‘What a selfish, greedy old man he has become, Ramu. He wants to take our wooden cupboards away from us. The Evil Eye must have found out about my good luck. This time too.’
Ramu had put his fingers in his ears. His face began to shake; his teeth chattered. Mrs Puri knew what was coming, but he beat her to it, ran into the toilet, and slammed the door. No: he wouldn’t open the door for Mummy.
‘Ramu, I won’t say anything bad about Masterji again. I promise.’
The door opened at last, but Ramu wouldn’t get up from the toilet bowl. Breathing as normally as she could, to show that she was not angry with him, that he had not made a stinky mess in the toilet, Mummy washed his behind clean with a mug of water, changed his trousers, and put him into bed with Spiderman and the Friendly Duck.
She struggled down to her knees and scrubbed the toilet floor clean. When he was frightened, he missed the bowl.
When she opened the door of his bedroom, Ramu was sitting up, angling the book in which his father had drawn lizards and spiders so that the Friendly Duck could see the pictures too.
Just outside the bedroom, a bird began to trill, its notes long and sharp like a needled thread, as if it were darning some torn corner of the world. Mother and son listened together.
When Mrs Puri came down the stairs, she found three women on the first landing, talking in whispers.
‘He plays with his Rubik’s Cube all day long. But does he have a solution?’ Mrs Kothari, the Secretary’s wife, asked. ‘He’s just a block of darkness.’
‘Won’t even do it for his son. Or his grandson,’ Mrs Ganguly said.
‘It’s that girl next door. She made him crazy,’ Mrs Nagpal, of the first floor, said.
They went silent as Mrs Puri passed. She knew they suspected her of sympathy with Masterji.
She took a left at the gate and walked past the slums. Soon she was at the site of the two new Confidence buildings. Under the blue tarpaulin covers, the work of laying slabs of granite and marble continued despite the rains. A drizzle began. She waited under an umbrella and hoped Ramu had not woken up.
A tall man came running up to her from one of the buildings. He got under her umbrella; she spoke to him and he listened.
‘Mrs Puri,’ Shanmugham smiled. ‘You are a person of initiative. Just last year, in a redevelopment project in Sion, we encountered a problem like this Masterji of yours. There are many things we can do, and we will try them one by one. But you must trust me and Mr Shah.’
23 JULY
The lift at Vishram Society moved like a coffin on wheels. When a button was pressed, a loud click followed: ropes, levers, and chains went into action. Through the lattice of the metal shutter guarding the open elevator shaft, you could see a dark wooden rectangle – a counterweight – sliding down the wall, and a circular light on the top of the lift rising, as the large dark box scraped past to the floor above, carrying with it a sign: ‘ITS YOUR SOCIETY. KEEP IT CLEAN’.
Masterji saw the lift pass him before slamming its dark mass into the fourth floor. A latch clicked and the door opened, but he heard no one come out.
It was one of those phantom trips that the Otis sometimes took on its own – compensating for weeks of inertia with these spectral bursts of activity.
No children yet. He went back to his room, leaving the front door open.
It was seven o’clock on a Monday. Time for the first science top-up of the week. The ceiling lights were turned off in anticipation, and the lamp light projected on to the far wall.
Ten minutes later, Masterji ran down the stairs and found the boys playing cricket in the compound. Mohammad Kudwa was bowling; Anand Ganguly held a bat high. Sunil Rego was fielding at cover point.
‘Masterji, don’t stand there,’ Mohammad called out, ‘the ball might hit you.’
‘It’s time for class, Mohammad.’
The boy turned and grinned.
‘Boycott, Masterji.’
He released the ball towards Anand Ganguly, who leaned back and smacked it high and hard; it bounced off a grille at a fourth-floor window and returned to the ground.
‘Boycott?’ Masterji asked, stepping back to avoid the bouncing ball. ‘Is this a new excuse not to come to the top-up?’
He walked towards parliament, where he found Mrs Saldanha talking to Mrs Kudwa, who was tickling Mariam on her lap.
