Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

‘We don’t see the likes of you any more, Masterji,’ Vittal said, as he bent low to arrange volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelf. ‘Young people don’t want to go into teaching. Computers or banking for them. Money, money, money.’

Masterji turned the pages of the newspaper. ‘No sense of public service, is there?’

The librarian blew his nose into a handkerchief, moving his head from side to side.

‘Remember when we were young. We had to walk to school every morning. Study by candlelight during exam-time. Now the computers do their work for them.’

Masterji laughed. ‘I don’t know anything about computers or the internet, Vittal. I don’t even have a mobile phone.’

‘Oh, that’s extreme, Masterji,’ the librarian said. He took a shiny red object from his pocket and smiled proudly.

‘Nokia.’

Masterji turned the pages of his newspaper.

‘Why does a physics teacher need these things, Vittal? The facts of life do not change: high tide is followed by low tide, and the equinox is still the equinox.’

He tapped a finger on his paper, and drew Vittal’s attention to a proposal to restore Crawford Market to pristine glory.

‘The sculptures outside the market were done by Kipling’s father. Lockwood Kipling. Did you know that?’

Vittal stretched his back.

‘Know nothing about Mumbai, Masterji. Not a genius like you. If you were a young man today, working at a foreign bank, playing with stocks, God knows how much money you would be making.’

‘What would I spend it on?’ Masterji folded the paper with a smile. He beckoned to the librarian.

‘Vittal…’ he whispered. ‘Purnima’s one-year death anniversary is around the corner. I want to call Trivedi about it.’

‘Of course.’

It was a little conspiratorial luxury the old teacher enjoyed here; Vittal allowed him (provided no one was watching) to use the black payphone for free.

A student in white-and-navy-blue uniform sneaked in through the side-door as Masterji dialled. He gaped at the two old men as if he had discovered two palaeosauruses.

In the market, Masterji walked with his head to the ground, sniffing citrus and apple, raw shit (from the roosters in the chicken coops), raw carrot and cauliflower.

‘Great man! Look up!’

Under the banyan tree in whose shade the business of the market was conducted, a vendor was waving at Masterji, from behind a stall full of onions.

Chubby, with a bulbous nose and knobby lumps on his dark forehead, he looked like an anthropomorphic advertisement for his produce.

‘I’ve seen you for a long long time.’ The onion-seller found a small red stool and placed it before Masterji. ‘But I never knew until now that you were a great one. There is something special about all of you in Vishram. The Confidence Group didn’t pick you for no reason.’

Fruit- and vegetable-vendors drew towards the red stool, looking its occupant up and down with wonder, as if he had been struck by lightning and survived.

‘My greatness — if there be any — is to do with my students,’ Masterji explained.

He pointed to the discarded newspapers that the onion-seller had piled on his cart, to wrap his produce in: ‘You’ll find an article written by a man named Noronha in the Times . My student. Oh, I take no credit for Noronha. A smart boy, so hard-working — used to walk to school every day from Kalina. Boys were hard-working in the old days. I wonder where those days have gone…’

One of the vendors, a big swarthy man whose plump face was dotted with white stubble, turned to the onion-seller and asked loudly: ‘Ram Niwas, there’s a man here asking for “the old days”. Are you selling them? Because I’m not. I’m selling only potatoes.’

And then he laughed at his own joke, before returning to his potatoes.

A horn sounded through the market. A man on a scooter was waving at Masterji.

‘My wife told me you called — I came at once, came at once looking for you.’

Everyone in Vakola was familiar with the sight of Shankar Trivedi’s shirtless, mesomorphic torso — a white shawl draped over the shoulders — dramatically entering or leaving a building on a red Honda scooter, like an angel of birth or death. He had been recruited by Purnima to conduct, each year, the memorial service for their daughter Sandhya; a service that Masterji, for his wife’s sake, had always attended. When Purnima died, it was Trivedi who had performed the last rites, with coconuts and incense, at a temple in Bandra.

Drawing the old teacher away from the vendors, he pumped Masterji’s hand in his. ‘Congratulations, congratulations,’ he said.

‘Trivedi, Purnima’s one-year death anniversary is coming up. October the 5th. It is five months away, but I wanted to make sure you mark it on your calendar. A very important day for me, Trivedi.’

The priest let go of Masterji’s hand: he gaped.

‘Masterji: when your daughter passed away, who performed the rites for her?’

‘You did, Trivedi.’

‘When your wife passed away, who performed the rites for her?’

‘You did, Trivedi.’

‘And when my son needed a science “top-up”, who taught him?’

‘I did, Trivedi.’

‘So what’s this talk of appointment and disappointment, Masterji? It’ll be an honour to perform your late wife’s first-year Samskara. Don’t worry.’

Trivedi offered to buy Masterji a little something for the heat — a coconut. Masterji knew the priest as a tight-fisted, even unscrupulous man — there was always some unpleasantness over the bill for his ceremonies — and he succumbed to the sheer novelty of the offer; with Trivedi walking his scooter, they went to the coconut-man who sat near the entrance to St Catherine’s with a black knife and a large wicker basket that groaned with coconuts.

As the coconut-man began tapping on the green nuts to sound out the water in each, Masterji watched Trivedi’s face. The priest, in between births, marriages, and deaths, gave lessons in the proper recitation of Sanskrit verse to paying pupils. The well-oiled moustache that sat on his lips was itself a fine line of poetry: supple and balanced, robustly black with a tinge of grey at the edges, punctuated in the middle by a perfect caesura . Trivedi was curling its ends and smiling, but the truth was leaking out of his eyes and nose.

He was almost on the verge of tears.

Burning with jealousy , Masterji thought. Indeed, it now seemed to him that a good portion of everyone’s professed admiration for Vishram all these years had been a kind of condescension for an old, crumbling building. And now they had been startled into real respect for its inhabitants.

‘I’ll give you good news, Trivedi,’ he said, taking pity on the man.

With a curved knife the coconut-man slashed open the mouth of one of the nuts.

The priest’s eyes grew large.

‘This Shah is going to make an offer for our place too?’

‘No. The good news for you is that there is no good news for us. The Pintos have said no. Shelley won’t be able to find her way around any other building.’

‘Twenty thousand rupees per square foot! You could buy her new eyes with so much money.’ Trivedi grinned. ‘You’re teasing me, aren’t you, Masterji?’

The market filled with noise: a funeral procession began to move, clamorously, towards the highway.

The coconut man handed each of them a sliced-open nut, brimming with fresh water and pierced by a pink straw.

Masterji knew he ought to refuse: the nut was meant for a man who would take Mr Shah’s money.

‘… of course you must be joking, Masterji… will you really say no? Once the deadline comes near, will you really really…’