Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

WORK IN PROGRESS INCONVENIENCE IS REGRETTED BMC

had been crossed out and rewritten:

INCONVENIENCE IN PROGRESS WORK IS REGRETTED BMC

Age had accumulated in fatty rings around Mrs Puri, but her laughter came from a slim girl within: a joyous, high-pitched, ascending ivory staircase of mirth. The shovels stopped moving; the men looked at her.

‘Who wrote this joke on the sign?’ she asked. They went back to filling the hole.

‘Ram Khare! Look up from your book. Who did that to the municipal sign?’

‘Mr Ibrahim Kudwa,’ the guard said, without looking up. ‘He asked me what I thought of the joke and I said, I can’t read English, sir. Is it a good joke?’

‘We are impotent people in an impotent city, Ram Khare, as Ibby often says. Jokes are the only weapon we have.’

‘Truly, madam.’ Khare turned the page of his book. ‘There will be no water supply this evening, by the way. These men hit a water pipe when working and they have to shut down the supply for a few hours. The Secretary will put up a sign on the board after he gets back from his business.’

Mrs Puri wiped her face with a handkerchief. Breathe in. Breathe out. She turned around from the guard’s booth and retraced her steps out of the gate.

The warning about the water cut had reminded her of Masterji’s blocked taps.

Any good Society survives on a circulation of favours; it is like the children’s game where each passes the ‘touch’ on to his neighbour. If Mrs Puri needed a man’s helping hand when her husband was at work, the Secretary, who was good with a hammer and nail, helped out; just last week he had struck a nail into the wall for a new rope-line for her wet clothes. In return, she knew she had to take responsibility for Masterji’s needs.

When her boy was diagnosed with Down’s syndrome, Sangeeta Puri, before telling her mother or sister, had told her immediate neighbours. Masterji, listening to the news with a hand on his wife’s shoulder, had begun to cry. She still remembered those tears falling down his cheeks: a man who had never wept on any other day, even when there was a death in his family. For years he had given her suggestions from medical journals and newspapers, to halt — or even reverse — Ramu’s ‘delay’. Everything she had done to stir Ramu’s inert neurons into life, she had discussed first with Masterji: consultations with foreign-trained specialists, oil massages, innovative mental and physical exercises, shock doses of shark liver oil and cod liver oil; Masterji, despite his well-known atheism, had even approved of her trips to holy shrines to seek divine favour on Ramu’s slow brain.

And there was another matter. Six months before her death, Purnima had lent Mrs Puri five hundred rupees, which she had in turn lent to a relative. Masterji had not been told about this by Purnima, who often shielded her financial indiscretions (as he would judge them) from his temper.

So, becoming Ms Responsibility once more, Mrs Puri headed for the slums.

There were two ways in which the residents of Vishram Society had, historically, dealt with the existence of slums in Vakola. One was to leave the gate of Vishram every morning, process to the main road, and pretend there was no other world near by. The other was the pragmatic approach — taken by Mr Ajwani, the broker, and also by Mrs Puri. Down in the slums, she had discovered many men of talent, experts at small household tasks. Had she not once seen a plumber there?

So now she walked down the mud road, past two other middle-class buildings — Silver Trophy and Gold Coin — and into the slums, which, branching out from here, encroached on to public land belonging to the Airport Authority of India, and expanded like pincers to the very edge of the runway, so that the first sight of a visitor arriving in Mumbai might well be of a boy from one of these shanties, flying a kite or hitting a cricket ball tossed by his friends.

Smelling woodsmoke and kerosene, Mrs Puri passed a row of single-room huts, each with its tin door open. Women sat outside, combing each other’s hair, talking, watching over the pots of steaming rice; a rooster strutted across the roofs. Where had Mrs Puri seen that plumber? Further down the road, two giant half-built towers covered in scaffolding — she had not seen them before — only multiplied her confusion.

Suddenly, the roar of an engine: white and tubular and glistening, like a sea snake leaping up, a plane shot over a small Tamil temple. This was the landmark she had been trying to remember: this temple. Somewhere here she had seen that plumber.

A group of boys were playing cricket at the temple: a guardian demon’s face painted on the outer wall (its black mouth opened wide enough to swallow all the world’s malefactors) served as the wicket.

All this animal power, all this screaming from the cricketers: oh, how a mother’s heart ached. These boys with their rippling limbs and sinewy elbows were growing into men. And not one of them half as good-looking as her Ramu.

‘Mummy,’ one of the cricketers shouted. ‘Mummy, it’s Mrs Puri Aunty.’

Mary, the cleaning lady of Vishram Society, stood up from the roots of a tree in the temple courtyard, wiping her hands on her skirt.

‘This is my son,’ she pointed to the cricketer. ‘Timothy. Spends too much time here, playing.’

Inside the Society, relations between Mary and Mrs Puri were frosty (‘yes, it is part of your job to catch that early-morning cat’), but the distance from Vishram and the presence of Mary’s boy permitted a relaxation in mistress — servant tensions.

‘Nice-looking boy. Growing tall and strong.’ Mrs Puri smiled. ‘Mary, that plumber who lives here, I need to find him for some work in Masterji’s flat.’

‘Madam—’

‘There are problems with his pipe. Also his ceiling needs to be scrubbed. I’ll go from flat to flat and make a collection for the plumber’s fee.’

‘Madam, you won’t find anyone today. Because of the big news. They’ve all gone to see the Muslim man’s hut.’

‘What big news is this, Mary?’

‘Haven’t you heard, madam?’ She smiled. ‘God has visited the slums today.’

In the evening, the ‘big news’ was confirmed by Ritika, an old college mate of Mrs Puri and a resident of Tower B, who came over to parliament.

Their higher average income, lower average age, and a sense of being ‘somehow more modern’ meant that Tower B residents kept to themselves, used their own gate, and celebrated their religious festivals separately.

Only Ritika, a show-off even in college, ever came over to Tower A, usually to brag about something. Her husband, a doctor who had a clinic near the highway, had just spoken to the Muslim man in the slums, who was a patient of his.

Mrs Puri did not like Ritika getting such attention — who had beaten whom in the debating competition in college? — but she sat on a plastic chair in between Ajwani the broker and Kothari the Secretary and listened.

Mr J. J. Chacko, the boss of the Ultimex Group, had made an offer of 81 lakh rupees (81,00,000) to that Muslim man for his one-room hut. It was just down the road from Vishram. Had they seen where the two new buildings were coming up? That was the Confidence Group. J. J. Chacko was their big rival. So he was buying all the land right opposite the two new buildings. He already owned everything around the one-room hut; this one stubborn old Muslim kept saying No, No, No , so Mr Chacko bludgeoned him with this astronomical offer, calculated on God alone knows what basis.

‘Everyone, please wait a minute. I’ll find out if this is true.’

Amiable and dark, Ramesh Ajwani was known within Vishram to be a typical member of his tribe of real-estate brokers. Ethics not to be trusted, information not to be doubted. He was a small man in a blue safari suit. He punched at his mobile phone; they waited; after a minute, it beeped.