The huts along the nullah were now glowing from inside. Mary had been given an old three-battery white fluoroscent lamp by Mrs Rego, which she had hung by a hook from the roof of her tent.
In a little while, someone had come by to check on her. It was the Battleship herself.
Wiping her hands on her sari, Mary came out to talk.
‘Today was a false alarm, Mary, but sooner or later they will come to demolish this place. You should move while you can.’
‘This is my home, madam. Would you leave yours?’
She asked the Battleship about Timothy, her son. ‘Is he playing cricket by the temple?’
‘Let him play, Mary. He’s a child. There won’t be time to play later on.’
‘Those other boys don’t go to school, madam. Some of them are nearly twenty years old. Do you let your son play with them?’
Mrs Rego, about to put Mary in her place, restrained herself.
‘I’m the one who gives lectures here, Mary. I’m not used to hearing them from people who live by the nullah. But let’s not fight. Both of us had good news today.’
She was on her way home from the office of a lawyer in Shivaji Park who specialized in Housing Societies and their disputes. Not true, he had told her, that every member of a Society has to say ‘Yes’ before it can be demolished. A three-quarters majority vote in favour may be enough, legally speaking. But the law spoke ambiguously on this matter. As on most matters, the lawyer added. The law in Mumbai was not blind: far from it, it had two faces and four working eyes and saw every case from both sides and could never make up its mind. But an ambiguous, ambivalent, and ambidextrous law was not without its advantages. The issue here – individual right vis-à-vis collective well-being – was so complicated that if a single resident of Vishram went to court, the demolition would be postponed for years while the judge scratched his head over the case and tried to find a pattern in half a century of conflicting legal precedents. Mr Shah would give up and go somewhere else.
Mary came out of her hut with an axe and started cutting firewood for her evening cooking.
Mrs Rego had wandered a few huts down the nullah.
‘How many times have I told you,’ she was shouting at a man who had a well-known drinking problem, ‘not to even think of raising a hand at your wife?’
Mary was thinking of her Timothy. He should be in here, studying, not out there by the Tamil temple, playing cricket with those older, rougher creatures. He would soon start to look up to them.
She might hit him too hard for breaking her orders: better to take it out on the firewood. She swung and chopped.
‘I used to take you and your mother to a street fair in Bandra when you were this high. I’m sure you remember.’
At the other end of town, Dharmen Shah walked with his son past coloured balloons and fluorescent plastic loops. They had had an awkward tea in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, and emerged to find Nariman Point closed to traffic for a street fair. Blobs of vanilla ice cream, in cones or in cups, materialized around them like snowballs; horses, drawing chariots plated with silver-foil and shaped like swans, clattered up and down the avenue.
‘When am I getting my credit card back?’
‘When I feel like giving it back. Have you been seeing those gang boys again?’
Satish stopped. ‘Horse shit. Everywhere,’ he said. The bottoms of his jeans dragged on the dirty road, but Shah assumed it was the reigning style and checked himself.
‘I asked you a question about the gang, Satish. Do you still…’
The boy had put his fingers on his nose. ‘I want to go home,’ he said. His father asked only if he had money for a taxi.
Shah dialled for Shanmugham, who was at Malabar Hill, waiting to deliver the evening report to him.
‘Come over to Nariman Point.’
He stood behind a row of children who had lined up to buy red crystalline ice candy in a cup. The children looked at him and giggled; he smiled. All around him he saw men with their wives and sons.
I’m losing my boy, he thought. He knew that Satish had probably not told his taxi to go to Malabar Hill – he was headed straight to the home of one of his friends.
A cluster of yellow balloons rose above the fair and floated into the darkness; Shah followed them.
Leaving light and noise behind him, he came to a car park. A metal fence stood behind the car park, and dark water beyond it. At the end of the water, he saw the lights of Navy Nagar: the southern tip of Mumbai.
Shah pressed his face on the cold metal ringlets of the fence. He gazed at the distant lights, and then rotated his face until he was looking at the earth.
This fence was supposed to mark the land’s end, but a promontory of debris, broken chunks of old buildings, granite, plastic, and Pepsi Cola had sneaked past it – the enterprising garbage pushed several feet into water. Shah’s fingers pulsed as he gazed at the amphibian earth of Nariman Point. Look: how this city never stops growing: rubble, shit, plants, mulch, left to themselves, start slurping up sea, edging towards the other end of the bay like a snake’s tongue, hissing through salt water, there is more land here, more land.
A churning began in the promontory – plastic bags and pebbles started to ripple, as if mice were scurrying beneath them; then a sparrow shot out of the detritus. It’s coming to life, Shah thought. If only Satish were here to see it. All of Bombay was created like this: through the desire of junk and landfill, on which the reclaimed city sits, to be come something better. In this way, they all emerged: fish, birds, the leopards of Borivali, even the starlets and super-models of Bandra.
Now a homeless man began moving over the debris; he must have found a hole in the fence. He squatted and spat. His spit contributed to the reclaiming thunderhead, as would his shit, soon to follow. Shah closed his eyes and prayed to the debris, and to the man defecating in it: Let me build, one more time.
