Last Man in Tower

  ‘But I don’t want the money, boys. I’ll explain again. India is a republic. If a man wants to stay in his home, then it is his freedom to do so. If he wants to go, then…’

  The three listened; at the end, one of them said: ‘You used to quote Romans in class, sir. The one who knew about the sun.’

  ‘Anaxagoras. A Greek.’

  ‘You’re as tough as any Roman, sir. You’re like that fellow in the movie… Maximus the Gladiator.’

  ‘Which movie is this?’

  That made them laugh.

  ‘Maximus Masterji!’ said one, and all three left in a good mood.

  Masterji saw his story – the interpretation of his recent actions, which had until now been held securely in his conscience – slipping away from him. He had become part of the market: his story, in newsprint, was used by the vendors to cover their produce. The okra was wrapped in him; fresh bread lent him its aroma.

  ‘Masterji!’ It was Mary. She had a copy of the Sun.

  ‘You’re in the English papers.’ She grinned and showed him her big front teeth. ‘We’re all so proud of you. We passed it around the nullah. When my son comes back from school, I’ll have him read it to us.’

  ‘I haven’t read it, Mary,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t?’ Mary, scandalized, insisted that he take the paper. She turned to the article with the photograph of Vishram Society.

  OLD MAN IN TOWER SAYS NO TO BUILDER

  Masterji skimmed:

  … only one man, Yogesh Murthy, retired teacher at the nearby school, has resisted the generous offer of the reputable… ‘it is a question of an an individual’s freedom to say Yes, No, or Go to Hell’…

  By describing himself thus as the small man in this situation, Murthy may hope to win the sympathy of some, but how honest is this picture he paints? One of the residents of the Society, not wishing to be identified, said, ‘He is the most selfish man in the world. His own son does not speak to him now…’

  …was borne out by many others to whom this reporter spoke. According to one of Mr Murthy’s former students, who did not wish to be named, ‘He had no patience and he was always ready to punish. We used to call him names behind his back. To say that we remember him fondly would be the biggest…’

  Mary bent down to pick up the paper; it had fallen from Masterji’s hands.

  Looking down, Masterji saw a bird, smaller than the centre of a man’s palm, thrashing about on the ground like a vitalized chunk of brown sugar. This only makes things worse, he thought, as he followed the bird’s dizzying movements. My neighbours will blame me for it.

  A little boy with a black string amulet around his neck began circling Masterji in off-balance, chick-like loops, hands flapping by his side. The onion-seller came running behind him: ‘Bad boy!’ He caught the little fellow and pinched him; the chastised boy cried with operatic emotion: ‘Pa-pa-jee!’

  Seconds later, he had escaped his father again, had been caught again, and was now bawling: ‘Ma-maa-jee!’

  To make the boy stop crying, Masterji offered him a piece of bread. ‘Would you like this?’

  A big nod of the little head; the boy nibbled.

  Masterji insisted that Mary take the rest of his fresh bread for her son.

  For over thirty years he had handed out sweet, soft things to the children of Vishram Society on Gandhi Jayanti.

  He stopped at the whitewashed banyan outside Ibrahim Kudwa’s cyber-café. Arjun, Kudwa’s assistant, had placed a photograph of the Mahatma in a niche in the banyan, and he and the Hindu holy man who sometimes stopped there, clapping their hands in unison, were chanting Gandhi’s favourite hymn:

  ‘Ishwar Allah Tero Naam

  Sabko Sanmati de Bhagavan.’

  ‘Ishwar and Allah are both your names

  Give everyone this wisdom, Lord.’

  The national tricolour had been hoisted above the Speed-Tek Cyber Café; Masterji saw it reflected in the tinted window of a moving car, streaming in reverse like a dark meteor over Vakola.

  In the middle of the night, Ashvin Kothari woke up sniffing the air.

  ‘What is that smell?’

  He turned on his bedside lamp. His wife was staring at the ceiling.

  ‘Go back to sleep.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Go back to—’

  ‘It’s something you women are doing, isn’t it?’

  The Secretary followed the smell down the stairs to the third floor.

  Something brown, freshly applied by hand, the fingermarks still visible in it, covered Masterji’s door. A fly buzzed about it.

