The workers at the sugarcane stand had overheard, and now they asked the fortunate man for details; a nearby newspaper-vendor came to listen in. A fellow in a slum? Sixty-three lakhs? Nearby? Which slum? Which fellow? Are you sure it was sixty-three?
Mrs Rego and Ajwani watched the bearded man, who had freckles on his large nose, perhaps from measles, wondering if those were the marks by which fortunate humans were identified.
Done with their sugarcane juice, the boys walked from the beach to the main road. Vijay, revitalized by the juice, had caught Dharmendar in a head-lock.
Mrs Rego wished she hadn’t had the juice: the sudden sugar, as it always did, made her feel depressed. She licked her lips and spat away what remained of the sweet juice – the finest compensation the city could offer these boys for the dreams it wouldn’t make real.
‘What will become of them, Mr Ajwani? Such fine boys, all of them… ’
‘What do you mean, what will become of them?’
‘I mean, Mr Ajwani, all this talent, all this energy: do these boys have any idea of what lies ahead for them? Disappointment. That’s all.’
The broker stopped. ‘How can you say this, Mrs Rego? You have always helped others.’
She stopped by his side. Her face contracted into something smaller and darker with grief.
Ajwani smiled; the parallel lines on his cheeks deepened.
‘I have learned something about life, Mrs Rego. You and I were trapped: but we wanted to be trapped. These boys will live in a better world. Look over there.’
‘Where?’ She asked.
A bus passed by with an advertisement for a film called Dance, Dance; autorickshaws and scooters followed it. When they had passed, Mrs Rego saw a group of white-uniformed dabba-wallahs with their pointed caps, seated in a ring, playing cards on the pavement.
‘The light is not good. I can’t see what you’re…’
After a while, Mrs Rego saw, or thought she saw, what her former neighbour was pointing at.
Past the traffic, on the other side of the road, she saw the boundary wall of an old Juhu housing society, displaying three generations of torture devices: primitive coloured bottle-glass shards, stuck into the entire length of the wall, and over them a layer of rusty barbed wire with its ends tied into jagged knots, and over that, rolled into giant coils, a shinier barbed wire with large square metal studs, like she had seen in action movies around American military installations, less crudely threatening than the rusty layer but unmistakably more lethal. Behind these overlapping wires she saw banyan trees; all of which were hemmed in by the fencing; except for one greying ancient, whose aerial roots, squirming through barbed wire and broken glass, dripped down the wall like primordial ooze until their bright growing tips, nearly touching the pavement, brushed against a homeless family cooking rice in the shade; and with each root-tip that had beaten the barbed wire the old banyan said: Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free.
Vakola, Mumbai
March 2007–October 2009
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Robin Desser at Knopf edited this novel and made it a better one.
I thank my uncle, Mr Udaya Holla of Sadashivanagara, Bangalore, for taking care of my interests for so many years.
I thank Drew MacRae, Ravi Mirchandani, Pankaj Mishra, Akash Shah and his family, Justice Suresh and Rajini, Shivjit ‘Chevy’ Sidhu, Vinay Jayaram, Vivek Bansal, William Green, Elizabeth Zoe Vicary, Professor Robert W. Hanning, Professor David Scott Kastan, Jason Zweig, S. Prasannarajan, Devangshu Datta, Sree Srinivasan, Robert Safian, Jason Overdorf and Ivor Indyk.
Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower
(Series: # )
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends