The lawyer wiped his lips and said: ‘Exactly.’
‘But Mofa…’ Masterji mumbled. ‘Mofa, Mofa?’
The lawyer ran his hand over his three silver strands. ‘The name of Mofa Act is not to be taken lightly.’ He shook his head. ‘For thirty years you have taught your students in accordance with Dharma. Now let us be two teachers to you, Masterji. Even some lawyers who have been twenty, thirty years in this honourable profession don’t understand what Mofa Act is, frankly speaking. Common man cannot understand subtleties of Mofa Act. Because you have to think of how Mofa behaves with MMRDA and BMC.’
‘MHADA,’ the other reminded him. ‘MHADA.’
‘Very true. In this city, MHADA is always there. Somewhere in background. Sometimes in foreground. We must not forget that the government is about to repeal ULCRA any day. Urban Land Ceiling Regulation Act? All this we have to think before we bring up the name of Mofa Act. Understand? Don’t worry. We understand on your behalf.’
Masterji saw before him not just two bullying lawyers, but the primal presence of authority. Is this how my students saw me all those years? Beneath that low ceiling, an old teacher sat crushed under understanding.
This lawyer with the hidden gold medallion, and this young man, son or assistant, were crooks changing coins in the temple of the law. That was why Parekh had asked for the phone number of the Secretary; all this time the two of them had been in contact.
Masterji looked at the photograph of Angkor Wat, and asked: ‘You spoke to Mr Shah? Behind my back?’
‘Mr Shah contacted me. His man came here – nice Tamilian fellow, what was his name? Shatpati? Shodaraja?’ The lawyer tapped a tooth. ‘No business card, but he gave his number. I can renegotiate. Squeeze an even better settlement for you.’
‘I don’t want a better settlement.’
‘We’ll get you the best settlement.’
‘I want no settlement. I will find another lawyer.’
‘Now, Masterji.’ Mr Parekh leaned in to him. ‘The others will ask for a retainer and waste your time and tell you the same. Frankly, sir: I don’t understand what it is you want.’
‘I keep telling you: nothing.’
At once the A/C seemed to stop working: Mr Parekh wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief.
‘Sir: these real-estate men pick on us senior citizens. Politicians and police are in their pay, you must know that. They shot an elected member of the city corporation dead the other day. In broad daylight. Didn’t you see it in the papers? Old men must stick together in this new world.’
‘You are threatening me now?’ Masterji asked.
‘My own lawyer?’ Mr Parekh sneezed into a handkerchief, and then said,
‘I am threatening you, sir, with the facts of human nature.’
Instead of an Angkor Wat behind the lawyer’s head, Masterji now saw an image of the High Court of Bombay: a Gothic structure with a soaring roof, ancient and massive, sitting like a paperweight on the city, and symbolizing, for its residents, the authority of law. Now this High Court and its high roof shuddered and its solid Gothic arches became shredded paper fluttering down on Masterji’s shoulders. Mofa. MHADA. ULCRA. MSCA. ULFA. Mohamaulfacramrdama-ma-ma-abracadabra, soft, soft, it fell on him, the futile law of India.
Just then he heard Mr Parekh’s young colleague say, ‘You didn’t even charge him for your basic expenses, Father. All the photocopying we had to do. You have a conscience, that is why. All senior citizens are your family.’
So he is the son, Masterji thought. The possession of this fact – trivial, and irrelevant to his troubles – mysteriously filled him with strength. He put his hands on the arms of his chair and stood up.
‘Now wait here,’ the younger Parekh said, realizing that the bird was about to fly. ‘If you’re going to leave like this, what about our dues? What about all the photocopying we did for you?’
From behind him, Masterji heard the young man’s voice protesting: ‘Let’s stop him, Father – at once. Father, let’s run after him.’
The green bucket fell over as Masterji pulled his umbrella from it, and splattered his ankles with water.
Past the guards and their blind deity he walked, down the old stairs – past the pigeon, thrashing behind the blind lunette.
