Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Beads of sweat fell from his neck all the way down to the tip of his spine.

Wasn’t Gaurav right — wasn’t it just pride that kept him from running to Mr Shah and saying: ‘I accept your offer. Now leave me alone!’

Smoke blew at him from the charcoal kebab grills outside the continuous cheap restaurants that line Mohammad Ali Road. Masterji turned into one restaurant, which was so filthy he knew he had broken his one-rat rule even before going in. A small figure crouching by the door folded its legs to let him in.

He sat down on one of the communal benches, where labourers waited for tea and bread and biscuits on wet dirty plates.

‘What?’ the waiter asked, swatting a dirty red rag on the table, in simulation of an act of cleaning.

‘Tea. And — put all the sugar in the world in it. Understand?’

‘All the sugar in the world,’ the waiter said. He grinned.

He came back with a glass of tea and a packet of milk biscuits. Standing at the end of table he ripped open the packet, letting the biscuits spill tunktunktunk into a stainless-steel plate.

The other customer at the table — Masterji noticed him now — a gaunt, middle-aged man in a dirty blue shirt, looked Muslim because of his beard. Masterji guessed he was one of those who had been pulling carts on the road — he thought he could even identify the man’s wooden cart resting against the door of the café. The labourer picked a biscuit from the stainless-steel plate and chewed. Done with it, he breathed, picked a second biscuit, and chewed. Each movement of his bony jaws spoke of fatigue; the permanent fatigue of men who have no one to care about them when they work and no one to care about them after they work. The thin body broadcast a raw animal silence. Middle-aged? No. His hair was greying at the edges, but youth had only recently been exorcised from his face. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the most. Masterji watched this young man with sunken, shocked eyes and barely enough strength to lift one milk biscuit at a time. This is his daily life. Pulling that cart and coming here for these biscuits , he thought.

The tired Muslim man returned Masterji’s gaze. Their eyes met like foreign languages, and the labourer, without moving his lips, spoke at last.

Have you never before noticed how many are all alone?

Leaving the restaurant, Masterji held out a five-rupee note to the waiter, and pointed to the plate of biscuits, still being consumed, one at a time.

Outside, a car with a huge plastic Red Bull on top of it was cruising down the road. The bull glowed in neon, and its snout blared a popular Hindi song, as the car stopped to hand out free cans of Red Bull to onlookers. The beat of the song tuned Masterji’s blood. Until now he had only been conscious of fighting against someone: that builder. Now he sensed he was fighting for someone. In the dark dirty valley under the concrete overpass half-naked labourers pushed and slogged, with such little hope that things might improve for them. Yet they pushed: they fought. As Mary was fighting to keep her hut by the nullah . And maid-servants like her across Vakola were fighting to keep their huts.

Strips of incandescence from behind the buildings fell on the road, and people crowded into them as if they were the only points of fording the traffic. Illuminated in these strips, the straining coolies looked like symbols: hieroglyphs of a future, a future that was colossal. Masterji gazed at the light behind the dirty buildings. It looked like another Bombay waiting to be born.

He knew that Ronak had a place in this new Bombay. Mary and all the other maid-servants had a place in it. Each one of the solitary, lost, broken men around him had a place in it.

But for now their common duty was to fight.

He heard the tuba again: the marching band, as if it had lost its way, had doubled back on its steps, and was heading again towards Victoria Terminus, greeting the hordes of new migrants with its blasts.

Masterji walked behind the marching band towards VT, and felt — for the first time since his wife had died — that he was not alone in the world.

Oval Maidan at sunset.

Dust everywhere, and the sun doing wonderful things to the dust: electrolysing it into a golden cloud in which the stone of the Gothic towers, the singed green of the palm fronds, and the living brown of humans were blended into one.

Driving past the maidan, the bars of the fence broke the cricket matches into large rectangular panels, like frames from a film put up on a wall for analysis.

‘Feeling better, Uncle?’

‘You’re a good girl, Rosie. A good girl to come to the hospital.’

Resting his head on Rosie, Shah watched as the driver, who had collected the two of them from Breach Candy Hospital (Rosie, in the waiting room, had flicked through a copy of Filmfare magazine while they took his X-rays), now drove in slow circles around the heart of the city.

‘I know what you’re thinking about, Mr Confidence.’

‘What?’

‘Money. The only thing on your mind.’

Her fingers moved into his pocket.

‘Your phone is ringing, Uncle.’

‘Let it.’

‘There are fifteen missed calls.’

‘Let there be a sixteenth. I don’t care about my work. I don’t care about anything.’

‘Why are you talking like this, Mr Confidence?’ She smiled at him.

My Shanghai , Shah thought. Gone. Because of one old teacher .

He felt as if a hand had entered his abdomen and surgically removed the breath.

In the driver’s mirror he saw his blackened teeth and thought: Not nearly enough . Neither the damaged teeth, nor the disease in his chest, nor the blood he spat out, were nearly enough punishment. For the sin of being a mediocrity. The only real sin on this earth. He should have stayed in Krishnapur and cleared cow shit from the family shed.

Fingers ran through his hair; he felt a breath on his face.

‘ To-re-a-dor. To-re-a-dor .’

‘Leave me alone, Rosie.’

Prising the blue X-ray folder away from him, she slid out the grinning phosphorescent skull.

‘So this is who you really are, Uncle.’

He took it back from her and held it up against the light. Taking out a pen he began to sketch over the skull.

‘Don’t!’

He slapped Rosie’s fingers away. He drew more lines up and down the glowing skull and showed her.

‘That’s my Shanghai, Rosie. Gothic style, Rajput touch, Art Deco fountain. My life’s story in one building. Why does that old teacher keep saying no to it? In China, you know what they would have done to a man like him by now?’

She snatched at the X-ray; he raised his hand high to dodge her.

‘Teachers are the worst kind of people, Rosie. All that time they spend beating children, it makes them cruel. Twisted on the inside.’

‘Unlike builders, of course.’

And though he wished she wouldn’t make jokes like this, he had to chuckle.

She laughed at her own joke as she slid his X-ray back into its manila folder. A husky cackle: it made Shah shiver. One of the things he loved about Rosie — her voice always had its knickers down.

‘Come here,’ he said, though the girl was already beside him. ‘Come here .’ He kissed her on the neck.

It was first time he had done something like this in the car; Parvez, his driver, pretended not to notice.

Shah did what he had not done for days. He forgot about the Shanghai.

At the next traffic signal, they stopped by a bus painted with advertisements for a new Bollywood film — Dance, Dance .

‘What’s the inside scoop, Rosie?’ Shah asked, tapping the glass with his fingers. ‘Why is that Punjabi man wasting so much money on this flop?’