Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Stale gossip to the left, mediocre produce to the right: Ramesh Ajwani knew that his eyes were the brightest things for sale in Vakola market.

Pizzicati of intercepted raindrops dripped from a coconut palm: a virtuoso of brightness in the concert of thunderclouds, dense sky, thickening rain.

From their bedroom window Ramu and the Friendly Duck watched.

The metal trellis meant to guard the window from burglars came to life; the wrought-iron foliage dripped and became real leaves and real flowers.

‘Oy, oy, oy, my prince. What deep thoughts are you thinking?’

Sitting next to her son, Mrs Puri pointed to the sky. The lines of diminishing rain were sparkling: the sun was coming out.

‘Remember what Masterji says? When there is rain and sun together, there is a… You know the word, Ramu. Say it. It’s a rai… a rain… a rainb…’

Shielding Ramu’s wet head with her arm, Mrs Puri looked up. A drop of rainwater was hanging from the ceiling. Vishram’s old walls glistened with bright seepage; moisture was snuggling into cracks in the paint, licking steel rods, and chewing on mortar.

Ramu, who could read his mother’s thoughts, reached for her gold bangles and began to play with them.

‘We don’t have to worry, Ramu. We’re moving into a brand-new home. Just three months from now. One that won’t ever fall down.’

Ramu whispered.

‘Yes, everyone, even Masterji and Secretary Uncle.’

The boy smiled; then plugged his ears and closed his eyes.

Mrs Puri turned and shouted, ‘Mary! Don’t make so much noise with the rubbish. I have a growing son here!’

*

Mary, as she did every day, was dragging a mildewed blue barrel from floor to floor of Vishram Society, emptying into it the contents of the rubbish bins placed outside each door, and cleaning up the mess made by the early-morning cat as it looked for food.

The people of Vishram Society did not praise servants lightly: but Mary they trusted. So honest that even a one-rupee coin dropped on the floor would be put back on the table. In seven years of service not one complaint of theft. True, there was always dirt on the banisters and on the stairs, but the building was an old one. It secreted decay. Why blame Mary?

Her life was a hard one. She had married a pair of muscled arms that drifted into and out of her life, leaving bruises and a child; her father sometimes turned up under the vegetable stalls in the market, dead-drunk.

Done with 5B, the last flat on the top floor, she rotated the blue bin down the steps, filling the stairwell with a noise like thunder. (‘Mary! Didn’t you hear me! Stop that noise at once! Mary!’) With the branching veins on her forearms in high relief, as if the bin were tied to them, she rolled it out of the Society and out of the gate and down the road to an open rubbish pit.

The rains had turned the pit into a marsh: cellophane, eggshell, politician’s face, stock quote, banana leaf, sliced-off chicken’s feet and green crowns cut from pineapples. Ribbons of unspooled cassette-tape draped over everything like molten caramel.

Throwing plastic bags from her blue bin into the marsh, Mary, through the corner of her eye, saw a man walking towards her. She smelled Johnson’s Baby Powder. She took a step closer to the rubbish pile, preferring its odours.

‘Mary.’

She grunted to acknowledge Ajwani’s presence. She disliked the way he looked at her; his eyes put a price on women.

‘What was in Mrs Puri’s rubbish bag this morning?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will you find it for me?’ he asked, with a smile.

She waded into the rubbish and picked out a plastic bag, which she threw at Ajwani’s feet. He turned it over with his shoe.

‘Do you remember, Mrs Puri said she was taking her Ramu to the temple yesterday? Sitla Devi in Mahim, she said, when I asked her. Now, when Hindus go to the temple they bring things back with them — flowers, coconut shells, kumkum powder — and you don’t see any of them in her rubbish. What does that tell you?’

Mary, having emptied the blue bin, scraped its insides with her palm. Three dark hogs began snivelling in the muck; a fourth, its eyes closed, stood stationary in the slush, like a holy meditating thing.

‘I don’t know.’

‘A man has no secrets from his rubbish bin, Mary. From now on, I want you to look through three rubbish bags every morning. Masterji’s, Mr Pinto’s, and Mrs Rego’s.’

‘That is not my work,’ she said. ‘It is the early-morning cat’s work.’

‘Then become the cat, Mary.’

With a smile Ajwani offered a ten-rupee note. She shook her head.

‘Take it, take it,’ he said.

‘This is for you too.’ Ajwani held out a red box with the image of Lord SiddhiVinayak on it. ‘For your son.’

Mary looked at the red box: large spots of grease stained its cardboard sides.

Two scavenger-women had been waiting for Mary to toss out the contents of the blue bin; one was holding a car’s windscreen-wiper. Now they went barefoot through the wet refuse, old jute bags on their shoulders, sifting through the rubbish with the wiper. They left Mrs Puri’s bag alone. They were not looking for information: merely plastic and tin.

Back in Vishram, Mary hid the sweet-box in the servant’s alcove, then swept the common areas, the stairwell, and the compound.

Half an hour later, with the sweet-box in one hand, she was buying vegetables at the market. Something fresh for her son. Beetroots. Good for children’s brains, Mrs Puri said, who was always cooking them for her boy. She should give me the beetroots , Mary thought. What was the point of wasting them on that imbecile?

Balancing a pav of beetroots on top of the red sweet-box, she came to Hibiscus Society.

‘Why are you looking for work here? Don’t you have a job at Vishram?’ the security guard asked.

‘The builder has made them an offer. Everyone leaves on October 3.’

‘Oh, a redevelopment.’ The guard sucked his teeth. He was an old man; he had seen Societies. ‘It will take years and years. Someone will go to court. You don’t have to worry now.’

‘Anyone living in the slum by the nullah — attention!’

A man came running through the market. He cupped his hands to his mouth: ‘Slum clearance! The men are here!’

The guard at Hibiscus Society, scratching his head and contemplating Mary’s proposal, said, ‘All right. But what’s my interest in this? Do I get a monthly cut? If I don’t, then…’

But where the maid-servant had stood, a red box of sweets now lay on the ground, beetroots rolling around it.

Bumping into people, she ran. Pushing cycles and carts, she ran.

Past Vishram Society, past the Tamil temple, past the construction site where the two towers were coming up, and into the slums; passing narrow lane after narrow lane, dodging stray dogs and roosters to run into the open wasteland beyond. A plane soared above her. Finally she reached the nullah , a long canal of black water, on whose banks a row of blue tarpaulin tents had risen.

Her neighbours were chopping wood; a rooster strutted round the huts; children played on rubber tyres tied to the trees.

‘No one is coming here, Mary,’ her neighbour told her in Tamil. ‘It was a false alarm.’

Slowing down, breathing deeply, Mary came to her tent, and looked inside its blue tarpaulin cover, held aloft by a wooden pole. Everything intact: cooking oil, cooking vessels, her son’s school books, photo albums.

‘They won’t come till after the monsoons,’ her neighbour shouted. ‘We’re safe till then.’