‘Your son is refusing to attend the top-up class, Mrs Kudwa. Are you aware of this?’
The two women at once got up from their chairs, went into the building, and stood by the noticeboard. There they continued to talk.
‘They are not speaking to us either,’ Mr Pinto said.
Masterji went up the stairs to 3C. Mrs Puri opened the door with her left hand, the fingers of her right bunched together and stained with the curd and rice she had been feeding Ramu. He was seated at the table in his apron; he gave his Masterji a big smile.
‘Sangeeta, what is going on?’
‘Ramu…’ She turned to her son and said (forcing a big smile on her face so he would not suspect the content of her words), ‘… tell your Masterji that the boycott is going on.’
‘Boycott?’ Masterji said. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Ramu…’ Mrs Puri smiled again. ‘… Masterji, being a famous teacher, must know all about Gandhi and Nehru and what they did to the British. So tell him not to ask us what a boycott is.’
‘Gandhi and Nehru and… Mrs Puri, this is madness.’
‘Madness?’ Mrs Puri chuckled. Ramu, at the table, joined in the fun.
‘And refusing an offer of 250 per cent the market value of his flat is not madness, Ramu? Some people should not speak of madness, Ramu.’
‘I haven’t said no. I’m still thinking about Mr Shah’s proposal.’
Mrs Puri looked at her neighbour.
‘Still thinking? You’ve always been happy to share your deep thoughts with us, haven’t you, Masterji? Have we ever asked you to be Secretary of this Society? What does that tell you about how we felt about your deep thinking?’
‘I haven’t said no. But I won’t be forced into—’
Mrs Puri shut the door in his face. Returning to his flat, Masterji sat by the teakwood table and tapped the arms of his chair, as if he did not really believe that the boys would not come.
24 JULY
Masterji opened the door. His rubbish bin had been overturned.
Pieces of rubbish – the banana peel, for example – had been flung far from his doorstep, as if someone had kicked them there.
He got down on one knee and began gathering in the errant garbage.
A young woman’s foot scraped the banana peel towards him.
‘Leave it alone, Ms Meenakshi, I’ll clean it.’
‘I’m only trying to help.’
His neighbour’s sleek black jeans exposed inches of skin above the ankles, and she wore no socks; bunched together within the silver crisscrossing of her sandals, her plump white toes, incarnadined with lacquer, looked like bonsai cleavage. Once she got rid of the braces and bought better glasses, Masterji decided, she would make a very good marriage.
He put pressure on the wrong leg as he stood up: a sharp angular pain cut into his left knee like an accent over a French ‘e’.
Accent aigu. He sketched it in the air: pleased that he could civilize his arthritis by connecting it to a beautiful language.
Ms Meenakshi leaned on her doorway, grinning and exposing her braces.
‘That woman must hate you even more than she hates me.’ She leaned her head towards Mrs Puri’s door. ‘She just looks through my rubbish.’
‘This is the early-morning cat, Ms Meenakshi,’ Masterji said, massaging his knee-cap. ‘Mrs Puri has not done this.’
His neighbour adjusted her hexagonal glasses before closing her door. ‘Then why is your rubbish bin the only one that has been overturned?’
At one o’clock that day, Ibrahim Kudwa, uninvited, came and joined the Pintos’ table for lunch.
Perhaps be
cause Kudwa, the only Muslim in the building, was considered a fair-minded man by the others – or perhaps because, being the owner of a not-so-busy internet café, he could leave his business in the afternoon – he had been designated a ‘neutral’ in the dispute, and sent, in this capacity, by the rest of the Society. Halfway through lunch, when Nina, the maid-servant, was serving steaming appams, he said: ‘Masterji, I don’t approve of this thing. This boycott.’
‘Thank you, Ibrahim.’
‘But Masterji… understand why people are doing this. There is so much anguish in the building over your strange actions. You say you’ll sign, then you go to see your son, and say you won’t sign.’
‘I never said yes, Ibrahim.’ Masterji wagged his finger. ‘I said maybe.’
