by Vikram Seth
Lata was looking slightly disgusted.
‘Here we are. Elm Villa!’ said Haresh, rather as if he were announcing the Viceregal Lodge. They got down and went to the drawing room. Mrs Mason was out shopping, and they were alone except for a liveried bearer.
The drawing room was large and light, the liveried bearer extremely deferential. He bowed low and spoke softly. Haresh offered them nimbu pani, and the bearer brought the glasses on a plate, with doilies on the top: finely netted in white, with little glass beads hanging down from the edges. Two coloured prints of Yorkshire (which was where Mrs Mason traced her ancestry to) hung on the wall. The orange cosmos arranged in the vase added an additional touch of brightness to the flower-patterned sofa; it was one of the few flowers of the season that were not white. Haresh had told the cook the previous evening that he might be having guests for lunch, so there had been no need to make any last-minute arrangements.
Mrs Rupa Mehra was impressed by the establishment at Elm Villa. She deferred drinking the nimbu pani for a few minutes after taking her homoeopathic powder. But when she did, she found it satisfactory.
Though the purpose of their meeting was continuously on all three minds, the conversation was easier than before. Haresh talked about England and his teachers, about his plans for improving his position, above all about his work. The order he had procured was much on his mind, and he assumed that Mrs Rupa Mehra and Lata too must be anxiously awaiting the outcome of that project. He talked about his life abroad—without, however, mentioning any of the English girls whom he had had affairs with. On the other hand he could not refrain from mentioning Simran once or twice, and could not entirely conceal his emotion when he did so. Lata did not mind; she was almost indifferent to the proceedings. From time to time her eye would fall on his co-respondent shoes, and she invented a Kakoli-couplet to amuse herself.
Lunch was presided over by Miss Mason, a desperately ugly and lifeless woman of forty-five. Her mother was still out; and the two other lodgers were lunching out as well. In contrast to the drawing room, the dining room was dingy and flowerless (except for a dark still life, which, though it contained roses, did not please Mrs Rupa Mehra). It was full of heavy furniture—two sideboards, an almirah and a huge, heavy table—and at the far end of the room, opposite the still life, hung an oil painting of an English country scene containing cows. Mrs Rupa Mehra immediately thought of their edibility, and was upset. But the meal itself was innocuous, and served on flower-patterned plates with wavy edges.
First there was tomato soup. Then fried fish for everyone except Mrs Rupa Mehra, who had vegetable cutlets. Then there was chicken curry and rice with fried brinjal and mango chutney. (Mrs Rupa Mehra had a vegetable curry.) And finally there was caramel custard. The imperial deference of the liveried servant and the lifelessness of Miss Mason succeeded in freezing most of the conversation.
After lunch Haresh offered to show Mrs Rupa Mehra and Lata his rooms. Mrs Rupa Mehra agreed eagerly. One could learn much from a room. They went upstairs. There was a bedroom, an anteroom, a verandah and a bathroom. Everything was neat, tidy, smart—to Lata it appeared to be in extreme, almost disturbing, order. Even the volumes of Hardy on the small bookshelf were arranged alphabetically. The shoes standing on a shoe rack in a corner of the room were polished to a glacial shine. Lata looked out from the verandah at the garden of Elm Villa, which included a bed of orange cosmos.
Mrs Rupa Mehra, on the other hand—while Haresh was in the bathroom—looked around the room and drew in her breath sharply. A photograph of a smiling, long-haired young woman stood in a silver frame on Haresh’s writing table. There were no other photographs in the room, none even of Haresh’s family. The girl was fair—Mrs Rupa Mehra could make that out even from the black-and-white picture—and her features were classically beautiful.
She felt that Haresh, before inviting them to Elm Villa, could at least have put the photograph away.
Such a thought, however, would not even have occurred to Haresh. And had Mrs Rupa Mehra by any chance thought fit to talk slightingly about this omission, that would have been the end of matters as far as Haresh went. He would have forgotten about the Mehras’ visit in a week.
When Haresh returned after washing his hands, Mrs Rupa Mehra said to him, frowning slightly:
‘Let me ask you a question, Haresh. Is there someone else in your life still?’
