‘I will hope to work directly with you if things work out,’ said Jagat Ram.
Haresh shook his head. ‘I met you through Kedarnath and I’ll deal with you through Kedarnath,’ he replied.
Jagat Ram nodded a little grimly, and saw Haresh to the door. There seemed to be no getting away from these bloodsucking middlemen. First the Muslims, now these Punjabis who had taken their place. Kedarnath, however, had given him his first break, and was not such a bad man — as such things went. Perhaps he was merely blood-sipping.
‘Good,’ said Haresh. ‘Excellent. Well, I have a lot of things to do. I must be off.’
And he walked off with his usual high energy through the dirty paths of Ravidaspur. Today he was wearing ordinary black Oxfords. In an open but filthy space near a little white shrine he saw a group of small boys gambling with a tattered pack of cards — one of them was Jagat Ram’s youngest son — and he clicked his tongue, not so much from moral disapproval as from a feeling of annoyance that this should be the state of things. Illiteracy, poverty, indiscipline, dirt! It wasn’t as if people here didn’t have potential. If he had his way and was given funds and labour, he would have this neighbourhood on its feet in six months. Sanitation, drinking water, electricity, paving, civic sense — it was simply a question of making sensible decisions and having the requisite facilities to implement them. Haresh was as keen on ‘requisite facilities’ as he was on his ‘To Do’ list. He was impatient with himself if anything was lacking in the former or undone in the latter. He also believed in ‘following things through’.
Oh yes; Kedarnath’s son, what’s his name now, Bhaskar! he said to himself. I should have got Dr Durrani’s address from Sunil last night. He frowned at his own lack of foresight.
But after lunch he collected Bhaskar anyway and took a tonga to Sunil’s. Dr Durrani looked as if he had walked to Sunil’s house, reflected Haresh, so he couldn’t live all that far away.
Bhaskar accompanied Haresh in silence, and Haresh, for his own part, was happy not to say anything other than where they were going.
Sunil’s faithful, lazy servant pointed out Dr Durrani’s house, which was a few doors away. Haresh paid off the tonga, and walked over with Bhaskar.
4.10
A tall, good-looking fellow in cricket whites opened the door.
‘We’ve come to see Dr Durrani,’ said Haresh. ‘Do you think he might be free?’
‘I’ll just see what my father is doing,’ said the young man in a low, pleasant, slightly rough-edged voice. ‘Please come in.’
A minute or two later he emerged and said, ‘My father will be out in a minute. He asked me who you were, and I realized I hadn’t asked. I’m sorry, I should introduce myself first. My name’s Kabir.’
Haresh, impressed by the young man’s looks and manner, held out his hand, smiled in a clipped sort of way, and introduced himself. ‘And this is Bhaskar, a friend’s son.’
The young man seemed a bit troubled about something, but did his best to make conversation.
‘Hello, Bhaskar,’ said Kabir. ‘How old are you?’
‘Nine,’ said Bhaskar, not objecting to this least original of questions. He was pondering what all this was about.
After a while Kabir said, ‘I wonder what’s keeping my father,’ and went back in.
When Dr Durrani finally came into the drawing room, he was quite surprised to see his visitors. Noticing Bhaskar, he asked Haresh:
‘Have you come to see one of my, er, sons?’
Bhaskar’s eyes lit up at this unusual adult behaviour. He liked Dr Durrani’s strong, square face, and in particular the balance and symmetry of his magnificent white moustache. Haresh, who had stood up, said:
‘No indeed, Dr Durrani, it’s you we’ve come to see. I don’t know if you remember me — we met at Sunil’s party. . ’
‘Sunil?’ said Dr Durrani, his eyes scrunched up in utter perplexity, his eyebrows working up and down. ‘Sunil. . Sunil. .’ He seemed to be weighing something up with great seriousness, and coming closer and closer to a conclusion. ‘Patwardhan,’ he said, with the air of having arrived at a considerable insight. He appraised this new premise from several angles in silence.
Haresh decided to speed up the process. He said, rather briskly:
‘Dr Durrani, you said that we could drop in to see you. This is my young friend Bhaskar, whom I told you about. I think his interest in mathematics is remarkable, and I felt he should meet you.’
Dr Durrani looked quite pleased, and asked Bhaskar what two plus two was.
Haresh was taken aback, but Bhaskar — though he normally rejected considerably more complex sums as unworthy of his attention — was not, apparently, insulted. In a very tentative voice he replied:
‘Four?’
Dr Durrani was silent. He appeared to be mulling over this answer. Haresh began to feel ill at ease.
‘Well, yes, you can, er, leave him here for a while,’ said Dr Durrani.
‘Shall I come back to pick him up at four o’clock?’ asked Haresh.
‘More or less,’ said Dr Durrani.
When he and Bhaskar were left alone, both of them were silent. After a while, Bhaskar said:
‘Was that the right answer?’
‘More or less,’ said Dr Durrani. ‘You see,’ he said, picking up a musammi from a bowl on the dining table, ‘it’s rather, er, it’s rather like the question of the, er, sum of the angles in a — in a triangle. What have they, er, taught you that is?’
‘180 degrees,’ said Bhaskar.
‘Well, more or less,’ said Dr Durrani. ‘On the, er, surface of it, at least. But on the surface of this, er, musammi, for instance—’
For a while he gazed at the green citrus, following a mysterious train of thought. Once it had served his purpose, he looked at it wonderingly, as if he could not figure out what it was doing in his hand. He peeled it with some difficulty because of its thick skin and began to eat it.
‘Would you, er, like some?’ he asked Bhaskar matter-of-factly.
‘Yes, please,’ said Bhaskar, and held out both hands for a segment, as if he were receiving a sanctified offering from a temple.
An hour later, when Haresh returned, he got the sense that he was an unwelcome interruption. They were now both sitting at the dining table, on which were lying — among other things — several musammis, several peels of musammis, a large number of toothpicks in various configurations, an inverted ashtray, some strips of newspaper stuck together in odd-looking twisted loops, and a purple kite. The remaining surface of the dining room table was covered with equations in yellow chalk.
Before Bhaskar left with Haresh, he took with him the loops of newspaper, the purple kite, and exactly sixteen toothpicks. Neither Dr Durrani nor Bhaskar thanked each other for the time they had spent together. In the tonga back to Misri Mandi, Haresh could not resist asking Bhaskar:
‘Did you understand all those equations?’
‘No,’ said Bhaskar. It was clear from the tone of his answer, however, that he did not think this mattered.
Though Bhaskar did not say anything when he got home, his mother could tell from one glance at his face that he had had a wonderfully stimulating time. She took his various objects off him and told him to wash his gummy hands. Then, almost with tears in her eyes, she thanked Haresh.
‘It’s so kind of you to have taken this trouble, Haresh Bhai. I can tell what this has meant to him,’ Veena said.