Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

He took the brimming coconut in his hands and felt its weight. When you’re rich, you don’t have to give people things , he thought. They give you things.

How wonderful.

Sucked through a straw, the cool sweet water was a bitter thrill: he understood, for four or five seconds, what it was to be a millionaire.

Bald, moist, chocolate-dark, the drummer’s head glistened in the mid-morning light; behind him, a swaying man blew on a nadaswaram . Four teenagers carried the wooden bier; two followed them striking bronze cymbals. On the bier lay the body of an old woman draped in a bright green sari, her nostrils stopped with cotton balls. A boy at the head of the procession broke out, every few steps, into jubilant dance.

Standing in the Vakola market with folded arms, Ajwani, the broker in Vishram Society, watched Shanmugham, a few steps away, watching the funeral procession with folded arms.

The Confidence Group man wore his standard white-over-black uniform; under his arm he held what looked like a financial prospectus.

Shanmugham turned and noticed Ajwani noticing.

The broker approached him with a smile.

‘I’m from Vishram Society. Name is Ajwani.’

Shanmugham returned the smile. ‘I know. Ramesh. Tower A. You own the Toyota Qualis.’

Soon the two men were sitting together at a nearby restaurant. Ajwani dispatched a mouse from under their table with a kick; he made a sign to the waiter.

He picked up the green prospectus that Shanmugham had laid on the table and flicked through its pages.

‘Mutual Funds… I used to play the market in the nineties. Technology companies. I bought Infosys shares. Made no money. You won’t, either.’

‘I have ,’ Shanmugham said.

‘Then you’ll lose it all. Men like us don’t become rich from shares.’

Ajwani slid the prospectus across the table; he looked his interlocutor in the eye.

‘I want to ask you, Mr Shanmugham: what is your title in the Confidence Group?’

‘Don’t have one. I am helping out as a personal favour to Mr Shah.’

‘No, you’re not.’ The broker clamped his hand down on the prospectus. ‘Every builder has one special man in his company. This man has no business card to hand out, no title, he is not even on the company payroll. But he is the builder’s left hand. He does what the builder’s right hand does not want to know about. If there is trouble, he contacts the police or the mafia. If there is money to be paid to a politician, he carries the bag. If someone’s knuckles have to be broken, he breaks them. You are Mr Shah’s left hand.’

Shanmugham retrieved his prospectus from beneath the broker’s hand.

‘I’ve never heard of that term before. Left-hand man.’

The waiter put two cups of tea on their table.

‘Bring me a bowl of sugar,’ Ajwani said.

He courteously moved Shanmugham’s tea a bit closer to him.

‘Have you heard the saying, a broker is first cousin to a builder? I’ve seen redevelopments all my life. The builder always has a man on the inside. He gives you information about the other members of the Society. You give him a bribe. Unfortunately, you picked the wrong man this time.’

Shanmugham, who had begun blowing on his tea to cool it, stopped.

The broker continued: ‘It’s usually the Secretary who is picked. The Secretary of Tower B, Mr Ravi, is a good man. But our Secretary is a nothing man.’

‘Nothing man?’ Shanmugham asked his tea.

‘Didn’t have a son till he was nearly fifty years old. He can’t do this .’ Ajwani raised a finger. ‘All he has done for days is say, Africa, Africa, Africa .’

‘Then who can help us?’

Ajwani shrugged.

‘Let me ask you this. How many people in Vishram Tower A are saying no to the offer?’

‘Four.’

Ajwani tapped the table with his mobile phone.

‘Wrong. Only one person really opposes it. The other three don’t know what they want.’

‘Which one?’

The waiter placed the sugar on the table; Ajwani tucked his mobile phone into his pocket. He smiled.

‘The deadline is too tight, Mr Shanmugham. A project like this will take two years, minimum. Why is your boss pushing so hard?’

Shanmugham’s eyes glistened. He drank his tea and moved the empty glass back to the centre of the table.

‘Which one?’

Reaching for the sugar, Ajwani took a spoonful, and held it poised over his cup. ‘You want information from me…’ He vibrated the spoon. ‘… for nothing. That’s greed. Give me a sweetener. Another thousand rupees a square foot.’

Shanmugham rose to his feet.

‘I came to Vakola to deliver boxes of sweets to your Society. You will find one for you at the gate, Mr Ajwani. Other than that, I have nothing to give you.’

The broker stirred the sugar into his tea.

‘You will never get Vishram Society to accept your offer without my help.’

*

Stopping at the gate of the building, Ajwani discovered that Shanmugham had been telling the truth about the sweets.

Red boxes, each with an image of Lord SiddhiVinayak. Inside each one was 300 grams of dough-and-cashew sweets, cut into diamond-shaped slices. A handwritten letter strapped to every box. Signed. ‘From my family to yours. Dharmen Shah. MD, Confidence Group.’

‘I gave your box to your wife,’ Ram Khare said.

Ajwani pointed to the stack by the guard’s side. ‘Why are there four boxes there?’

‘Four people said they didn’t want the sweets,’ the guard said. ‘Can you believe that?’

Ajwani peered at the boxes. ‘Which four?’

A sunny smile from Ibrahim Kudwa’s bearded face was a sure thing as one of his neighbours passed the jumble of wire, vegetation, brick, cheap roofing, and peeling paint that went by the title SPEED-TEK CYBER ZONE CYBER CAFÉ. The trunk of the banyan by the cybercafé had been painted white, in simulation of snow. Kudwa’s long-time assistant, Arjun, had apparently converted to Christianity some years ago; last Christmas, he won the banyan tree over to his religion and placed a private crib with toy figures, arranged in a splendour of cotton-snow, at its foot. Other evidence of Christmas could be found in the large five-pronged star, surrounded by bunting, that Arjun had hung over the roof of the café; months later, it was still there, un expected, colossal, the bunting fraying, and, with the light behind it in the morning, looking like a symbol of the Apocalypse. As if drawn to the mystic star, a Hindu holy man sometimes sat outside the café. Mr Kudwa saw no objection to his doing so; indeed he had even encouraged the man with the occasional two-rupee coin.

Man of enterprise, Ibrahim Kudwa; lead singer in a rock-and-roll band at university, he had chosen, after graduation, not to remain in the Muslim-only building in Bandra East where his brothers and sisters still lived. Vishram was old, but he wanted his children to mix with Hindus and Christians. On the advice of a magazine article, he had decided that the future was in technology. Rejecting an offer from his brother to join the family hardware store in Kalanagar, he opened a cyber-café in the neighbourhood in 1998. Easy money. His rates rose from ten rupees per hour, to fifteen, to twenty, and then declined again to fifteen, and then to ten. A treacherous thing, technology. Within six months, an internet connection had become so cheap that only the rough, the rowdy and the tourists needed a cyber-café. Hardware held its price; his brother had recently bought a second two-bedroom flat as an investment property. Then the government decided that anyone using a cyber-café was a potential terrorist. User name, phone number, address, driving licence or passport number — the café owner was legally obliged to keep detailed records of every customer, and the police swooped on Kudwa’s books for any excuse to extort a bribe.