Considering that he was a vegetarian (mushrooms were the closest he approached anything even faintly resembling meat), it was interesting that Pyare Lal Bhalla had quickly agreed to act as agent for the whole of the undivided Punjab for James Hawley & Company. Leather was polluting, and, certainly, many of the animals whose skins continued their post-mortem existence as an additional layer on human feet were not ‘fallen’; they had been slaughtered. Bhalla said that he had nothing to do with the killing. He was a mere agent. The line of demarcation was clear. The English did what they did, he did what he did.
Still, he had been stricken with leucoderma, and many people thought that this was the disfiguring mark of the indignant gods, since he had tainted his soul, however indirectly, with the taking of animal life. Others, however, flocked around him, for he was enormously successful and enormously rich. From being sole agent in the Punjab he had become sole agent for the whole of India. He moved to Kanpur, the headquarters of the group of which James Hawley was a part. He dropped many of his other lines of business in order to concentrate on this particular lucrative account. In time he not only sold their shoes, but also told them what would sell best. He suggested that they reduce their output of Gorillas and increase their output of Champions. He virtually determined their product mix. James Hawley flourished because of his acumen, and he because they had grown dependent on him.
During the war, of course, the company had shifted its entire production to military boots. These did not go directly through Bhalla’s hands, but James Hawley – out of a combination of fair-play and far-sighted interest – continued to pay Bhalla commission. Though this was a smaller percentage, it left him no worse off than before owing to the larger volumes of sales. After the War, again steered by the sales and marketing wizardry of Pyare Lal Bhalla, James Hawley had swung back into civilian lines of production. This too appealed to Haresh, since it was for this sort of production that he had been trained at the Midlands College of Technology.
Not more than an hour after he received the bitter news that the HSH order was to be taken away from him, Haresh bicycled up to the offices of Pyare Lal Bhalla. ‘Offices’ was perhaps too elevated a word for the warren of small rooms that constituted his residence, his place of business, his showroom and his guesthouse, all of which occupied the first floor of a congested corner on Meston Road.
Haresh walked up the stairs. He waved a piece of paper at the guard, and muttered, ‘James Hawley’ and a few words in English. He entered an ante-room, another room with almirahs whose purpose he could not figure out, a store-room, a room with several clerks seated on the ground at their floor-desks and red ledgers, and finally the audience chamber – for that was its function – of Pyare Lal Bhalla himself. It was a small room, whitewashed rather than painted. The old man, energetic at the age of sixty-five, his face whitened with disease, sat on a great wooden platform covered with a spotless white sheet. He was leaning against a hard, cylindrical cotton bolster. Above him hung a garlanded photograph of his father. There were two benches along the walls contiguous to his platform. Here sat various people: hangers-on, favour-seekers, associates, employees. There were no clerks, no ledgers in this room; Pyare Lal Bhalla was himself the repository of whatever information, experience, and judgment he required for making decisions.
Haresh entered and, lowering his head, immediately put his hands forward as if to touch Pyare Lal Bhalla’s knees. The old man raised his own hands over Haresh’s head.
‘Sit down, son,’ said Pyare Lal Bhalla in Punjabi.
Haresh sat down on one of the benches.
‘Stand up.’
Haresh stood up.
‘Sit down.’
Haresh sat down once more.
Pyare Lal Bhalla looked at him with such intentness that he was almost mesmerized into submission to his orders. Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized, and Haresh’s need, as he himself saw it, was great.
Besides, Pyare Lal Bhalla expected deference as an elderly man and as a man of substance. Had not his daughter been married to the son – the eldest son – of a first-class gazetted officer – the executive engineer for the Punjab canals – in the finest wedding Lahore had known for years? It was not a question of the Services deigning to acknowledge the existence of Trade. It was an Alliance between them. It announced his arrival in a manner that the endowment of twenty temples would not have. In his usual off-hand manner he had said to the groom’s father: ‘I am, as you know, a poor man, but I’ve left word at Verma’s and Rankin’s, and they’ll take measurements for whoever you think appropriate.’ Sharkskin achkans, suits of the finest cashmere wool: the groom’s father had thought nothing of having fifty sets of clothes made for his family – and the fulfilment of this carte blanche was a drop in the ocean of the wedding expenses that Pyare Lal Bhalla proudly and cannily bore.