Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Pieces of rubbish — the banana peel, for example — had been flung far from his doorstep, as if someone had kicked them there.

He got down on one knee and began gathering in the errant garbage.

A young woman’s foot scraped the banana peel towards him.

‘Leave it alone, Ms Meenakshi, I’ll clean it.’

‘I’m only trying to help.’

His neighbour’s sleek black jeans exposed inches of skin above the ankles, and she wore no socks; bunched together within the silver crisscrossing of her sandals, her plump white toes, incarnadined with lacquer, looked like bonsai cleavage. Once she got rid of the braces and bought better glasses, Masterji decided, she would make a very good marriage.

He put pressure on the wrong leg as he stood up: a sharp angular pain cut into his left knee like an accent over a French ‘e’.

Accent aigu . He sketched it in the air: pleased that he could civilize his arthritis by connecting it to a beautiful language.

Ms Meenakshi leaned on her doorway, grinning and exposing her braces.

‘That woman must hate you even more than she hates me.’ She leaned her head towards Mrs Puri’s door. ‘She just looks through my rubbish.’

‘This is the early-morning cat, Ms Meenakshi,’ Masterji said, massaging his knee-cap. ‘Mrs Puri has not done this.’

His neighbour adjusted her hexagonal glasses before closing her door. ‘Then why is your rubbish bin the only one that has been overturned?’

At one o’clock that day, Ibrahim Kudwa, uninvited, came and joined the Pintos’ table for lunch.

Perhaps because Kudwa, the only Muslim in the building, was considered a fair-minded man by the others — or perhaps because, being the owner of a not-so-busy internet café, he could leave his business in the afternoon — he had been designated a ‘neutral’ in the dispute, and sent, in this capacity, by the rest of the Society. Halfway through lunch, when Nina, the maid-servant, was serving steaming appams , he said: ‘Masterji, I don’t approve of this thing. This boycott.’

‘Thank you, Ibrahim.’

‘But Masterji… understand why people are doing this. There is so much anguish in the building over your strange actions. You say you’ll sign, then you go to see your son, and say you won’t sign.’

‘I never said yes , Ibrahim.’ Masterji wagged his finger. ‘I said maybe .’

‘Let me teach you something today, Masterji: there is no maybe in this matter. We think you should go and meet Mr Shah in his house. Have a talk with him. He holds teachers in high regard.’

Ibrahim Kudwa washed his mouth and wiped his lips and beard on the Pintos’ hand-towel. He put the towel back on its rack and stared at it.

‘Masterji, when the builder’s offer was made, I suffered, because I did not know what to do with the money — I took an Antacid to sleep. Now that there is the possibility of the money I never had being taken away from me — I need two Antacids to sleep.’

He wiped his hands again and left, apparently abandoning whatever remained of his neutrality on the wet hand-towel.

‘Boycott — it’s just a word,’ Masterji told Mr Pinto. ‘Remember the time Sangeeta’s Aquaguard machine leaked water into Ajwani’s kitchen, and from there into Abichandani’s kitchen? Remember how they stopped talking to her until she paid for the repairs? She never agreed to it. After two weeks they were talking to her again.’

After an hour, he went down the stairs, kicked aside the stray dog, and sat on the ‘prime’ chair in front of Mrs Saldanha’s window. The small TV was on in her kitchen, a ghostly quadrilateral behind the green curtain; a slice of the newsreader’s face showed through the almond-shaped tear like a kernel of truth. As he watched, Mrs Saldanha came to the window and closed its wooden shutters.

Masterji surveyed the compound of his Society as if nothing had happened.

On his way up the stairs, he saw the sick dog lying once again on the landing. At least it looked at him the same way as it had before. He let it lie there.

He was looking so intently at the dog that he almost missed the handwritten sign that had been stuck with Scotch tape to the wall above it.

Some facts about ‘a certain person’ who has received respect from us for thirty years. But why? Now we find out the truth.

1. Because he was a retired teacher, he got respect from all of us. He offered to help children with exams, true. But what kind of help? He would talk about the parts of the sun, like the corona, and the dense core of hydrogen and helium, and so on, far beyond the strict requirements of the syllabus, which meant that when the exam papers appeared, the children found nothing of use in his tutorials. So to go to him for tuition, or private lessons, was the ‘kiss of death’.

2. For DEEPAVALI, CHRISTMAS, OR EID, he has never given one rupee in baksheesh to Ram Khare. He is always saying, I have no money, I am retired, but is this true? Do we not know otherwise?

3. Even though he liked to boast loudly ‘he had no TV’, every evening he would sit in front of Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen in the exact position where he would block everyone else’s view and then he would watch TV.

4. NEVER GIVES TIPS, for large waste material left outside the door, to the Khachada-wali.

SO WHY HAVE WE RESPECTED HIM BLINDLY?

He read it twice before he could understand it. Tear it down? He withdrew his hand. A man is not what his neighbours say he is. Laugh and let it go.

When he bent to his sink a few minutes later to wash his face, the water burned his eyes and nose.

But a man is what his neighbours say he is.

In old buildings truth is a communal thing, a consensus of opinion. Vishram Society had retained mementoes, over forty-eight years, of all those who had lived in it; each resident had left a physical record of himself here, like the kerosene handprint made by Rajeev Ajwani on the front wall on the day of his great tae kwon-do victory. If you knew how to read Vishram’s walls, you would find them covered with handprints. These prints were permanent, but they could move; a person’s record was alterable. Now Masterji felt the opinion of him that was engraved into the building — in its peeling paint and 48-year-old brickwork — shift. As it moved, so did something within his body.

He could not say, looking at his wet face and dripping moustache, how much of what was written in the poster was untrue.

He went down and read it again. Nothing about the Pintos in it: they were hoping to drive a wedge between them. He ripped it down.

But that evening another appeared glued to the lift door, different in handwriting, similar in its complaints (‘never taught English to students even though he knew Shakespeare and other big writers who were part of the examinations’) — and then there was one on Ram Khare’s guard-booth (‘Put your own poster up,’ he said, when Masterji protested). Though he tore each one down, he knew another would go up: the black handprints were multiplying.

In the old days, you had caste, and you had religion: they taught you how to eat, marry, live, and die. But in Bombay caste and religion had faded away, and what had replaced them, as far as he could tell, was the idea of being respectable and living among similar people. All his adult life Masterji had done so; but now, in the space of just a few days, he had shattered the husk of a respectable life and tasted its bitter kernel.

It was nearly 8 a.m. He was still in bed, listening to savages screaming below him.

Down in 2C, Rajeev and Raghav Ajwani practised tae kwon-do under their father’s supervision.