Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

I cannot go back to bed. If I lie down, I will curse my neighbours and my city again.

He opened the door and went down the stairs. The moonlight pierced the octahedronal stars of the grille; it seemed as bright as the moon he had seen that night, so many years ago, in Simla.

Pinned by a moonbeam, he leaned against the wall.

The Republic, the High Court, and the Registered Co-operative Society might be fraudulent, but the hallways of his building were not without law; something he had obeyed for sixty-one years still governed him here.

He returned to his home; he closed the door behind him.

Opening his wife’s green almirah , Masterji knelt before the shelf with the wedding sari, and thought of Purnima.

Low, white, and nearly full, the moon moved over Vakola.

Ajwani could not stay at home on a night like this. He had walked along the highway, sat under a lamp post, then walked again, before taking an autorickshaw to Andheri, where he had dinner.

It was past eleven o’clock. After a beer at a cheap bar, he was returning along the highway in an autorickshaw. The night air lashed his face. He passed packed, box-like slum houses along the highway. Dozens of lives revealed themselves to him in seconds: a woman combing her long hair, a boy wearing a white skullcap reading a book by a powerful table lamp, a couple watching a serial on television. The autorickshaw sped over a concrete bridge. Below him, homeless men slept, bathed, played cards, fed children, stared into the distance. They were the prisoners of Necessity; he flew.

Tomorrow by this time I will be different from all of them , he thought: and his hands became dark fists.

When Masterji opened his eyes, he was still kneeling before the open green almirah . Sunlight had entered the room.

It was a new day: the anniversary of Purnima’s death.

My legs are going to hurt , he thought, searching for something to hold on to, as he raised himself up.

He walked over the underwear lying around the washing machine and went into the living room.

It was his wife’s first anniversary, but Trivedi had refused to do the rites. Where could he get them done at the last minute?

As he brushed his teeth, it seemed to him that the face in the mirror, enriched by wisdom from the foaming toothpaste, was offering him a series of counter-arguments: so what if Trivedi said no? Why a temple, why a priest? Physics experiments could be done by oneself at home: the existence of the sun and the moon, the roundness of the earth, the varying velocities of sound in solids and liquids, all these could be demonstrated in a small room.

True, he acknowledged, as he washed his face and mouth at the sink, very true.

He cupped the weak flow from the tap in his palm. It seemed that water was a part of all Hindu religious ceremonies. The Christians used it too. Muslims gargled and cleaned themselves before their namaaz .

He clutched a handful of water and went to the window. Sunlight too was congenial to religion. He opened the window and sprinkled water in the direction of the morning sun. Something was usually said to accompany this sprinkling. People used holy languages for this purpose. Sanskrit. Arabic. Latin. But the words came out of him in English. He said: ‘I miss you, my wife.’

He sprinkled more water.

‘Forgive me for not being a better husband.’

He sprinkled the last of the water into the light.

‘Forgive me for not protecting you from the things I should have protected you from.’

One drop of water had fallen on Masterji’s fingertip; it glowed in the morning light like a pearl.

The iridescent drop spoke to him, saying: I am what you are made of. And in the end I am what you return to. In between there were puzzling things a man had to do. Marry. Teach. Have children. And then his obligations were done and he would become drops of water again, free of life and its rainbow of restrictions. Death said to Master ji: Fear me not. Purnima your wife is more beautiful than ever, she is a drop of shining water. And Sandhya your daughter is right by her side.

The creeper from the Secretary’s home had grown down to Masterji’s window again; tender, translucent in the morning light, its blind pale tip curled up, apparently searching for him, like Sandhya’s infant finger, the first time he came close to her.

He fed it the water drop.

Something was usually done for others in remembrance rituals. When he had performed his father’s last rites in Suratkal, they had left steaming rice balls on a plantain leaf for the crows.

He came down to the compound, where Mrs Puri was clapping to keep time for Ramu; with a gold-foil sword in his hand, the boy, whose cheeks had been rouged, walked four measured steps, swished his sword, and bowed before an imaginary audience. Masterji remembered: the annual pageant.

‘Good luck, Ramu,’ he said.

Ramu, despite his mother’s stern gaze, thrust his golden sword at Masterji.

Ajwani woke up and found himself under arrest.

Two samurai had taken his arms in theirs. ‘Tae kwon-do time, Papa’ — little Raghav brought his fist right up to his father’s face. ‘You’ve over-slept.’

In brilliant white outfits embellished with Korean symbols and a small Indian flag in the upper right-hand corner, the boys arranged themselves before the dining table in kicking-and-punching positions. Though not formally trained in the martial arts, Ajwani understood the basic principles of strength and speed well enough.

‘Hey-a! Hey-a!’

The two of them kicked; Father watched from the sofa, yawning.

‘Harder. Much harder.’

Then the three of them sat down at the green dinner table for a breakfast of their mother’s toast.

Now in their blue ties and white school uniforms, Rajeev and Raghav lined up for the spoon full of shark liver oil that their father held out for them. Wetting his fingers at the kitchen tap, he wiped shark liver oil from each boy’s lips and sprinkled his face to make him laugh.

‘All right. Off to school.’

Ajwani’s wife, a heavy swarthy woman, was frying something in sunflower oil in the kitchen. She shouted out: ‘Will you bring some basmati rice in the evening?’

‘If I remember,’ he shouted back, and slapped his armpits with Johnson’s Baby Powder, before putting on a safari suit, and shutting the door behind him.

Halfway down the stairwell, he stopped and did a set of push-ups leaning against the banister.

Some time after 10 a.m., Masterji returned from the market with a packet of sweets.

He walked past the gate of Vishram Society, down to the Tamil temple. He remembered it from the evening he had gone through the slums to see Mr Shah’s new buildings.

The sanctum of the temple was locked, and two old women in saris sat on its square verandah, in the centre of which a tree grew.

He put the sweet-box before the old women. ‘Please think of my departed wife, Purnima, who died a year ago.’

Ripping open the plastic packaging around the sweets the old women began eating. He sat on the verandah with them. Through the grille door with the shiny padlock, he could see the small black Ganesha idol inside the dim temple, anointed with oil and kumkum and half buried under marigolds.

He watched the old women gobble; he felt their filling stomachs refuelling her flight. Their belches and grunts were a benediction on Purnima’s soul. Through the grille door, he watched the Ganesha, a distant cousin of the red idol at SiddhiVinayak. He was a jolly god, Ganesha, always game for a bit of mischief, and when the wind blew Masterji thought he heard someone whisper: ‘I’ve been on your side the whole time, you old atheist.’