Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine, Shelley. Just a cough.’

Mr Pinto heard singing in the distance: children rehearsing patriotic songs for Independence Day:

‘ Saarey jahan se accha

Yeh Hindustan hamara

Hum bulbule hain iski

Yeh gulistan hamara .’

‘Better than all the world

Is this India of ours;

We are its nightingales,

It is our garden.’

A few steps down, he turned to his wife and said: ‘Wait.’

They were in the ‘blood stretch’, and he held his breath. Leaning over the wall, he saw a pack of stray black dogs, down in the gutter, running after a small white-and-brown puppy. It squealed as if this were no game. The four dogs chased it down the length of the gutter. Then all of them vanished.

‘What is happening there, Mr Pinto?’

‘They’re going to kill that little thing, Shelley.’ He paused. ‘It looks like Sylvester.’

The Pintos had once had a dog, Sylvester, for the sake of their son Tony. When Sylvester died, the Society had allowed them to bury him in the backyard so they could be near him as they walked around Vishram.

The squealing noise broke out again from inside the gutter.

The old accountant put his hand on his wife’s back. ‘You walk on along the wall, Shelley; you know the way, don’t you? I have to see what they are doing to that puppy.’

‘But Masterji said not to leave the building till he came back with a lawyer.’

‘I’m going right outside, Shelley. We have to save that little fellow.’

Shelley waited by the wall, holding her breath against the stench from the beef-shop. The squealing from the gutter grew louder, and then died out. She heard footsteps from the other side of the wall. She recognized them as Mr Pinto’s. She heard him lower himself into the gutter.

‘Don’t walk in the gutter, Mr Pinto. Do you hear me?’

Now she heard a second set of footsteps. Younger, faster footsteps.

‘Mr Pinto,’ she called. ‘Who is that coming close to you?’

She waited.

‘Mr Pinto… where are you? And who is that who has come in to the gutter? Say something.’

She put her hand on the wall; from a bruise in the brick, she knew that the guard’s booth was to her left, about thirty-four small steps away.

She walked with her hand on the wall.

The guard’s booth was still twenty-nine steps away when Shelley Pinto heard her husband cry out.

Masterji, on his way to the lawyer’s office, stopped and sniffed. Balls of batter-coated starch were sizzling inside a snack store.

Quick dark arms emerged from a white banian to grate potatoes into a vat of boiling oil. Another pair of arms waited with a scoop; now and then the scoop dipped into the vat to come up with sizzling wafers. Big bins full of snacks surrounded the two men: fried potatoes (red and spicy, or yellow and unspiced), fried plantains (cut into round slices, or sliced longitudinally into strips, or coated in spices, or dusted in brown sugar), and batter-fried greens. Next door, in a rival establishment, a rival vat of raucous oil hissed with potatoes. Between them, the two shops produced the continuous competitive buzzing of boiling oil that is as much a dialect of the Bombay street as Hindi, Marathi, or Bhojpuri.

The competition of painted signs came next.

FERROUS NONFERROUS METALS. IQBAL ROZA PROPRIETOR. D’SOUZA BRAND WEDDING CARDS. BULK SALES

The old buildings began to ooze out fresh juice; ensconced in arched niches in the rotting façades, vendors sat before pyramids of oranges and lemons, operating electric mixers that rumbled apoplectically.

The sound of metallic snipping warned Masterji to slow down.

FAMOUS HAIR CUTTING PALACE

— this was the landmark mentioned in the advertisement. The next doorway must lead into the Loyola Trust Building.

The pigeons landing on the metal grilles of the windows made a constant cooing as he walked in; a sapling had cracked the cornice above the doorway. No reception area, no signboard in the lobby. A metal cage went up the airshaft, as if protecting the lift, which seemed, in any case, to be broken. Masterji knew at once the story of this building. The landlord could not — because of tenant protection laws — force his tenants out; they were probably paying the same rent they were in 1950, and he was retaliating by refusing to provide even the basics — light, safety, hygiene. You could almost hear him praying every night to God: make my tenants fall down the stairs, break their bones, burn in fire.

It grew darker as Masterji climbed the steps. A plaque of dense black wires criss-crossed the wall like a living encrustation growing over old plaster and brick. He could even smell the acridity of cockroach on the wall. He heard talking from above him:

‘There are three great dangers in this city.’

‘Three?’

‘Three: children, goats, and a third thing I forget.’

‘Children — a danger?’

‘The greatest. Responsible for half the traffic accidents in this city. Half .’

He climbed more steps to see a pale pot-bellied idol of Ganesha in a dim niche, like a soft white rat living on the staircase. There appeared to be no electricity up here, and uniformed men sat beneath a paraffin light. He walked unchallenged past the men, just as one cried: ‘I remember the third danger now. I remember it. Shall I tell you?’

Along a dim corridor, a bright metal sign on an open door announced:

PAREKH AND SONS ADVOCATE ‘LEGAL HAWK WITH SOUL & CONSCIENCE’

A small man in a grey uniform sat on a wooden stool between the metal sign and a glass door. A red pencil behind his ear.

‘You are here to see…’ he asked, taking out the pencil.

‘I am a man in need of legal help. A connection of mine told me about Mr Parekh.’

The man wrote in the air with the pencil. ‘What is the name of your connection?’

‘Actually, it was a connection of a connection. He had used Mr Parekh’s services.’

‘So you want to see…’

‘Mr Parekh.’

‘ Which Parekh?’

‘Legal hawk with a conscience. How many of them are here?’

The peon held up four fingers.

With the red pencil behind his ear, he went into the office; Masterji sat on his chair, raising his feet as an old servant woman mopped the floor with a wet rag.

Having apparently figured out which Parekh he was after, the peon opened the glass door and beckoned with the red pencil.

Masterji stepped into fluorescent light and air-conditioning breeze.

With its low dark wooden ceiling, the office had the look of a ship’s cabin; a man wearing thick glasses sat beneath a giant framed photograph of Angkor Wat with the legend: ‘World’s Biggest Hindu Temple’.

The air smelled of disinfectant.

Mr Parekh (so Masterji assumed) was drinking tea. He stopped to blow his nose into a handkerchief and turned to use a spittoon before returning to his tea; he was like some non-stop hydrostatic system able to function only while accepting and discharging liquids. As with liquids, so with information; he was simultaneously talking on a mobile phone propped on his shoulder, and signing documents that an assistant held out for him, while somehow finding himself able to whisper to Masterji: ‘Tea? Any tea for you, sir? Sit. Sit.’

Putting down his mobile phone, he sipped the last of his tea, turned to one side to spit, and said: ‘State the problem in your own words.’

The lawyer had a bald, baby-pink scalp, but three immortal silver strands went from his forehead to the base of his neck. An ailment, possibly related to the pinkness of scalp, had eaten away his eyebrows, so that his eyes looked at Masterji with startling directness. A neck-chain with a gold medallion dangled over his white shirt. The size of the gold medallion, contrasting with the palsied state of eyebrows and scalp, suggested that though Mr Parekh had endured much in life, he had survived and prospered.