‘Mrs Mehra,’ said Haresh, ‘I told Kalpana and I am sure she has told you that Simran was and still is very dear to me. But I know that that door is closed to me. I cannot tear her away from her family, and for her family the fact that I am not a Sikh is all that matters. I am now looking for someone with whom I can live a happy married life. You need have no fears on that score. I am very glad that Lata and I have had the chance to get to know each other a little.’
Lata had come back in from the verandah during this exchange. She had overheard his forthright remarks and, without thinking, said to him: ‘Haresh, what part will your family play in all this? You have talked very little about them. If—if—you intend to marry someone, will they have any say in the matter?’ Her lips were trembling slightly. The thought of talking about such matters in such direct terms embarrassed her painfully. But something about the manner in which Haresh had said, ‘I know that that door is closed to me,’ had moved her, and so she had spoken.
Haresh, noticing her embarrassment, liked her for it, and smiled; as usual his eyes disappeared. ‘No. I will ask for Baoji’s blessing, naturally, but not for his consent. He knows that I feel strongly about my engagements.’
After a few moments of silence, Lata said:
‘I see you like Hardy.’
‘Yes,’ said Haresh. ‘But not The Well Beloved.’ Then he looked at his watch and said: ‘I have enjoyed this so much that I’ve lost track of the time. I have to do a bit of work at the factory, but I wonder if you’d like to come and see where I work? I don’t want to hide anything from you; the atmosphere there is a little different from Elm Villa. Today I have managed to get the use of the car, so I could either take you there or have you dropped at Mr Kakkar’s place. But perhaps you’ll want to rest a little. It’s a hot day and you must be tired.’
This time it was Lata who said, ‘I would like to see the factory. But could I first—?’
Haresh indicated the bathroom.
Before she emerged she looked at the dressing table. Here too everything was neatly and methodically laid out: the Kent combs, the badger-hair shaving brush, the solidified stick of Pinaud deodorant that lent a cool fragrance to the warm day. Lata rubbed a little on the inside of her left wrist, and came out smiling. It was not that she didn’t like Haresh. But the thought of their getting married was ridiculous.
9.11
She was no longer smiling a little later in the stench of the tannery. Haresh had to take the new employee Lee around CLFC’s own tannery to show him the various kinds of leather (other than sheep, which they bought on the open market) that were available for making shoes. Lee’s designs would depend partly on the leather available; and in his turn he could influence the choice of colours that the tannery would supply in the future. Haresh’s nose, after a year at CLFC, was somewhat used to its distinctive smell, but Mrs Rupa Mehra felt almost faint, and Lata sniffed her left wrist from time to time, amazed that Lee and Haresh could treat the foul stench almost as if it didn’t exist.
Haresh was quick to explain to Lata’s mother that the hides were from ‘fallen animals’, in other words cows that had died a natural death and had not, as in other countries, been slaughtered. He said that they did not accept hides from Muslim slaughterhouses. Mr Lee gave her a reassuring smile, and she looked a little less miserable if not much more enthusiastic.
After a quick visit to the temporary storage godowns where the hides lay piled in salt, they went to the soaking pits. Men with orange rubber gloves were pulling the swollen hides out with grappling-hooks and transferring them to the liming drums where the hair
and fat would be removed. As Haresh explained the various processes—de-hairing, de-liming, pickling, chrome tanning and so on—in a voice of enthusiasm, Lata felt a sudden revulsion for his work, and a sense of disquiet about someone who could enjoy this sort of thing. Haresh meanwhile was continuing confidently: ‘But once you have it at the wet-blue stage, it’s easy enough to see what comes next: fat liquoring, samming, splitting, shaving, dyeing, setting, drying, and then there we are! The leather that we actually think of as leather! All the other processes—glazing, boarding, ironing and so on—are optional, of course.’
Lata looked at the lean, exhausted, bearded man who was squeezing the water out of the wet-blue leather with the help of a roller press, then at Mr Lee, who had gone over to have a word with him.
