Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

This was where they had left off.

‘I’m not frightened,’ Ajwani said. ‘Don’t think I am.’

About to speak, Mrs Puri saw Mani, and stopped.

The broker looked at his assistant. ‘Go outside and play with Ramu,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t leave the boy alone out there.’

Mani sighed. He stood outside the office and pointed at passing cars and trucks; Ramu held on to the little finger of his left hand. He was still sobbing because of the way the chick’s head had been crushed under Kothari Uncle’s foot.

After half an hour, Mrs Puri left with her boy.

As he watched the fat woman leave, Mani thought: What have they been talking about?

When he pushed open the glass door, he found the office deserted; from the inner room beyond the Daisy Duck clock came the noise of a coconut being hacked open.

Lying next to Ramu’s blue aeroplane quilt, Sanjiv Puri, who had been drawing cartoons of lizards, white mice, and spiders, now began to sketch, as if by logical progression, politicians.

As he was putting the final touches to the wavy silver hair of his favourite, ex-president Abdul Kalam, he looked up.

The lights were on in the living room: his wife had come home with his son.

‘Ramu.’ He put down his sketchbook and held out his arms.

Mrs Puri said: ‘Play with your father later. He and I have to talk now.’

Closing Ramu’s bedroom door behind her, she spoke in a soft voice.

‘You can’t come to Ramu’s pageant tomorrow.’

‘Why not?’

‘Stay late in the office. Have dinner there. Use the internet. Don’t come home till after ten o’clock.’

He watched her as she went to the dining table, where she began folding Ramu’s freshly washed laundry.

‘Sangeeta…’ He stood by her. ‘What is happening that I can’t come to my own home until ten?’

She looked at him, and said nothing, and he understood.

‘Don’t be crazy. If they do it, Ajwani and the Secretary, well and good. Why should you dip your hands into it?’

‘Keep your voice down.’ Mrs Puri leaned her head in the direction of you know who . ‘Ajwani is doing it. Kothari is going to hide somewhere all day long — so if Shanmugham comes in the morning, he will not be able to tell him that the Confidence Group has withdrawn its offer. And unless their letter is not handed to the Secretary of a Society in person, they cannot say they have taken back their offer. That is the law. In the evening Ajwani will do it. I’ll phone him when Masterji goes up to the terrace. That’s all there is to it.’

‘But if anything goes wrong… it is a question of going to jail .’

She stopped, a blue towel over her forearm. ‘And living in this building for the rest of my life is better than going to jail?’ She flipped the towel over and folded it.

Her husband said nothing.

Ramu popped his head out of his room, and Mummy and Daddy smiled and told him to go back to bed.

‘My fingers still smell,’ she whispered. ‘That man made me dirty my fingers. With my own son’s… He made me do that. I can never forgive him.’

Mr Puri whispered: ‘But tomorrow is Ramu’s pageant.’

‘So it’s perfect,’ Mrs Puri said, pushing the towels to one side, to start work on Ramu’s underwear. ‘No one will suspect me on a day like tomorrow. I will have to stay back at the school hall to help dismantle the pageant. Someone will remember me. Someone will get the time confused. I’m not asking you to do anything. Just stay away from home. That’s all.’

Mr Puri went to the sofa, where he slapped magazines and newspapers on to the ground with his palm; then he walked over to the kitchen, where he stripped things off the fridge door, and then he shouted: ‘No. I won’t do it.’

His wife stood holding Ramu’s underwear against her chest. She stared.

‘No.’ He took a step towards her. ‘I’m not leaving you alone tomorrow. I’m staying here. With you.’

Letting the underwear fall, she put her fingers around her husband’s neck, and — ‘Oy, oy, oy’ — kissed the crown of his head.

Ramu, opening his bedroom door just a bit, gaped at the show of affection between Mummy and Daddy.

Mrs Puri blushed; she pushed the boy back into his room and bolted the door from the outside.

‘He isn’t in his room now,’ she said, putting her ear to the wall to check for any sound. ‘So he’s still up on the roof, then. He went up there yesterday and he went today. He will probably go tomorrow too. Ajwani will have to do it then. Up there.’

‘Kothari?’

‘He will say what we want him to say. When it’s all over. He promised me that much.’

Mr Puri nodded. ‘It could work,’ he said. ‘Could work.’

The sketchbook on which he had been doodling lizards and politicians lay on the table; he tore out a page.

‘Here. We should write it down here. What time he goes up to the terrace and what time he comes down. This will help us tomorrow.’

‘Ramu! Stop pushing the door!’ Mrs Puri raised her voice; the bedroom door stopped rattling.

‘Write it down?’ she asked her husband.

‘Why not? It’s how they do it in the movies. In the English movies. They always plan the previous day. Let’s take this seriously,’ Mr Puri said, as if he had been the one to come up with the whole idea.

He put his ear to the wall.

‘His door has opened.’ He turned to his wife and whispered: ‘What time is it?’

So I have failed you again, Purnima . Masterji removed his shoes, went to his bed and lay down, his arm over his face.

He controlled his tears.

His shirt was wet from walking round and round the terrace; when he turned in the bed, it stuck to his back and made him shiver. A husband who survives his wife must perform her memorial rites. But all of them had got together to strip away even this final satisfaction from him.

He bit his forearm.

How obvious now that Mr Pinto had wanted someone to threaten him outside the compound wall that evening. How obvious now that he and Shelley wanted the money. How obvious that the Secretary had been lying all this time about responsibility and flamingoes; he wanted money. He had been cheating them for years; he had been stealing from the funds. How obvious that Mrs Puri wanted money for herself, not for Ramu.

He covered his face in his blanket and breathed in. The game he played as a child: if you cannot see them, they cannot see you. You are safe in this darkness with your own breathing.

Look down — he heard a whisper.

What is down there? he whispered back.

Look at me .

Under his blanket, Masterji felt himself sliding: trapdoors had opened beneath his bed.

Now he was again on the builder’s terrace on Malabar Hill, watching the darkening ocean. He heard blows like the blows of an axe. The water was ramming into Breach Candy — into the original wall that held the tides out of the great breach of Bombay.

He saw its horns rising out of the dark water: the bull in the ocean, the white bull of the ocean charging into the wall.

Now he could see the original breach in the sea wall reopen: and the waters flooding in — waves rising over prime real estate, wiping out buildings and skyscrapers. Now the white angry bull, emerging horns-first from the waves, charges. The waves have come to the edge of the towers, and flooded into them. Muscles of water smash into the Brabourne Stadium and into the Cricket Club of India; a hoof of tide has brought down the Bombay University…

A finger snapped in the darkness, and a voice said: ‘Get up.’

He opened his eyes; he was too weak to move. Again the finger snapped: ‘Up.’