‘Get up. Show me your hand.’
It was Haresh’s fourth tense encounter of the day. He breathed deeply, then put his right hand forward. Pyare Lal Bhalla pressed it in a few places, especially the side of the hand just below the little finger. Then, giving no indication of whether he was satisfied or not, he said: ‘Sit down.’
Haresh obediently sat down. Pyare Lal Bhalla turned his attention to someone else for the next ten minutes.
Reverting to Haresh he said, ‘Get up.’
Haresh rose.
‘Yes, son? Who are you?’
‘I am Haresh Khanna, the son of Amarnath Khanna.’
‘Which Amarnath Khanna? The Banaras-wallah? Or the Neel Darvaza-wallah?’
‘Neel Darvaza.’
This established a connection of sorts, for Haresh’s foster-father was very indirectly related to the executive engineer, Pyare Lal Bhalla’s son-in-law.
‘Hmm. Speak. What can I do for you?’
Haresh said: ‘I’m working in the shoe line. I returned from Middlehampton last year. From the Midlands College of Technology.’
‘Middlehampton. I see. I see.’ Pyare Lal Bhalla was obviously somewhat intrigued.
‘Go on,’ he said after a while.
‘I’m working at CLFC. But they make mainly ammunition boots, and my experience is mainly civilian. I have started a new department, though, for civilian –’
‘Oh. Ghosh,’ interrupted Pyare Lal Bhalla somewhat slightingly. ‘He was here the other day. He wanted me to sell some of his lines for him. Yes, yes, he said something about this civilian idea.’
Considering that Ghosh ran one of the biggest construction companies in the country, Pyare Lal Bhalla’s dismissive tone might have seemed a. little incongruous. The fact, however, was that in the shoe line he was small fry compared to the plump carp of James Hawley.
‘You know how things run there,’ said Haresh. Having felt too often – but most painfully today – CLFC’s inefficiency and arbitrariness, he did not feel that he was in any sense letting down his firm by speaking thus. He had worked his hardest for them. It was they who had let him down.
‘Yes. I do. So you have come to me for a job.’
‘You honour me, Bhalla Sahib. But actually I have come for a job with James Hawley – which is almost the same thing.’
For a minute or so, while Haresh remained standing, cogs clicked in Pyare Lal Bhalla’s business brain. Then he summoned a clerk from the next room and said: ‘Write him a letter for Gower and sign it for me.’
Pyare Lal Bhalla then put up his right hand towards Haresh in a combined gesture of assurance, blessing, commiseration and dismissal.
My foot’s in the door, thought Haresh, elated.
He took this note and cycled off to the grand four-storey edifice of Cromarty House, the headquarters of the group of which James Hawley was a part. He planned to make an appointment with Sir David Gower, if possible this week or the coming week. It was five-thirty, the end of the working day. He entered the imposing portals. When he presented his note at the front office, he was asked to wait. Half an hour passed. Then he was told: ‘Kindly continue to wait here, Mr Khanna. Sir David will see you in twenty minutes.’
Still sweaty from bicycling, dressed in nothing better than his silk shirt and fawn trousers – no jacket, not even a tie! – Haresh started at this sudden intimation. But he had no choice except to wait. He didn’t even have his precious certificates with him. Luckily, and characteristically, he carried a comb in his pocket, and he used it when he went to the bathroom to freshen up. He passed through his mind what he needed to say to Sir David and the order in which it would be most effective to say it. But when he was escorted up the great, ornamented lift and into the vast office of the Managing Director of the Cromarty Group he forgot his script entirely. Here was a durbar of an entirely different kind from the small whitewashed room in which he had been sitting (and standing) an hour earlier.
The cream-painted walls must have been twenty feet high, and the distance from the door to the massive mahogany table at the end at least forty. As Haresh walked across the deep red carpet towards the grand desk he was aware that behind that desk sat a well-built man – as tall as Ghosh and bulkier – who was looking at him through his spectacles. He sensed that, short as he was, he must look even shorter in these gigantic surroundings. Presumably any interviewee, anyone who was received in this office, was expected to quail with trepidation as he traversed the room under such intent inspection. Though Haresh had stood up and sat down for Pyare Lal Bhalla as unresistingly as a child would before his teacher, he refused to display any nervousness before Gower. Sir David had been kind enough to see him at such short notice; he would have to make allowances for his dress.