Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Mary sat down and wiped her face.

Among the patchwork of fully legal slums, semi-legal slums and pockets of huts in Vakola, this row of tents next to a polluted canal, the nullah that cut through the suburb, led the most precarious existence. Because they had come here after the last government amnesty for illegal slums, and because the canal could flood during a heavy monsoon, the squatters had not been granted the identification cards which ‘regularized’ a slum-dweller’s existence and gave him the right to be relocated to a pucca building if the government bulldozed his hut. Municipal officials had repeatedly threatened the dwellers by the nullah with eviction, yet someone had always intervened to save them, usually a politician who needed their votes at the next municipal election. Last month, Mrs Rego had come down to explain to them that things had changed. It was now a season of will power in Bombay: the coalition of corruption, philanthropy, and inertia that had protected them for so long was disintegrating. A new official had been put in charge of clearing the city’s illegal slums. He had smashed miles of huts in Thane and promised to do the same in Mumbai. Every day their slum survived should be considered a miracle.

The huts along the nullah were now glowing from inside. Mary had been given an old three-battery white fluoroscent lamp by Mrs Rego, which she had hung by a hook from the roof of her tent.

In a little while, someone had come by to check on her. It was the Battleship herself.

Wiping her hands on her sari, Mary came out to talk.

‘Today was a false alarm, Mary, but sooner or later they will come to demolish this place. You should move while you can.’

‘This is my home, madam. Would you leave yours?’

She asked the Battleship about Timothy, her son. ‘Is he playing cricket by the temple?’

‘Let him play, Mary. He’s a child. There won’t be time to play later on.’

‘Those other boys don’t go to school, madam. Some of them are nearly twenty years old. Do you let your son play with them?’

Mrs Rego, about to put Mary in her place, restrained herself.

‘I’m the one who gives lectures here, Mary. I’m not used to hearing them from people who live by the nullah . But let’s not fight. Both of us had good news today.’

She was on her way home from the office of a lawyer in Shivaji Park who specialized in Housing Societies and their disputes. Not true, he had told her, that every member of a Society has to say ‘Yes’ before it can be demolished. A three-quarters majority vote in favour may be enough, legally speaking. But the law spoke ambiguously on this matter. As on most matters, the lawyer added. The law in Mumbai was not blind: far from it, it had two faces and four working eyes and saw every case from both sides and could never make up its mind. But an ambiguous, ambivalent, and ambidextrous law was not without its advantages. The issue here — individual right vis-à-vis collective well-being — was so complicated that if a single resident of Vishram went to court, the demolition would be postponed for years while the judge scratched his head over the case and tried to find a pattern in half a century of conflicting legal precedents. Mr Shah would give up and go somewhere else.

Mary came out of her hut with an axe and started cutting firewood for her evening cooking.

Mrs Rego had wandered a few huts down the nullah .

‘How many times have I told you,’ she was shouting at a man who had a well-known drinking problem, ‘not to even think of raising a hand at your wife?’

Mary was thinking of her Timothy. He should be in here, studying, not out there by the Tamil temple, playing cricket with those older, rougher creatures. He would soon start to look up to them.

She might hit him too hard for breaking her orders: better to take it out on the firewood. She swung and chopped.

‘I used to take you and your mother to a street fair in Bandra when you were this high. I’m sure you remember.’

At the other end of town, Dharmen Shah walked with his son past coloured balloons and fluorescent plastic loops. They had had an awkward tea in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, and emerged to find Nariman Point closed to traffic for a street fair. Blobs of vanilla ice cream, in cones or in cups, materialized around them like snowballs; horses, drawing chariots plated with silver-foil and shaped like swans, clattered up and down the avenue.

‘When am I getting my credit card back?’

‘When I feel like giving it back. Have you been seeing those gang boys again?’

Satish stopped. ‘Horse shit. Everywhere,’ he said. The bottoms of his jeans dragged on the dirty road, but Shah assumed it was the reigning style and checked himself.

‘I asked you a question about the gang, Satish. Do you still…’

The boy had put his fingers on his nose. ‘I want to go home,’ he said. His father asked only if he had money for a taxi.

Shah dialled for Shanmugham, who was at Malabar Hill, waiting to deliver the evening report to him.

‘Come over to Nariman Point.’

He stood behind a row of children who had lined up to buy red crystalline ice candy in a cup. The children looked at him and giggled; he smiled. All around him he saw men with their wives and sons.

I’m losing my boy , he thought. He knew that Satish had probably not told his taxi to go to Malabar Hill — he was headed straight to the home of one of his friends.

A cluster of yellow balloons rose above the fair and floated into the darkness; Shah followed them.

Leaving light and noise behind him, he came to a car park. A metal fence stood behind the car park, and dark water beyond it. At the end of the water, he saw the lights of Navy Nagar: the southern tip of Mumbai.

Shah pressed his face on the cold metal ringlets of the fence. He gazed at the distant lights, and then rotated his face until he was looking at the earth.

This fence was supposed to mark the land’s end, but a promontory of debris, broken chunks of old buildings, granite, plastic, and Pepsi Cola had sneaked past it — the enterprising garbage pushed several feet into water. Shah’s fingers pulsed as he gazed at the amphibian earth of Nariman Point. Look: how this city never stops growing: rubble, shit, plants, mulch, left to themselves, start slurping up sea, edging towards the other end of the bay like a snake’s tongue, hissing through salt water, there is more land here, more land .

A churning began in the promontory — plastic bags and pebbles started to ripple, as if mice were scurrying beneath them; then a sparrow shot out of the detritus. It’s coming to life , Shah thought. If only Satish were here to see it . All of Bombay was created like this: through the desire of junk and landfill, on which the reclaimed city sits, to be come something better. In this way, they all emerged: fish, birds, the leopards of Borivali, even the starlets and super-models of Bandra.

Now a homeless man began moving over the debris; he must have found a hole in the fence. He squatted and spat. His spit contributed to the reclaiming thunderhead, as would his shit, soon to follow. Shah closed his eyes and prayed to the debris, and to the man defecating in it: Let me build, one more time .

‘Sir…’ He felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s not clean here.’

Shanmugham, in his white shirt and black trousers, was standing behind him.

They returned to light and noise.

‘What is that Secretary doing?’ Shah asked, as they walked back to the street fair.

He had just heard the bad news: the four No s at Vishram had become three, but those three No s were simply not budging. And the Secretary protested on the phone that there was nothing he could do to make them sign the agreement.