Mr Lee’s Hindi was unusual, and Lata, the rebellion of her nose and eyes notwithstanding, could not help listening to him with interest. He appeared to be knowledgeable not only about shoe design and manufacture but about tanning as well. Soon Haresh had joined them, and they were talking about the reduced volume of hides that went through the tannery during the monsoon weeks, when air-drying was difficult and tunnel-drying had to be resorted to.
Suddenly remembering something, Haresh said, ‘Mr Lee, I recall some Chinese tanners from Calcutta telling me that in Chinese there is a word, a special word for ten thousand. Is that so?’
‘Oh yes, in proper Peking Chinese it is called “wan”.’
‘And a wan of wans?’
Mr Lee looked at Haresh in surprise, and, scribbling with the index finger of his right hand on the palm of his left he drew an imaginary character and said something like ‘ee’—to rhyme with his own name.
‘Ee?’ said Haresh.
Mr Lee repeated the word.
‘Why do you have such words?’ asked Haresh.
Mr Lee smiled sweetly. ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you?’
By now Mrs Rupa Mehra was feeling so weak that she had to ask Haresh to take her out of the tannery.
‘Do you want to go to the factory then, where I work?’
‘No, Haresh, thank you, that’s very sweet of you, but we should go home now. Mr Kakkar will be waiting for us.’
‘It will just take twenty minutes, and you can meet Mr Mukherji, my boss. Really, we are doing wonderful work there. And I’ll show you the set-up for the new department.’
‘Some other time. Actually, I am feeling the heat a little—’
Haresh turned to Lata. Though she was putting on a brave front, her nose was crinkling upwards.
Haresh, suddenly realizing what the matter was, said: ‘The smell—the smell. Oh—but you should have told me. I’m sorry—you see, I hardly give it a thought.’
‘No, no,’ said Lata, a bit ashamed of herself. Somewhere within her had risen an atavistic revulsion against the whole polluting business of hides and carrion and everything associated with leather.
But Haresh was very apologetic. While taking them back to the car he explained that this was a comparatively odourless tannery! Not far away, there was a whole locality with tanneries on both sides of the road, whose wastes and effluents were left in the open to dry or stagnate. At one time there had been a drain that took the stuff to the river, the holy Ganga itself, but there had been objections, and now there was no outlet at all. And people were very funny, said Haresh—they accepted what they had seen since childhood—shavings of leather and other offal strewn all around—they took it all for granted. (Haresh waved his arms to support his contention.) Sometimes he saw cartloads of hides coming in from villages or marketplaces being pulled by buffaloes who were almost dead themselves. ‘And of course in a week or two, when the monsoons come, it won’t be worth drying these shavings, so they’ll just let them lie and rot. And with the heat and the rain—well, you can imagine what the smell is like. It’s as bad as the tanning pits on the way to Ravidaspur—in your own city of Brahmpur. There even I had to hold my nose.’
The allusion was lost on Lata and Mrs Rupa Mehra, who would no more have dreamed of going to Ravidaspur than to Orion.
Mrs Rupa Mehra was about to ask Haresh when he had been to Brahmpur when the stench once more overpowered her.
‘I’m going to take you back at once,’ said Haresh decisively.
He sent a message that he would be back a little late at the factory and summoned the car. On the way back to Mr Kakkar’s house he said, a little humbly: ‘Well, someone has to make shoes.’
Mrs Rupa Mehra said: ‘But you don’t work in the tannery, do you, Haresh?’
‘Oh, no!’ said Haresh. ‘Normally I only visit it about once a week. I work in the main factory.’
‘Once a week?’ said Lata.
Haresh could sense the apprehension behind her words. He was sitting in the front with the driver. Now he turned around and said, in a slightly troubled voice: ‘I am proud of the shoes I make. I don’t like sitting in an office giving orders and expecting miracles. If this means that I have to stand in a pit and soak a buffalo’s hide myself, I’ll do it. People who work in managing agencies, for instance, are perfectly happy to deal in commodities but don’t like smudging their fingers with anything except ink. If that. And they care less for quality than for profits.’
After a few seconds, in which no one spoke, he added:
‘If you have to do something, you should do it without making a fuss. An uncle of mine in Delhi thinks that I have become polluted, that I have lost caste by working with leather. Caste! I think he is a fool, and he thinks that I’m one. I’ve come close to telling him what I think of him. But I’m sure he knows. People can always tell if you like or dislike them.’