  The Secretary closed his eyes. He raced up the stairs to his flat.

  His wife was on the sofa, waiting for him.

  ‘Don’t blame Mrs Puri,’ she said. ‘She asked me and I agreed.’

  The Secretary sat down with his eyes closed. ‘O Krishna, Krishna…’

  ‘Let him smell what we think of him, Mr Kothari. That’s what we women decided.’

  ‘… Krishna…’

  ‘It’s Ramu’s shit – that’s all. Don’t become melodramatic. Masterji talked to the Mumbai Sun, didn’t he? Famous man. He wants Mrs Puri to clean it herself for the rest of her life, doesn’t he? So let him clean Ramu’s shit one morning, and see how much he likes it. Let him use that same Sun to clean it.’

  With his fingers in his ears, her husband chanted, as his father had taught him to do, years ago in Nairobi, the name of Lord Krishna.

  Their noses covered with handkerchiefs, saris, and shirtsleeves, they filled the stairs to see what had been done to the door of 3A. Hunched over, Masterji was scrubbing his door with a wet Brillo pad. He had a bucket of water next to him, and every few minutes squeezed the Brillo pad into it.

  Brought back down the stairs by his sense of responsibility, the Secretary dispersed the onlookers. ‘Please go back to bed,’ he whispered. ‘Or the whole neighbourhood will find out and talk about us.’

  The door to 3C opened.

  Had Masterji shouted, Mrs Puri would have shouted back. Had he rushed to hit her, she would have pushed him down the stairs. But he was on his knees, scraping the grooves and ridges into which Ramu’s excrement was hardening; he glanced at her and went back to his work, as if it did not concern her.

  A man pushed from behind Mrs Puri and stepped into the corridor.

  Sanjiv Puri saw what was on Masterji’s door; he understood.

  ‘What have you done, Sangeeta?’ He looked at his wife. ‘What have you done to my name, to my reputation? You have betrayed your own son.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Puri,’ the Secretary whispered. ‘Please. People will hear.’

  Sangeeta Puri took a step towards her husband.

  ‘It’s all your fault.’

  ‘My fault?’

  ‘You kept saying we couldn’t have children till you had a manager’s job. So I had to wait till I was thirty-four. That’s why Ramu is delayed. The older a woman is, the greater the danger. And now I have to clean his shit for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Sangeeta, this is a lie. A lie.’

  ‘I wanted to have Ramu ten years earlier. You talked of the rat race. You complained that migrants were taking the jobs, but you never fought back. You never became manager in time for me to have a healthy child. It was not the Evil Eye: it was you.’

  Masterji stopped scrubbing.

  ‘If you shout, Sangeeta, you will wake Ramu. No one did this thing. Sometimes plaster falls from the ceiling, because it is an old building. I say the same thing has happened here. Now all of you go to sleep.’

  The Secretary got down on his knees and offered to help with the scrubbing, but Masterji said: ‘I’ll do it.’

  He closed his eyes and remembered the light from behind the buildings at Crawford Market. Those labourers pulling carts under the JJ flyover did work that was worse than this every day.

  2 OCTOBER

  The compound wall was dark from Mary’s morning round with the green garden hose. Water
drops shivered off the hibiscus plant; Ramu was prodding its stem with a stick.

  Walking up from the black Cross, where she had been standing for a while, his mother called to him. The hibiscus plant shook.

  She came near and saw what he was doing.

  ‘… what is the meaning of…?’

  The boy would not turn around. He had sucked in his lips; he kept poking the thing at the root of the plant. Mrs Puri pulled him back and looked at him with disbelieving eyes.

  ‘Don’t hurt the poor worm, Ramu. Is it hurting you?’

  Shaking his mother’s hands off him, he thrust his wooden stick back into the coiled-up earthworm, which squirmed under the pressure, but did not uncoil. Mrs Puri felt as if someone had poked a rod into her side.

  ‘Oy, oy, oy, my Ramu, it is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. What would he say if he saw you?’

  He must have overheard someone talking in the stairwell or in the garden. He knew what had happened last night.

