Basil Cox smiled. ‘It’s an idea. Let me think about it. We’ll talk about it in the car this afternoon on the way to Puttigurh.’
‘There’s one other matter, Basil.’
‘Could it wait till the afternoon too?’
‘Actually, one of our friends from Rajasthan is coming to see me in an hour and it has to do with him. I should have brought it up earlier, but I thought it could wait. I didn’t know he was so eager to have a quick response.’
This was a stock euphemism for a Marwari businessman. The grasping, enterprising, canny, energetic and above all ungentlemanly traits of that community were intensely distasteful to the leisured and gentlemanly sahibs of the managing agencies. The managing agency might borrow a great deal of money from a certain kind of Marwari businessman, but the chairman would not dream of inviting him to his club, even if it were one to which Indians were admitted.
But in this case it was the Marwari businessman who wanted Bentsen Pryce to finance him. His suggestion, in brief, was this: his house wanted to expand into a new line of operations, but he wanted Bentsen Pryce to invest in this expansion. In return, he would give them whatever insurance business arose from the new operations.
Arun, swallowing his own instinctive distaste for the community, and reminding himself that business was business, put the matter to Basil Cox as objectively as he could. He forbore from mentioning that this was no more than what one British firm did for another in the regular way of business. He knew that his boss was not unaware of that fact.
Basil Cox did not ask him for his advice. He looked at a point beyond Arun’s right shoulder for a disconcertingly long time, then said: ‘I don’t like it – it smells a bit Marwari to me.’
By his tone he implied that it was a species of sharp practice. Arun was about to speak when he added: ‘No. It’s definitely not for us. And Finance, I know, would not like it at all. Let’s leave it at that. So I’ll see you at two-thirty?’
‘Right,’ said Arun.
When he got back to his room, he wondered how he would put things to his visitor, and what reasons he could adduce to defend the decision. But he did not need to. Mr Jhunjhunwala took the decision surprisingly well. When Arun told him that his company couldn’t go ahead with the proposal, Mr Jhunjhunwala did not ask him to explain himself. He merely nodded, then said in Hindi – implying an awful complicity, it seemed to Arun, a complicity of one Indian with another – ‘You know, that’s the trouble with Bentsen Pryce: they won’t take something on unless there’s a bit of a smell of the English in it.’
7.22
AFTER Mr Jhunjhunwala had gone, Arun phoned Meenakshi to say that he would be back from work fairly late that evening, but that they should still plan to go for cocktails at the Finlays’ at about seven-thirty. He then answered a couple of other letters, and finally settled back to his crossword.
But before he could solve more than two or three more clues, the phone rang. It was James Pettigrew.
‘Well, Arun, how many?’
‘Not many, I’m afraid. I’ve just begun to look at it.’
This was an outright lie. Apart from straining every brain-cell he could while sitting on the toilet, Arun had frowned at the crossword over breakfast and even scribbled the letters of possible anagrams underneath the clues while being driven to work. Since his handwriting was illegible, even to himself, this usually didn’t help him much.
‘I won’t ask you if you got “that confounded pane in the neck”.’
‘Thanks,’ said Arun. ‘I’m glad you give me credit for an IQ of at least eighty.’
‘And “Johnson’s rose”?’
‘Yes.’
‘How about “Knife a gentleman buys in Paris”?’
‘No – but since you’re obviously eager to tell me, why don’t you put both of us out of our agony?’
‘Machete.’
‘Machete?’
‘Machete.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t quite see how –’
‘Ah, Arun, you’ll have to learn French some day,’ said James Pettigrew infuriatingly.
‘Well, what didn’t you get?’ asked Arun with ill-masked irritation.
‘Very little, as it happens,’ said the obnoxious James.
‘So you’ve solved it all, have you?’ said Arun.
‘Well, not exactly, not exactly. There are a couple that are still troubling me a little.’
‘Oh, just a couple?’
‘Well, perhaps a couple of couples.’
‘For example?’
‘ “Musician who sounds rapacious”, five letters, third letter T, fifth letter R.’