Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

Ajwani leaned against the tree and touched its trunk.

‘Rich man! Where have you been?’

A tall and lean man, brushing white dust from his white shirt and black trousers, had come up to him.

‘You haven’t signed the Confidence Group papers,’ Shanmugham said, ‘and without it we can’t give you the money.’

Ajwani stepped back from the tree.

Shanmugham raised a leg and patted white dust off his trousers.

‘One and a half crores of rupees. All of you are now rich men, and what do I get, Mr Ajwani? Nothing.’

Mr Shah had not given him a bonus or an extra. Not even a pat on the head, not even what a dog would get for chasing a stick. All the boss had said was: ‘Now I want you to make sure that the demolition does not fall one day behind, Shanmugham. Time is money.’

For months he had been the man handing out red boxes of sweets to the residents of Vishram: where was his red box?

Moving close to the broker, he lowered his voice.

‘I’ve been thinking about what you said. That day in your inner room, when we sat with the coconuts. About how some clever left-hand men actually manage to…’

Shanmugham started. The broker was walking away briskly, arms swinging, as if he were about to break into a run.

‘Come back, Mr Ajwani! If you don’t sign your papers, you won’t get the money!’

What was wrong with the man?

With one eye closed, Shanmugham looked at the old banyan’s leaves: sunlight oozed through the dark canopy like raw white honey. He picked up a stone and threw it at the light.

The lift opened: the chai boy stepped out into the car park with a tray full of teacups.

He stopped and stared.

The tall man in the white shirt was doing it again. Standing before his Hero Honda motorbike, he was talking into the rear-view mirror.

‘Mr Shah, I know you told me you didn’t want to talk about a certain event ever again, but yesterday I met that broker, and I…’

The tall man closed his eyes, and tried again.

‘Mr Shah, the real story behind… I know you told me never to mention it again, but I…’

The chai boy tiptoed around him; he took his tray of morning tea to the drivers waiting at the other end of the basement car park.

A quarter of an hour later, Shanmugham stood before his employer. Giri was in the kitchen, cutting something to pieces.

At his work desk, with the poster of the Eiffel Tower behind him, the boss was signing each page of a bundle of documents.

‘Did I ask you to come up, Shanmugham?’ he said without looking up. ‘Go down and wait for me. We have to go to Juhu immediately.’

The left-hand man did not move.

Shah looked up; he held a silver pen in his fingers.

‘We just had a call, Shanmugham. Satish has been arrested. Doing the same thing with the gang. This time in Juhu.’ He made a circular motion with his pen in his hand. ‘They sprayed some politician’s van. Giri is putting the money in the envelope. We won’t be able to keep it out of the newspapers this time.’

Shanmugham said what he had rehearsed for nearly twenty minutes in the basement: ‘Sir: in the matter of the murder at Vishram Society. I have been thinking about it for some time. It is not a suicide. In Vakola they say either Shah did it, or the neighbours did it. And you didn’t do it, since I didn’t do it. So the neighbours did it.’

Shah did not look up.

‘The newspapers said it was suicide. Go down and wait. We must go to Juhu.’

Shanmugham spoke to the poster of the Eiffel Tower over his boss’s head.

‘The police might be interested, sir, if someone told them that the people in Vishram did it. They might reopen the case. Look at the photographs of the corpse more carefully. The construction might be delayed.’

The silver pen dropped on to the table.

Shanmugham shivered; in another room, Shah’s mobile phone had begun to ring. Giri came in with the mobile phone, wiped it on his lungi, and placed it on his employer’s desk.

Shah, his eyes closed, listened to the voice on the phone.

‘I am on my way. I understand. I am on my way.’

He rubbed the phone on his forearm and held it out for Giri.

Giri stood in the threshold for a minute, looking at the two men. Then he went back to the kitchen to continue cutting his bread.

Shah’s jaw began working. He started to laugh.

‘Oh, you are a son of mine, Shanmugham. A real son.’

He tapped twice on his desk.

‘You listen to me: there is already one body in the foundations of the Shanghai, and there’s plenty of space there for another. Do you understand?’

Shah grinned. Shanmugham understood that he had one sharp tooth, but this man had a mouth full of them.

‘Do you understand ?’

Shanmugham could not move. He felt his smallness in the den he had walked into: the den of real estate.

‘Shanmugham. Why are you wasting my time?’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Go down to the basement and wait in the car. We have to get the boy out of the police station.’

And Shanmugham went down to the basement.

At least , Shah thought, I got six good years out of this one . On the pad on his table, where he had written:

Beige marble.

Grilles on windows. (Fabergé egg pattern: pay up to one rupee extra per kg wrought iron. No more.)

he added:

Left-hand man

He straightened his clothes in the mirror, spat on to a finger, checked the colour of his insides, and went downstairs.

Juhu. Two half-built towers like twin phantoms behind a screen of trees, neither vanishing nor growing into clarity.

Dharmen Shah was sick of buildings.

He turned to his son and asked: ‘How many more times will you do this?’

‘Do what?’ Satish was looking out of the window of the moving car. He wore a light green shirt; his school uniform shirt, which he had changed out of, was in a plastic bundle by his feet.

‘Disgrace your family name.’

The boy laughed.

‘I disgrace your name?’ He stared at his father. ‘I read the papers, Father. I saw what happened in Vakola.’

‘I don’t know what you’ve read. That old teacher killed himself. He was mad.’

The boy spoke slowly. ‘All of us in the gang are builders’ sons. If you don’t let us do these things now,’ he said, ‘how will we become good builders when we grow up?’

Shah saw a platinum necklace around his son’s neck; the younger generation preferred it to gold.

Satish asked to be let down at Bandra; he wanted to eat lunch at Lucky’s. His father had taken his credit card from him at the Juhu station; now he gave it back here to the boy, along with a 500-rupee note.

Satish touched the note to his forehead in a salaam . ‘One day, Father, we’ll be proud of each other.’

On a pavement near the Mahim Dargah, Shah saw a dozen beggars, waiting for free bread and curry, sitting outside a cheap restaurant. Tired, lively, cunning, each dirty face seemed to glow. One blind man had his face turned skywards in a look of dumb ecstasy. Just a few feet away, a man with red bleary eyes, his head in his hands, appeared to be the most frightened thing in the world.

Shah watched their faces go past.

If only the traffic hadn’t been so light that evening the old teacher came to the Malabar Hill house. If only he had met face to face with that teacher, the matter would have ended right then. Blood need not have been spilled.

So why had they not met?

He had a vision of a blazing red curtain and a silhouette moving behind it: when the red curtain was torn away, he saw the faces of the beggars outside his car. All his life he had seen faces like these and thought: Clay. My clay . He had squeezed them into shape in his redevelopment projects, he had become rich off them. Now it seemed to him that these shining mysterious faces were the dark powers of his life. They made this thing happen. Not to get my Shanghai built. To get their city built. They have used me for their ends.