‘Well, I’ll try to get you a sample pair of those,’ he continued, pointing at the paper patterns in Jagat Ram’s hands, ‘by one means or another.’
He had given a pair of CLFC winged brogues as a present to the old college friend whom he was staying with. Now he would have to borrow his own gift back for a few days. But he had no compunction about doing that. When it came to work, he never felt awkward in the least about anything. In fact, Haresh was not given to feeling awkward in general.
As they walked back to the waiting rickshaw, Haresh felt very pleased with the way things were going. Brahmpur had got off to a sleepy start, but was proving to be very interesting, indeed, unpredictable.
He got out a small card from his pocket and noted down in English:
Action Points –
1. Misri Mandi – see trading.
2. Purchase leather.
3. Send leather to Jagat Ram.
4. Dinner at Sunil’s; recover brogues from him.
5. Tmro: Jagat Ram/Ravidaspur.
6. Telegram – late return to Cawnpore.
Having made his list, he scanned it through, and realized that it would be difficult to send the leather to Jagat Ram, because no one would be able to find his place, especially at night. He toyed with the idea of getting the rickshaw-wallah to see where Jagat Ram lived and hiring him to take the leather to him later. Then he had a better idea. He walked back to the workshop and told Jagat Ram to send someone to Kedarnath Tandon’s shop in the Brahmpur Shoe Mart in Misri Mandi at nine o’clock sharp that night. The leather would be waiting for him there. He had only to pick it up and to begin work at first light the next day.
4.6
IT was ten o’clock, and Haresh and the other young men sitting and standing around Sunil Patwardhan’s room near the university were happily intoxicated on a mixture of alcohol and high spirits.
Sunil Patwardhan was a mathematics lecturer at Brahmpur University. He had been a friend of Haresh’s at St Stephen’s College in Delhi; after that, what with Haresh going to England for his footwear course, they had been out of touch for years, and had heard about each other only through mutual friends. Although he was a mathematician, Sunil had had a reputation at St Stephen’s for being one of the lads. He was big and quite plump, but filled as he was with sluggish energy and lazy wit and Urdu ghazals and Shakespearian quotations, many women found him attractive. He also enjoyed drinking, and had tried during his college days to get Haresh to drink – without success, because Haresh used to be a teetotaller then.
Sunil Patwardhan had believed as a student that to get one true mathematical insight a fortnight was enough by way of work; for the rest of the time he paid no attention to his studies, and did excellently. Now that he was teaching students he found it hard to impose an academic discipline on them that he himself had no faith in.
He was delighted to see Haresh again after several years. Haresh, true to form, had not informed him that he would be coming to Brahmpur on work but had landed on his doorstep two or three days earlier, had left his luggage in the drawing room, had talked for half an hour, and had then rushed off somewhere, saying something incomprehensible about the purchase of micro- sheets and leatherboard.
‘Here, these are for you,’ he had added in parting, depositing a cardboard shoe-box on the drawing room table.
Sunil had opened it and been delighted. Haresh had said: ‘I know you never wear anything except brogues.’
‘But how did you remember my size?’ '
Haresh laughed and said, ‘People’s feet are like cars to me. I just remember their size – don’t ask me how I do it. And your feet are like Rolls-Royces.’
Sunil remembered the time when he and a couple of friends had challenged Haresh – who was being his usual irritatingly overconfident self – to identify from a distance each of the fifty or so cars parked outside the college on the occasion of an official function. Haresh had got every one of them right. Considering his almost perfect memory for objects, it was odd that he had emerged from his English B.A. Honours course with a third, and had messed up his Poetry paper with innumerable misquotations.
God knows, thought Sunil, how he’s wandered into the shoe trade, but it probably suits him. It would have been a tragedy for the world and for him if he had become an academic like me. What is amazing is that he should ever have chosen English as a subject in the first place.
‘Good! Now that you’re here, we’ll have a party,’ Sunil had said. ‘It’ll be like old times. I’ll get a couple of old Stephanians who are in Brahmpur to join the more lively of my academic colleagues. But if you want soft drinks you’ll have to bring your own.’