Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Kothari brushed his hair from ear to ear to hide his baldness, an act that hinted at vanity or stupidity; yet his eyes were slit-like beneath snowy eyebrows, and each time he grinned, whiskery laugh-lines gave him the look of a predatory lynx. His position carried no salary, yet he was ingratiating at each annual general meeting, virtually pleading for re-election with his palms folded in a namaste; no one could tell why this bland bald businessman wanted to sit in a dingy Secretary’s office and sink his face into files and folders for hours. He was so secretive, indeed, that you feared one day he would dissolve among his papers like a bar of Pears’ Soap. He had no known ‘nature’.

Mrs Puri (3C), who was the closest thing to a friend the Secretary had, insisted there was a ‘nature’. If you talked to him long enough, you would discover he feared China, worried about Jihadis on the suburban trains, and favoured a national identification card to flush out illegal Bangladeshi immigrants; but most had never known him to express any opinion, unless it was related to the game of cricket. Some believed that he was always on his guard because as a young man he had committed an indiscretion; his wife was rumoured to be his cousin, or from another community, or older than him by two years; or even, by the malicious, his ‘sister’. They had one son, Tinku, a noted player of carom and other indoor sports, fat and white-skinned, with an imbecilic smile pasted on his face at all times — although whether he was truly stupid, or whether, like his father, merely hiding his ‘nature’, was unclear.

The Secretary threw his sandwich wrapper into the waste bin. His breath was now a passion of raw onion and curried potato; he returned to work.

He was calculating the annual maintenance fees, which paid for the guard, Mary the cleaning lady, the seven-kinds-of-vermin man who came to fight invasions of wasps and honeybees, and the annual heavy repairs to the building’s roofing and general structure. For two years now Kothari had kept the maintenance bill constant at 1.55 rupees a square foot per tenant per month, which translated into an annual bill of (on average) 14,694 rupees per year per tenant, payable to the Society in one sum or two (in which case the second instalment was recalculated at 1.65 rupees a square foot). His ability to keep the maintenance bill steady, despite the pressure of inflation in a city like Mumbai, was considered his principal achievement as Secretary, even if some whispered that he pulled this off only by doing nothing at all to maintain the Society.

He burped, and looked up to see Mary, the Khachada-wali , who had been sweeping the corridor with her broom, standing outside his office.

A lean silent woman, barely five feet tall, Mary had big front teeth erupting out of her concave cheeks. Residents kept conversation with her to a minimum.

‘That man who asked all the questions is taking a long time to make up his mind,’ she said.

The Secretary went back to his figures. But Mary still stood at the doorway.

‘I mean, to ask the same set of questions for two days in a row. That’s curiosity.’

Now the Secretary looked up.

‘Two days? He wasn’t here yesterday.’

‘You weren’t here yesterday morning,’ the servant said. ‘He was here.’ She went back to her sweeping.

‘What did he want yesterday?’

‘The same thing he wanted today. Answers to lots and lots of questions.’

Mr Kothari’s bulbous nose contracted into a dark berry: he was frowning. He got up from his desk and came to the threshold of the office.

‘Who saw him here yesterday other than you?’

With a handkerchief over his nose he waited for Mary to stop sweeping, so he could repeat the question.

Mrs Puri was walking back to Vishram Society with her eighteen-year-old son Ramu, who kept turning to a stray dog that had followed them from the fruit and vegetable market.

Mrs Puri, who moved with a slight limp due to her weight, stopped, and took her son by the hand.

‘Oy, oy, oy, my Ramu. Slowly, slowly. We don’t want you falling into that .’

A pit had materialized in front of Vishram Society. It swallowed everything but the heads and necks of the men digging inside it, and an occasional raised muddy arm. Pushing her son back, Mrs Puri looked in. The soil changed colour every two feet as it went down, from black to dark red to bone-grey at the very bottom, where she saw ancient cement piping, mottled and barnacled. Wormy red-and-yellow snippets of wire showed through the strata of mud. There was a sign sticking out of the pit, but it faced the wrong direction, and only when Mrs Puri went all the way around the hole did she see that it said:

WORK IN PROGRESS INCONVENIENCE IS REGRETTED BMC

Ramu followed her; the dog followed Ramu.

Mrs Puri saw the Secretary was at the guard’s booth, reading the register and holding a hand up against the early-evening sun.

‘Ram Khare, Ram Khare,’ he said, and turned the register around so it confronted the guard. ‘There is a record of the man today, Ram Khare. Here.’ He tapped the entry the inquisitive visitor had made. ‘But…’ He flipped the page. ‘… there is no record of him in here yesterday.’

‘What are we talking about?’ she asked.

Ramu took the stray dog with him to the black Cross, where he would play until his mother called him in.

When the Secretary described the man, she said: ‘Oh, yes. He came yesterday. In the morning. There was another one with him, too. A fat one. They asked all these questions. I answered some, and I told them to speak to Mr Pinto.’

The Secretary stared at the guard. Ram Khare scraped the ledger with his long fingernails.

‘If there is no record in here,’ he said, ‘then no such men came.’

‘What did they want to know?’ the Secretary asked Mrs Puri.

‘Whether it is a good place or a bad place. Whether the people are good. They wanted to rent a flat, I think.’

The fat man with the gold rings had impressed Mrs Puri. He had red lips and teeth blackened by gutka , which made you think he was lower class, yet his manners were polished, as if he were of breeding, or had acquired some in the course of life. The other man, the tall dark one, wore a nice white shirt and black trousers, exactly as the Secretary had described him. No, he said nothing about being in chemicals.

‘Maybe we should tell the police about this,’ the Secretary said. ‘I don’t understand why he came again today. There have been burglaries near the train station.’

Mrs Puri dismissed the possibility of danger.

‘Both of them were good men, polite, well dressed. The fat one had so many gold rings on his fingers.’

The Secretary turned, fired — ‘Men with gold rings are the biggest thieves in the world. Where have you been living all these years?’ — and walked away.

She folded her fat forearms over her chest.

‘Mrs Pinto,’ she shouted. ‘Please don’t let the Secretary escape.’

What the residents called their sansad — parliament — was now in session. White plastic chairs had been arranged around the entrance of Tower A, right in front of Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen, an arrangement that allowed those seated a glimpse, through an almond-shaped tear in the green kitchen curtain, of a small TV. The first ‘parliamentarians’ were about to sit on the plastic chairs, which would remain occupied until water returned to the building.

A small, slow, white-haired man, refined by age into a humanoid sparrow, lowered himself into a chair with a direct view of the TV through Mrs Saldanha’s torn curtain (the ‘prime’ chair). A retired accountant for the Britannia Biscuit Company, Mr Pinto (2A) had a weak vascular system and kept his mouth open when walking. His wife, almost blind in her old age, walked with her hand on his shoulder, although she knew the compound well enough to navigate it without her husband’s help; most evenings they walked as a pair, she with her blind eyes, and he with his open mouth, as if sucking sight and breath from the other. She sat next to her husband, with his help.