Last Man in Tower

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Uncle. I can hear the cough. Like the thunder they use in films.’

  ‘If I had designed the human body, I’d have done a much better job, Rosie. The materials used are not the best. Corners have been cut. The structure collapses too soon.’ He laughed. ‘But I’m fine, Rosie. By the grace of Lord SiddhiVinayak I’m fine.’

  By the grace of the Lord. Rosie knew exactly what that meant. By my own grace. Just like a film producer who says, once you’ve sucked his cock, ‘By the grace of God, you’ll get a small role in this film.’

  She sighed, and cleared the greasy plates from the table.

  Six months earlier: Shah had been waiting in a restaurant for an order of chow mein that his mistress of the time, Nannu, had wanted him to bring her, personally; she was in one of her hysterical moods. The pretty girl in the tank-top had smiled at him, walked up to him without an invitation, and stuck out her hand: ‘My name is Rosie. Yours?’ He had known, at once, what was on offer. This was Versova, after all. ‘Thank you,’ he had smiled and left. Nannu was lighter-skinned.

  Next morning – one of those small things that add up to make life grand – opening the newspaper, he saw this in a side-column: ‘Aspiring model arrested in Oshiwara gym. Accused of stealing from women’s locker.’ He read the name of the girl: ‘Rosie.’ A challenge thrown down to his will power. He had cancelled the morning’s meetings, driven down to the Oshiwara gym; settled in cash with the gym owner; gone to the police station, freed her, and looking at her, her shoulders, hair, still, after a day in the lock-up, in good shape, had decided, ‘She’ll do.’ Nannu was given three days to clear out of this flat; after which he moved Rosie in here, telling her she could continue to do what she came to Bombay for: try and make it in the movies. No need for petty hustling as long as she lived with him; just one great hustle and humiliation to accept. One or two mornings a week she went to see a producer about an itty-bitty role in a new production; sometimes had her hopes of success renewed, at other times worried about ageing, felt she would never make it, and asked for ‘help’ in setting up a hair-dressing studio of her own, which Shah promised she would receive. At the end of their relationship. But until then, if she made eyes at anyone else, she would fly head-first into the Indian Ocean.

  When he came out of the shower, she was singing songs in a foreign language.

  ‘Opera,’ she shouted in response to his question. There was a new craze for Italian opera in Bollywood, and she was trying out bits of songs. They were called ‘aria’.

  ‘Ariya,’ he said, rubbing his hair with a soft white towel. ‘Is that how it’s said?’

  ‘Aaa-ria, Uncle. Don’t pronounce things like a Gujarati village goat.’

  ‘Ha, ha. But I am a Gujarati village goat, Rosie.’

  Another of her moods; and he enjoyed all of them. ‘Get a room with a sea view. One wall is always new,’ they said in real estate. Get a woman who changes and you have a dozen women. He relished the smell of Pears’ Soap on his skin; he wanted her in his arms.

  ‘Why don’t you introduce me to Satish, Uncle? I’m in his age group, I can talk to him if he’s in trouble,’ she asked, when he emerged, still rubbing his hair.

  ‘I’ll bring you a model of the Shanghai, Rosie. It’s so beautiful, you should see it. Gothic, Italian, Indian, Art Deco styles, all in one. My whole life story is in it.’

  ‘Why don’t you introduce me to Satish, Uncle?’

  He bent down and rubbed more vigorously, so the moisture from his hair irritated her face.

  ‘I’m not your prostitute! I’m not your property! I don’t give a shit about your fucking money!’

  With his head bent to the floor, covered in his towel, he heard feet thump on the floor, and a door going Slam! He rubbed his hair and asked the floor (dark green tiles with embedded white flakes, a favourite pattern, used in all his buildings): why, when she is worried about your interest in her, will a woman do the very things that will cause your interest to drop further?

  Sitting on his chair, watching his ocean, swaying from his hip, Shah hummed his favourite Kishore Kumar song. Aa chal ke tujhe, mein… Leaning back from the chair, he pressed down on the bed with a finger, feeling the 2.8 micron pore width bedding on the premium spring mattress: he lifted the finger with a pinprick of recharging will power.

