Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

The guard was a lean light-skinned man; he assured Mary he would keep an eye out, but then asked about her ‘family’ with a gleam in his eye that could only signify lechery.

The guard at a building near the Dhobi-ghat had told her to check with him after noon; a doctor’s family had just moved in from Delhi.

Rain clouds were regrouping in the evening sky. Mary crossed the road, and walked past the rows of fish-sellers with their glistening fresh catch, to be told:

‘Those people from Delhi found a servant girl just ten minutes ago. Not even ten.’

Thanking the guard, she sat on a stone wall near the fish-sellers, and breathed into a fold of her sari. She had been out since seven in the morning. On either side of her, in baskets, or spread on blue tarpaulin sheets on the ground, she saw dried anchovies, fresh crabs, prawns in plastic buckets, and small slimy things that were still wriggling. An old fisherwoman scraped the scales off a two-foot yellow-finned tuna with a curved knife.

As if the departed souls of the fish were rising in a great host, a boom filled the air.

Mary looked up. A Boeing, climbing up from the Santa Cruz airport, cut through the darkening sky.

A blind man sat selling jasmine in the compound of the Tamil temple. The gate of the altar was open, and a small oil lamp glowed in front of a black Ganesha, resinous from decades of holy oil.

The side wall of the temple with the painted demon’s mouth was once again doing duty as a wicket.

Kumar, who worked as a cleaner in the kitchen of a nearby hotel, stood near the side wall, slapping his thighs in anticipation.

Dharmendar, the cycle mechanic’s boy, was running up to bowl with the red rubber ball in his hand.

Timothy, who had ‘bunked’ school to be here, had been given the honour of batting first, and took guard in front of the demon’s mouth.

Instead of releasing the red ball, Dharmendar dropped it and grinned.

‘It’s your lucky day, Timothy. Your mother is coming.’

‘Shit.’

The boy dropped his bat, grabbed his school satchel, and ran. Screaming his name — as the cricketers whistled with glee — Mary chased after him with her right hand raised and her fingers flexed.

Lightning forked over their heads, and large drops of rain fell on mother and son as they ran towards the nullah .

An old man leaned out of the open door, relishing the wind in his hair like a fourteen-year-old on his first unaccompanied ride. He stared at a train going in the opposite direction.

What power . The passing locomotive was a vector of raw momentum, rushing from another dimension at an angle through this one. A fragment of a dream slicing into the waking world.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

The first-class compartment was almost empty. But on an impulse Masterji had got up from his seat and done something he had not for decades — come to the open door of the compartment.

Insanity .

He, above all other men, should know the danger of standing here: he who had warned his students so many times against doing so: he, who had suffered so much from the tracks.

Another express sped past, and this time, the warm wind rushing between the trains felt like a spell. The faces of the commuters opposite him looked potent, magical, even demonic — as if they were creatures from another world: or perhaps always present in his world, well-hidden, exposed now by the jarring energy released by the passing of the engines.

A touch on his shoulder.

‘Radium, sir? It works. Real radium.’

Masterji turned round. It took him a second to recover from the illusion of the passing demon-faces.

A man in a dirty shirt was offering him a packet of glow-in-the-dark stars: ‘Radium for Children.’ Ten rupees. Suitable for bedroom walls. Sparks the intellect, sends them to university.

Masterji looked at the packet; he had forgotten to bring a gift for Ronak.

Paunchy, with his breasts pressing against a patterned silk shirt, Gaurav Murthy walked down the aisle of the grocery store. He pointed at peanut chikkis and golden ladoos, at fried banana chips and spicy farsan packets; the storekeeper swept them all into a plastic bag.

Ten rupee packets of peanuts, natural and masala batter-coated, one packet of Frito-Lay’s masala kurkure . One more packet of peanuts? Why not.

‘My father is coming home again, you see.’

‘A happy occasion,’ the store owner said. ‘Buying sweets for him. You’re a good son.’

‘Why not give me some banana chips, just in case? A small packet will do.’

With a half-kilo of snacks in a bag, Gaurav Murthy walked home. A quarter to five. His father had said he would come at five. Which meant he was already there.

He shouldn’t have strayed this far from his Society, but the snacks in Dhobi Talao, just around the corner, were cheaper. Stopping outside his building to catch his breath, he noticed a star from last Deepavali on the terrace; he was sure his father had noticed it too. (‘Why is it still up there? Don’t you pay the maid to…’) Reaching into his shopping bag, he ripped open a packet of chikki . He chewed the peanuts. His father would mock him for having put on weight; he chewed faster.

‘His father’s tail.’ That was what his mother had called him in the earliest days, when with a dumb, animal joy he had jumped up when the doorbell rang in the evening and had followed his father around the house, even into the bathroom, which he had to be pushed out of. The disenchantment began when he was fourteen, and his mother came back from Suratkal robbed by his uncles: he discovered that his father, who struck him on the knuckles with a steel foot-ruler for minor infractions, could not stand up to two provincial thieves. Contempt was born in Gaurav, the contempt of a son who has been hit by a weak father. As his shoulders grew, the contempt grew with them. His father wanted him to become a scientist or a lawyer, a man who worked with his mind; he decided to study commerce. In the university library he looked up from his textbooks of finance and thought of something his father had done or said the previous day: like a common stock on the Bombay Sensex, the value of Yogesh Murthy’s reputation was recalculated daily in his son’s mind, and daily it fell.

A man has no choice in his father; but if he keeps his distance from an unlikeable one, Society always blames him . It seemed wildly unfair to Gaurav.

As he pressed the doorbell, he could hear screams from the compound of his Society; he identified the particular shrillness that was his son’s. Why hasn’t the boy come up right away?

The maid opened the door. His father stood in the living room, admiring Sonal’s latest acquisition: a large bronze ornamental plate, filled to the brim with water, on which floated red gulmohar petals.

‘Look, Gaurav: Father-in-law has brought a nice gift for Ronak,’ his wife said, showing him the packet of Radium stars. ‘How sweet of him to spend the money.’

Saying it was time to feed her father, she retreated into an inner room, leaving the two men to the business of the day.

‘Life is difficult, Father. Sonal’s life is very difficult.’

‘I thought you had a good job, son.’

When Gaurav spoke, Masterji had the impression he was addressing someone on his right shoulder. He moved his head to intercept his son’s gaze; the boy shifted his eyes further to the right.

‘Job is good, Father. Other things in life are not good. Stress. All the time. I see a Guru now for my stress. Sangeeta Aunty told me about him. He gives me mantras to chant.’

His father was a rationalist, of course. Something stinging would be on its way soon. Gaurav bit into the chikki .