Purnima, he prayed, swoop down and lift me from the land of the living.
His wife answered him, as he ran out of the Loyola Trust Building, in an aroma of freshly fried potatoes.
He stopped at a fried-snacks shop.
In seconds a ball of batter-fried vada pav, bought for four rupees, was dissolving in Masterji’s gut. Oil, potato, cholesterol, trans-fats slowed the whirlpool in his stomach.
Wiping away the humiliating slick of grease on his lips, he found a grocery store where he could make calls from a yellow payphone wrapped in plastic. Gaurav would be at work now. The one place where that boy might be free of his wife’s influence. Umbrella under his arm, he called Vittal, in the school library, and asked for the phone number of Gaurav’s bank, the Canara Cooperative Society. With a second rupee, he called the bank and asked for Mr G. Murthy, junior branch manager.
‘It’s me. Your father. I’m calling from Bandra. Something very bad has just happened.’
There was silence.
‘What is it, Father? I’m at work.’
‘Can you speak now? It’s urgent, Gaurav. No, it’s a payphone. I’ll call back from this same number. Ten minutes.’
Telling the grocery store owner to keep the phone free for him, he ran over to the fried-snacks store, and bought another vada pav.
Munching on the batter-fried potatoes, he walked back to Parekh’s office: at the barber’s shop, he saw a familiar dark face reflected in one of the mirrors.
He turned and found a man in a crisp white shirt standing right outside the Loyola Trust Building.
He stared at Mr Shah’s left-hand man. The metal grilles of the building groaned as pigeons landed on them.
‘Mr Masterji…’ Shanmugham held out his hand. ‘Don’t do this to yourself. This is the last chance.’
Masterji shivered at the sight of that hand. Without a word he walked away from his ex-lawyer’s office.
‘Hire another lawyer,’ Gaurav said, when his father, calling him from the pay telephone, had explained everything. ‘There are thousands in the city.’
Masterji found his son’s voice changed, ready to listen.
‘No,’ he told Gaurav. ‘It won’t work. The law won’t work.’
He could hear the builder’s tongue vibrating within Parekh’s mucus. Just like the tuning fork he had used in class for an acoustics experiment. Corruption had become Physics; its precise frequency had been discovered by Mr Shah. If he engaged another lawyer, that thick tongue would fine tune him too.
‘My last hope is Noronha. At the Times. I’ve written letter after letter, and he won’t write back. If there’s some way to reach him, son…’
More silence. Then Gaurav said: ‘I have a connection at the Times. I’ll see if we can reach Noronha. In the meantime you go home and lock the door, Father. When my connection gets back to me, I’ll phone you.’
‘Gaurav,’ he said, his voice thickening with gratitude. ‘I’ll do that, Gaurav. I’ll go home and wait for your call.’
A cow had been tied up by the side of the fried-snacks store, a healthy animal with a black comet mark on its forehead. It had just been milked, and a bare-chested man in a dhoti was taking away a mildewed bucket inside which fresh milk looked like radioactive liquid. Squatting by the cow a woman in a saffron sari was squeezing gruel into balls. Next to her two children were being bathed by another woman. Half a village crammed into a crack in the pavement. The cow chewed on grass and jackfruit rinds. Round-bellied and big-eyed, aglow with health: it sucked in diesel and exhaust fumes, particulate matter and sulphur dioxide, and churned them in its four stomachs, creaming good milk out of bad air and bacterial water. Drawn by the magnetism of so much ruddy health, the old
man put his finger to its shit-caked belly. The living organs of the animal vibrated into him, saying: all this power in me is power in you too.
I have done good to others. I was a teacher for thirty-four years.
The cow lifted her tail. Shit piled on the road. When they saw Masterji talking to the cow and telling her his woes, those who had been born in the city perhaps thought that he was a mad old man, but those who had come from the villages knew better: recognizing the piety in his act, the woman in the saffron sari got up. The two children followed her. Soon the cow’s forehead was covered with human palms.