  The path to a new building in Mumbai sparkled with small stones – police, litigation, greed – and he would need every ounce of his body fat to crush those stones, one by one. Before every new project, like a religious ritual, he had to come here, to this flat, to whichever girl he was with at that moment, Nannu or Smita or Rosie, to inhale her perfume, eat toast, watch the ocean, touch the golden fittings in the toilet. In the presence of luxury his capacity for violence was always heightened.

  He knocked on her door: ‘I’ll count to five, Rosie.’

  ‘No. I’ll never come out. You never take me to your home. Never—’

  ‘One,’ he counted. ‘Two. Three. Four.’

  A woman’s face peeped from behind the opened door.

  An hour later, Mr Shah washed his face, hands, and chest in her bathroom. From the window he spotted a man in white shirt and black trousers down by the beach, sitting on rocks and doodling on the sand as he waited for his master’s phone call.

  No assistant had done the job as long as this one had without giving in to fear or greed. But this Shanmugham was special. A thorough-bred Doberman.

  He called Giri on his mobile phone.

  ‘I’m going to SiddhiVinayak temple at five o’clock and then to my Society in Vakola. Tell the boy to be at the temple. On time.’

  Rosie lay on her right side, her face hidden in her arms. He lay down beside her, and clapped, turning the light in her room on. He clapped again – it went off – and again – until Rosie slapped his shoulder and said, ‘Stop acting like a child.’

  Shanmugham, still sitting on the rock, had picked up a stone and was pounding it into the hot sand, again and again.

  He had been tricked. Tricked.

  By his own bank manager.

  He remembered that greasy old white-haired man’s exact words – since he was such a valued customer, he would be getting a ‘little extra’ on top of the scheduled interest rates (‘the best rate legally obtainable in this city, I promise you’); and now he had discovered that a beach umbrella was advertising a higher interest rate!

  Throwing the stone away, Shanmugham got up from the rock, and brushed the sand off his trousers.

  After lunch at a Punjabi dhaba where he had to wash his hands with water from a plastic jug, he watched young women run on treadmills inside a gym called ‘Barbarian’, drank a fresh coconut by the side of a road at two o’clock and ate pistachio ice cream from a porcelain plate at a restaurant at three.

  He divided the slab of ice cream into sixteen parts, and ate one part at a time, to prolong his stay at the restaurant. By the fourteenth piece of ice cream, he was certain that the middle-aged man in shorts was that actor who used to be famous ten years ago. Amrish Puri.

  Not Amrish. He punished a piece of ice cream by squashing it with his spoon. Om Puri.

  Chewing the fifteenth piece, he thought: I am eating ice cream at a restaurant where a film actor strolls in for the same thing.

  He would never have dreamed such a thing possible till that day, six years ago, when in his dingy real-estate office in Chembur he heard that a builder was looking for a labour contractor. They had met in a nearby south Indian restaurant. Mr Shah had been pouring tea into his saucer.

  ‘A simple question.’ The fat man had shown him two gold-ringed fingers. ‘Two rooms. One is four by five, one is ten by two. Both are twenty square feet. Correct?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Shanmugham said.

  ‘So they both cost the same to build. Correct?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Explain.’ Shah slurped tea from the saucer.

  ‘The ten-by-two room is thirty-three per cent more expensive, s
ir. Four plus five is nine, nine nine is eighteen feet of wall to build. Ten plus two twelve, twelve twelve is twenty-four feet of walls to build. You don’t build floors, you build walls.’

  ‘You’re the first man today who has got the answer right. I’ve fired my labour contractor. Do you know how to get me workers for a job?’

  ‘No, but by the evening I will,’ Shanmugham had said.

  Six months later, Shah had told him at a construction site: ‘The other day you broke up a fight between the workers. I was watching. You know how to hit a man.’

  ‘I am sorry, sir,’ Shanmugham looked at the ground. ‘I won’t do it again.’

  ‘Don’t say sorry,’ Shah had said. ‘This is not politics we are in: this is construction. We have to speak the truth in this business, or nothing will ever get built. Do you know what a left-hand man is?’

  Shanmugham had not known at the time.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You’re a quick learner,’ Shah had said. ‘You can be my new left-hand man from Monday. But today, I must fire you from my company, and you must tear up all your business cards. If we ever get involved with the police, I have to say that I dismissed you.’

