Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Something very bad was going to happen to his Society this evening: unless he stopped it from happening.

After eating lunch in his office at two o’clock, Ajwani had taken the train into the city; he had brought along his copy of the Times of India real-estate classifieds to read on the journey.

He got off at Charni Road. Grant Road would have been closer, but he wanted to see the ocean before seeing the girls.

He crossed Marine Drive to the ocean wall and stood on it. Except for a rag-picker down among the tetrapod rocks, he was alone.

All his life he had dreamed of something grand — going across the Kala Paani to a new country. Like Vasco da Gama. Like Columbus.

‘Just a push,’ he said aloud. He practised pushing a phantom body off the ocean wall into the rocks, and then did it again.

At Chowpatty beach he crossed the road to stop at Café Ideal for an ice-cold mug of draught beer. Done with his drink, he was startled to find a phrase written all over the Times of India real-estate page: ‘Just a push’. Ripping the paper to shreds, he asked the waiter to make sure it went into the waste bin.

Outside, he hailed a taxi and said: ‘Falkland Road.’

Marine Drive is flooded with light from ocean and open sky; but a simple change of gear, three turns on the road, and the ocean breeze is gone, the sky contracts, and old buildings darken the vista. When you have gone deep enough into this other Bombay, you will come to Falkland Road.

Ajwani stopped the taxi, and paid his fare with three ten-rupee notes from a wad in his pocket.

‘I don’t have any change,’ the driver said.

Ajwani told him not to worry. One and two rupee coins wouldn’t matter after today.

He put the wad of notes back in his pocket, patted it, and felt better. Having money made things so much simpler, as one grew older.

There were friendly hotels by the Santa Cruz station and all along the highway, but it would do a man no good to look for pleasure where he might be recognized. In the old days — oh, five, six years ago — Ajwani went to Juhu and visited a pretty young actress there once or twice a month. Then real-estate prices went up in Juhu. Even those holes-in-the-wall became too costly for that actress and the other nice girls like her. They packed up and went north: to Versova, Oshiwara, Lokhandwala. Ajwani’s trips grew longer. Then real-estate prices went up in the north too. The girls moved to Malad, too far for him. And that wouldn’t be the end of it. Sooner or later a man would have to drive all the way to Pune for a blowjob. Real-estate speculation was destroying Bombay.

Thank God , Ajwani thought, there will always be Falkland Road .

Greying multi-storeyed buildings stood on either side of the road, each collapsing in some way. Some of the windows had been gouged out, and men in banians sat in the open holes, looking down. Ajwani passed dental shops with plaster-of-Paris dentures on display, dim restaurants as greasy as the biryani they served, and cinema theatres with garish film posters (collages of violent action and sympathetic cleavage) outside which young migrant men stood in queues, withering in the heat and the shouting of theatre guards. Muck was congealed in between the buildings, and spilled on to the road. As if summoned for contrast, a row of silvery horse carriages shaped like swans, the kind that took tourists on joyrides near the Gateway of India, had been parked by the rubbish. Neither the horses nor the drivers were around, but women leaned on the carriages, sucking their teeth at Ajwani.

He smiled back at them.

This early in the day, Kamathipura would be quiet, and the second floor of the discreet building behind the Taj Hotel would be closed, and Congress House might or might not accept gentlemen callers. But Falkland Road was always open for business. The women waited in bright blue doorways, squatted on thresholds, and stepping forward from the silvery carriages taunted Ajwani.

A girl in a green petticoat sat hunched over in a bright blue doorway; cigarette smoke rose up her face like sideburns.

He was about to speak to her when he heard metallic noise, and saw flashes of light behind the prostitute.

Smiling at the warm green petticoat to indicate that he’d be back, Ajwani took a few steps down the lane behind her brothel.

The bylane, like the others around the red-light district, was busy with the hammering of iron and the hiss of white-blue oxyacetylene flame. In an economy typical of the city, the metal-working district is packed into the mazy lanes around Falkland Road — the pounding of steel and sex combined in the same postcode. Ajwani had seen the metal-cutting shops in passing many times before.

Now he walked about the glaring and hissing workshops like a man who had stumbled into a new country. Outside one shop, the metal worker lifted up his rusty visor and stared at him.

Ajwani turned away from his gaze. He walked further down the lane. Strings of glossy ribbons led down to a bulbous green mosque at the end. An acrid industrial stench. Behind a chink in a blue door, a man in a visor squatted on the floor and seared a rod with a flame. Metal grilles for windows were stacked outside another shop. A worker stood tapping on the grilles; a customer in a grey suit was listening to him.

‘… a flower pattern in the iron rods is normal, it’s free. But this thing you want, two flowers joining together… I’ll add two rupees per kilogram…’

‘Oh, that’s too much,’ the customer said. ‘Too much, too much.’

Suddenly both the worker and the customer turned and faced Ajwani.

He walked to the end of the lane. Right in front of the green mosque, he saw a buffalo tied to a tree; the restless head and horns of the animal emerged from the deep shade and then drew back into it.

A door opened in what he had thought was the mosque wall. A piece of corrugated iron roofing emerged from it. Two bare-chested men carried it in front of Ajwani, and he saw his own shadow ripple over the folds of iron.

He stared at the disappearing shadow; he shivered.

‘It is not just a push,’ he said aloud, and turned, to make sure the buffalo had not overheard him.

Ajwani sneaked past the workshops to the main road. Leaning on the horseless silver carriages, the prostitutes sucked their teeth for him as he left Falkland Road. His eyes full of oxyacetylene, his sinuses full of fumes, the broker staggered back towards Marine Drive.

He still heard hammer blows from the workshops that were far behind him; his nose still burned, as if reality had been brought red-hot right up to it. He stopped for breath. Ahead, foreshortened by the perspective, the massed buildings skidded like a single lightning bolt of stone and masonry towards Chowpatty beach. The plunge in the city’s topography worked a corresponding effect in Ajwani’s mind; all other thoughts fell away, isolating a lone enormous truth.

… it is not ‘just a push’. It is killing a man.

A rubber ball struck the demon’s face painted on the wall of the Tamil temple.

Masterji opened his eyes, and stood up in the shade of the fruit tree. He realized he had gone to sleep. As he rubbed his eyes, he heard a woman’s voice booming: ‘Rakesh: is that how to bowl? Don’t you watch TV?’

Masterji hid behind the tree; he had recognized the voice.

‘Yes, Aunty. Sorry.’

‘I am not your aunty.’

Half a dozen boys converged around Mrs Rego. Sunil and Sarah were with her, and also Ramu, who was dressed in a red shirt, with make-up on his face and a golden sword in his hand. The pageant day must have ended. Why was Mrs Puri not around? Why had she left Ramu with Mrs Rego, of all people? But he no longer had any right to ask about their lives.