Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Masterji saw his story — the interpretation of his recent actions, which had until now been held securely in his conscience — slipping away from him. He had become part of the market: his story, in newsprint, was used by the vendors to cover their produce. The okra was wrapped in him; fresh bread lent him its aroma.

‘Masterji!’ It was Mary. She had a copy of the Sun .

‘You’re in the English papers.’ She grinned and showed him her big front teeth. ‘We’re all so proud of you. We passed it around the nullah . When my son comes back from school, I’ll have him read it to us.’

‘I haven’t read it, Mary,’ he said.

‘You haven’t?’ Mary, scandalized, insisted that he take the paper. She turned to the article with the photograph of Vishram Society.

OLD MAN IN TOWER SAYS NO TO BUILDER

Masterji skimmed:

… only one man, Yogesh Murthy, retired teacher at the nearby school, has resisted the generous offer of the reputable… ‘it is a question of an an individual’s freedom to say Yes, No, or Go to Hell’…

By describing himself thus as the small man in this situation, Murthy may hope to win the sympathy of some, but how honest is this picture he paints? One of the residents of the Society, not wishing to be identified, said, ‘He is the most selfish man in the world. His own son does not speak to him now…’

…was borne out by many others to whom this reporter spoke. According to one of Mr Murthy’s former students, who did not wish to be named, ‘He had no patience and he was always ready to punish. We used to call him names behind his back. To say that we remember him fondly would be the biggest…’

Mary bent down to pick up the paper; it had fallen from Masterji’s hands.

Looking down, Masterji saw a bird, smaller than the centre of a man’s palm, thrashing about on the ground like a vitalized chunk of brown sugar. This only makes things worse , he thought, as he followed the bird’s dizzying movements. My neighbours will blame me for it.

A little boy with a black string amulet around his neck began circling Masterji in off-balance, chick-like loops, hands flapping by his side. The onion-seller came running behind him: ‘Bad boy!’ He caught the little fellow and pinched him; the chastised boy cried with operatic emotion: ‘Pa-pa-jee!’

Seconds later, he had escaped his father again, had been caught again, and was now bawling: ‘Ma-maa-jee!’

To make the boy stop crying, Masterji offered him a piece of bread. ‘Would you like this?’

A big nod of the little head; the boy nibbled.

Masterji insisted that Mary take the rest of his fresh bread for her son.

For over thirty years he had handed out sweet, soft things to the children of Vishram Society on Gandhi Jayanti.

He stopped at the whitewashed banyan outside Ibrahim Kudwa’s cyber-café. Arjun, Kudwa’s assistant, had placed a photograph of the Mahatma in a niche in the banyan, and he and the Hindu holy man who sometimes stopped there, clapping their hands in unison, were chanting Gandhi’s favourite hymn:

‘ Ishwar Allah Tero Naam

Sabko Sanmati de Bhagavan .’

‘Ishwar and Allah are both your names

Give everyone this wisdom, Lord.’

The national tricolour had been hoisted above the Speed-Tek Cyber Café; Masterji saw it reflected in the tinted window of a moving car, streaming in reverse like a dark meteor over Vakola.

In the middle of the night, Ashvin Kothari woke up sniffing the air.

‘What is that smell?’

He turned on his bedside lamp. His wife was staring at the ceiling.

‘Go back to sleep.’

‘What is it?’

‘Go back to—’

‘It’s something you women are doing, isn’t it?’

The Secretary followed the smell down the stairs to the third floor.

Something brown, freshly applied by hand, the fingermarks still visible in it, covered Masterji’s door. A fly buzzed about it.

The Secretary closed his eyes. He raced up the stairs to his flat.

His wife was on the sofa, waiting for him.

‘Don’t blame Mrs Puri,’ she said. ‘She asked me and I agreed.’

The Secretary sat down with his eyes closed. ‘O Krishna, Krishna…’

‘Let him smell what we think of him, Mr Kothari. That’s what we women decided.’

‘… Krishna…’

‘It’s Ramu’s shit — that’s all. Don’t become melodramatic. Masterji talked to the Mumbai Sun , didn’t he? Famous man. He wants Mrs Puri to clean it herself for the rest of her life, doesn’t he? So let him clean Ramu’s shit one morning, and see how much he likes it. Let him use that same Sun to clean it.’

With his fingers in his ears, her husband chanted, as his father had taught him to do, years ago in Nairobi, the name of Lord Krishna.

Their noses covered with handkerchiefs, saris, and shirtsleeves, they filled the stairs to see what had been done to the door of 3A. Hunched over, Masterji was scrubbing his door with a wet Brillo pad. He had a bucket of water next to him, and every few minutes squeezed the Brillo pad into it.

Brought back down the stairs by his sense of responsibility, the Secretary dispersed the onlookers. ‘Please go back to bed,’ he whispered. ‘Or the whole neighbourhood will find out and talk about us.’

The door to 3C opened.

Had Masterji shouted, Mrs Puri would have shouted back. Had he rushed to hit her, she would have pushed him down the stairs. But he was on his knees, scraping the grooves and ridges into which Ramu’s excrement was hardening; he glanced at her and went back to his work, as if it did not concern her.

A man pushed from behind Mrs Puri and stepped into the corridor.

Sanjiv Puri saw what was on Masterji’s door; he understood.

‘What have you done, Sangeeta?’ He looked at his wife. ‘What have you done to my name, to my reputation? You have betrayed your own son.’

‘Mr and Mrs Puri,’ the Secretary whispered. ‘Please. People will hear.’

Sangeeta Puri took a step towards her husband.

‘It’s all your fault.’

‘My fault?’

‘You kept saying we couldn’t have children till you had a manager’s job. So I had to wait till I was thirty-four. That’s why Ramu is delayed. The older a woman is, the greater the danger. And now I have to clean his shit for the rest of my life.’

‘Sangeeta, this is a lie. A lie.’

‘I wanted to have Ramu ten years earlier. You talked of the rat race. You complained that migrants were taking the jobs, but you never fought back. You never became manager in time for me to have a healthy child. It was not the Evil Eye: it was you .’

Masterji stopped scrubbing.

‘If you shout, Sangeeta, you will wake Ramu. No one did this thing. Sometimes plaster falls from the ceiling, because it is an old building. I say the same thing has happened here. Now all of you go to sleep.’

The Secretary got down on his knees and offered to help with the scrubbing, but Masterji said: ‘I’ll do it.’

He closed his eyes and remembered the light from behind the buildings at Crawford Market. Those labourers pulling carts under the JJ flyover did work that was worse than this every day.

The compound wall was dark from Mary’s morning round with the green garden hose. Water drops shivered off the hibiscus plant; Ramu was prodding its stem with a stick.

Walking up from the black Cross, where she had been standing for a while, his mother called to him. The hibiscus plant shook.

She came near and saw what he was doing.

‘… what is the meaning of…?’

The boy would not turn around. He had sucked in his lips; he kept poking the thing at the root of the plant. Mrs Puri pulled him back and looked at him with disbelieving eyes.