‘After the British–Indian Electrical debacle I tried to get Romesh to understand that the boy’s talents were being wasted. But let me confess. It wasn’t a problem I spent any sleepless nights over. You want me to be frank. And frankly I did not much care for the kind of Indian Duleep Kumar had turned his son into. Please remember that in those days I was only in my forties, also that my main interest was in politics. And I did not respond to Hari Kumar as a political animal. His father had taught him no doubt that Indian politics were all a nonsense, all window-dressing. Hari did not take them seriously. He had no real knowledge of them, no conception for instance of the step forward that provincial power had meant to the Congress. He scarcely realised that the province he lived in had once been ruled directly by a British Governor and a nominated council. He took democracy for granted. He had no experience of autocracy. Politically he was an innocent. Most Englishmen were. In those days I had no time for such people. Today, of course, I am a political innocent myself. It is the fate that awaits us all, all of us anyway who ever had strong views about political affairs when we were younger. Particularly it awaits those of us who paid for our views with imprisonment. Prison left its disagreeable mark. It made us attach too much importance to the things that led us to it.’
*
When Hari left his uncle’s employment he also told Pandit Baba Sahib he no longer wanted Hindi lessons. He did this to save his aunt from spending money uselessly. He had picked up enough Hindi to give orders, picked up in fact what the average Englishman in India thought worth while bothering with. His series of interviews with the British–Indian Electrical Company took place in the early part of the rainy season of 1939. His rejection was a blow, even though he had expected it after his final interview. For the first time he wrote a letter to Colin that gave young Lindsey – or should have given him – a clearer idea of what Hari Kumar was up against.
‘There was a strong likelihood of being sent back home to learn the technical ropes,’ he told his friend in Didbury. ‘First in Birmingham and then in the London office of the parent company. Things went swimmingly at the first interview with a pleasant chap called Knight who was at Wardens from 1925 to 1930. He played in the Chillingborough-Wardens match of 1929, when apparently they beat us by twenty-two runs. We didn’t talk about the job at all, really, although it was Knight who mentioned London and Birmingham and got my hopes up. It sounded like the answer to a prayer, one that had been here on my doorstep all these months. I told him the whole thing, about father, etc. He seemed pretty sympathetic. The next interview was with the managing director, and that was stickier – probably because, as Knight had let slip, he was grammar-school with a university veneer. But even so, I still thought it was going well, even when he poured a bit of cold water on the idea of sending me home for training. He said there was a sort of understanding with the Technical College here to look primarily among their graduates for young Indians who had executive prospects, but that they were also working on a scheme with the college for extra-mural courses for their own“promising men”, something to do with part-time training in the firm and part-time education at the college. If I got some kind of diploma from the college then it might be possible to send me home for more intensive instruction. He made rather heavy weather of my not having matriculated and said, “Of course, Coomer, at your age most young Indians have a BA or a BSc” I felt like saying, “Well, of a sort,” but didn’t, because I guessed anyway that he appreciated the difference between a BSc Mayapore and a man who’d been at Chillingborough on the classical side. Anyway, the second interview ended on an optimistic note. I saw Knight again for a few minutes afterwards and he said that in the month since he and I had had a chat he’d written to someone at the London office who’d been in touch with old Toad-in-the-hole, and that I’d been given a good reference.
‘I had to wait another two weeks for interview number three which both Knight and the managing director had warned me about, but given me the impression was not much more than a formality, an interview with a fellow they called the Technical Training Manager, a fellow called Stubbs, who is best described as a loud-mouthed—. He began right away by shoving a little cylinder at me, across his enormous desk, and asking me to tell him what it was and what it was used for. When I said I didn’t know but that it looked like a sort of valve he smirked and said, “Where are you from, laddie? Straight down from the tree?” Then he picked up a printed sheet and read out a list of questions. Long before he got to the end I said, “I’ve already told Mr Knight I know nothing about electricity.” He took no notice. Probably I shouldn’t have mentioned Mr Knight. He went on until he’d asked me the last question and I’d said, “I don’t know,” for the last time. Then he glared and said, “You some sort of comedian or something? Are you deliberately wasting my time?” I told him that was for him to decide. He leaned back in his swivel chair, and we stared at each other for what seemed ages. Then he said, “There’s only you and me in this room, Coomer or whatever your name is. Let me tell you this. I don’t like bolshie black laddies on my side of the business.” I got up and walked out. Which is what he wanted me to do and what I couldn’t avoid doing unless I wanted to crawl.