‘Sir…’ He felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s not clean here.’
Shanmugham, in his white shirt and black trousers, was standing behind him.
They returned to light and noise.
‘What is that Secretary doing?’ Shah asked, as they walked back to the street fair.
He had just heard the bad news: the four Nos at Vishram had become three, but those three Nos were simply not budging. And the Secretary protested on the phone that there was nothing he could do to make them sign the agreement.
‘I don’t know why they made him Secretary, sir,’ Shanmugham said. ‘He’s useless. But there is someone else… a broker… who might help us. He has asked for money.’
‘That’s fine. Spend another lakh, or two lakhs, if you have to. Spend even more than that, if absolutely necessary. October the 3rd is near by.’ Shah cupped his hand around his ear. ‘Every day I can hear it coming closer. Can you hear it too?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Shanmugham said. ‘I can hear it. I can hear October 3 coming closer.’
The builder stopped and turned his head. A sugarcane juice stand had been brought to the side of the road as part of the fair. His eyes rose to the top of the stand, where the canes had been piled, six foot high, the tallest of them curling down at the ends, like the claws of a crab.
The cane-crushing machine was lit up by naked electric bulbs. In a square of raw light, a boy turned a red wheel, which turned smaller green wheels, which tinkled and crushed the cane, whose juice, dribbling down a gutter full of irregular chunks of ice, passed through a dirty strainer into a stainless-steel vessel that fogged up from the cold liquid. Poured into small conical glasses, and sold to customers for five rupees each, seven for a larger glass.
‘I used to live on this juice when I came to Bombay, Shanmugham. Live on it.’
‘Sir: they use dirty water to make the ice. Jaundice, diarrhoea, worms, God knows what else.’
‘I know. I know.’
The bright, fast, musical wheels turned once again, crushing the cane – Shah imagined bricks rising, scaffolding erected, men
hoisted miles into the air on such tinkling energy. If only he were new to Bombay again: if only he could drink that stuff again.
On the drive back, in his mind’s eye he continued to see them, the sugarcane-crusher’s wheels turning under the naked light bulbs, discs of speeding light punching holes into the night like spinning machines of fate, having completed their day shift, and now working overtime.
Late in the night, the first storm crashed into the city.
20 JUNE
Low rentals, five minutes to Santa Cruz train station, ten minutes to Bandra by auto. There are many advantages to life in Vakola, yes, but Ajwani, an honest broker, advises first-timers that there is also one big negative.
Not the proximity of slums (they stay in their huts, you stay in your building, who bothers whom?). Not the Boeing 747s flying overhead (cotton in your ears, arm on your wife, off to sleep).
But-one-thing-you-must-know-before-you-move-here: Ajwani taps his mobile phone on his laminated table. This is a low-lying area. One day each monsoon, there is a storm, and on that day life in Vakola becomes impossible.
By morning floodwater had risen to waist height near the highway signal and in parts of Kalina. Vishram Society, on higher ground, was more secure, but the alley leading up to it was a foot below water; every now and then an autorickshaw arrived, scything storm water, discharging a client near the gate, and returning gondola-like. Abandoning the guard’s booth, Ram Khare sought the protection of the Society. Not that this protection was absolute; a continuous spray came through the stars in the grille. Buckets kept under the leaky spots in the roof overflowed every fifteen minutes; tongues of fresh algae and moss grew under the stairwell. Shifting diagonals of rain lashed the rusty gate and the blue roof of the guard’s booth; the water fell thick and glowing, and though the sun was hidden the rain-light was strong enough to read a newspaper in.
In the Renaissance Real-Estate Agency, Ajwani saw that it was futile to expect clients, told Mani ‘This is the day that comes once a year’, and staggered back to his Society under an umbrella.
At four o’clock, the sky was bright again. The thunderclouds, like a single dark bandage, had been stripped away, exposing a raw sun. People ventured out of their buildings into the water, the colour of Assam tea, on which floated rubbish and blazing light.
21 JUNE
The morning after the storm, Masterji paced about his living room. The compound was full of storm water and slush. He had just washed his brown trousers in the semi-automatic washing machine, and they would be flecked with red and black if he took even a few steps outside.
He knocked on Mrs Puri’s door, hoping for a cup of tea and some conversation.
‘You’ve become a stranger to us, Masterji,’ Mrs Puri said, when she opened the door. ‘But we have to go to SiddhiVinayak temple soon, Ramu and I. Let us talk tomorrow.’
It was true that his neighbours had not seen much of Masterji lately.
Parliament no longer met because of the rains; and, in any case, all the talking now took place behind closed doors. A hush of covert business had fallen over a garrulous Society. Amidst the silent germination of schemes and ambitions all around him, Masterji sat like a cyst, looking at the rain and his daughter’s drawings of Vakola, or playing with his Rubik’s Cube, until there was a knock on the door and Mr Pinto shouted, ‘Masterji, we are waiting, it’s time for dinner.’
A man’s past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.
