A Suitable Boy(478)

‘Oh!’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, not knowing what to think. After a pause she added: ‘Does Arun know?’

An abstracted look appeared on Meenakshi’s face. ‘No, not yet,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’ll have to tell him. Should I send him a telegram? No, such things are best done in person. Anyway, I’m tired of Brahmpur. There’s no Life here.’ She had begun to pine once again for canasta, mah-jongg, the Shady Ladies and the bright lights. About the only lively person in Brahmpur was Maan, and he appeared far too rarely. Mr and Mrs Maitra, her hosts, were too deadly for words. As for the Rudhia riffraff – words failed her. Besides, Lata appeared to be too immersed in this cobbler and his concerns to be vulnerable to hints about Amit.

‘What do you say, Kuku?’

‘Say?’ said Kuku. ‘I’m flabbergasted. When did you know?’

‘I meant, about going back to Calcutta.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Kakoli obligingly. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t enjoying herself here. But she missed Cuddles, and Hans, the telephone, the two cooks, the car, and even the family. ‘I’m ready to leave whenever you want. But why are you looking so thoughtful?’

It was a look that Meenakshi was to wear off and on for quite a while.

When exactly had she managed to get pregnant?

And with whom?





13.26


HARESH was disappointed that he had not been encouraged to stop in Brahmpur on his way to Calcutta or asked to visit Lata’s brothers in Calcutta despite the fact that they were surely going to be his future brothers-in-law, but the tone of understanding in Lata’s letter gave him great consolation among his uncertainties. The letter from the Praha Shoe Company reiterating their offer to him of a job at Rs 28 a week was such a pathetic response to his application that he couldn’t believe that Mr Khandelwal had had anything to do with it. It had probably been passed on to the Personnel Department, they had been forced to respond, and they had done so in their standard, dismissive manner.

Haresh decided that he would go to Calcutta anyway, and he lost no time after his arrival in trying to get Praha to change its corporate mind. He went to Prahapore by train, a journey of less than fifteen miles. It was raining, so his first impression of the grand complex – one of the largest and most efficient in Bengal – took place under gloomy conditions. The endless rows of workers’ houses; the offices and cinema; the green palm trees lining the road and the intensely green playing fields; the great, walled factory – the wall itself painted in neat segments advertising the latest lines of Praha footwear; the officers’ colony (almost exclusively Czech) hidden behind even higher walls; all these were seen by Haresh through the discomfort and greyness of a hot, wet morning. He was wearing an off-white suit and carrying an umbrella. But the weather and Bengal itself – both of which he found dampening – had seeped a little into his spirits. Memories of Mr Ghosh and Mr Sen Gupta came flooding back as he got a rickshaw from the train station to the Personnel Office. Well, at least I’ll have to deal with Czechs here, not Bengalis, thought Haresh.

The Czechs for their part treated all Indians (with one exception) the same, whether they spoke Bengali or not: with contempt. Indians, they had decided from experience, were fond of talking, not working. The Czechs liked nothing better than to work: in order to increase production, quality, sales, profits, and the glory of the Praha Shoe Company. Talking usually put them at a disadvantage; by and large they did not speak or write good English, nor did they have a great deal of culture. It could be said of them that when anyone talked about culture they reached for their awl. People started out young in the Praha Shoe Company, whether in Czechoslovakia or in India; they began on the shop floor; there was no need for the niceties of a university education. The Czechs mistrusted on the one hand what they saw as an Indian glibness with words (union   negotiators were the worst), and resented on the other the fact that the British commercial establishment in Calcutta did not treat them, although they were fellow-Europeans, as anything like their equals. The directors and heads of department and even covenanted assistants of the managing agency of Bentsen & Pryce, for example, would not dream of fraternizing with the Czechs of the Praha Shoe Company.

The Czechs had transformed the face of the Indian footwear industry by rolling up their sleeves and creating a great factory and township on what had been virtually a swamp, by following this up with four smaller factories including the one at Brahmpur, and by running a tight network of shops throughout the country, not by hobnobbing over Scotch at the Calcutta Club. The Czech officers, including their Managing Director, had not been born to white collars. For them the Praha Shoe Company was their life and the Praha creed virtually their religion. Their branches and factories and shops spread around the world; and though they had been taken over by the communists in their own homeland, those ‘Prahamen’ who were abroad at the time or had managed to escape had not been dispossessed of their employment. The Praha Shoe Company was owned and run by Mr Jan Tomin, the eldest and identically named son of its legendary founder, now referred to as ‘Old Mr Tomin’. Mr Tomin had made sure that his flock, whether in Canada or England or Nigeria or India, were well taken care of, and they repaid his loyalty to them with a fierce gratitude that verged on feudal fealty. When he decided to retire, this vassalage had been transferred to his son. Whenever Young Mr Tomin visited India from his world headquarters in London (not, alas, Prague any longer), the entire Praha world would be abuzz with excitement. Telephones rang all over Prahapore and urgent messages went back and forth from the head office in Calcutta to announce his god-like progress: ‘Mr Tomin has arrived at the airport,’ the rumour would go around.