‘So now you know what I am, Colin, a bolshie black laddie. (Remember that bastard Parrott, in our first year at Chilling-borough?) I’m a bolshie black laddie because I know how to construe Tacitus but haven’t any idea what that fellow Stubbs was talking about. And that wasn’t the end of it. I had a letter from Knight about three days later asking me to go and see him. He told me that for the moment there weren’t any vacancies. He was quite a different fellow. Puzzled and embarrassed, doing the right thing by an old Chillingburian, but underneath it all bloody unfriendly. Stubbs must have spun them all a yarn. And because Stubbs was a white man they felt they had to believe him. After all, for the job I was applying for, there were probably a score of BAs and BScs, failed or otherwise, who would be willing to jump when Stubbs said jump.
‘The one thing that puzzled me was why it was Stubbs who was allowed to call the tune? Why him? Surely Knight knew what kind of a man he was? But he never so much as hinted he’d like to hear my side of what happened. He never referred to my interview with Stubbs at all. In fact when I came away I wondered why he’d bothered to call me in. He could have given me the brush-off by letter. Later I realised he probably wanted to have another look at me – sort of through Stubbs’s eyes, bearing in mind whatever it was Stubbs had told them. And then I guessed that at this second interview with Knight I couldn’t have made much of an impression, although it was hardly my fault because as soon as I sat down in front of him I could tell it was no go, and I was damned disappointed. Trying not to show it probably made me look as if I didn’t care a damn. But I cared like hell, Colin. After a while the conversation just dried up because he had nothing more to tell me and I had nothing I could say except something like Please, sir, give me a chance. Perhaps he was waiting for me to say “sir”. I don’t think I ever said “sir” at the first interview, but if I didn’t he hadn’t noticed. But since he’d talked to Stubbs he was probably on the look-out for that sort of thing. Anyway, he suddenly stopped looking at me, so I got to my feet and said thank you. He said he’d keep a note about me in case something turned up, and stood up too, but stayed behind his desk, and didn’t offer to shake hands. I think he had it in mind to give me some kind of tip about remembering that this wasn’t Chillingborough and that I should start learning how to behave in front of white men. Anyway that was the feeling in the room. There was that desk between us. For me to be in his office at all had suddenly become a privilege. A privilege I ought to know how to respect. I don’t remember coming away – only finding myself outside the main gate of the factory, and getting on my bike and riding back along the Grand Trunk road, over the Bibighar bridge, back to my side of the river.’
*
For a while after what Srinivasan called the British–Indian Electrical debacle, Hari did nothing. He
regretted writing that letter to Lindsey, regretted it more and more as week after week went by and he got no reply. Other things fell into place in his mind: Mr Lindsey’s attitude to him towards the end of his last few weeks in England, which he had always attributed to the man’s embarrassment at having been unable to do anything constructive for him financially; the experience on the boat, in which, once past Suez, the English people who had spoken to him freely enough from Southampton onwards began to congregate in exclusive little groups so that for the last few days of the voyage the only Englishmen he managed to talk to were those making the passage for the first time. He had shared a cabin with two other boys, Indian students returning home. He had not got on very well with them because he discovered that he had nothing in common with them. They asked his opinion on subjects he had never given a thought to. They were students of political economy and intended to become university teachers. He had thought them incredibly dull and rather old-maidish. It seemed that he shocked them by sleeping in the nude and dressing and undressing in the cabin instead of in the lavatory cubicle.
And so Hari came, one painful step at a time, to the realisation that his father’s plans for him had been based upon an illusion. In India an Indian and an Englishman could never meet on equal terms. It was not how a man thought, spoke and behaved that counted. Perhaps this had been true in England as well and the Lindseys had been exceptions to the general rule. He did not blame his father. His anger was directed against the English for fostering the illusion his father had laboured under. If he had felt more liking for his fellow-countrymen he might at this stage have sided with them, sought an occasion for paying the English out. But he did not care for any Indian he had met and what he knew or read of their methods of resisting English domination struck him as childish and inept. In any case theydid not trust him. Neither, it seemed, did the English. He recognised that to the outside world he had become nothing. But he did not feel in himself that he was nothing. Even if he were quite alone in the world he could not be nothing. And he was not quite alone. There was still Colin, at home, and Aunt Shalini in Mayapore. The affection he had for her, grudging at first, when he first recognised it as affection, had become genuine enough. In her self-effacement he saw evidence of a concern for his welfare which was just as acute – perhaps more acute than Mrs Lindsey’s which had been so effusively, openly and warmly expressed. He could not help knowing that in her odd, retiring way his Aunt Shalini was fond of him. The trouble was that her fondness could not reach him or encourage him outside the ingrown little world which was the only one she knew, one that stifled him and often horrified him. It was difficult for him to enter it even briefly to show her that he returned fondness for fondness. To enter it he had to protect himself from it by nursing his contempt and showing his dislike. He could not help it if often she believed the contempt and dislike were meant for her. When she gave him money he could not thank her properly. It was Gupta Sen money. Perhaps she understood his dislike of such money and the way his dislike grew in proportion to his increasing need; or perhaps he had hurt her by the curt words with which he acknowledged it. She took to putting the money in an envelope and leaving it on his bedroom table. It touched him that in writing his name on the envelope she always spelled it Harry.