Though the men and women around him dreamed of bigger homes and cars, his joys were those of the expanding square footage of his inner life. The more he looked at his daughter’s sketches, the more certain places within Vishram – the stairwell where she ran up, the garden that she walked around, the gate that she liked to swing on – became more beautiful and intimate. Sounds were richer. A scraping of feet somewhere in the building reminded him of his daughter wiping her tennis shoes on the coir mat before coming in. Sometimes he felt as if Sandhya and Purnima were watching the rain with him, and there was a sense of feminine fullness inside the dim flat.
When the sky cleared, he would notice it was evening, and walk along the garden wall. When the breeze scattered the dew from the begonia leaves on to his hand, she was at his side again, his little Sandhya, tickling his palm as in the old days. He superimposed her features on the women walking about the garden. Nearly thirty she would have been. Her mother was slim, she would have stayed slim.
At dinner the Pintos would say, ‘Masterji, you’ve become so quiet these days’, and he would only shrug.
They asked him once or twice if he had had his diabetes test done yet.
Though he was spending more time by himself, he would not say he had been bored; he was conscious, indeed, of a strange contentment. But now, when he wanted to talk to someone, he found himself all alone.
He opened the door and went into the stairwell. Instead of going down the steps, he walked up. He walked up to the fifth floor, and paused in front of a steep single-file staircase, which led to the rooftop terrace.
After the suicide of the Costello boy in 1999, the Society had discouraged the use of the terrace, and children were forbidden from going up there.
Masterji went up the staircase to the terrace. The small wooden door at the end of the stairs had not been opened in a long time, and he had to push with his shoulder.
And then, for the first time in over a decade, he was on the roof of Vishram Society.
Fifteen years ago, Sandhya had come up here in the evenings to play on a rocking-horse, which was still rotting in a corner. Planting a foot on it, he gave it a little kick. It creaked and rocked.
Years of uncleaned guano had calcified on the floor of the terrace, and rainwater had collected over it.
Masterji walked slowly through water to the wall of the terrace. From here, he could see Mary picking up leaves and twigs that littered the compound, and Ram Khare walking back into his booth.
Mrs Puri came out into the compound with Ramu; they went towards the black Cross with a bowl full of channa. As if she had a sixth sense, Mrs Puri looked up and saw her neighbour up on the terrace.
‘Masterji, what are you doing up there?’ she shouted. ‘It’s dangerous on the roof.’
Blushing with embarrassment, like a schoolboy who had been caught, Masterji came down the stairs at once.
To make up for his indiscreet walk around the terrace, he read from The Soul’s Passageway after Death for a while; then tried playing with his Rubik’s Cube. Eventually he yawned, shook himself awake, and walked down to the Secretary’s office.
Ajwani was in a corner of the office, reading the front page of the Times of India through his half-moon glasses. Secretary Kothari had another section of the paper; he was examining the real-estate advertisements. The two men were about to sip tea from little plastic cups; Kothari found a third cup into which he poured Masterji some of his tea. Ajwani came to the table to do the same.
‘Wonderful isn’t it, the rain,’ Kothari said, moving the little cup towards Masterji. ‘The whole world has become green. Everything grows.’
‘And buildings fall,’ Masterji said. Taking the Times of India from Ajwani, he read aloud the big story on the front page: ‘A three-storey building in Crawford Market fell during yesterday’s storm, killing the watchman and two others. Since the building was home to over twenty people, the people say it is a miracle only three died.’
Masterji kept reading. The desire for self-improvement had been the cause of destruction. Against the advice of the municipal engineer, the residents had installed overhead water tanks, and these, too heavy for the old building, had bent the ancient roof, which broke in the storm. Death, because they had wanted a better life.
‘There was also a collapse in Wadala. That’s in the inside pages.’
Ajwani crumpled his teacup and aimed it at the wastebasket.
‘Still, that makes it only six deaths this year. What was it last year? Twenty? Thirty? A light
year, Masterji. A light year.’
A macabre competition that the men in Vishram had played for at least a decade. If it was a ‘heavy’ year for monsoon-related deaths, it accrued somehow to the advantage of one side (Masterji and Kudwa); a ‘light’ year was a point scored by the other (Mr Puri and the Secretary).
‘A light year,’ Masterji conceded. ‘But I’m hopeful. There’s a long way to go yet before this monsoon is over.’
‘I don’t like this competition,’ Ajwani said. ‘The roof that’s collapsing could one day be our own.’
‘Vishram? Never. This building would have lasted a thousand years.’
‘Will last,’ Masterji corrected the Secretary, with a smile.
‘Would have lasted.’
Masterji looked at the ceiling with a stylish wave of his hand: sardonic forbearance, as a character in a play might express it.
‘One point to your party,’ he said.
‘How is the girl in 3B? The journalist. Still troubling you?’
‘Oh, not at all. We’re friends now. She had tea with me the other day.’
‘Import-Export gave her notice. She has to leave by 3 October.’
Masterji turned to his left to face the broker. ‘Is Hiranandani finding a new tenant?’
‘Yes,’ Ajwani smiled. ‘Mr Shah, of the Confidence Group.’
Masterji looked at the ceiling and raised his voice. ‘Another point for that party. We’re losing here, my fellow Opposition members.’