Giri laid out dinner on the table. White rice, spinach curry, curried beans, and pappad, around a hilsa fish, grilled and chopped, mixed with salt and pepper, and served in a porcelain bowl. The fish’s head sat on top, its lips open, as if pleading for breath among its own body parts.
The hilsa made Shah’s mouth water. He walked around the dinner table in his Malabar Hill home with a piece of silk in his hand – a handkerchief that Rosie had bought him, one of those tiny portions of his own money that she returned to him, perfumed and gift-wrapped in damask. He rubbed it between his fingers.
He had been walking about the flat ever since Shanmugham had come back from the lawyer’s office, sweating with bad news.
Fresh breeze: he went up to the window. Down below, in the gutter outside his building, a man in rags scavenged for empty bottles.
Even down there, Shah saw wanting. That beggar with the gunny sack, if the story so far were told to him, would be appalled by this old teacher. A man who does not want: who has no secret spaces in his heart into which a little more cash can be stuffed, what kind of man is that?
‘I have seen every kind of negotiation tactic, Giri. I can classify them. Saying you’re ill. Blind. You miss your beloved dead dog Timmy or Tommy that lived in that flat. But I have never seen this tactic of simply saying “No”, permanently.’
‘Yes, Boss.’ Giri said. ‘Will you eat now?’
‘We are dealing with the most dangerous thing on earth, Giri. A weak man. A weak man who has found a place where he feels strong. He won’t leave Vishram. I understand now.’
Giri touched his master.
‘Sit. Or the hilsa will get cold, and what did Giri go to all this trouble for?’
Shah looked at the fish: and he had a vision of the old teacher, sliced and chopped the same way, salted and peppered, sitting on the dinner table. He shivered, and rubbed the silk again.
All Shanmugham had done so far was to send a boy with a hockey stick to speak to that old man – Mr Pinto. Nothing criminal in that. He had just been sending Vishram Society a gift from reality. He had assumed that would be enough, for a building full of older people. Social animals.
Now Shanmugham was waiting in the basement for instructions. He could see him standing by a car’s rear-view mirror or in the lift, practising his threats: ‘Old man, we have given you every chance, and now we are left with no…’
The silk grew warm in Shah’s fingers.
A dirty business, construction, and he had come up through its dirtiest part. Redevelopment. If you enjoy fish, you have to swallow a few bones. He made no apology for what he had had to do to get here. But this was not how the Shanghai was meant to happen: not after he had offered 19,000 rupees a square foot for an old, old building.
The hot silk handkerchief fell to the floor.
Hanging above the writing desk in his study was Rosie’s gift, the framed three-part black-and-white poster of the Eiffel Tower being raised into place. Placing all his fingers on the polished mahogany table Shah saw, as if through a periscope, the rabbit-warren of cash networks that ran beneath it: he spied into the deepest, most secret paths through which the Confidence Group moved its money and followed the flipping serial numbers of accounts in the Channel Islands and in the Maldives. He was master of things seen and things unseen. Buildings rising above the earth and concourses of money running below it.
And why had he built these things above and below the earth?
Now everyone believed India was going to be a rich country. He had known it ten years ago. Had planned for the future. Skip out of slum redevelopment. Start building glossy skyscrapers, shopping malls, maybe one day an entire suburb, like the Hiranandanis in Powai. Leave something behind, a new name, the Confidence Group, founder Dharmen Vrijesh Shah, a first-wife’s son from Krishnapur.
And some stupid old teacher was going to get in the way? One of the neighbours had told Shanmugham that Masterji’s son had contacted her. He had told her that his father planned on going to the Times of India the next day. To say that the Confidence Group was threatening him.
The builder slapped both palms against his skull. Of all the good housing societies in Vakola, of all the societies dying to receive such an offer, why had he picked this one?
Fate, chance, destiny, luck, horoscopes. A man had his will power, but there were dark powers operating all around him. So he sought protection in astrology. His mother had died when he was a boy. Wasn’t he marked out for bad luck from the start? The first wife’s son. Krishnapur, he smelled its cow shit in his nostrils. He had rebelled against it, but it was still there, the village mud, village fatalism.
