He stood up, went inside, and fetched the pieces he had cut according to the patterns Haresh had given him from the handsome maroon leather that he had fetched the previous night.
While Haresh was examining them, he said: ‘I haven’t punched them with the brogue design yet – but I thought I’d do the cutting myself, not leave it to my cutter. I’ve been up since dawn.’
‘Good, good,’ said Haresh, nodding his head and in a kinder tone. ‘Let’s see the piece of leather I left for you.’
Jagat Ram rather reluctantly took it out from one of the brick shelves embedded in the wall of the small room. Quite a lot of it was still unused. Haresh examined it carefully, and handed it back. Jagat Ram looked relieved. He moved his hand to his greying moustache and rubbed it meditatively, saying nothing.
‘Excellent,’ said Haresh with generous enthusiasm. Jagat Ram’s cutting had been both surprisingly swift and extremely economical of the leather. In fact, he appeared to have an intuitive spatial mastery that was very rare even among trained shoemakers of many years’ standing. It had been hinted at yesterday in his comments when he had constructed the shoe in his mind’s eye after just a brief glance at the components of the pattern.
‘Where’s your daughter disappeared to?’
Jagat Ram permitted himself a slight smile. ‘She was late for school,’ he said.
‘Did the people from the Lovely Shoe Shop turn up yesterday?’ asked Haresh.
‘Well, yes and no,’ said Jagat Ram and did not elaborate further.
Since Haresh had no direct interest in the Lovely people, he did not press the question. He thought that perhaps Jagat Ram did not want to talk about one of Kedarnath’s competitors in front of Kedarnath’s friend.
‘Well,’ said Haresh. ‘Here is all the other stuff you need.’ He opened his briefcase and took out the thread and the components, the lasts and the shoes. As Jagat Ram turned the lasts around appreciatively in his hands, Haresh continued: ‘I will see you three days from today at two o’clock in the afternoon, and I will expect the brogues to be ready by then. I have bought my ticket for the six-thirty train back to Kanpur that evening. If the shoes are well made, I expect I will be able to get you an order. If they are not, I’m not going to delay my journey back.’
‘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.