Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

The Secretary sucked his lips and nodded. Satisfied.

Shah was still holding his hand; he felt the pressure grow.

‘But I tell you one thing, Mr Kothari. Old builder or new, the basic nature of my business has not changed. Do you know what a builder is?’

‘A man who builds houses,’ Kothari said, hoping his hand would be released.

‘No. Architects build houses. Engineers build roads.’

Kothari turned around for help. Shanmugham was looking at the night sky; the birthday boy was jerking his right arm back and forth behind his head for some reason.

Shah held up a gold-ringed index finger.

‘The builder is the one man in Bombay who never loses a fight.’

With this he let go of Kothari’s hand.

‘Why were you gone so long?’ Mrs Kothari asked, as her husband joined her in bed. ‘People kept asking for you, but I didn’t tell anyone you were at the builder’s house.’

Saying the name of Lord Krishna three times, the Secretary switched off the bed lamp.

‘Did his car drop you off? What is his home like? Gold fittings in the bathroom? Is there a jacuzzi?’

Her husband covered his face in the blanket and said nothing.

In the darkness he saw a flock of pink birds flying around him. He felt his father’s fingers pressing on his — and then all the wasted decades in between fell away, and they were together once again at the lake in Kenya.

Ashvin Kothari fell asleep with tears on his cheeks.

Like an army that had been coming closer for months and was now storming a citadel, they went into the Fountainhead and the Excelsior with bricks on their heads.

It was the final surge of work before the monsoons. Those day-labourers who had wilted in the heat and fled to their villages were replaced by those offloaded from buses at ever-rising cost: the day rate for men was now 370 rupees. Heat or no heat, humidity or no humidity, all the civil work — walls, floors, columns — must be done before the rains.

Once again, as he had been every hot morning, Dharmen Shah was here, dipping his silk trousers in the slush and muck, pointing fingers at things and shouting at men. He stood by the roaring cement grinder, as women in bright saris and diamond nose-rings bent down and rose up with troughs of wet dark cement on their heads.

Shah put his foot on a pile of concrete tubes. ‘Faster, son,’ he told one of the workers. ‘I’m paying you good money. I want to see you work.’

Shanmugham, running his fingers up and down the spine of a green financial prospectus, stood behind the boss.

Shah directed his assisant’s attention to two teenagers breaking in half a long corrugated metal rod.

‘Work. Hard work. A beautiful thing to see.’

The two muscled boys had rested the rod on a metal triangle; one of them raised a mallet. He brought it down. With each blow, the long rod trembled. Behind the boy swinging the mallet, a bag of cement rose into the upper floors of the Confidence Excelsior on a pulley.

‘I’ve heard that Chacko never comes to his construction sites. He doesn’t like the smell of cement and steel. What a third-rate builder he is.’

On the lift up to the fourth floor of the Excelsior, Shanmugham opened up his financial prospectus. Out of it he slid a small black book and opened its pages.

‘I spoke to the Secretary, sir.’ He read from the black book. ‘As of now, four people in Vishram are saying no to the offer. Four in Tower A. Everyone in Tower B has said yes.’

‘What is this black book?’ Mr Shah took it from his assistant and turned it over.

‘It has dates, and things we deal with, and wise sayings I hear from you. My wife encourages me to write things down, sir.’

Shah flipped through it.

‘If only my son paid this much attention to what I say.’ He returned the book to his assistant. ‘You told me once there were teachers in Vishram Society. Are they among those who are saying no?’

They stepped off the lift.

‘There is only one teacher, sir. And he is one of those saying no.’

‘I knew it, Shanmugham. I don’t like teachers. Write that down in your book.’

A worker’s family was spending the nights on the unfinished fourth floor, which one day a technology executive or a businessman would occupy. Shah touched the workers’ washing, which hung in the alcoves where Versace would soon hang; their little bars of soap and detergent did the work that expensive perfumes would soon do. And they probably did it better. Shah smiled; he wished Satish were here by his side, so he could show him little things like this. Folding a twenty-rupee note, he left it near a bar of soap as a surprise for the worker’s wife.

An open-backed truck fought its way through the muck of the construction site loaded with marble tiles. At the edge of the floor, Shah squatted down and shouted:

‘Don’t unload the tiles!’ He gestured at the workers. ‘Don’t touch them!’

On the way down, Shanmugham stood as far away as he could from his employer, who was on the mobile phone.

‘“Beige”. I wrote it down. In case you were too stupid to know what the word meant. You’ve sent “Off-white”. You think I have time to waste like this? Everything has a schedule here. Everything is going to be delayed because of you. I want the correct shade of marble loaded and brought here by the end of the day!’

Reaching the ground Shah marched over to the truck and yelled at his workers, who had already begun to unload the marble. They blinked at him. He cursed them. They reloaded the marble. The diesel fumes of the departing truck spurted into Shah’s face. He was still coughing a minute later.

Shanmugham accompanied him to the blasted tree that grew by the row of workers’ huts. One of the workers’ children was brushing his teeth by the water pump under the tree. Seeing the fat coughing man, he stepped back.

Shah sat by the water pump. Shanmugham saw, like first rain on the ground, red dots speckling the white scum of toothpaste on the ground.

‘Sir, we should take you to the hospital…’

Shah shook his head. ‘It has happened before, Shanmugham. It goes away in a few minutes.’

A cow sat nearby, whipping flies away with its tail. The worker’s son stared at the two men; toothpaste dripped from his mouth.

‘Come, sir. Let’s go to Breach Candy Hospital. I’ll call Doctor Nayak.’

‘Nayak will frighten me again, and tell me to stop coming here. We have to finish the civil work before the rains come. That will happen only if I am here every single morning.’

Shanmugham knew it was true: the master’s fat-bellied body was a human version of the cement mixers that churned and set the workers in motion.

‘Mr J. J. Chacko,’ Shah said. ‘Right here. Under my nose.’

He looked over at the large plot of land, right opposite the Excelsior, with the big Ultimex sign on it.

‘Do you know when he’s starting work? Is there a date?’

‘No date, sir. But he’ll start building some time in October.’

‘Let’s go back.’ Shah rose to his feet. ‘I don’t want the workers thinking something is wrong.’

He pointed a finger at his left-hand man’s chest.

‘I want each of those Nos to become a Yes , Shanmugham. At once.’

Vittal, the old librarian at St Catherine’s School, was probably the only man in Vakola still unaware of the good news. Masterji was glad to be in his presence. Exercising his privilege as a retired teacher, he came to the school library every Monday to read the Times of India for free.