Haresh said: ‘I am grateful. I accept these terms, but there is one thing I will not compromise on. I must live inside the colony and be able to use the Officers’ Club.’
He realized that, however momentous in terms of the Praha culture was his direct entry at the supervisory level, he would be fatally disadvantaged in social terms if he was not seen – by Lata and her mother and her much-vaunted Calcutta brother, for example – to be on easy terms with the managers of his company.
‘No, no, no –’ said Pavel Havel. He looked thoroughly worried.
‘Impossible,’ said Novak, his eyes boring into Haresh, willing him to give in.
Kurilla did not say anything. He looked at the pair of shoes. He knew that no supervisor – and only one Indian – had been allocated a place among the forty or so houses in the walled compound. But he was glad to see the excellence of the training of his old college vindicated by Haresh. Among his Praha colleagues, most of whom had learned their skills on the job, Kurilla’s technical training was often treated as something of a joke.
Haresh too had found out from Havel’s Indian assistant that only one Indian had so far gained admittance into the hallowed colony – a manager from the Accounts Department.
He sensed Kurilla’s sympathy and Havel’s hesitancy. Even the icy Novak had a little earlier – and most uncharacteristically for him – praised his work in three brief syllables. So there appeared to be hope.
‘I want above everything else to work for Praha,’ said Haresh with feeling. ‘You can see how much I care for quality. That is what has drawn me to your company. I have been an officer at the Cawnpore Leather and Footwear Company, and I was offered a manager’s, an officer’s grade at James Hawley, so my living in the compound would not be so extraordinary. I cannot take the job otherwise. I am sorry. I want to work here so much that I am willing to compromise on salary and on status. Keep me as a foreman, a supervisor, if you wish, and pay me less than I was getting before. But please compromise on this small matter of accommodation.’
There was a confabulation in Czech. The Managing Director was out of the country and could not be consulted. More importantly, the Chairman, who sometimes treated the Czechs as brusquely as they treated Indians, would not be sympathetic to what he would see as their exclusivism. If Haresh refused the job after all this, there would be hell to pay.
Like a litigant listening to legal incomprehensibilities in court, incomprehensibilities that would decide his fortune, Haresh listened to the three men, sensing from their tones and gestures and the occasional word – ‘colony’, ‘club’, ‘Khandelwal’, ‘Middlehampton’, ‘Jan Tomin’ and so on – that Kurilla had persuaded Havel and that both were now bearing down on Novak. Novak’s replies were brief, trenchant, entrenched, consisting only rarely of more than five or six syllables. Then, quite suddenly, Novak made an expressive gesture – he half shrugged, he half threw up his hands. He did not utter a word or even a nod of assent, but there was no further dissent from him either.
Pavel Havel turned to Haresh with a broad smile.
‘Welcome – welcome to Praha!’ he said, as if he were offering Haresh the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
Haresh beamed with pleasure, as if indeed he were. And everyone civilly shook hands.
13.29
ARUN MEHRA and his friend Billy Irani were sitting on the verandah of the Calcutta Club overlooking the lawn. It was lunchtime. The waiter had not yet come around to take his order for a drink. Arun, however, did not wish to press the little brass bell at his white cane table. As a waiter walked past a few yards away, Arun got his attention by patting the back of his left hand with the palm of his right.
‘Abdar!’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘What’ll you have, Billy?’
‘A gimlet.’
‘One gimlet and one Tom Collins.’
‘Yes, Sir.’ The drinks came around in due course. Both of them ordered grilled fish for lunch.
They were still on their drinks when Arun, looking around, said: ‘That’s Khandelwal sitting there by himself – the Praha chap.’
Billy’s comment was relaxed: ‘These Marwaris – there was a time when membership in this club meant something.’
They had both on several occasions noted with distaste Khandelwal’s drinking habits. Being limited at home by the powerful Mrs Khandelwal to one drink in the evening, Khandelwal made it his business to get in as many as possible during the day.
But Arun today found nothing much to object to in Khandelwal’s presence, particularly in the fact that he was sitting alone and drinking his fourth Scotch. Mrs Rupa Mehra had written to Arun, ordering him to acquaint himself with Haresh Khanna and to write to her telling her what he thought of him. Haresh apparently had got some job or other in Praha and lived and worked in Prahapore.