Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Now a ray of sun entered the compartment and their varied faces glowed like a single human light refracted into colours. He searched for the face of the day-labourer from Crawford Market; he could not find him, but there were others like him. The vibrating green cushions and the green-painted walls of the carriage were luminous around them. ‘Calm down, Masterji,’ the radiant men in the white shirts said, ‘for we are all with you.’ He understood now that he had not struck the two boys down: they had done it for him. Beyond the grille, the faces in the yellow second-class compartment turned to him, and said: ‘We are with you too.’ Around him they stood thick and close; he felt hands come into his hand; and every murmur, every whisper, every jarring of the train said: You were never born and you will never die: you cannot hurt and cannot be hurt: you are invincible, immortal, indestructible.

Masterji unbolted the latch, left his door open, and slept.

‘Sir.’ Nina, the Pintos’ maid, turned to her employer. ‘You should see for yourself who it is.’

Mr Pinto, rising from a breakfast of a masala three-egg omelette, served with buttered toast and tomato ketchup, came to the door dragging his brown leather sandals along the floor.

He saw who was at the door and turned around: ‘Nina,’ he cried. ‘Come back here.’

Masterji was standing outside.

‘I was sure in the night it was Mr Shah who had done it,’ Masterji said. ‘And I felt safe until the morning. But when I woke up, I thought, those boys did not break down the door. They had a spare key. Who gave them this spare key?’

Mr Pinto turned and gestured to the table.

‘Come have breakfast with us. It’s the three-egg omelette. Your favourite. Nina — one more omelette, at once. Come, Masterji, sit at the table.’

‘Did you know what was going to happen last night?’ Masterji asked. ‘Did the Secretary tell everyone to keep quiet when I screamed? That was something else I didn’t think about until this morning. No one came to help me.’

Mr Pinto gestured helplessly. ‘For our part, honestly, we heard nothing. We were asleep. Ask Shelley.’

Mrs Pinto, rising from the breakfast table, stood next to her husband, and took his hand in hers.

‘We wanted to save you, Masterji,’ she said in her rasping voice. ‘They told us if we kept quiet we would save you.’

‘Shelley, shut up. Go back to the table. We didn’t know anything, Masterji. We thank God that you are safe. Come in and eat now—’

‘You’re lying, Mr Pinto.’

Masterji pulled the front door from Mr Pinto’s grasp and closed it on himself. He pressed his forehead against the door. Rajeev and Raghav Ajwani, in their school uniforms, tried to tiptoe past him.

Hearing voices from below, Masterji went down the stairs.

Three women sat in the white plastic chairs.

Mrs Puri was speaking to the Secretary’s wife; Mrs Ganguly, bedecked in gold and silk, apparently on her way to a wedding ceremony, was listening.

‘So what if the Sisters at the Special School want Ramu to play David Slayer of Goliath in the pageant? What is it to me that David was a Christian and we are Hindus? Jesus and Krishna: two skin colours, same God. All my life I have gone in and out of churches like a happy bird.’

‘You’re right, Sangeeta,’ the Secretary’s wife responded. ‘What difference is there, deep down?’

Masterji went from Mrs Puri to Mrs Kothari to Mrs Ganguly, trying to find a face that revealed guilt when he stared at it. None paid the slightest attention to him. Am I looking at good people or bad? he thought.

Mrs Puri brushed a housefly from Mrs Kothari’s shoulder and continued.

‘Didn’t I pray at St Antony’s and then at St Andrew’s and then at Mount Mary that the doctors should be wrong about Ramu? Just as I prayed in SiddhiVinayak temple, Mrs Kothari.’

‘You are a liberal person, Sangeeta. A person of the future.’

‘Did all of you know what was going to happen last night?’ Masterji asked. ‘Am I the only human being in this building?’

Mrs Puri continued to talk to the Secretary’s wife.

‘I make no distinction between Hindu and Muslim and Christian in this country.’

‘So true, Sangeeta. Let the heart be good, that’s what I say.’

‘I agree with you one hundred per cent,’ Mrs Ganguly joined in. ‘I never vote for the Shiv Sena.’

Now Masterji saw Tinku Kothari, the Secretary’s son. Squished into a plastic chair with his miniature carom board, the fat boy was playing by himself, alternately striking black and beige pieces. With his fingers tensed to hit the blue striker, he paused, turning his eyes sideways to Masterji.

He was chuckling. His jelly-like flesh rippled beneath his tight green T-shirt with its golden caption, Come to Ladakh, land of monasteries . The grins of Tibetan monks on the boy’s T-shirt widened.

The blue striker scattered the carom pieces. One black piece ricocheted over the board’s edge, and rolled through parliament, until it touched Masterji’s foot: he shivered.

He went up the stairs to his living room and waited for his old friend. If only Shelley would persuade that stubborn old accountant to knock on the door and say one word. ‘Sorry.’

Just one word.

He waited for half an hour. Then he got up and reached for the No-Argument book, still wrapped in a blue rubber band, lying on top of The Soul’s Passageway after Death in the bookshelf.

He undid the rubber band. He tore the pages out of the No-Argument book one by one, then tore each page into four pieces, and then tore each piece into smaller pieces.

Down in 2A, Mr Pinto, sitting at his dining table, turned to the window to watch the snowfall of paper pieces: all that was left of a 32-year-old friendship.

A scraping noise began in the compound. Mary was sweeping the confetti into a plastic bag. Masterji watched. He was waiting for her to look up at him, he was waiting for one friendly face within his Society. But she did not look.

He understood: she was ashamed. She too had known of what was going to happen.

A shadow fell over Mary’s bent back: a hawk went gliding over her into one of the open windows of Tower B.

‘Come to this tower!’ Masterji called out.

From his window he watched as the hawk, as if at his command, came out of Tower B and flew back.

And not just you.

Pigeon, crow, hummingbird; spider, scorpion, silverfish, termite and red ant; bats, bees, stinging wasps, clouds of anopheles mosquitoes.

Come, all of you: and protect me from human beings.

The cricket game at the Tamil temple had ended. A good game for Timothy; his mother had not caught him playing, and he had scored the most runs this afternoon.

Kumar, tallest of the boys who played with Timothy, had not had a good game. His shift as a cleaner at the Konkan Kinara, a cheap restaurant near the Santa Cruz train station, would start soon, and he was walking through the wasteland around Vakola to his home in one of the slums behind the Bandra-Kurla Complex. He was limping this evening; with the cricket bat in his hand, he slashed at the tall grass to either side of the mud path. A few paces ahead of him, Dharmendar, the cycle mechanic’s assistant, walked with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground.

From the tall grass, a small dark creature in a blue safari suit leapt out at them.

‘Ajwani Uncle,’ Kumar said.

The broker slapped Dharmendar on the head. ‘The simplest of jobs.’ A second slap. ‘All you had to do was scare an old man. A 61-year-old man.’

Ajwani’s forehead bulged and his scalp retracted. The tendons in his neck became taut. His spit came out in a spray; he swore.