Last Man in Tower (34 page)

He smiled and reached for the handkerchief; but the Secretary hid it behind his back.

‘Look here, Ajwani, if you’re getting anything extra for this from Shah – and I know you are – I want half of it. I did all the work today.’ Coming close to Ajwani’s ear, he whispered: ‘I want a large glass panel in my living room in Sewri. For a full view of the flamingoes. A large glass panel.’

Ajwani grinned. ‘You’re becoming a man, Kothari. All right, fifty fifty.’

He reached behind the Secretary’s back and took the thing wrapped in a handkerchief; in return he handed the Secretary a large soft packet.

‘Cotton wool,’ he said. ‘Distribute it to everyone in the Society. Before 9 p.m. I’m going right now to see the boys.’

The Secretary turned his face to the right and held the cotton bale up to his ear. ‘
Don’t
tell me what is going to happen.’

Outside Vishram Society, the street lamps were flickering to life. Mrs Puri was out in the market, shopping for fresh, vitamin-rich spinach with which she would stimulate her son’s slow neurons.

A jarring noise of brakes tore through the market. The Tata Indigo, which had swerved from the main road, slowed down, but not fast enough: there was a mad squealing, and a thrashing of living limbs under its wheels.

‘You’ve killed it!’ someone shouted at the driver. ‘And on Gandhi Jayanti!’

Two men came out of a grocery store; one of them, who wore a blue lungi, tied it up around his knees. ‘Pull him out of his car and give him a thrashing!’ he yelled.

The Indigo sped away; the grocery-store men went back to their work.

The stray yellow dog, an uninvited and unexpelled guest at Vishram Society for so many months, lay in a puddle of dark sticky blood near the market. A crow hopped by the side of the animal. It picked at its entrails.

Mrs Puri shielded Ramu’s face with her palm. He whimpered. Hugging him into her side, she led him back to Vishram, and left him there with Mrs Saldanha.

She shook Ram Khare out from his guard’s booth.

Ram Khare brought water in the channa bowl Ramu had left near the black Cross. The dog was too weak to drink it. They lowered the animal into the gutter, so that it might pass away in dignity, if not in comfort.

‘Ask the municipality men to take it with them when they come here in the morning, Ram Khare. We can’t leave its body out here.’

She went back and explained to Ramu: that wasn’t their friendly stray dog. No, it was another dog that looked a bit like theirs. Ramu brightened. His mother promised that they would see their yellow dog in the morning, eating channa from the bowl. Promise.

She was tucking him into bed with the Friendly Duck when the Secretary knocked on the door.

‘Double lock your door tonight, Mrs Puri,’ he said.

She came to the door and whispered: ‘Is it really going to happen? The
simple thing
?’

Kothari said nothing; he handed her a small plastic bag full of cotton wool, and went down the stairs. Mrs Puri stood in the stairwell, listening as he knocked on the Pintos’ door.

‘Double-lock your door tonight, Mr Pinto.’

‘We lock them every night.’

‘Lock it extra tight tonight. Wear cotton in your ears if you have any. You don’t? Then take some of this. It’s in the bag. Wear it at night. Do you understand?’

‘No.’

‘Try. It is a simple thing, Mr Pinto.’

She heard Kothari’s footsteps go down another flight of stairs, and then his voice saying: ‘Double-lock your door tonight, Mrs Rego.’

Just as he was turning from Mrs Saldanha’s door, the Secretary saw Mary, standing near his office. She was staring at him.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘I clean your office every evening at this time,’ she said. ‘I was going to get the broom.’ And then she added: ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘Clean the office tomorrow, Mary. You may take the rest of the day off.’

She stood there.

‘Mary’ – the Secretary lowered his voice – ‘when the Shanghai comes up, they’ll hire you. I’ll make sure that they do. They’ll give you a uniform. Good pay. I’ll make sure. Do you understand?’

She nodded.

‘Now go home,’ Kothari said. ‘Enjoy the evening with your son.’

