Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

‘You’re my guest, Mrs Rego. You may not like my offer, but you must eat the food at my table. A lady like you, who grew up in Bandra, must know not to snub her host. If it’s too much you can take it back for your boy. You have two boys, don’t you? A son and daughter, sorry. Well, you’ll take it back for both of them.’

Pulling out a chair, Mrs Rego sat.

A waiter cleared the napkin from her plate. Mr Shah himself served a portion of curried lobster, and offered Mrs Rego a naan, which she declined.

She never had carbohydrates in the afternoon.

*

Sunil Rego, coming home dirty from his cricket, found his mother sitting on the bed, with Sarah on her lap. The bedside lamp had been turned on.

‘There’s food for you in the fridge, Sunil. It’s wrapped in silver foil.’

Mrs Rego looked at her daughter. ‘Very good, isn’t it?’

Sarah nodded.

‘Why did you buy it, Mother?’ Sunil sat next to them.

‘I didn’t buy it. You know we don’t have money to spend on restaurant food.’

Mrs Rego whispered: ‘The builder sent it. Mr Shah. He has made us an offer.’

‘Yes, Mummy. I know.’

‘No, Sunil. He has made us a separate offer. This afternoon.’

Sunil listened to everything — how Shah had ordered food, listened to her life story, sympathized with her life story, then pushed a folder and a blank envelope over to her.

Not a bribe; a first instalment of the money to come — that was all. Don’t want it, she had said — thinking it was a trap. It will be deducted, will be deducted from the final payment. Take it, Mrs Rego. Think of your two sons. Your son and daughter, sorry.

‘What did you do, Mummy?’

‘I said no, of course. He said we could think about it and let him know.’

Sunil covered his mouth with his palm. Sarah did the same as her brother did.

‘What do we do now? Should we call your father in the Philippines and ask him?’

‘No, Mother,’ Sunil said sternly. ‘How could you even think of that? After all that he’s done to us?’

‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right.’

‘Are you calling Daddy?’ Sarah kicked her legs about. ‘Daddy in the Philippines?’

Sunil put his finger on his lips and glared at his sister.

‘Let’s take a walk, Mummy.’

Mrs Rego understood. The walls of Vishram were thin.

Mother and children, hand in hand, went to the main road, where she told them again, in slightly different words, all that had happened; and soon they were at the Dhobi-ghat, the part of Vakola where clothes were washed in the open air, in small cubicles seething with soap-suds and foam. Mother and children stood outside a laundry cubicle and talked. Behind them a long white petticoat rose and fell like a sail in a storm, as it was slapped on a granite slab. On the other side of the road, a bhelpuri-vendor sliced a boiled potato into cubes while his lentil broth simmered.

Mrs Rego turned around: the washerman had stopped his work to watch them.

Hailing an autorickshaw, Mrs Rego and Sunil said, almost in one voice: ‘Bandra.’

The dividing wall between the west and the east of Mumbai is punctured at Santa Cruz at just three places — indeed, the difficulty of passage is the harshest kind of tax imposed on the residents of the poorer east (for it is usually they who have to make this passage). Two of these passages are called ‘subways’, tunnels under the railway tracks, and both of these, Milan and Khar, are equally congested at rush hour. The third option, the Highway, is the most humane — but, being the longest, is also the most expensive by autorickshaw.

For reasons of economy, Mrs Rego asked that their driver take the Khar subway; turning left just before the station, their rickshaw joined the queue of vehicles hoping to make it through the tunnel to the west.

South Mumbai has the Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Building, but the suburbs, built later, have their own Gothic style: for every evening, by six, pillars of hydro-benzene and sulphur dioxide rise high up from the roads, flying buttresses of nitrous dioxide join each other, swirls of unburnt kerosene, mixed illegally into the diesel, cackle like gargoyles, and a great roof of carbon monoxide closes over the structure. And this Cathedral of particulate matter rises over every red light, every bridge and every tunnel during rush hour.

In a narrow passageway like the Khar subway, the pollution chokes, burns, ravages human tissue. When their rickshaw finally came, after twenty minutes of honking and crawling, to the mouth of the tunnel, Mrs Rego covered Sarah’s nose with her kerchief, and instructed the boy to cover his face too. The line of autos moved into the choked tunnel, passing under a giant advertisement offering cures for kidney stones by the latest ultrasonic methods to make, in this primitive fashion, the passage to the west.

Ahead in the distance, where the tunnel ended, the three Regos could see light, clean air, freedom.

In the shade of a group of king palms, a woman in a burqa lifted up her face-mask and whispered to a young man. Watching them, Mrs Rego thought: I am almost old. I am forty-eight years old .

Hand in hand, she and her children walked down the Bandra bandstand.

They spilled over, as if from the ocean: girls with golden straplets on their handbags, boys with buff shaved chests showing through their white shirts, on every brow and lip the moisture placed there by the warm night, and sucked away by the ocean breezes.

Mrs Rego waited for darkness to fall.

An old woman’s night is so small: a young woman’s night is the whole sky.

When the street lamps came to life, they took another rickshaw so she could see her Bandra again — the Bandra of her college days, where even the façade of a Catholic church had the quality and excitement of sin.

Getting off at National College, the three walked towards the old neighbourhood.

Girls were shopping for handbags and sandals in the lit stalls of the Linking Road. Just as she had done, all those years ago. If her younger self, searching for a handbag, were to bump into her, would she believe that this was her destiny in life — to end up as a left-wing radical in Santa Cruz (East)?

On Waterfield Road, she stopped by a café and looked into the glass window: what were all these young people, in their black T-shirts and turtleshell-rimmed glasses, talking about? How fat and glossy they looked, like glazed chicken breasts turning on a rotisserie spit.

The touch of cold glass on the tip of Mrs Rego’s nose was like a guard’s rebuke.

Not yet. Not till you sign that document.

‘Are we moving to Bandra, Mummy?’

‘Quiet. Mummy’s watching the people on the other side of the glass.’

‘Mummy—’

‘Anyway, we can’t move to Bandra, so don’t disturb her.’

‘Why not, Sunil?’

‘Because the builder is an evil man. Just like Karim Ali who robbed Grand-Uncle Coelho.’

‘Mummy, let’s move to Bandra. I like it here.’

Mrs Rego looked at her son, and then at her daughter, and nodded at both of them.

Ajwani took the slice of lemon and pressed it with dark fingers: seeds and juice oozed out.

‘That’s what she feels like. Pretends to be special, a social worker helping the poor, but every day the deadline comes nearer, this is what is happening to her brain.’

Mrs Puri glared at him; she bent and picked up the lemon seeds from the carpet of her living room. ‘Don’t do that. Ramu might slip on them.’

Ramu lay under his blue aeroplane quilt, the door to his bedroom ajar; as he sipped lemon tea on the living-room sofa, Ajwani waved to the boy.