Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

He closed his eyes. At the age of sixteen, when other boys his age in Suratkal were playing cricket in the maidan or chasing college girls, Masterji had gone through a ‘spiritual’ phase, spending his afternoons reading Dr Radhakrishnan on Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, performing exercises from a second-hand copy of B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga , and teaching himself Sanskrit. This ‘spiritual’ phase ended the night he watched his father’s corpse burning in the cemetery and thought: That’s all there is to life. Nothing more . After his father’s death, when he went to Mumbai to live with an uncle, he left Dr Radhakrishnan and B. K. S. Iyengar behind him. Bombay was a new world, and he had come here to become a new man. Now it seemed to him that, oddly enough, he had spent his forty-four years in Bombay exactly in the manner prescribed by the Hindu philosophers: like a lotus in a dirty pond, be in the world but not of it . Nothing had made him cry for years. Not even his wife’s death. Was he really sorry that she had died? He did not know. The hypodermic needle of the outside world had bent at his epidermis and never penetrated.

He heard something strike the floor, and realized it was his book. ‘I’m falling asleep. During the day.’

Not once in his adult life, not even when sick, had he allowed himself this luxury; he had scolded his wife and daughter if he caught them napping in the afternoon, and punished, by a stroke of a steel foot-ruler applied to the knuckles, his son. With a concentrated exertion of will he broke through the settling surface of sleep and got up.

He turned the tap in the living-room sink to wash his face in cold water, but the customary trickle had dried up completely.

How, in the midst of the monsoons, could he have no water in his living room? He struck the tap with his fist.

From the stairwell, as if to taunt him, came the words:

‘By the rivers of Bab-y-lon

Where we sat dowwwwwn.’

The song was in English and the voice was deep: Ibrahim Kudwa, going up to his flat.

An hour later, the children were in the room, and Masterji was casting shadows on the wall to show how a healthy star changes into a red giant.

He was still talking and casting shadows, when the red giant flickered on the wall and vanished. Flashes of light and great explosions from near at hand overwhelmed the stars and black holes of Masterji’s distant galaxies.

The residents of Tower B were setting off firecrackers.

The physics students watched from Masterji’s window, craning their necks to get the best view.

‘What is going on?’ Masterji asked. ‘Is it a festival today?’

‘No,’ Mohammad Kudwa said.

‘Is someone getting married, then?’

The lights came on in the room: Mrs Puri had walked in through the open door.

‘Have you read the notice, Masterji?’ she asked, her fat fingers still at the light switch. ‘They beat us to it. Tower B. They have accepted the offer.’

‘You are interrupting the physics top-up, Mrs Puri.’

‘Oy, oy, oy…’ She flicked the light switch on and off. ‘Masterji. This cannot go on any longer. Speak to the Pintos. Must we all lose the light because of Shelley’s blindness? Here…’ She held out a paper. ‘… read this. And let the boys go. What kind of class can you have with all that noise outside?’

‘All right,’ Masterji shouted to the boys at the window. ‘Go down and play with those fellows. That’s what you want, isn’t it? No one cares about physics. Go. And you too, Mrs Puri.’

She stood at the door with the notice in her hands.

‘I’ll go, Masterji. But will you do what Ajwani asked? Will you go down and see Mr Shah’s new buildings?’

He closed the door behind all of them.

How did she know what Ajwani asked me to do? he wondered. Are they talking about me behind my back?

He read what Mrs Puri had left for him:

NOTICE

Vishram Co-operative Hsg Society Ltd, Tower B, Vakola, Santa Cruz (E), Mumbai — 40055

Minutes of the extraordinary general meeting held on 24 june

Theme: Dissolution of Society (Approved)

As the quorum was sufficient, the meeting commenced on time, at 12.30 p.m.

Mr V. A. Ravi, Secretary, suggested that the members should dispense with formalities and deal with the main issue, which was to consider the generous offer of redevelopment presented by…

He opened the window and tried to get a good view of Tower B. Standing in front of their building, men and women were lighting sparklers, rockets, dizzying sudarshan -chakras, and things in bottles with no purpose but to emit raw noise and light.

The doorbell rang.

‘Masterji… Please … just go down and look at Mr Shah’s…’

Mrs Puri had brought Ramu with her this time. The boy smiled; he too was pleading with his Masterji.

A tower of Babel of the languages of construction.

Bricks, concrete, twisted steel wires, planks, and bamboo poles held up the interiors. Long metal spokes stuck out from the floors with green netting, which sagged between the spokes like webbing, as if a fly had been squashed into the blueprint of the building. Holes in the concrete as big as a giant’s eyes, and massive slabs that appeared to be aligned incorrectly, overlapping and jutting over each other. Everything was an affront to a man’s sense of scale and order, even the sign that identified the thing, large as a political advertisement, and lit from beneath:

THE CONFIDENCE EXCELSIOR

Masterji stood before the two half-built concrete towers.

One day they would be glassed and sheathed, but now their true nature was exposed. This was the truth of 20,000 rupees a square foot. The area already had a water shortage, how would it support so many new homes… and what would happen to the roads?

Lights came on at the top of the second tower: somehow a crane had been lifted up there, and it began to move. In the glare of the lights Masterji saw men sitting on the dark floors like an advance army concealed in the entrails of the building.

He lifted his foot just in time: a dead rat lay before him imprinted with a tyre-track.

He walked past the huts and the Tamil temple, to return to the gate of his Society. The celebrations continued outside Tower B.

He was halfway up the stairs, when a red missile hurtled down in the opposite direction.

‘Sorry, Masterji.’

It was Ms Meenakshi, his next-door neighbour: wearing a red blouse that did not quite reach her jeans.

‘Don’t worry, Ms Meenakshi. How are things?’

She smiled and kept going down the stairs.

‘How is your boyfriend?’ he shouted.

From somewhere near the ground floor, she laughed. ‘My boy friend is scared of you, Masterji. He won’t come here any more.’

He listened to her charge out of the building. Exactly the way Sandhya, when her friends called her for a game of volleyball, dropped her sketchbook and rocketed downstairs.

He placed his hand on the warm building. Just as when a drop of formaldehyde falls on a dead leaf in a science class, revealing a secret life of veins, Vishram throbbed with occult networks. It was pregnant with his past.

Back in his flat, he turned the tap at the washbasin sink. He slapped it. Water spurted out brown and then red and then stopped. He slapped it again, and now the tap spat out a stone. A final red spurt, and finally the water flowed clear and strong.

Who says it is falling down? he thought, washing his face in the cold water. It will last for ever, if we take care of it.

From the kitchen, the old calendar tapped against the wall in a frenzy of approval.