Ram Lakhan: ‘Now I’ve done it — will you keep your side of the bargain?’
Ram Lakhan looked at the pile of welted shoes and said: ‘Sahib, you’ve done it for an hour. But I have to do it every hour, every day, every week, every year. I will be finished, worn out, if I work at that rate.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do to prove you won’t?’ said Haresh.
‘Show me that you can do it for a whole day.’
‘All right. But I’m not going to close the production line for a day. We won’t stop the conveyor. Everyone will work at the same pace. Is that agreed?’
The conveyor was started up, and the work continued. The operators shook their heads at the unconventionality of it all, but they were amused and worked as hard as they could. Just over 450 pairs were made that day. Haresh was completely exhausted. His hands were trembling from having had to hold each lasted shoe against a needle going in and out of it at high speed. But he had seen people in a factory in England doing this with a single hand, turning the shoe casually around on the machine, and he had known it could be done.
‘Well, Ram Lakhan? We have done 450. Now of course you’ll make 500?’
‘I said so,’ said Ram Lakhan, stroking his moustache thoughtfully. ‘I won’t shift from that stand.’
After a couple of weeks Haresh got an extra man to assist Ram Lakhan with his crucial operation — mainly by handing him the shoes so that he wouldn’t have to reach out for them — and the production level reached the final figure of 600.
What in Haresh’s mind was the Battle of Goodyear Welted had been won. The Praha standard of production and profit was floating higher — and Haresh’s own pennant too had ascended a notch. He was very happy with himself.
16.11
But not everyone was. One consequence of this whole business — and in particular the fact that Haresh had circumvented Novak — was that the Czechs, almost to a man, began to view him with intense suspicion. All kinds of rumours about him began to float around the colony. He had been seen allowing a driver to sit down in his house — to sit down on a chair as an equal. He was a communist at heart. He was a union spy, in fact the secret editor of the union paper Amader Biplob. Haresh could sense them cold-shouldering him, but he could do nothing about it. He continued to produce 3,000 pairs a week instead of the earlier 900—and to pour his energy into every task within his direct control, down to the cleaning of his machines. And since he had given his own soul to the organization, he believed that Praha too — maybe in the distant form of Jan Tomin himself — would sooner or later do him justice.
He was in for a rude shock.