Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

All day long, whether eating breakfast with Masterji or lying in bed, she had heard the buzz of discussion around Vishram. What if the others overpowered them and carried her off to a building with strange walls and neither ‘the Diamond’ nor ‘the Bad Tooth’ nor her million other eyes? Her heart beat faster. She forgot how many steps lay before her and the ground floor.

The powerful voice of Mrs Rego revived her.

‘It’s an illusion, Mr Pinto. I know about these builders. They won’t ever pay up.’

We have the Battleship on our side , Mrs Pinto thought. How can we lose?

‘We knew all these years you were strange, Mrs Rego, but we did not realize you were actually mad,’ Mrs Puri fired back at the Battleship.

Now Mrs Pinto’s heart sank. Mrs Puri is on their side. How can we win?

‘This is a democracy, Mrs Puri. No one will silence me. Not you, not all the builders of the world.’

‘I’m just saying, Mrs Rego, even a Communist must understand that when someone comes and offers us Rs 20,000 a square foot we should say yes. Once you think of all the repairs we need to make to the building, to each individual flat, before it can be sold — new paint, new doors — it is closer to 250 per cent of market value. And think of the time it takes to find a buyer in a neighbourhood like this. Mr Costello waited six months, gave up, and went to Qatar. This is cash in hand.’

‘But will this Mr Shah actually pay?’ Ibrahim Kudwa’s voice.

Good. Ibrahim Kudwa, the cyber-café owner, was the average man in the building. If he was sceptical, everyone was sceptical.

‘Look,’ Mr Pinto said, when his wife came out into parliament, groping for a chair. The main item of evidence.

‘How will she survive in another Society?’

Aware that people were looking at her, Mrs Pinto held her smile for all to see.

‘Just wait until this man comes here and speaks to us,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Is that too much to ask of all of you?’

Ibrahim Kudwa came up to Mrs Pinto and whispered: ‘I wanted to tell you about the sign that I changed outside the Society. They’ve filled up the hole now, but there was a sign there. It said: “Work in progress, inconvenience regretted”, but I changed it to “Inconvenience in progress, work regretted”.’

‘That’s very clever, Ibrahim,’ she whispered back. ‘Very clever.’

She could almost hear the blood rushing proudly to his cheeks. Ibrahim Kudwa reminded her of Sylvester, a pet dog that she had once had. Always needed an ‘attaboy’, and a pat on the head.

‘Now all of you must excuse us. Shelley and I are going for our walk.’

Masterji, who had been sitting in the ‘prime’ chair, pretending not to watch Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen TV, got up in stages. He followed Mr and Mrs Pinto to the compound wall.

Behind him, he could hear the indiscreet Ibrahim Kudwa whispering: ‘What’s his position?’

Masterji slowed to hear the faithful Mrs Puri’s reply: ‘The moment his friends said, we don’t want the money, he said, me too.’

Even though he had opposed the offer, she was proud of him, and wanted everyone to know this.

‘He is an English gentleman. Only when the Pintos change their answer will he change his.’

Suppressing his smile, Masterji caught up with the Pintos. Shelley had her hand on her husband; he could hear her count her steps. When she counted ‘twenty’ she had passed the danger-zone: where the boys played their cricket game, and their smacked balls could hit her cheeks or stomach. Now she would smell hibiscus plants for twenty steps.

Mary, having done with her evening cleaning of the Society’s common areas, was beginning to water the plants in the garden. Picking up the green pipe that lay in coils in the garden all the day long like a hibernating snake, she fitted it to a tap near the compound wall; sluicing the water flow with a pressed thumb, she began slapping the hibiscus plants awake. One-two-three-four-five, holding the pipe in her right hand, Mary counted off the seconds of irrigation for each plant on the joints of her left hand, like a meditating brahmin. Small rainbows sprang to life within the arch of the sluiced water, disappeared when the water moved away, then reappeared on the dripping spider’s webs that interlinked the branches.

Mrs Pinto left the smell of hibiscus behind. Now came ‘the blood stretch’ — the ten yards where the stench of raw beef from the butcher’s shop behind the Society wafted in, mitigated somewhat by the flourish of jasmine flowers growing near the wall.

‘It’s your phone, Masterji.’ Mrs Pinto turned around.

She could pinpoint the exact cubicle within the building that a noise came from.

‘It must be Gaurav again. The moment he smells money on me, my son calls.’

Gaurav had called earlier in the morning. The first call he had made to his father in months. He explained that ‘Sangeeta Aunty’ had told him about the builder’s offer.

‘I wish Mrs Puri had not phoned him.’

‘Oh, she is like a second mother to the boy, Masterji. Let her call.’

Masterji winced; yet he could not deny the fact.

Everyone in Vishram knew of Mrs Puri’s closeness to the boy; it was one of the triumphs of their communal life — one of the cross-beams of affection that are meant to grow in any co-operative society. Even after Gaurav moved to Marine Lines for his work, Mrs Puri stayed in touch with him, sending him regular packages of peanut- chikki and other sweets. It was she who had called to tell him of his mother’s death.

Masterji said: ‘I told Gaurav, you are my son, this is your home, you can come see me whenever you want. But there is nothing to discuss . The Pintos have said no.’

And then, looking at Mrs Pinto through the corner of his eye, he waited in the hope that she too would call him an ‘English gentleman’.

Mr Pinto completed the circuit of the compound wall, and scraped his chappals on the gravel around the guard’s booth. He waited for his wife and Masterji with his thin hands on his hips, panting like the winner in a geriatric sprint.

‘Let’s do breathing exercises together,’ he said, and gave Shelley his arm. ‘It makes you feel young again.’

As the three of them practised inhaling-exhaling-inhaling, the Secretary walked past with a large microphone, which he planted near the black Cross.

At five o’clock, ‘Soda Pop’ Satish Shah, recently the terrorizer of parked cars on Malabar Hill, stood by the entrance of the most famous Hindu shrine in the city, the SiddhiVinayak temple at Prabhadevi, waiting for his father.

With the latest issue of Muscle-Builder magazine in his right hand, he was practising behind-the-head tricep curls with his left.

He paused, turned the page of the magazine, and practised more repetitions with his left hand.

With his right hand he touched his nose. It still hurt.

It had not been his idea to spray-paint the cars. He had told the other fellows: the police would never allow it in the city. Let’s go to the suburbs, Juhu, Bandra. A man could live like a king out there. But did they listen?

In any case, what had they done? Just spray a few cars and a van. It was nothing compared to what his father did in his line of work.

The bastard works in construction , Satish thought, and he has the guts to tell me I am the bad one in the family .

Thinking about his father, he goaded himself into practising his tricep curls faster. He thought about the way that man chewed gutka like a villager. The way he wore so many gold rings. The way he pronounced English, no better than Giri did. ‘Cho-chyal Enimalz. Cho-chyal.’