There was another pause. Then Haresh, thrown off a little by his own unexpected profession of faith, said, ‘I would like to invite you to dinner. We have very little time to get to know each other. I hope that Mr Kakkar won’t mind.’
He had simply assumed that for their part the Mehras wouldn’t. Mother and daughter looked at each other in the back seat of the car, neither able to anticipate the other. After five seconds or so, Haresh took their silence for consent.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ll come to fetch you at seven thirty. And I will be smelling as sweet as a violet.’
‘A violet?’ cried Mrs Rupa Mehra in sudden alarm. ‘Why a violet?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Haresh. ‘A rose, if you like, Mrs Mehra. At any rate, better than wet-blue.’
9.12
Dinner was at the railway restaurant, which provided an excellent five-course meal. Lata was dressed in a pale green chanderi sari with little white flowers and a white border. She wore the same pearl ear-tops as before; they were virtually her only item of jewellery, and since she had not known she was going to be on display she had not bothered to borrow anything from Meenakshi. Mr Kakkar had taken a champa out of a vase and put it in her hair. It was a warm night, and she looked lively and fresh in green and white.
Haresh was wearing an off-white Irish linen suit and a cream tie with brown polka dots. Lata disliked these expensive, over-smart clothes and wondered what Arun would have thought of them. Calcutta tastes were quieter. As for a silk shirt, sure enough, it was there too. Haresh even brought his shirts into the conversation: they were made of the finest silk, the only silk he deigned to have made into shirts—not the silk poplin that was so popular these days, but the kind that had the brand-mark of two horses at the base of the bale. All this meant no more to Lata than did wet-blue, samming and splitting. Luckily Haresh’s co-respondent shoes were hidden beneath the table.
The meal was excellent; none of them drank anything alcoholic. The conversation ranged from politics (Haresh thought that Nehru was ruining the country with all his socialist waffle) to English literature (where, with a few misquotations, Haresh asserted that Shakespeare had been written by Shakespeare) to the cinema (Haresh, it seemed, had seen about four films a week while in England).
Lata wondered how he had found the time and energy to do so wel
l in his course and earn a living simultaneously. His accent continued to put her off. She recalled that, by way of overcompensation, he had called daal ‘doll’ at lunch. And Kanpur ‘Cawnpore’. But when she compared his company with that of the polished and covenanted Bishwanath Bhaduri that evening at Firpo’s not so long ago, she realized how very much she preferred it. He was lively (even if he repeated himself) and optimistic (even if overconfident of his own abilities), and he appeared to like her.
She reflected that Haresh was not westernized in the proper sense: she sensed that in his manners and style he was a bit half-baked (at least by Calcutta standards), and that consequently he sometimes put on airs. But though he wished to be liked by her, he did not ingratiate himself by attempting to anticipate her opinions before putting forward his own. If anything, he was too certain about the correctness of his views. Nor did he lay on the odious, insincere charm that she had got used to with Arun’s young Calcutta friends. Amit, of course, was different; but he was Meenakshi’s brother rather than Arun’s friend.
Haresh found Mrs Rupa Mehra affectionate as well as good-looking. He had tried to maintain a respectful distance by calling her Mrs Mehra throughout, but she had eventually insisted on him calling her Ma. ‘Everyone else does so after five minutes, so you must as well,’ she told Haresh. She waxed voluble about her late husband and her coming grandson. She had already forgotten her afternoon’s trauma and had appended her future son-in-law to the family.
Over ice-cream, Lata decided she liked his eyes. They were lovely, she thought, and surprisingly so; they were small and lively, did not spoil his good looks, and when he was amused they disappeared completely! It was fascinating. Then, for no accountable reason, she began to dread the thought that after dinner, while driving her back, he would offer to stop for paan—unconscious of how horribly it would jar with the spirit of the evening, the linen, the silverware, the china, how it would undo the threads of her goodwill with the blind torque of distaste, how it would sandwich the entire day with the image of a red mouth stained with betel juice.