Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Kothari did so. Then the two men lifted Masterji’s body, and moved towards the door. Mr Puri winced: ‘I stepped on something.’ His wife kicked the Rubik’s Cube out of their path.

She opened the door for the men, and checked the corridor.

‘Wait for the lift. I’ve hit the button.’

‘It never works, let’s take the stairs, there’s two strong men here. He has lost a lot of weight.’

‘It was working in the morning. Wait.’

Mrs Puri jabbed the ‘call’ button again and again.

Sanjiv Puri had given up on the lift, and had begun moving with Masterji’s feet (his end of the dazed body) towards the stairs, when the machine clicked — the whirls and wheezes began — and a circle of light moved up towards them.

His wife held the door open from the outside until the three bodies were in. The Secretary managed to reach the button for the fifth floor. The two men saw, in the round white light on the roof of the lift, three tiny dark shapes. Wasps, which must have flown into the light a long time ago: six undecomposed wings.

When they reached the fifth floor, Sanjiv Puri prepared to press against the lift door; but it swung open of its own accord. His wife, despite her bulk, had come up the stairs faster than they had.

While they brought the body out of the lift, she pushed open the door leading to the roof terrace.

‘We’ll never take him up that way,’ the Secretary said, looking at the steep narrow staircase.

‘One step at a time. You can do it,’ Mrs Puri said, from above them. ‘One step at a time.’

The two men put the body down and changed positions. Sanjiv Puri, the stronger of the two, took the head this time. The Secretary followed with the feet. One step at a time. Pigeons scattered on the terrace as they came out.

‘Mrs Puri…’ the Secretary panted, ‘make sure no one is sitting down there in parliament…’

The wall of the terrace was three feet high. Mrs Puri looked down.

‘He’s opened his eyes. Do you have the hammer here?’

‘No, I left it in the room.’

‘Why didn’t you bring it up with you?’

‘You never told me to…’

‘Oh, stop it,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Get the work done.’

The two men staggered with the body, which had begun to squirm, to the edge of the terrace; on a count of three, they heaved it up and pushed.

‘Why isn’t it going over?’

‘He’s awake again. He’s holding on to the terrace with his hand. Push harder. Push.’

Watching the struggle, Mrs Puri joined in, and pressed her back and buttocks against the stone that had blocked her happiness for so long.

Now, when he opened his eyes, he could not tell if he were dead or alive; these men seemed to be demons, though kindly, who were forcing his body to budge from some place between life and death where it was stuck.

And this was because he was neither good nor bad enough; and neither strong nor weak enough. He had lost his hands; he had lost his legs; he could not speak. Yet everything he had to do was right here, in his head. He thought of Gaurav, his son, his living flesh. ‘Help me,’ he said.

And then he realized that the thing that was blocking his passage was cleared, and he was falling; his body had begun its short earthly flight — which it completed almost instantaneously — before Yogesh Murthy’s soul was released for its much longer flight over the oceans of the other world.

Down on the ground it lay, sprawled, in perfect imitation of a suicide’s corpse.

Loose strands of hair fell down the sides of Kothari’s bald head; he rearranged them into a comb-over.

‘We have to go back and find that hammer, Mrs Puri. And where is Ibrahim? Is he still in the room? What is he doing there? Mrs Puri, are you listening to me?’

‘He’s still alive,’ she said. ‘He’s moving down there.’

The Secretary was out of breath. So Sanjiv Puri ran down the stairs to the fifth floor, took the lift, and burst out of the entranceway. He stood by the body, turned his head upwards and shook it. The movement had stopped. It was just a death spasm.

A corona of dark liquid surrounded the head; Mrs Puri thought she saw things coming out of the skull. It was done.

‘Scotch tape…’ she hissed at her husband from the terrace. ‘The Scotch tape on his mouth. Quick-ly. Ram Khare is coming back.’

A special night. He usually had a quarter of Old Monk rum in his room, but tonight he had gone into a bar and said: ‘Whisky. Royal Stag.’

Why not? It was the evening of 5 October. The fight in his Society had to be over now. Even if you thought that the builder had delayed by one day, that was yesterday. Any man who gave his word that he would not extend the deadline would lose face if he did so after today.

The TV screen in the bar was playing a movie featuring Praveena Kumari, a famous ‘sex bomb’ of the 1980s, now making a come-back in a film called Dance, Dance . Ram Khare had never been a fan. Not curvy enough.

He had his whisky and asked for another.

The truth be told , he thought, I was always hoping that Masterji would defeat the builder. Where would I find work at another building at my age?

Now he was hungry.

A fine meal of chow mein, fried in a large black wok, at a street-side stand run by Gurkhas. Ram Khare sat on a bench next to the wok, and ate with a plastic fork, splashing a vivid green sauce and ketchup on the chow mein.

Done with his dinner, he washed his mouth and headed back to Vishram.

He had unlatched the gate and was walking to his booth, when he saw a human being lying near the entranceway of the Society.

Catherine D’Mello-Myer’s flat in the Bandra Reclamation was a warm anarchy of left-wing academic journals and foreign toys.

Her three children and their two cousins had rampaged through the kitchen and the bathroom before she ordered them into the TV room, where they had turned on the Sony PlayStation.

Now she sat at the dinner table with her sister and the sweet imbecile boy holding his green sign saying ‘NO NOISE’. His sword had become a piece of crushed cardboard on the floor.

Catherine had never seen her sister like this.

Mrs Rego sat at the table with her right hand lying on a black mobile phone.

Frank, Catherine’s American husband, looked out from their bedroom. He gestured with his head towards the children screaming at their PlayStation.

She glared at him.

Some things men could not understand. Her sister had never done this before — come here at such short notice, bringing along her children and this neighbour’s son.

Catherine knew she had never done enough for poor Georgina.

She understood that an important call was going to be made from that mobile phone. Her job was to take care of the children until the call was made, and Frank could go to hell.

‘Come, Ramu,’ she said, drawing the imbecile boy away from her sister. She touched him and withdrew her hand almost at once.

‘Georgina,’ she whispered. ‘I think he’s soiled his trousers.’

The boy parted his lips, and began to emit a soft, high-pitched whine.

Mrs Rego picked up her mobile phone and dialled.

‘Is that you, Mrs Puri?’ she asked, when the call was answered.

Catherine came closer to listen.

‘No, it’s Mr Puri,’ a man’s voice said. ‘My wife will call you in half an hour. The police are asking her some questions — there has been an unfortunate incident at the building. Is Ramu safe?’

Frank, opening the door of the bedroom to send another message, saw Mrs Rego break down and sob, while her sister stood over her, patting her back and whispering: ‘Georgina, now, now…’

*

Bowing to the golden Ganesha on the lintel, Shanmugham walked through the open door of his employer’s home in Malabar Hill.