Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Sitting on his chair, watching his ocean, swaying from his hip, Shah hummed his favourite Kishore Kumar song. Aa chal ke tujhe, mein … Leaning back from the chair, he pressed down on the bed with a finger, feeling the 2.8 micron pore width bedding on the premium spring mattress: he lifted the finger with a pinprick of recharging will power.

The path to a new building in Mumbai sparkled with small stones — police, litigation, greed — and he would need every ounce of his body fat to crush those stones, one by one. Before every new project, like a religious ritual, he had to come here, to this flat, to whichever girl he was with at that moment, Nannu or Smita or Rosie, to inhale her perfume, eat toast, watch the ocean, touch the golden fittings in the toilet. In the presence of luxury his capacity for violence was always heightened.

He knocked on her door: ‘I’ll count to five, Rosie.’

‘No. I’ll never come out. You never take me to your home. Never—’

‘One,’ he counted. ‘Two. Three. Four.’

A woman’s face peeped from behind the opened door.

An hour later, Mr Shah washed his face, hands, and chest in her bathroom. From the window he spotted a man in white shirt and black trousers down by the beach, sitting on rocks and doodling on the sand as he waited for his master’s phone call.

No assistant had done the job as long as this one had without giving in to fear or greed. But this Shanmugham was special. A thorough-bred Doberman.

He called Giri on his mobile phone.

‘I’m going to SiddhiVinayak temple at five o’clock and then to my Society in Vakola. Tell the boy to be at the temple. On time.’

Rosie lay on her right side, her face hidden in her arms. He lay down beside her, and clapped, turning the light in her room on. He clapped again — it went off — and again — until Rosie slapped his shoulder and said, ‘Stop acting like a child.’

Shanmugham, still sitting on the rock, had picked up a stone and was pounding it into the hot sand, again and again.

He had been tricked. Tricked .

By his own bank manager.

He remembered that greasy old white-haired man’s exact words — since he was such a valued customer, he would be getting a ‘little extra’ on top of the scheduled interest rates (‘the best rate legally obtainable in this city, I promise you’); and now he had discovered that a beach umbrella was advertising a higher interest rate!

Throwing the stone away, Shanmugham got up from the rock, and brushed the sand off his trousers.

After lunch at a Punjabi dhaba where he had to wash his hands with water from a plastic jug, he watched young women run on treadmills inside a gym called ‘Barbarian’, drank a fresh coconut by the side of a road at two o’clock and ate pistachio ice cream from a porcelain plate at a restaurant at three.

He divided the slab of ice cream into sixteen parts, and ate one part at a time, to prolong his stay at the restaurant. By the fourteenth piece of ice cream, he was certain that the middle-aged man in shorts was that actor who used to be famous ten years ago. Amrish Puri.

Not Amrish. He punished a piece of ice cream by squashing it with his spoon. Om Puri.

Chewing the fifteenth piece, he thought: I am eating ice cream at a restaurant where a film actor strolls in for the same thing .

He would never have dreamed such a thing possible till that day, six years ago, when in his dingy real-estate office in Chembur he heard that a builder was looking for a labour contractor. They had met in a nearby south Indian restaurant. Mr Shah had been pouring tea into his saucer.

‘A simple question.’ The fat man had shown him two gold-ringed fingers. ‘Two rooms. One is four by five, one is ten by two. Both are twenty square feet. Correct?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Shanmugham said.

‘So they both cost the same to build. Correct?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Explain.’ Shah slurped tea from the saucer.

‘The ten-by-two room is thirty-three per cent more expensive, sir. Four plus five is nine, nine nine is eighteen feet of wall to build. Ten plus two twelve, twelve twelve is twenty-four feet of walls to build. You don’t build floors, you build walls.’

‘You’re the first man today who has got the answer right. I’ve fired my labour contractor. Do you know how to get me workers for a job?’

‘No, but by the evening I will,’ Shanmugham had said.

Six months later, Shah had told him at a construction site: ‘The other day you broke up a fight between the workers. I was watching. You know how to hit a man.’

‘I am sorry, sir,’ Shanmugham looked at the ground. ‘I won’t do it again.’

‘ Don’t say sorry,’ Shah had said. ‘This is not politics we are in: this is construction. We have to speak the truth in this business, or nothing will ever get built. Do you know what a left-hand man is?’

Shanmugham had not known at the time.

‘Doesn’t matter. You’re a quick learner,’ Shah had said. ‘You can be my new left-hand man from Monday. But today, I must fire you from my company, and you must tear up all your business cards. If we ever get involved with the police, I have to say that I dismissed you.’

Pushing aside his ice cream, Shanmugham took a small black book out of his pocket, and found a clean white page. Drawing a box with seven columns and twenty rows, he made a small calendar: the last date was October 3. Next to it he wrote: ‘Shanghai.’

He turned the pages. The first few pages of the book were covered with Mr Shah’s wise sayings, which he had been recording for months.

When it comes to work — hurry, hurry, hurry. When it comes to payment — delay, delay, delay.

Caste, religion, family background nothing. Talent everything.

Be 10 per cent more generous to people than you feel like being.

He clicked a black ballpoint pen and added one of his own:

Do not trust connections made with bank…

When the sixteenth piece of ice cream melted, he paid his bill and left with a last glance at the actor.

He stopped in the shade of a small park.

A stray black dog loped by the park, a bright red patch of flesh shining near its left buttock. Shanmugham thought of a bank manager with grey oiled hair. Of ‘a little extra’. With an eye closed, he aimed a sharp rock at the open wound.

His mobile phone began to beep.

At four o’clock, Mrs Pinto’s left arm reached for solid wall. Her chappal found the first step.

When her eyesight had begun to dim, over a decade ago, Mrs Pinto had kept a strict count of the steps (even retracing her path when she lost the count), but that was no longer necessary.

The walls had sprouted eyes for her.

She knew she had taken three steps down when she reached ‘the Diamond’: a rhomboidal crevice in the fourth step. Seven steps and two landings later came ‘the Bad Tooth’. Sliding along the wall her palm encountered a molar-shaped patch in the plaster, which felt like the back of her teeth when they had cavities in them. This meant she had almost reached the second floor. She angled her body again.

She sensed dim radiance: the evening sun blazing into the entranceway.

‘Is anybody there?’ she called. ‘Be careful when you run; Shelley Pinto is coming down, step by step she is coming down.’

Just five steps to go now to the ground floor: she heard her husband’s weak voice from the plastic-chair parliament.

‘… if one person says no, you can’t tear down the Society. That’s the whole idea of a Co-operative Housing Society. One for all, all for one.’

I wish he had said something smarter than that , she thought.

Last night, the moment he had come up the stairs with Masterji and told her of the thing posted on the noticeboard, she had wanted to cry. Their plans for the rest of their lives were set into Vishram Society. What did they need money for? A fixed deposit in the HDFC bank’s Versova branch paid them Rs 4,000 a month, taking care of all expenses; both children were settled in America — a good, Christian country — one in Michigan, the other in Buffalo. The children were far away, but they had Vishram all around them, warm, human, familiar; it was the protective keratin they had secreted from the hardships of their lives. It guided Shelley down its stairs and around its fragrant garden. How would she find her way in a strange new building? Mr Pinto and his wife had sat on the sofa, hand in hand, feeling more in love than they had in years. And when Masterji said, ‘If it’s no from you, it’s no from me’, Shelley Pinto had begun to cry. A husband by her side, and a wise man for a friend.