  ‘If Masterji doesn’t say yes, we won’t ever get our new home. Remember, Ramu, the wooden cupboard in that nice new building in Goregaon… the fresh smell, the sunlight on the wood?’

  He did not turn around. She saw that he had cut the earthworm into two writhing pieces.

  ‘I promise: not one thing to upset Masterji after this. I promise. Don’t hurt the worm.’

  But he would not turn.

  ‘Ramu. Are you fighting with your mother?’

  Masterji, who had walked in through the gate, came towards the hibiscus plant. ‘Happy Gandhi Jayanti,’ he said to the woman who had applied excrement to his door only a few hours ago.

  She said nothing.

  The boy dropped his stick and came to him; the old teacher put his arms around his neighbour’s son and whispered: ‘Mustn’t fight with Mummy, Ramu. The deadline will end soon. After that your Mummy and I will be friends again.’

  He left the two of them alone and went up to his flat.

  Standing at the window of the living room, he was hoping to see some celebrations for Gandhi Jayanti. It was traditionally a big day at the Society. An old picture of Mahatma Gandhi kept inside the Secretary’s desk for such occasions would be placed over the guard’s booth. A black Sony three-in-one would play old film songs from Ibrahim Kudwa’s window.

  His phone rang. It was Ms Meenakshi, his ex-neighbour. She was calling from her new home in Bandra.

  The response to the story about him – the one her boyfriend had written – had been ‘fantastic!’ Would Masterji consider a follow-up? Would he keep a blog? Not a blong, a blog.

  ‘Thank you for your help, Ms Meenakshi, and give my regards to your boyfriend. But my answer remains no.’

  He put the phone down. He went back to the window.

  Another truck had stopped in front of Tower B; beds and tables had been brought down from the building and were being loaded on to it. The last residents were leaving. The remaining children of Tower B were playing cricket by the truck with the children of Tower A.

  He closed his eyes: he imagined the living room full of his neighbours’ children again. Dirty cricket bats and bright young faces again.

  ‘Today we shall see how sound travels at different speeds in solids and in liquids’ – he stretched his legs – ‘right here in this room. And you, Mohammad Kudwa, make sure you don’t talk while the experiment is going on. No, I haven’t forgotten what you did last time…’

  When he woke from his nap, the truck was gone.

  The security grilles, removed from what used to be Vishram Tower B, had left rusty ghost-shadows around the windows and balconies, like eyebrows plucked in a painful ceremony. Pigeons flew in and out of the rooms, now no one’s rooms, just the spent cartridges of old dreams. Yellow tape criss-crossed the base of the building:

  THE CONFIDENCE GROUP (HEADQUARTERS: PAREL) HAS TAKEN PHYSICAL POSSESSION OF THIS BUILDING MARKED FOR DEMOLITION

  *

  Holding the latest letter from Deepa in her fingers, re-creating her daughter’s face and voice from the texture of the paper, Mrs Pinto lay in bed. The stereophonic buzz of evening serials from TV sets on nearly every floor of the building penetrated her thoughts, as if they were long-wave messages from her daughter in America.

  The door to the flat scraped open; she heard her husband’s slow footsteps.

  ‘Where were you gone so long?’ she shouted. ‘Leaving me alone here.’

  Her husband sat down at the dining table, breathing noisily and pouring himself a glass from a jug of filtered water.

  ‘The deadline has almost passed, Shelley. I really thought he would say yes in the end, Shelley. I really did.’

  She spoke softly.

  ‘What will that Confidence Man do to him now, Mr Pinto?’

  ‘Anything could happen. These are not Christian men. These builders.’

  ‘Then you must save Masterji, Mr Pinto. You owe it to him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The number of times you cheated him, Mr Pinto. You owe him.’

  ‘Shelley Pinto.’ Her husband sat up on his side of the bed. ‘Shelley Pinto.’

  ‘In the No-Argument book. When you were an accountant at the Britannia Biscuit Company you cheated people at work. I think you cheated Masterji too.’

  ‘This is a lie, Shelley. How dare you speak to your husband like this?’