  Pushing aside his ice cream, Shanmugham took a small black book out of his pocket, and found a clean white page. Drawing a box with seven columns and twenty rows, he made a small calendar: the last date was October 3. Next to it he wrote: ‘Shanghai.’

  He turned the pages. The first few pages of the book were covered with Mr Shah’s wise sayings, which he had been recording for months.

  When it comes to work – hurry, hurry, hurry. When it comes to payment – delay, delay, delay.

  Caste, religion, family background nothing. Talent everything.

  Be 10 per cent more generous to people than you feel like being.

  He clicked a black ballpoint pen and added one of his own:

  Do not trust connections made with bank…

  When the sixteenth piece of ice cream melted, he paid his bill and left with a last glance at the actor.

  He stopped in the shade of a small park.

  A stray black dog loped by the park, a bright red patch of flesh shining near its left buttock. Shanmugham thought of a bank manager with grey oiled hair. Of ‘a little extra’. With an eye closed, he aimed a sharp rock at the open wound.

  His mobile phone began to beep.

  At four o’clock, Mrs Pinto’s left arm reached for solid wall. Her chappal found the first step.

  When her eyesight had begun to dim, over a decade ago, Mrs Pinto had kept a strict count of the steps (even retracing her path when she lost the count), but that was no longer necessary.

  The walls had sprouted eyes for her.

  She knew she had taken three steps down when she reached ‘the Diamond’: a rhomboidal crevice in the fourth step. Seven steps and two landings later came ‘the Bad Tooth’. Sliding along the wall her palm encountered a molar-shaped patch in the plaster, which felt like the back of her teeth when they had cavities in them. This meant she had almost reached the second floor. She angled her body again.

  She sensed dim radiance: the evening sun blazing into the entranceway.

  ‘Is anybody there?’ she called. ‘Be careful when you run; Shelley Pinto is coming down, step by step she is coming down.’

  Just five steps to go now to the ground floor: she heard her husband’s weak voice from the plastic-chair parliament.

  ‘… if one person says no, you can’t tear down the Society. That’s the whole idea of a Co-operative Housing Society. One for all, all for one.’

  I wish he had said something smarter than that, she thought.

  Last night, the moment he had come up the stairs with Masterji and told her of the thing posted on the noticeboard, she had wanted to cry. Their plans for the rest of their lives were set into Vishram Society. What did they need money for? A fixed deposit in the HDFC bank’s Versova branch paid them Rs 4,000 a month, taking care of all expenses; both children were settled in America – a good, Christian country – one in Michigan, the other in Buffalo. The children were far away, but they had Vishram all around them, warm, human, familiar; it was the protective keratin they had secreted from the hardships of their lives. It guided Shelley down its stairs and around its fragrant garden. How would she find her way in a strange new building? Mr Pinto and his wife had sat on the sofa, hand in hand, feeling more in love than they had in years. And when Masterji said, ‘If it’s no from you, it’s no from me’, Shelley Pinto had begun to cry. A husband by her side, and a wise man for a friend.

  All day long, whether eating breakfast with Masterji or lying in bed, she had heard the buzz of discussion around Vishram. What if the others overpowered them and carried her off to a building with strange walls and neither ‘the Diamond’ nor ‘the Bad Tooth’ nor her million other eyes? Her heart beat faster. She forgot how many steps lay before her and the ground floor.

  The powerful voice of Mrs Rego revived her.

  ‘It’s an illusion, Mr Pinto. I know about these builders. They won’t ever pay up.’

  We have the Battleship on our side, Mrs Pinto thought. How can we lose?

  ‘We knew all these years you were strange, Mrs Rego, but we did not realize you were actually mad,’ Mrs Puri fired back at the Battleship.

  Now Mrs Pinto’s heart sank. Mrs Puri is on their side. How can we win?

  ‘This is a democracy, Mrs Puri. No one will silence me. Not you, not all the builders of the world.’

  ‘I’m just saying, Mrs Rego, even a Communist must understand that when someone comes and offers us Rs 20,000 a square foot we should say yes. Once you think of all the repairs we need to make to the building, to each individual flat, before it can be sold – new paint, new doors – it is closer to 250 per cent of market value. And think of the time it takes to find a buyer in a neighbourhood like this. Mr Costello waited six months, gave up, and went to Qatar. This is cash in hand.’

