Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Where is your daughter these days?

The same place she has been for eleven years.

She had been on her way to college, when someone had pushed her out of the train. A packed compartment in the women’s first class in the morning — someone had elbowed her out. She had fallen head first on to the tracks, and lain there like that. Not one of her fellow passengers stopped the train. They didn’t want to be late for their work. All of them women, good women. Secretaries. Bank clerks. Sales managers. She had bled to death.

This child that he had made, the tracks had unmade. Her brains, oozing from her broken head, because the passengers did not want to be late. Surely in the men’s compartment someone would have pulled the emergency chain, jumped out, surely someone would have…

For three months he could not take the train. He used to take one bus after the other, and walk when there was no bus around. His revolt had to end eventually. He was helpless before Necessity. But he could never look again at a women’s compartment. Who said the world would be a better place run by women? At least men were honest about themselves , he thought.

He turned the page.

She had drawn the hibiscus plants that grew by the back of the compound, and the little spider’s webs between their leaves, shiny and oval and gliding over one another like parallel Milky Ways. Father and daughter, in the old days, had often stopped in the garden to look at the webs and talk of the differences between men and spiders. He remembered one difference they had agreed on. A spider’s mind is outside him; every new thought shoots off at once in a strand of silk. A man’s mind is inside. You never know what he’s thinking. Another difference. A spider can live without a family, all alone, in the web he makes.

A smattering of applause from below; the builder must have arrived.

Mr Pinto is holding a chair for me . With Sandhya’s sketchbook in his hand, he stood by the window.

A fat man with a gold necklace stood by the black Cross between the two Secretaries.

‘… to me you are now members of my own family. I say this, and the proof is in the motto of the Confidence Group: from my family to…’

Poor Mr Pinto had given up his fight to protect the vacant seat. Someone from Tower B had taken it.

Standing at the window, he turned the pages of the sketchbook back and forth. Parrots, churches, washing, trees, Sandhya’s school dress, her face, her brushed and shampooed hair, as if they were corpuscles of sunlit water, bobbed up and down around him. Every now and then, in the distracted way that a man busy at the office might overhear the odd snippet of cricket commentary from a colleague’s desk, he heard voices from the meeting.

‘… I speak for everyone here, Mr Shah, when I ask: are you serious about this offer? Will you honour it in all its details?’

‘… it is normal for developers to offer members of the existing Society units in the new building. Why are you not…’

‘Why are the residents of Tower B, which is newer and in better condition in every way, not getting a higher rate per square foot than…’

He turned to the last page. Here she had scribbled in pencil: ‘Je tien. Vous tenez. Il tient. Vous Tenez. Nous…’ Practising the French that he had been teaching her at home, two evenings a week. Masterji scraped on the ‘tien’ with a finger and looked around for a red pen. He did not want his daughter speaking incorrect French for all of eternity.

A piercing voice — the Battleship’s — made him turn to the window:

‘We do not want your money, whether it is 200 per cent or 250 per cent. This is our home and no one can ask us to leave it.’

Silence from down below. The Battleship and both her children had risen to their feet.

‘By our Lord Jesus Christ I will fight you. I know builders, and they are all liars and criminals. Better you leave now. Right now.’

It was one thing to oppose the deal, but why this personal attack? Did she know this Mr Shah to call him a liar? He closed the window.

He saw the Rubik’s Cube lying on the teakwood table. It was stiff with age, and rotating the colours took effort, as if he were working the jaws of a small animal.

Half an hour later, when Mr Pinto walked in through the open door, he found Masterji asleep at the table, his daughter’s sketchbook on the floor, its pages fluttering in the breeze from the window.

He shut the door, and went back down to 2A, where his wife lay in bed.

‘Asleep, Shelley. In his chair. I fought so hard to keep his seat for him.’

‘Mr Pinto. Don’t be so petty. When we said no to the offer, he said no at once.’

He grumbled.

‘Now go up and wake him. He hasn’t had any dinner.’

Mr Pinto looked out of the window. The crowd below had gathered in two nuclei; some residents stood around Mrs Rego (‘all builders are liars, and this one is no different’) and another group, right below his window, were listening to Ajwani, the broker.

‘Our place is 812 square feet. At 20,000 rupees a square foot, that is…’

Ajwani sketched the number of zeros in the air.

‘And mine is bigger than yours, Ajwani,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Twenty-two square feet bigger. That means I get…’

With a thick finger she superimposed her figure on Ajwani’s figure. Now Ibrahim Kudwa added his on top of hers.

‘But mine is slightly bigger than yours, Mrs Puri…’

Mr Pinto shook his head.

‘Aren’t they going to work tomorrow?’ he whispered to his wife. ‘Don’t their children have to go to school? They’ve forgotten everything because of this money.’

‘They’re very excited, Mr Pinto. They’re going to agree to the proposal and throw us out of the building.’

‘What a thing to say, Shelley! This is a Registered Co-operative Society. Not a jungle. If even one person says no that means that the Society cannot be demolished. Let’s have dinner now.’

His wife got up from the bed.

‘Don’t be angry. Please go upstairs and wake Masterji. We should all have some soup and bread.’

‘All right,’ Mr Pinto said, and put on his shoes.

The black Mercedes had been stuck in traffic near the Vakola highway for half an hour. ‘Something’s bothering you, Shanmugham.’

He turned from the front seat to face his employer.

‘No, Mr Shah.’

‘Don’t lie. I watched you while I was talking to those people in Vishram. You kept rubbing your hands.’

‘Nineteen thousand rupees a square foot, sir. Tower A was built in 1959 or 1960, sir. Ten thousand is a very good rate for a place like that.’

His employer chuckled.

‘Shanmugham. Six years you’ve worked for me and still you are an idiot. I’ve underpaid by a thousand rupees a square foot.’

The traffic jam began to clear; Shah looked at his assistant’s eyes in the driver’s mirror.

‘Those people would be thrilled at an offer of 10,000 a square foot. So 20,000 is unbelievable. Correct? And 19,000 is the same as 20,000 in a man’s mind.’ He hummed an old Hindi film song.

‘Turn left,’ Shanmugham told the driver, when they got on to the highway to Bandra. ‘Quickly. Turn left. Down the service road, until I tell you to stop.’

‘It’s still 200 per cent of the market rate, sir. We’ll have to sell the Shanghai at 25,000 a square foot — more — to make any profit. This is the east, sir. Who will pay that much money to live here?’

‘You can’t insult these people, Shanmugham. You can’t offer them ten per cent or fifteen per cent above market value. You’re asking them to give up their homes, the only homes some of them have ever had. You have to respect human greed.’

The driver now pulled on to the wasteland by the side of the highway.