  ‘I have been your wife for thirty-six years. That one time you and Masterji went to Lucky Biryani in Bandra. You came back very happy that night and I thought: He must have cheated Masterji again. Didn’t you change numbers in the No-Argument the way you changed numbers at the Britannia Biscuit Company?’

  She heard a creaking of springs; she was alone in the bedroom. Mr Pinto had turned on the television set.

  She went to the sofa and sat by him.

  ‘We don’t have to save him, Mr Pinto. The others will do it. We just have to keep quiet.’

  ‘What are they going to do?’

  She motioned for him to increase the volume of the television.

  ‘Sangeeta and Renuka Kothari came today and said, if all of us agree to do something – a simple thing – would you and Mr Pinto agree?’

  ‘What is this simple thing, Shelley?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Pinto. I told them not to tell us.’

  ‘But when is it happening?’

  ‘I told them not to tell me anything. Now turn the television down a bit.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Turn the TV down.’

  ‘I like it loud,’ Mr Pinto said. ‘You go into the garden.’

  Treading on ‘the Diamond’, Mrs Pinto went down the stairs.

  She thought of 1.4 crore rupees of Mr Shah’s money: the figure was part of the dark world around her. She went down two more steps. Now she thought of 100,000 dollars, sent to Tony, and another 100,000 dollars, sent to Deepa: her eyes filled with light, and the wall glowed like a plane of beaten gold.

  When she had descended another flight of steps, her foot struck something warm and living. It did not smell like a dog.

  ‘Stop prodding me with your foot.’

  ‘Why are you sitting on the steps, Kothari?’ she asked.

  ‘My wife won’t let me watch television, Mrs Pinto. Renuka has cut the cable connection. My wife of thirty-one years. Without TV, what is a home?’

  She sat a step above him.

  ‘What a strange situation. But you can watch in our house.’

  ‘My wife of thirty-one years. Yet she does this. See what is happening to our Society.’

  ‘If I may ask, Mr Kothari… why has she cut your cable connection?’

  ‘Because I won’t do the simple thing. The one she and the others want to do to Masterji. Do you know what the simple thing is?’

  ‘They did not tell me what it was. I thought it was your idea.’

  ‘Mine? Oh, no. It was Ajwani’s.’

  The Secretary tried to remember: was it Ajwani’s idea? It didn’t matter: like one of
those wasps’ nests that sometimes grew on the walls of the Society, the idea of the “simple thing” had materialized out of nowhere, swelling in size in hours, until every household in Vishram seemed to have become one of its cells. All of them wanted it done now. Even his own wife.

  ‘This simple thing… will it hurt Masterji?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mrs Pinto, what the “simple thing” is any more than you do. It’s Ajwani’s idea. He has connections in the slums. They just want me to give him the duplicate key to Masterji’s flat. I can’t do that, Mrs Pinto. It’s against the rules.’

  Mrs Pinto sucked in the dark air of the stairwell.

  ‘Will Mr Shah really not extend the deadline?’

  The Secretary exhaled.

  ‘Every time I hear a car or an autorickshaw, the tea spills from my teacup. It could be that Shanmugham fellow, coming to say, Sorry, it’s over.’

  ‘Then we won’t see the dollars.’

  ‘Dollars?’

  ‘Rupees.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Masterji see it the way we do?’

  ‘He doesn’t even come down to have dinner. Thinks he’s too good for Mr Pinto and me. After poor Mr Pinto broke his leg for Masterji’s sake. Thinks he’s a great man because he’s fighting this Shah. Went and spoke to the papers about his own Society.’

  ‘After all the times he came down to your house and ate your food. Ingratitude is the worst of sins, my father always said.’ He paused. ‘My father was the greatest man I ever knew. If he had stayed in Africa, he would have become a millionaire. A prince. But the foreigners didn’t want him to succeed. Isn’t that always the story of our people?’

  Mrs Pinto placed her cold hand on his. ‘Is someone walking up the stairs?’ she whispered.

  The Secretary peered down the stairwell. ‘Just the dog.’

  With his palm he wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  ‘Why don’t you make a duplicate of Masterji’s key?’ Mrs Pinto put her hand on the Secretary’s shoulder. ‘That won’t be against the rules. The key will always be in your possession. Just give the duplicate to Ajwani.’