  ‘But will this Mr Shah actually pay?’ Ibrahim Kudwa’s voice.

  Good. Ibrahim Kudwa, the cyber-café owner, was the average man in the building. If he was sceptical, everyone was sceptical.

  ‘Look,’ Mr Pinto said, when his wife came out into parliament, groping for a chair. The main item of evidence.

  ‘How will she survive in another Society?’

  Aware that people were looking at her, Mrs Pinto held her smile for all to see.

  ‘Just wait until this man comes here and speaks to us,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Is that too much to ask of all of you?’

  Ibrahim Kudwa came up to Mrs Pinto and whispered: ‘I wanted to tell you about the sign that I changed outside the Society. They’ve filled up the hole now, but there was a sign there. It said: “Work in progress, inconvenience regretted”, but I changed it to “Inconvenience in progress, work regretted”.’

  ‘That’s very clever, Ibrahim,’ she whispered back. ‘Very clever.’

  She could almost hear the blood rushing proudly to his cheeks. Ibrahim Kudwa reminded her of Sylvester, a pet dog that she had once had. Always needed an ‘attaboy’, and a pat on the head.

  ‘Now all of you must excuse us. Shelley and I are going for our walk.’

  Masterji, who had been sitting in the ‘prime’ chair, pretending not to watch Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen TV, got up in stages. He followed Mr and Mrs Pinto to the compound wall.

  Behind him, he could hear the indiscreet Ibrahim Kudwa whispering: ‘What’s his position?’

  Masterji slowed to hear the faithful Mrs Puri’s reply: ‘The moment his friends said, we don’t want the money, he said, me too.’

  Even though he had opposed the offer, she was proud of him, and wanted everyone to know this.

  ‘He is an English gentleman. Only when the Pintos change their answer will he change his.’

  Suppressing his smile, Masterji caught up with the Pintos. Shelley had her hand on her husband; he could hear her count her steps. When she counted ‘twenty’ she had passed the danger-zone: where
the boys played their cricket game, and their smacked balls could hit her cheeks or stomach. Now she would smell hibiscus plants for twenty steps.

  Mary, having done with her evening cleaning of the Society’s common areas, was beginning to water the plants in the garden. Picking up the green pipe that lay in coils in the garden all the day long like a hibernating snake, she fitted it to a tap near the compound wall; sluicing the water flow with a pressed thumb, she began slapping the hibiscus plants awake. One-two-three-four-five, holding the pipe in her right hand, Mary counted off the seconds of irrigation for each plant on the joints of her left hand, like a meditating brahmin. Small rainbows sprang to life within the arch of the sluiced water, disappeared when the water moved away, then reappeared on the dripping spider’s webs that interlinked the branches.

  Mrs Pinto left the smell of hibiscus behind. Now came ‘the blood stretch’ – the ten yards where the stench of raw beef from the butcher’s shop behind the Society wafted in, mitigated somewhat by the flourish of jasmine flowers growing near the wall.

  ‘It’s your phone, Masterji.’ Mrs Pinto turned around.

  She could pinpoint the exact cubicle within the building that a noise came from.

  ‘It must be Gaurav again. The moment he smells money on me, my son calls.’

  Gaurav had called earlier in the morning. The first call he had made to his father in months. He explained that ‘Sangeeta Aunty’ had told him about the builder’s offer.

  ‘I wish Mrs Puri had not phoned him.’

  ‘Oh, she is like a second mother to the boy, Masterji. Let her call.’

  Masterji winced; yet he could not deny the fact.

  Everyone in Vishram knew of Mrs Puri’s closeness to the boy; it was one of the triumphs of their communal life – one of the cross-beams of affection that are meant to grow in any co-operative society. Even after Gaurav moved to Marine Lines for his work, Mrs Puri stayed in touch with him, sending him regular packages of peanut-chikki and other sweets. It was she who had called to tell him of his mother’s death.

  Masterji said: ‘I told Gaurav, you are my son, this is your home, you can come see me whenever you want. But there is nothing to discuss. The Pintos have said no.’