Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Masterji was so excited he passed the receiver from one ear to the other.

‘And today’s deceit by the lawyer? You didn’t leave that out?’

‘—that too, Father. Noronha is going to meet us.’

‘Wonderful, wonderful.’

‘Father, Noronha is just going to hear us. He can’t promise anything.’

‘I understand,’ Masterji said. ‘I understand fully. I just want a chance to hit back at this Mr Shah. Right now the score is one hundred to zero in his favour. I just want one good hit at his fat stomach. That’s all I ask from Noronha.’

‘He’ll meet us tomorrow in the Times of India office at five o’clock. Can you meet him in the lobby? Yes, I’ll come from work straight to VT.’

‘Thank you, son. In the end there is family, or what else is there? I knew I could count on you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Masterji lay in bed and thrashed his feet like a boy.

At Mr Shah’s Malabar Hill home, Giri had wiped the kitchen clean, turned off the gas, opened the day’s mail, and sorted the letters. The last thing he had to do before leaving was to forge his employer’s signature.

Taking out his bifocals — a gift from his master on his fiftieth birthday — Giri sat at the table with the poster of the Eiffel Tower-under-construction behind him. He turned on the desk lamp, and opened the second drawer, which stored the chequebooks. Giri’s hand, which reproduced his master’s 1978 signature with exactness, was considerably more authentic than Shah’s, which had shifted in character over the years. For this reason Shah had long entrusted the signing of monthly bills to him. Giri took them out of a blue manila folder one by one. The electricity bill. The monthly maintenance charge from the Society. A 5,000-rupee voluntary request for the installation of ‘water-harvesting’ tanks in the building.

‘Voluntary.’ Giri sniffed. That meant in English you give money if you want. He crushed the paper and threw it into the waste basket.

Next he studied his master’s credit card bill before signing a cheque for it. He went through another credit card bill and signed a second cheque for the ‘Versova person’ — whom he refused to dignify with a more precise title.

He turned off the desk lamp.

Nearly nine o’clock. He would have to take an hour-long train to Borivali, where he lived in a one-bedroom with his mother. In the kitchen Giri changed out of his blue lungi into a pair of brown polyester trousers, and put on a white shirt over his banian .

Satish had left his bedroom. Giri straightened the sheets.

Mr Shah was in bed, his arm around that plaster-of-Paris building which had been near the dancing Nataraja statue all these weeks. Giri tried to prise the model out of his master’s arms, and gave up.

He turned off the lights inside the flat, and opened the door to find Shanmugham, with his arms folded.

‘When is the boss going to give me an answer?’ the left-hand man asked. ‘If we’re going to break that old teacher’s arms and legs, we have to do it now.’

It was not yet four o’clock.

Masterji stopped at Flora Fountain to wipe his face with a handkerchief; cool water trickled down the old stained marble, down its goddesses and trees and porpoise.

He passed the bronze statue of Dadabhai Naoroji and went through the shade of arcaded buildings towards the Times of India office. Half expecting to find Shanmugham behind him, he kept glancing over his shoulder, and for this reason missed it until it was right in front of him.

Victoria Terminus.

It had been years since he had seen the great train station, the city’s grandest Gothic structure. Demons, domes, gables and gargoyles grew all over the crazy mass of coloured stone. Stone mastiffs flew out from the central dome; rams, wolves, peacocks, other nameless hysterical beasts, all thrusting out of the station, screamed silently above the traffic and clutter. Multiplying the madness, a cordon of palm-trees fanned the building — frolicking, sensual, pagan trees, taunting, almost tickling, the gargoyles.

The heart of Bombay — if there is one — it is me, it is me!

The Times of India building was just around the corner; he still had an hour. He crossed the road. In the cool portico of the station, he saw stone wolves perched on the capitals of columns, as if about to spring down on the people below. Taped to one of the pillars of the station, he saw a poster for a boy gone missing in the city: like a real victim of the imaginary wolves of the architecture. The print, in Hindi, was smudged, and he read it with difficulty, thinking of the lonely parents looking for this boy, begging the indifferent police for information, until they went back on a train to Bhopal or Ranchi, worn out and defeated.

He had once been a migrant like these ones pouring through the door of the station into the city, men and women from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh carrying everything they owned in bundles of cloth. They stepped out of the shade of the stone wolves and blinked in the harsh light of Mumbai. But their bundles did not contain what his did, an education. How many of them would end up like the boy in the poster — beaten, kidnapped or murdered? His heart filled with pity for their lesser struggles.

‘Point! Point! Point!’

The taxi-drivers who were waiting by the station demanded to take him to Nariman Point. He shook his head: yet the yelling went on and on. He could feel their will power as something physical, a battering ram, trying to crush his own.

Entering the lobby of the Times of India building, he looked at a giant mural of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi scanning a copy of the Times . He sat down and waited. Half an hour to go. People streamed in and streamed out of the lobby. How many , he wondered, have come to see Noronha? He felt the familiar pride at seeing a student prosper, which is like the rush of growth hormone that straightens out a sapling, and makes an old teacher eager for another round of living.

He found a chair. He began to snooze. When he opened his eyes he saw Gaurav, in a blue business shirt, pleated trousers and tie, shaking him by the shoulder.

‘Sorry, son. I was tired.’ Masterji got up from his chair. ‘Shall we go in now to see Noronha?’

The words were sitting there on Gaurav’s tongue — I. Didn’t. Call. Noronha. I. Didn’t. Call. Him — but when they came out, they had become: ‘Yes. But I want to eat something first, Father.’

‘What about our appointment?’

‘We have time, Father. Plenty. I’m hungry now.’

Father and son went to the McDonald’s across from Victoria Terminus station. Masterji sat at an outdoor table and waited for Gaurav to come out with his food. He wished he had his Rubik’s Cube with him. Someone had left an advertising pamphlet on the table:

IMPATIENCE IS NOW A VIRTUE HIGH-SPEED BROADBAND INTERNET 512 KBPS @ 390 RUPEES A MONTH ONWARDS

Turning it over, he doodled on the back with a blue ballpoint pen, and superimposed words on the doodles:

Police

Media

Law and order

Social workers

Family

Students and old boys

Then he struck out ‘law and order’, and ‘social workers’, and ‘police’.

Gaurav came out of the restaurant carrying a chocolate-covered sundae. He gobbled it down with a plastic spoon.

At his son’s house, Masterji spoke in Hindi so Sonal would understand; now he mixed English with Kannada, their ancestral language: ‘What time did Noronha say he would meet us, son?’

Gaurav swallowed his ice cream in an almost simultaneous contraction of tongue and oesophagus.