‘Let me teach you something today, Masterji: there is no maybe in this matter. We think you should go and meet Mr Shah in his house. Have a talk with him. He holds teachers in high regard.’
Ibrahim Kudwa washed his mouth and wiped his lips and beard on the Pintos’ hand-towel. He put the towel back on its rack and stared at it.
‘Masterji, when the builder’s offer was made, I suffered, because I did not know what to do with the money – I took an Antacid to sleep. Now that there is the possibility of the money I never had being taken away from me – I need two Antacids to sleep.’
He wiped his hands again and left, apparently abandoning whatever remained of his neutrality on the wet hand-towel.
‘Boycott – it’s just a word,’ Masterji told Mr Pinto. ‘Remember the time Sangeeta’s Aquaguard machine leaked water into Ajwani’s kitchen, and from there into Abichandani’s kitchen? Remember how they stopped talking to her until she paid for the repairs? She never agreed to it. After two weeks they were talking to her again.’
After an hour, he went down the stairs, kicked aside the stray dog, and sat on the ‘prime’ chair in front of Mrs Saldanha’s window. The small TV was on in her kitchen, a ghostly quadrilateral behind the green curtain; a slice of the newsreader’s face showed through the almond-shaped tear like a kernel of truth. As he watched, Mrs Saldanha came to the window and closed its wooden shutters.
Masterji surveyed the compound of his Society as if nothing had happened.
On his way up the stairs, he saw the sick dog lying once again on the landing. At least it looked at him the same way as it had before. He let it lie there.
He was looking so intently at the dog that he almost missed the handwritten sign that had been stuck with Scotch tape to the wall above it.
Some facts about ‘a certain person’ who has received respect from us for thirty years. But why? Now we find out the truth.
1. Because he was a retired teacher, he got respect from all of us. He offered to help children with exams, true. But what kind of help? He would talk about the parts of the sun, like the corona, and the dense core of hydrogen and helium, and so on, far beyond the strict requirements of the syllabus, which meant that when the exam papers appeared, the children found nothing of use in his tutorials. So to go to him for tuition, or private lessons, was the ‘kiss of death’.
2. For DEEPAVALI, CHRISTMAS, OR EID, he has never given one rupee in baksheesh to Ram Khare. He is always saying, I have no money, I am retired, but is this true? Do we not know otherwise?
3. Even though he liked to boast loudly ‘he had no TV’, every evening he would sit in front of Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen in the exact position where he would block everyone else’s view and then he would watch TV.
4. NEVER GIVES TIPS, for large waste material left outside the door, to the Khachada-wali.
SO WHY HAVE WE RESPECTED HIM BLINDLY?
He read it twice before he could understand it. Tear it down? He withdrew his hand. A man is not what his neighbours say he is. Laugh and let it go.
When he bent to his sink a few minutes later to wash his face, the water burned his eyes and nose.
But a man is what his neighbours say he is.
In old buildings truth is a communal thing, a consensus of opinion. Vishram Society had retained mementoes, over forty-eight years, of all those who had lived in it; each resident had left a physical record of himself here, like the kerosene handprint made by Rajeev Ajwani on the front wall on the day of his great tae kwon-do victory. If you knew how to read Vishram’s walls, you would find them covered with handprints. These prints were permanent, but they could move; a person’s record was alterable. Now Masterji felt the opinion of him that was engraved into the building – in its peeling paint and 48-year-old brickwork – shift. As it moved, so did something within his body.
He could not say, looking at his wet face and dripping moustache, how much of what was written in the poster was untrue.
He went down and read it again. Nothing about the Pintos in it: they were hoping to drive a wedge between them. He ripped it down.
But that evening another appeared glued to the lift door, different in handwriting, similar in its complaints (‘never taught English to students even though he knew Shakespeare and other big writers who were part of the examinations’) – and then there was one on Ram Khare’s guard-booth (‘Put your own poster up,’ he said, when Masterji protested). Though he tore each one down, he knew another would go up: the black handprints were multiplying.
