Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Turning its page to October, where some dates had been circled by his wife ( 7 October — Dentist ), he added a circle of his own in red. 3 October . He flipped the calendar’s pages back to June. Last year’s calendar, but it would do. He crossed out ‘25 June’. The red tip of the pen hopped over days and months… just ninety-eight days left.

No.

Ninety-nine days left.

Down in the compound, a last firecracker exploded.

Friday mornings in 1B, Vishram Society Tower A. Kellogg’s, warm milk, lots of sugar. Marmalade on toast. Wedges of Amul cheese.

The dishes had been cleared from the dining table and immersed in a kitchen sink brimming with frothy soap-water.

Sitting on their mother’s bed, Sunil and Sarah watched as Mrs Rego, at her reading table, slit open the latest letter from her younger sister, Catherine, who lived in Bandra.

Hair brushed, double-windsor-knotted, wearing his navy-blue-and-white school uniform, fourteen-year-old Sunil, Mummy’s ‘senior adviser’, closed his eyes to concentrate. Next to him in her pretty uniform (pink and white), Sarah, eleven, the ‘junior adviser’, kicked her legs and watched a dragonfly.

A black-and-white photograph of Arundhati Roy hung from the bedroom wall next to a framed poster for a Vijay Tendulkar play performed at the Prithvi Theatre.

Putting on her glasses, Mummy read Aunty Catherine’s letter out loud, until she reached the sentence that began: ‘Even though you have not written for a week, as it is your wont to do…’

Reading it aloud a second time, Mrs Rego put a hand to her heart. Gasp. ‘Wont’ was a most stylish word, she explained to her children. Which meant that the three of them had been well and truly ‘trumped’.

The aim of this Friday-morning epistolary jousting was for each sister, in an apparently banal letter to the other, to slip in a ‘stylish’ word or phrase, which would catch the other off guard, and force her to concede that she had been ‘trumped’. Even though they were just minutes apart from each other (depending on the traffic in the east — west passage), Mrs Rego each Friday sealed a blue prepaid letter, addressed it with formal pomp (‘Mrs Catherine D’Mello-Myer of Bandra West’) and walked over to the postal workers’ colony near the Vakola mosque to drop it into the red box there.

A week later, the postman would deliver the riposte from Bandra.

Now Mrs Rego had to ‘trump’ Aunty Catherine back.

Taking out her best Parker fountain-pen, using her most florid hand, she wrote on the blue prepaid letter:

Dearest Darling Catherine…

… while preparing for an important executive meeting at the Institute, I found, quite serendipitously, your lovely little letter…’

‘“Serendipitously” is a very stylish way of saying “by chance”,’ Mrs Rego explained to the children. The three shared wicked giggles. The moment she got to the line, Catherine would have to swivel about in her chair, saying, ‘Oh, but I’ve been trumped .’

Sunil took Mummy’s Parker and underlined the phrase three times, just to stick it in to his Aunty Catherine.

‘Time for school, children.’ She rose from the bed. ‘I’ll get a plastic bag.’

Mrs Rego went into the kitchen to check on Ramaabai, the maid. Standing at the sink, the old woman removed one wet utensil after the other from the foamy water, like a psychoanalyst extracting submerged memories, and wiped each one clean with a pink Brillo pad.

‘Ramaabai, if you break any of the glasses today I’ll deduct the cost from your month’s salary,’ Mrs Rego said. ‘And be on time in the evening.’

The maid kept cleaning the dishes.

Mrs Rego and her children went from floor to floor in Vishram Society, inspecting the doors. Another shipment of sweets had arrived from the builder last night, to celebrate Tower B’s (unanimous) acceptance of his plan, and Mrs Rego knew from the last time what would happen. The golden Ganeshas from the red sweet-boxes, cut out by those who did not wish to discard a god’s image, had turned up alongside the overlapping Shivas and Jesuses on the doors.

Mrs Puri, naturally, had put up a Confidence Group Ganesha on her door. Two of them, in fact. Mrs Rego’s nails scraped at the god’s pot belly until it bulged out. She did the same to the second Ganesha. Sunil held up the black bag; his mother flicked the gods into it.

Saying goodbye to her two advisers at the gate — they would catch their school bus from the market — Mrs Rego went the other way. Her fingers touched her black handbag, her elbow thrust out at a sharp angle; her lips were sucked in and her eyes were narrowed. Not a square inch of vulnerable surface.

She pitched the black bag into the open rubbish pit, where, to her delight, a stray hog took an interest in it. She wished she had rubbed some honey over the Confidence Group Ganeshas she had removed from the doors.

‘Liar,’ Mrs Rego said, as if goading the animal to attack. ‘Liar, liar, liar’: she clapped three times.

Leaving the hog to enjoy Mr Shah’s gifts to Vishram, she walked towards her institute.

A life like Mrs Rego’s provided an excellent schooling in the ways of liars.

Georgina Rego, the ‘Battleship’, was one of two daughters of a famous Bandra doctor who would have been rich if he had not trusted every man he met on the street. Catherine, the younger sister with whom she played her game of ‘trump’, still lived in Bandra, in a flat in the Reclamation. Disobeying their father, Catherine had married an American exchange student, a half-Jew — a scandal in the community in those days; now the foreign husband, a quiet, goateed man, wrote articles on village life in India that were published in foreign magazines and in the copies of the Economic and Political Weekly that came to Mrs Rego’s desk at the Institute.

Her own husband, Salvador, had been picked by her father. A Bombay Bandra Catholic who liked worsted wool suits and dark shirts embroidered with his initials: ‘S.R.’ After two years in Manila working for a British merchant bank he confessed one evening by long-distance that he had found another, a local, younger. Naturally, a Catholic. They were all good Catholics in the Philippines. ‘You were never going to be enough for a man like me, Georgina.’

He cleaned her out.

Her entire dowry. Sixteen George V half-sovereigns, her father’s share certificates in the Colgate-Palmolive company, two heavy silverware sets — all smuggled in her husband’s luggage to Manila. Her father was dead and she could not live off Catherine’s handouts, so she had left Bandra, a single mother with two children, and moved to the eastern side of the city, to a neighbourhood without roads and reputation, but with Christians. Va-kho-la. (Or was it Vaa-k’-la? She still wasn’t entirely sure.)

From Catherine she heard about big changes in Bandra. One by one, the old mansions on Waterfield Road were melted down like ingots — even her own Uncle Coelho’s. It was always the same builder, Karim Ali, who broke down the houses. When he wanted to snatch Uncle Coelho’s house on Waterfield Road to put up his apartment block for Bollywood stars, he too had come with sweets and smiles — it was all ‘Uncle and Aunty’ at first. Later on, the threatening graffiti on the walls and the late-night phone calls, and finally the day when four teenagers burst in when Uncle Coelho was having dinner, put a cheque on one side of the table, a knife on the other, and said: ‘Either the knife or the cheque. Decide before dinner is over.’ This Confidence Shah was the same kind of man as that Karim Ali — how could anyone believe those oily smiles, those greasy sweets? Behind the smiles were lies and knives.