Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

‘It’s not a trick, Masterji, it’s a—’

‘Enough for today. Class is over,’ Masterji said and clapped his hands.

‘We can go in now,’ the Secretary whispered. Mrs Puri pushed open the door and turned the lights on in the room.

The four boys who had been sitting on the sofa — Sunil Rego (1B), Anand Ganguly (5B), Raghav Ajwani (2C) and Mohammad Kudwa (4C) — got up. Tinku Kothari (4A), the fat son of the Secretary, struggled to his feet from the floor.

‘Enough, boys, go home!’ Mrs Puri clapped. ‘Masterji has to have dinner soon. Class is over. Go, go, go.’

It was not a ‘class’, though conducted with such dignity, but an after-class science ‘top-up’ — meant to do to a normal schoolchild what a steroidal injection does to a merely healthy athlete.

Anand Ganguly picked up his cricket bat, which was propped up against the old fridge; Mohammad Kudwa took his blue cricket cap, emblazoned with the star of India, from above the glass cabinet full of silver trophies, medals, and certificates attesting to Masterji’s excellence as a teacher.

‘What a surprise to see you here,’ Masterji said. ‘I hardly have visitors these days. Adult visitors, that is.’

Mrs Puri checked to see if the lights were off in 3B — of course they were, young people of that lifestyle are never home before ten — and closed the door. She explained, in low tones, the problem caused by Masterji’s neighbour and what had been found in her rubbish by the early-morning cat.

‘There is a boy who goes into and comes out of that room with her,’ Masterji conceded. He turned to the Secretary. ‘But she works, doesn’t she?’

‘Journalist.’

‘Those people are known for their number two activities,’ Mrs Puri said.

‘She seems to me, though I have only seen her from a distance, a decent girl.’

Masterji continued, his voice gaining authority from the echoes of ‘sun, moon, eclipse, physics’ that still seemed to ring through it: ‘When this building first came up, there were no Hindus allowed here, it is a fact. Then there were meant to be no Muslims, it is a fact. All proved to be good people when given a chance. Now, young people, unmarried girls, they should also be given a chance. We don’t want to become a building full of retirees and blind people. If this girl and her boyfriend have done something inappropriate, we should speak to them. However…’ He looked at Mrs Puri. ‘… we have no business with her rubbish.’

Mrs Puri winced. She wouldn’t tolerate this kind of talk from anyone else.

She looked around the flat, which she had not visited in a while, still expecting to see Purnima, Masterji’s quiet, efficient wife, and one of her best friends in Vishram. Now that Purnima was gone — dead for more than six months — Mrs Puri observed signs of austerity, even disrepair. One of the two wall-clocks was broken. A pale rectangle on the wall above the empty TV stand commemorated the ancient Sanyo that Masterji had sold after her death, rejecting it as an indulgence. ( What an error , Mrs Puri thought. A widower without a TV will go mad .) Water stains blossomed on the ceiling; the pipes on the fourth floor leaked. Each year in September Purnima had paid for a man from the slums to scrub and whitewash them. This year, unscrubbed, the stains were spreading like ghostly evidence of her absence.

Now that Mrs Puri’s issue was dismissed, the Secretary raised his own, more valid, concern. He told Masterji about the inquisitive stranger who had come twice to the Society. Should they make a report to the police?

Masterji stared at the Secretary. ‘What can this man steal from us, Kothari?’

He went to the sink that stood in a corner of the room — a mirror above it, a framed picture of Galileo (‘Founder of Modern Physics’) above the mirror — and turned the tap; there was a thin flow of water.

‘Is this what he is going to steal from us? Our plumbing?’

Each year, the contractor who cleaned the overhead tank did his work sloppily — and the silt from the tank blocked the pipes in all the rooms directly below it.

The Secretary responded with one of his pacifying smiles. ‘I’ll have the plumber sent over next time I see him, Masterji.’

The door creaked open: Sunil Rego had returned.

The boy left his slippers at the threshold and entered holding a long rectangular scroll. Masterji saw the words ‘TUBERCULOSIS AWARENESS WEEK FUND-RAISING DRIVE’ written on the top.

Fourteen-year-old Sunil Rego’s mother was a social worker, a formidable woman of left-wing inclinations nicknamed ‘The Battleship’ within the Society. The son was already proving to be a little gunboat.

‘Masterji, TB is an illness that we can overcome together if we all—’

The old teacher shook his head. ‘I live on a pension, Sunil: ask someone else for a donation.’

Embarrassed that he had to say this in front of the others, Masterji pushed the boy, perhaps too hard, out of the room.

*

After dinner, Mrs Puri, folding Ramu’s laundry on the dining table, looked at a dozen ripe mangoes. Her husband was watching a replay of a classic India versus Australia cricket match on TV. He had bought the mangoes as a treat for Ramu, who was asleep under his aeroplane quilt.

Closing the door behind her, she walked up the stairs, and pushed at the door to Masterji’s flat with her left hand. Her right hand pressed three mangoes against her chest.

The door was open, as she expected. Masterji had his feet on the small teakwood table in the living room, and was playing with a multi-coloured toy that she took a whole second to identify.

‘A Rubik’s Cube,’ she marvelled. ‘I haven’t seen one in years and years.’

He held it up for her to see better.

‘I found it in one of the old cupboards. I think it was Gaurav’s. Works.’

‘Surprise, Masterji.’ She turned the mangoes in her right arm towards his gaze.

He put the Rubik’s Cube down on the teakwood table.

‘You shouldn’t have, Sangeeta.’

‘Take them. You have taught our children for thirty years. Shall I cut them for you?’

He shook his head.

‘I don’t have sweets every day — once a week: and today is not that day.’

He would not bend on this, she knew.

‘When are you going to see Ronak?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow.’ He smiled. ‘In the afternoon. We’re going to Byculla Zoo.’

‘Well, take them for him then. A gift from his grandfather.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The boy shouldn’t be spoiled with mangoes. You are too generous in every way, Sangeeta. I see that there is a stray dog lying on the stairs now. It seems to be ill — there is a smell from it. I hope you didn’t bring it into the Society, as you have done before.’

‘Oh, no, Masterji,’ she said, tapping on the mangoes. ‘Not me. It was probably Mrs Rego again.’

Though she had not actually given Masterji the mangoes, Mrs Puri felt the same sense of neighbourly entitlement that would have resulted from the act, and moved to his bookshelf.

‘Are you becoming religious, Masterji?’

‘Certainly not,’ he said.

Sliding out a thin paperback from the shelf, she showed it to him as evidence; on the cover was an image of the divine eagle Garuda flying over the seven oceans.

The Soul’s Passageway after Death .

She read aloud from it: ‘In its first year out of the body, the soul travels slowly and at a low altitude, burdened by the sins of its…’

‘Purnima’s first anniversary is not so far away. She wanted me to read about God when she was gone…’

‘Do you think about her often, Masterji?’

He shrugged.

For his retirement, Masterji had hoped to re-read his collection of murder mysteries, and history books of old Rome (Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars ; Tacitus, The Annals ; Plutarch, Illustrious Figures of the Roman Republic ) and old Bombay ( A Brief Life of Mountstuart Elphinstone; The Stages of the Creation of the City of Bombay, fully illustrated ). An Advanced French Grammar (with Questions and Answers Provided) , bought so he could teach his children at home, also stood on the shelf. But since the murder novels were in demand throughout the Society, and neighbours borrowed them frequently (and returned them infrequently), he would soon be left only with history and foreign grammar.