31 JULY
In the old days, you had caste, and you had religion: they taught you how to eat, marry, live, and die. But in Bombay caste and religion had faded away, and what had replaced them, as far as he could tell, was the idea of being respectable and living among similar people. All his adult life Masterji had done so; but now, in the space of just a few days, he had shattered the husk of a respectable life and tasted its bitter kernel.
It was nearly 8 a.m. He was still in bed, listening to savages screaming below him.
Down in 2C, Rajeev and Raghav Ajwani practised tae kwon-do under their father’s supervision.
He imagined he could hear similar noises from all the rooms of his Society: all of them were jabbing fists and lancing kicks to gouge him out of Vishram.
Now he heard the Secretary’s footsteps from above. He was sure they were louder than they had been for the past twenty-five years.
He did not want to get up; did not want to walk down the stairs and read the new notices they had posted about him.
If, in the early days of the ‘boycott’, there was an apologetic smile on the Secretary’s lips when he evaded Masterji’s attempts to make small talk, now there were neither smiles nor apologies.
They treat me like they would treat an untouchable in the old days, he thought: even at the thought of his shadow falling on them, his neighbours cringed and withdrew.
Degree by degree, they were turning their faces from him, until, as he passed the parliament, he confronted a row of turned backs.
If, in defiance, he sat among them, they got up and left. The moment he went up the stairs, they would regather. Then the taunts began. Always directed at him, never at the Pintos.
‘… if only Purnima were alive, wouldn’t she be ashamed of him?’
‘… his own son. A man who does not care for his own son, what do you…’
So this is what they mean by the word: boycott. Even in his bed he felt it, their contempt, like the heat radiating from a brick wall on a summer night.
He went down to the bottom of the stairwell. Through the octagonal stars of the grille, he saw Ajwani, pacing about the compound, talking on his mobile phone – to a client, no doubt.
I could never do that, Masterji thought: negotiate. Use the ‘personal touch’. He had none of the small-bored implements of personality that other men did; no good at charm and fake smile, he never bartered or traded in the normal human way. Which is why he had only two real friends. And for the sake of those two friends he was rejecting a windfall. Not so long ago they had called him an English gentleman for doing this. These very people.
He struck the grille with his fist.
It was a ‘top-up’ day; he looked at the
round water stains on the ceiling of his living room and saw asteroids and white dwarves. In the cursive mildew he read E = mc2.
He straightened out the books in his cabinet (where had all the Agatha Christies vanished?), dusted the teakwood table, tried to limit his use of the Rubik’s Cube by hiding it on a shelf of his wife’s cupboard, and drew the blinds and lay in bed.
He closed his eyes.
He did not see her until too late. The old fish-seller had a leathery face, cunning with wrinkles, and she walked with a basket on her head. Closer and closer she came towards him, grinning all the time: and just as she passed him he saw that a large wet tail was poking out of her basket.
He awoke to find his face and arms smelling like fish. He swatted the pillows off his bed and got up.
I’ve slept during the day, he thought. Around him the living room trembled, like a cage from which light had just sprung out. It was thirty-five minutes past four.
To expunge the sin of afternoon indolence, his first lapse since childhood, he washed his face in cold water three times, slapped his cheeks, and decided to walk all the way to the train station and back.
Tinku Kothari, the Secretary’s son, dressed in a crumpled school uniform, stood outside his door. Masterji paused with the key in his hand.
‘They’re calling you.’
‘Who?’
The fat boy went down the stairs. Still holding the key in his palm, Masterji followed the boy through the gates of Vishram; every now and then, Tinku would turn around, like a dark finger that was summoning him. Masterji thought he smelled more and more strongly of fish’s tail. He followed the boy to Ibrahim Kudwa’s cyber-café.
Tinku ran in and shouted: ‘Uncle! He’s here!’
Arjun, the Christianized assistant, had climbed up to the glass lunette above the doorway of the café to fix a loose rivet with a screwdriver. From up there he looked down, monkey-like, on the fat boy who had run into the café. How all creatures, Masterji thought, watching Arjun, have their niche in this world. Just two weeks ago I was like him. I had somewhere to perch among the windows and grilles of Vishram.