Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Kudwa removed his glasses. ‘He hasn’t done any of these things.’

Mrs Puri, her mouth open, turned to Ajwani.

‘Hasn’t? Didn’t he say he would sign the form and change his mind? Isn’t that deceiving his Society? Hasn’t he invited the police into our gates? And the things that Mary has seen in his rubbish, tell him, Ajwani, tell him…’

The broker tickled little Mariam’s belly rather than describe those things.

Kudwa took his daughter back.

‘I want to please you by saying yes to this. This is my weakness. I wanted to please my friends in college, so I joined the rock-and-roll band. I send my boy to tae kwon-do because you wanted someone your boys could practise with. I want to please my neighbours who think of me as a fair-minded man, so I pretend to be one.’

Ibrahim Kudwa closed his eyes. He held Mariam close to him.

He wanted to tell her how different his early life had been from what hers would be.

His father had set up and closed hardware shops in city after city, in the north and south of India alike, before settling in Mumbai when his son was fourteen. The boy had never been anywhere long enough to make friends. From his mother he learned something better than having friends — how to sit in a darkened room and consume the hours. When she closed the door to her bedroom she slipped into another world; he did the same in his. Then the doorbell would ring, and they came out running into the real world together. Visitors, relatives, neighbours: he saw his mother bribe these people with smiles and sweet words, so they would let her return, for a few hours each day, into her private kingdom.

Only when he grew up did he understand what his upbringing had done to him. Instead of a man’s soul, he had developed a cockroach’s antennae inside him. What did this man think of the way he dressed? What did that man think of his politics? The way he pronounced English? Wherever he went, the opinions of the five or six people living near him became a picket fence around Ibrahim Kudwa. One day when he was fifteen or sixteen years old, playing cricket with his neighbours, he had chased the ball until it fell into a gutter. Black, fibrous, stinking, that swampy gutter was the worst thing he had ever seen in his life. But he knew his neighbours wanted him to get that ball; pressed down by their expectations, he had dipped his hands into the muck, up to the elbow, to find the ball. When it came out, his arm was green and black and smelled like rotten eggs. Ibrahim showed the dirty ball to the other boys, then turned around and tossed it back into the gutter; he never played cricket with them again.

Each time he detected the ingratiating impulse within him, he became rude, and from this he earned a reputation in his university years for being woman-like in his mood swings. When he married Mumtaz, he thought: I have found my centre, this girl will make me strong . But the shy dentist’s assistant had not been that kind of wife: she cried by herself when she was unhappy. She refused to steady his hand. Sometimes Ibrahim Kudwa wanted to abandon everything — even Mariam — and run away to Ladakh and live with those Tibetan monks he had seen on his recent holiday.

He looked at the document that Mrs Puri and Ajwani had brought for him, but he would not touch it.

‘Just three, four months ago you were calling him an English gentleman. Yes, you, Sangeeta-ji. And now…’

‘Ibrahim, do you know what the Kala Paani is?’ Ajwani asked. ‘That’s what they called the ocean in the old days. Black water. Hindus weren’t allowed to sail on the Kala Paani . That is what kept us backward. Fear. All of us are now at the Kala Paani . We have to cross it, or we’ll be stuck in Vishram Society for the rest of our lives.’

‘Theft,’ Kudwa whispered. ‘You’re asking me to approve of theft.’

‘It is not theft. I’m telling you, Ibrahim, because I know what it is to steal. I am not a good man like you are. I tell you: this is not theft.’

Kudwa slapped the table, startling Mariam, who began crying.

His visitors got up; Kudwa consoled his child. When they had reached the door, he thought he heard Ajwani whisper: ‘… so typical of his community.’

He could hear Mrs Puri whisper back: ‘… do you mean?’

He saw Ajwani at the door, playing with the white cat, and speaking to Mrs Puri, who was hidden behind the banyan tree.

‘Do they join the army? The police? Zero national spirit. Zero.’

Kudwa could barely breathe.

‘Why bring in religion, Ajwani?’ Mrs Puri asked from behind the tree. ‘He has been in Vishram for ten years… well, nine…’

The broker pressed the white cat with his shoe; it curled itself helplessly around his foot.

‘It is time to say it, Mrs Puri. If he were a Christian, a Parsi, a Sikh, even a Jain — he would have agreed to this.’

And then the two voices faded away.

Kudwa closed his eyes; he patted his daughter.

Did Ajwani think he could not see through his plan? Mrs Puri was in it, too. They had probably rehearsed that speech before coming into his café. Next they would be teasing him for his dandruff. But it would not work. Would not . With his left hand he brushed at his shoulders.

He tried to break into his neighbours’ minds. Did Ajwani not see that expulsion would boomerang on them? This new tactic would only harden Masterji.

But maybe Ajwani wanted things to go wrong.

Kudwa had heard the rumour that the broker had been promised a ‘sweetener’ by Mr Shah. Maybe the worse things became at Vishram, the higher Ajwani’s price would climb. The web was so complex now. Kudwa saw intentions buried in intentions within Vishram Society, and was so absorbed in his thoughts that he did not notice when the white cat came into the office, climbed up on his table, and almost scratched Mariam’s face.

A man in danger must follow a routine.

Masterji now went out only twice a day. Morning for milk, evening for bread. In public he kept close to the crowd; every ten steps or so he turned around and checked behind him.

He gave in to an afternoon nap. In the evenings, in the dark, he could summon the memory of Purnima if he stood in front of the almirah breathing in the camphor and her old sari. But the afternoons were bright and difficult; the world outside beckoned to him. A regular nap helped him pass the time.

This afternoon, however, he had had a nightmare. He had been dreaming of Purnima’s brothers.

Waking in the dim evening, he limped to the basin in the living room. He struck the tap with the heel of his palm.

He stared at the dry tap, and felt there was nothing strong inside him at that moment.

Closing his eyes he thought of a full moon he had seen many years ago, during a week-long holiday in Simla, up in the Himalayas, just a few months before his marriage. He had stayed in a cheap hotel; one night the moonlight was so powerful it had woken him up. When he went outside, the cold sky above the mountains was filled with a bigger and brighter moon than he had ever seen before. A voice had whispered, as if from the heavens: ‘Your future will be an important one.’

He drew a circle in the dry basin.

He walked to the threshold of the toilet and stopped: black ants were crawling over the tiled floor. Placing his hands on the doorframe, he leaned in. At the base of the toilet bowl, the black things had lined up like animals at a trough.

Could there be any question now? They had come for the sugar in his urine. He could hear Purnima’s voice pleading with him: ‘You have to get yourself checked. Tomorrow.’

He went to the kitchen, and counted off on her calendar. Forty-seven days to go. With his finger on the circled date, he said, aloud, so it would reach her clearly: ‘If I go for a check-up and they say I have diabetes, it will weaken me, Purnima. I won’t go until 3 October.’