He could not leave Vishram now. He would lose face in Vakola. J. J. Chacko would take out advertisements up and down the highway mocking him.
And that meant there was only one thing to do with this old man. Only one thing could make the Shanghai happen.
Shah thought of the chopped hilsa.
In the old days, if a builder had a problem, that problem would end up in pieces in the wet concrete: it became part of the building it had tried to obstruct. A bit of calcium was good for the foundations. But those days were gone: the lawless days of the 1980s and ’90s. Vishram was a middle-class building. The man was a teacher. If he died suddenly, there would be an immediate suspect. The police would come to Malabar Hill and press his doorbell the next morning.
On the other hand, the palms of the policemen had been well greased. He might get away with it if the job were done well: scientifically, no fingerprints left behind. His reputation in Vakola would certainly improve: deep down, everyone admires violence. It was a risk, a big risk, but he might get away with it. He bent down and picked up the silk cloth.
As it became warm again between his fingers, he heard snoring.
The door to his son’s room was ajar. Satish’s thick legs were curled together on the bed. Shah closed the door behind him and sat down by his son’s side.
Seeing his son like this, a breathing thing amidst warm dishevelled sheets, Shah thought of the woman with whom he had made this new life.
Rukmini. He had never seen her before the wedding day; she had been sent by bus from Krishnapur after he refused to return for the marriage. They had been wed right here in the city. He admired her courage: she had adapted to the big city in a matter of hours. The evening of the wedding, she was fighting with the grocery store man over the price of white sugar. After all these years, Shah smiled at the memory. For thirteen years she had kept his house, raised his son, and supervised his kitchen while he shouted at his colleagues and left-hand men in the living room or on the phone. She seemed to have no more of an opinion about construction than he did about cooking. Then one evening – he could not remember what she had overheard – she came to the bedroom, turned off his Kishore Kumar music, and said: ‘If you keep threatening other people and their children, one day something might happen to your own child.’ Then she turned the music on and left the room. The only time she had ever commented on his work.
Shah touched the dark body on the dishevelled bed. He felt the boy’s future like a fever. Drugs, alcohol. Jail time. A spiral of trouble. All because of his karma.
He felt he had tripped over something ancestral and half buried, like a pot of gold in the backyard: a sense of shame.
‘Master’ – it was Giri, silhouetted in the blinding light through the open door. ‘The hilsa.??
?
‘Throw it out. And close the door, Giri, Satish is sleeping.’
‘Master. Shanmugham… has come upstairs. He asks if you have anything to say to him.’
His wife’s almirah was open, the fragrance of her wedding sari and the old balls of camphor filled the bedroom air.
Masterji sat like a yogi on the floor.
Mrs Puri was shouting at her husband next door; the Secretary was pounding his heavy feet above his head. Then he heard feet from all around the building heading for the door below him. They were speaking to the Pintos. He heard voices rising, and then Mr Pinto saying, ‘All right. All right. But leave us alone then.’
A few minutes later, the doorbell rang.
When he opened the door, a small thin woman stood outside with a red notebook. A blue rubber band had been tied twice around it.
‘Mr Pinto gave this to his maid to give you, Masterji.’
‘So why are you giving it to me, Mary?’
Mary looked at her feet. ‘Because she didn’t want to give it to you herself.’
Masterji took the red book and removed the rubber band. The No-Argument book had been returned to him, with a yellow Post-it note on its cover, All debts settled and accounts closed.
‘Don’t be angry with Mr Pinto,’ Mary whispered. ‘They forced him to do it. Mrs Puri and the others.’
Masterji nodded. ‘I don’t blame him. He is frightened.’
He did not know whether to look at Mary. In all these years, he had not exchanged, except on matters directly related to her work, even a dozen words with the cleaning woman of his Society.
She smiled. ‘But you don’t worry, Masterji. God will protect us. They’re trying to throw me out of my home too. I live by the nullah.’