‘The hall is used for everything,’ said Haresh. ‘For dining, for dancing, as a cinema-hall, and even for important meetings. When Mr Tomin’ – and here Haresh’s voice took on a somewhat reverential note – ‘when Mr Tomin came here last year, he gave a speech from the podium there. But these days it is used for the dance band.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Arun.
‘How wonderful,’ breathed Mrs Rupa Mehra.
16.14
MRS RUPA MEHRA was very impressed by all the arrangements. A thick white tablecloth and napkins, several sets of knives and forks, good glasses and crockery, and three flower arrangements consisting of an assortment of sweetpeas.
As soon as Haresh and his party entered, two waiters approached the table, and placed some bread on it, together with three dishes containing curlicues of Anchor butter. The bread had been baked under Khushwant’s supervision; he had learned the technique from the Czechs. Varun, who had been walking a little unsteadily, was feeling quite peckish. After a few minutes, when the soup had not yet arrived, he took a slice. It was delicious. He took another.
‘Varun, don’t eat so much bread,’ chided his mother. ‘Can’t you see how many courses there are?’
‘Mm, Ma,’ said Varun, his mouth full, and his mind on other things. When more beer was offered to him, he accepted with alacrity.
‘How lovely the flower arrangements are,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. Sweetpeas could never take the place of roses in her heart, but they were a lovely flower. She sniffed the air and took in the delicate colours: pale pink, white, mauve, violet, crimson, maroon, dark pink.
Lata was thinking that the sweetpeas made rather an odd arrangement. . Arun displayed his expertise on the subject of bread. He talked about caraway bread and rye bread and pumpernickel. ‘But if you ask me,’ he said (though no one had), ‘there’s nothing like the Indian naan for sheer delicacy.
Haresh wondered what other kind of naan there was.
After the soup (cream of asparagus) came the first course, which was fried fish. Khushwant made quite a few Czech specialities, but only the simplest and most staple of English dishes. Mrs Rupa Mehra found that she was facing a cheese-covered vegetable bake for the second time in two days.
‘Delicious,’ she said, smiling at Haresh.
‘I didn’t know what to ask Khushwant to make for you, Ma; but he thought that this would be a good idea. And he has a treat for the second course, so he says.’
Tears threatened to come to Mrs Rupa Mehra’s eyes at the thought of Haresh’s kindness and consideration. Over the last few days she felt she had been starved of it. Sunny Park was like a zoo and Arun’s explosions had been more frequent as a result. They were all staying together in the same small house, some of them sleeping on mattresses laid out at night in the drawing room. Though the Chatterjis had offered to put the Kapoors up in Ballygunge, Savita had felt that Uma and Aparna should be given the chance to get acquainted with each other. Also, she had quite unwisely wished to recreate the atmosphere of the old days in Darjeeling – or the railway saloons – when the four brothers and sisters had shared the same roof and pleasantly cramped quarters with their father and mother.
Politics was discussed. Results had started coming in from those states that had had early elections. According to Pran, the Congress would make a clean sweep of the elections. Arun did not contest the issue as he had the previous evening. By the end of the fish course politics was exhausted.
The second course was occupied mainly by Haresh impressing the assembled company with various facts of Praha history and production. He mentioned that Pavel Havel had praised him for ‘working very hardly’. Although no communist, there was something in Haresh that resembled a cheerfully Stakhanovite Hero of Labour. He told them with pride that he was only the second Indian in the colony, and mentioned the weekly figure of 3,000 pairs to which he had increased production. ‘I tripled it,’ he added, very happy to share his sense of his own achievement. ‘The welt-stitching operation was the real bottle-neck.’
A line from Haresh’s tour of the tannery had stuck in Lata’s mind. ‘All the other processes – glazing, boarding, ironing and so on – are optional, of course.’ She remembered it again now, and saw in front of her the soaking pits, where thin men with orange rubber gloves were pulling swollen hides out of a dark liquid with grappling hooks. She looked down at the delicious skin of her roast chicken. I can’t possibly marry him, she thought.
Mrs Rupa Mehra, on the other hand, had moved several miles forward in the opposite direction, aided by a delicious mushroom vol-au-vent. She had decided not only that Haresh would make an ideal husband for Lata but that Prahapore, with its playground and sweetpeas and protective walls was the ideal place to bring up her grandsons.