Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

He heard Kishore Kumar’s “Ek Aise Gagan Ke Tale” on a tape recorder.

The living room was deserted. A plate full of chewed crusts lay on the dining table; he recognized the marks of his employer’s teeth on the toast.

The fragrance of gutka guided him to the bedroom.

Dharmen Shah lay in a nest of printed papers, scratching on a pad with a pencil. The plaster-of-Paris model of the Confidence Shanghai sat beside him near the bedside lamp.

‘What?’

Shanmugham did not know how to say it. He felt a strange fear of incriminating himself with any word he might use.

Looking up from his calculations, Shah saw his assistant’s hand rising up in a fist.

The fist opened.

‘How?’

‘He fell, sir. From the terrace. About one hour ago. They say it’s suicide.’

Shah opened his red mouth. Eyes closed, he pressed his head back against the white pillow. ‘I thought it would be a push down the stairs, or a beating at night. That’s all.’

He caressed the soft pillow.

‘I forgot we were dealing with good people, Shanmugham.’

Scattering papers, the fat man climbed off the bed.

‘You drive back to Vakola. Find out from your connection in the police station what is happening with their investigation. I’ll call the astrologer in Matunga and get an auspicious date to start the demolition.’

MUMBAI SUN

SUICIDE IN SANTA CRUZ (EAST)?

By a staff reporter

Mr Yogesh Murthy, a retired teacher at the famous St Catherine’s School in the neighbourhood, allegedly committed suicide last night from the rooftop of ‘Vishram’ Society in Vakola, Santa Cruz (E).

While there is no suspicion of foul play in the matter, the Santa Cruz police said they are not ruling out any possibility at this stage. An investigation is underway.

It is believed, however, that the deceased had slipped into a state of extreme depression following the death of his wife almost exactly a year ago. Residents of the neighbourhood say that he had been progressively losing his mind under the pressure of diabetes and old age, withdrawing into his room, talking to himself, engaging in anti-social behaviour and fighting with his entire Society over a proposed offer of redevelopment, which he alone opposed. Dr C. K. Panickar, a clinical psychiatrist at Bandra’s Lilavati Hospital, says he had shown classic symptoms of mental deterioration. ‘Paranoia, passive-aggressive developments, and even schizophrenia cannot be ruled out given the subject’s behaviour in his final days,’ he suggests.

The deceased is survived by a son, Gaurav, who lives in Marine Lines, and a grandson, Ronak.

The little dark man in the blue safari suit walked through the vegetable stalls, disappointed that no one looked at him this morning as if he were a murderer.

For nearly two months the watermelon and pineapple sellers had discussed how that broker from Vishram, Ajwani, the one who sat across the road in that little real-estate office with the glass door, had arranged for one of his underworld contacts to kill Masterji; no — how he had done it himself, tiptoeing into Vishram under the cover of darkness and lifting the old teacher up on his thick arms to the terrace. They would turn around to find Ramesh Ajwani there, always with a smile, saying: ‘What is the price for brinjals today?’

And they would start to haggle with him: for being a murderer does not necessarily get one a better rate with the brinjals.

He had been the first suspect. Nagarkar, the senior inspector, had summoned him to the station the morning after the death; he knew that Ajwani had connections to shady characters throughout Vakola. (The kinds of clients he had bribed them to get clearance certificates for!) For half a day the inspector grilled him below the portrait of Lord SiddhiVinayak. But his story held. A dozen people remembered seeing the broker outside the Dadar train station at various hours of the night of Masterji’s death; he was said to have suffered an attack of indigestion, and to have lain there, writhing and incoherent.

‘If you didn’t do it, then who did?’ the inspector asked. ‘Do you really expect me to believe it was suicide?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ajwani said. ‘I came home after midnight. I was not well. The police were already there.’

The Secretary was the next to be summoned to the station. But three witnesses put him in Ajwani’s real-estate office at the hour of Masterji’s death. One was Mani, the broker’s assistant, and the other two were Ibrahim Kudwa and Mr Puri, two of his neighbours, both respectable men. Every resident of Vishram Society, it turned out, could prove that he or she had been somewhere else at that time. The only ones who were in the building when Masterji fell off the roof were an ancient couple, the Pintos, who seemed barely capable of either sight or movement.

The builder? Nagarkar knew that Shah was a smart man: too smart to become involved if he would be an immediate suspect. So Masterji became the prime suspect in his own murder. Many people, both in Vishram and in the neighbourhood at large, gave evidence that the teacher had been growing senile and unpredictable for a while. His wife’s death and his diabetes had made him depressed. In the end the Inspector decided, since he did not like unsolved mysteries, that it must have been suicide.

Ajwani knew it was not. For one week he had not spoken to anyone else in Vishram. Then he moved his son and wife to a rental flat by the train station. He was not going to live with those people again.

How they had done it he was not sure. Maybe Mr and Mrs Puri had done it on their own; the Secretary may have helped. Maybe it was just a push. But no, some part of him knew that Masterji would have struggled. A born fighter, that old man. They must have drugged him, or maybe hit him; whatever they did, either because the skull cracked in the fall, or because the doctor who examined the corpse was incompetent or bored, nothing had been detected.

He came to the fruit and vegetable market twice a day, three times a day if he could. He bargained for carrots and guavas and abuse; this was part of his penance. He hoped that the vendors would surround him one day and thrust their fingers into his ribcage; then pelt him with tomatoes and potatoes and push chillies into his eyes. He wanted to go home stained and accused of murder.

For two months after his death, Masterji was a residue of dark glamour on the Vakola market, a layer of ash over the produce. Then other scandals and other mysteries came. The vendors forgot him; Ajwani had become just another customer.

He walked away from the market, hands behind his back, until he heard hammers chipping away at stone and brick.

Vishram Society was overrun by workmen like a block of sugar by black ants. The roof had fallen in; men sat on the exposed beams and stood all along the stairs, hacking at wood with saws, and hammering at walls and beams. TNT could not be used in a neighbourhood this densely populated; the destruction had to be done by human hands. The men who had been working on the Confidence Excelsior and the Fountainhead were now chipping, peeling, and smashing Vishram; the women carried the debris on troughs on their heads and dumped it into the back of a truck.

Every few hours, the truck drove down the road, and poured its contents as filling into the foundations of the Ultimex Milano. The metal skeleton beneath the paint and plaster would be sent to workshops around Falkland Road to be broken up and recycled. Even in death, Vishram Society was being of service to Vakola and Mumbai.

As each hammer struck Vishram, the building fumed, emitting white puffs from its sides, like an angry man in the Tom and Jerry cartoons that Ajwani’s sons watched in the mornings. It looked like some slow torture for all the trouble that the building had given Mr Shah. Some of the Christian workers had wanted to save the black Cross, but it was gone, probably crushed into the foundations of the Milano. Soon all that would remain of Vishram Society would be the old banyan; and each time there was a wind, its leaves brushed against the abandoned guard’s booth like a child trying to stir a dead thing to life.