Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

‘I don’t know why they made him Secretary, sir,’ Shanmugham said. ‘He’s useless. But there is someone else… a broker… who might help us. He has asked for money.’

‘That’s fine. Spend another lakh, or two lakhs, if you have to. Spend even more than that, if absolutely necessary. October the 3rd is near by.’ Shah cupped his hand around his ear. ‘Every day I can hear it coming closer. Can you hear it too?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Shanmugham said. ‘I can hear it. I can hear October 3 coming closer.’

The builder stopped and turned his head. A sugarcane juice stand had been brought to the side of the road as part of the fair. His eyes rose to the top of the stand, where the canes had been piled, six foot high, the tallest of them curling down at the ends, like the claws of a crab.

The cane-crushing machine was lit up by naked electric bulbs. In a square of raw light, a boy turned a red wheel, which turned smaller green wheels, which tinkled and crushed the cane, whose juice, dribbling down a gutter full of irregular chunks of ice, passed through a dirty strainer into a stainless-steel vessel that fogged up from the cold liquid. Poured into small conical glasses, and sold to customers for five rupees each, seven for a larger glass.

‘I used to live on this juice when I came to Bombay, Shanmugham. Live on it.’

‘Sir: they use dirty water to make the ice. Jaundice, diarrhoea, worms, God knows what else.’

‘I know. I know.’

The bright, fast, musical wheels turned once again, crushing the cane — Shah imagined bricks rising, scaffolding erected, men hoisted miles into the air on such tinkling energy. If only he were new to Bombay again: if only he could drink that stuff again.

On the drive back, in his mind’s eye he continued to see them, the sugarcane-crusher’s wheels turning under the naked light bulbs, discs of speeding light punching holes into the night like spinning machines of fate, having completed their day shift, and now working overtime.

Late in the night, the first storm crashed into the city.

Low rentals, five minutes to Santa Cruz train station, ten minutes to Bandra by auto. There are many advantages to life in Vakola, yes, but Ajwani, an honest broker, advises first-timers that there is also one big negative.

Not the proximity of slums (they stay in their huts, you stay in your building, who bothers whom?). Not the Boeing 747s flying overhead (cotton in your ears, arm on your wife, off to sleep).

But-one-thing-you-must-know-before-you-move-here: Ajwani taps his mobile phone on his laminated table. This is a low-lying area . One day each monsoon, there is a storm, and on that day life in Vakola becomes impossible.

By morning floodwater had risen to waist height near the highway signal and in parts of Kalina. Vishram Society, on higher ground, was more secure, but the alley leading up to it was a foot below water; every now and then an autorickshaw arrived, scything storm water, discharging a client near the gate, and returning gondola-like. Abandoning the guard’s booth, Ram Khare sought the protection of the Society. Not that this protection was absolute; a continuous spray came through the stars in the grille. Buckets kept under the leaky spots in the roof overflowed every fifteen minutes; tongues of fresh algae and moss grew under the stairwell. Shifting diagonals of rain lashed the rusty gate and the blue roof of the guard’s booth; the water fell thick and glowing, and though the sun was hidden the rain-light was strong enough to read a newspaper in.

In the Renaissance Real-Estate Agency, Ajwani saw that it was futile to expect clients, told Mani ‘This is the day that comes once a year’, and staggered back to his Society under an umbrella.

At four o’clock, the sky was bright again. The thunderclouds, like a single dark bandage, had been stripped away, exposing a raw sun. People ventured out of their buildings into the water, the colour of Assam tea, on which floated rubbish and blazing light.

The morning after the storm, Masterji paced about his living room. The compound was full of storm water and slush. He had just washed his brown trousers in the semi-automatic washing machine, and they would be flecked with red and black if he took even a few steps outside.

He knocked on Mrs Puri’s door, hoping for a cup of tea and some conversation.

‘You’ve become a stranger to us, Masterji,’ Mrs Puri said, when she opened the door. ‘But we have to go to SiddhiVinayak temple soon, Ramu and I. Let us talk tomorrow.’

It was true that his neighbours had not seen much of Masterji lately.

Parliament no longer met because of the rains; and, in any case, all the talking now took place behind closed doors. A hush of covert business had fallen over a garrulous Society. Amidst the silent germination of schemes and ambitions all around him, Masterji sat like a cyst, looking at the rain and his daughter’s drawings of Vakola, or playing with his Rubik’s Cube, until there was a knock on the door and Mr Pinto shouted, ‘Masterji, we are waiting, it’s time for dinner.’

A man’s past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.

Though the men and women around him dreamed of bigger homes and cars, his joys were those of the expanding square footage of his inner life. The more he looked at his daughter’s sketches, the more certain places within Vishram — the stairwell where she ran up, the garden that she walked around, the gate that she liked to swing on — became more beautiful and intimate. Sounds were richer. A scraping of feet somewhere in the building reminded him of his daughter wiping her tennis shoes on the coir mat before coming in. Sometimes he felt as if Sandhya and Purnima were watching the rain with him, and there was a sense of feminine fullness inside the dim flat.

When the sky cleared, he would notice it was evening, and walk along the garden wall. When the breeze scattered the dew from the begonia leaves on to his hand, she was at his side again, his little Sandhya, tickling his palm as in the old days. He superimposed her features on the women walking about the garden. Nearly thirty she would have been. Her mother was slim, she would have stayed slim.

At dinner the Pintos would say, ‘Masterji, you’ve become so quiet these days’, and he would only shrug.

They asked him once or twice if he had had his diabetes test done yet.

Though he was spending more time by himself, he would not say he had been bored; he was conscious, indeed, of a strange contentment. But now, when he wanted to talk to someone, he found himself all alone.

He opened the door and went into the stairwell. Instead of going down the steps, he walked up. He walked up to the fifth floor, and paused in front of a steep single-file staircase, which led to the rooftop terrace.

After the suicide of the Costello boy in 1999, the Society had discouraged the use of the terrace, and children were forbidden from going up there.

Masterji went up the staircase to the terrace. The small wooden door at the end of the stairs had not been opened in a long time, and he had to push with his shoulder.

And then, for the first time in over a decade, he was on the roof of Vishram Society.

Fifteen years ago, Sandhya had come up here in the evenings to play on a rocking-horse, which was still rotting in a corner. Planting a foot on it, he gave it a little kick. It creaked and rocked.

Years of uncleaned guano had calcified on the floor of the terrace, and rainwater had collected over it.

Masterji walked slowly through water to the wall of the terrace. From here, he could see Mary picking up leaves and twigs that littered the compound, and Ram Khare walking back into his booth.