It touched him too that she seemed to consider him as head of the household, head in the Hindu family sense because he was a man; potentially a breadwinner, husband and father; procreator. He could not imagine himself becoming a married man. Indian girls did not attract him. The English girls he saw in the cantonment seemed to move inside the folds of some invisible purdah that made their bodies look unreal, asexual. His lusts centred upon an anthropomorphous being whose sex was obvious from the formation of the thighs and swollen breasts but whose colour was ambivalent; dumb, sightless and unmoving beneath his own body which at night, under waking or sleeping stress, sometimes penetrated the emptiness and drained itself of the dead weight of its fierce but undirected impulse.
*
Four weeks after the final meeting with Knight, Hari applied for another job. He had spent the intervening time trying to work out the logic of a situation which he now accepted as real and not illusory. That precious gift from his father, his Englishness, was clearly, in many respects, a liability, but he still regarded it fundamentally as an asset. It was the only thing that gave him distinction. He was strong, healthy, and not bad-looking, but so were countless other young men. Where he scored over them was in his command of the English language. Logic pointed to a deliberate exploitation of this advantage. It occurred to him that he might well earn money by setting up as a private tutor and coaching boys who wanted to improve their speech; but such a life did not appeal to him. He doubted that it would be active enough or that he would have the patience it needed, let alone the skill. The other possibility, perhaps the only other one, was much more interesting.
Having read the Mayapore Gazette now for over a year he saw where his qualifications might gain him a natural foothold. Owned by an Indian, edited by an Indian, it was also obviously written and sub-edited by Indians. Its leaders and general articles were of a fairly high standard, but its reports of local events were often unintentionally funny. Hari imagined that the paper’s reputed popularity among the Mayapore English was due to the fact that it gave them something to laugh at, as well as an opportunity to see their names in print on the social and sporting pages. For an Indian-owned newspaper it was shrewdly non-committal. It left political alignment to the local vernacular newspapers, of which there were several, and to an English language paper called The Mayapore Hindu, which some of the official English read as a duty and others bought in order to compare its reports with the Calcutta Statesman and The Times of India, but which most of them ignored. It had been suppressed on more than one occasion.
Once Hari had decided to apply for a job with the Mayapore Gazette he spent several days copying out particularly bad examples of syntax and idiom from old issues, and then rewriting them. When he was satisfied that he could do the work he had in mind to persuade the editor to give him, he wrote and asked for an interview. He drafted the letter several times until he was satisfied that he had stripped it to its essentials. According to the headings at the top of the leader column on the middle page of the Gazette the editor’s name was B. V. Laxminarayan. He told Mr Laxminarayan that he was looking for a job. He told him his age, and gave brief details of his education. He said that to save him the trouble of replying he would ring Mr Laxminarayan in two or three days to find out whether he could see him. He hesitated, but in the end decided, to add that Mr Knight of the British–Indian Electrical Company would probably be prepared to pass on the references that had been obtained from the headmaster of Chillingborough. He signed the letter ‘Hari Kumar’ and marked the envelope ‘Personal’ to reduce the odds on its being opened and destroyed by some employee who was concerned for the safety of his own position. He had not worked in the office of his uncle for nothing. He doubted that Mr Laxminarayan would know Knight, or know him well enough to ring him, or – if he was wrong in either of these two suppositions – that Knight would have the nerve to tell an Indian any story other than that there had been several interviews but no vacancy. Also he relied on Knight’s conception of what it was gentlemanly to say as one prospective employer to another about a young man who had played cricket against his old school.
Hari was right in the second of his suppositions. Laxminarayan knew Knight, but not well enough to ring him unless he wanted confirmation of a story about the British–Indian Electrical Company’s activities. In any case he would not have rung him about Kumar’s letter. Laxminarayan did not like Mr Knight, whom he described to himself as a two-faced professional charmer whose liberal inclinations had long ago been suffocated by his mortal fear of the social consequences of sticking his neck out. ‘Knight,’ he told Hari later, ‘can now only be thought of as a pawn.’ He had these harsh things to say about Knight in order not to have to think the
m about himself.