He watched until she went out of the gate and turned left towards the slums.

There was now a night-time silence in Vishram such as they had not heard in decades; the deserted Tower B with the yellow
Marked for Demolition
tape around it seemed to secrete stillness. The Pintos, as they lay in bed, could hear once again the roar of the planes going over Vakola.

‘There,’ Mr Pinto whispered.

‘Yes,’ Mrs Pinto whispered. ‘I heard it too.’

Masterji was back in his room. He was washing his face in the basin.

‘Maybe nothing will happen tonight,’ Mrs Pinto whispered.

‘Go to sleep, Shelley.’

‘He has stopped walking. He’s gone to bed,’ she said. She strained her ears.

‘But someone’s walking above him.’

A little after midnight, the Secretary woke up.

He had dreamed that he was standing before a panel of four judges. They wore the expected black robes and white wigs of the judiciary, but each had the face of a flamingo. The senior judge, who was larger than the others, wore a shawl of golden fur. The face of this flamingo-judge was so terrible that the Secretary could not look at it; hoping for sympathy, he turned to the lesser judges. All three were reading aloud, but all he could hear was one word, repeated endlessly,
Bye-law
,
Bye-law
. The senior judge, adjusting his wig, said: ‘Human beings are only human individually: when they get together they turn…’ His three junior colleagues were already tittering. ‘…
birdy
.’ The three laughed together in high-pitched cackles. Then the senior flamingo adjusted his golden shawl, for he was a vain judge, and spoke in a deep voice, which the Secretary recognized as his father’s:

‘Now for the verdict on Ashvin Kothari, Secretary, Vishram Society Tower A, incorporated in the city of Mumbai, who made a duplicate of a key entrusted to his care to facilitate a break-in into his own Society, and that too on the holy day of Gandhi Jayanti. In accordance with the law of the land, and to avoid giving offence, the verdict of this panel shall be read in English, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati…’

Kothari opened his eyes. He turned on his lamp so he could see the clock. His wife, lying next to him, began to grumble.

In the dark Kothari walked over the carpet in his living room. Holding his comb-over in place, he lowered himself on to the sofa.

No one should point a finger at
him
. Ajwani had arranged for the ‘simple thing’.

Yet he wanted to scream for help, or run to the police station near the highway and tell the fat constable Karlekar everything, before something terrible happened in the night, and they woke to find Masterji with his legs broken, or worse, much worse…

His wife snored from the bed. Getting down on his knees, Kothari put his ear to the carpet and listened. All he could hear was the sound of his own voice, whispering:

‘Do as you will, evil king:

I, for my part, know right from wrong…’

A little after two o’clock, the Pintos heard Masterji’s door open again.

It was like the way you hear someone making love in another home, their bed creaking and their sighing, and you’re trying hard to shut it out of your ears. They wanted not to hear.

Something was walking upstairs.
Two
somethings.

‘The boys are here.’

‘Yes.’

The two old bodies moved in bed, following the footsteps; a flurry of steps, and then a little cry of pain: bone had hit table.

‘The teakwood table.’

‘Yes. Oh, no.’

This was followed by more shuffling; the table fell over; a scream.

‘Thieves!’

No one stirred. No one moved. The two Pintos joined hands. Everyone in the building, prostrate in the same way, must have heard the cry. The Pintos could feel the warming of hearts in every listening bedroom – the same ‘At last.’

Then there was a muffled wrestling – and then there was the sound of swatting, as if someone was hitting at a rat running around the room. Then – piercing the night – not a human cry, but the howling of an animal.

The Rubik’s Cube saved him.

One of the boys stepped on it, slipped, and hit his knee against the teakwood table, which toppled over.

Masterji awoke.

He had grabbed the blue
Illustrated History of Science
at once – had some secret part of him been waiting for this, rehearsing this moment? – and rushed out of his bedroom; before they had even seen him he had hit the first one on the head with the book. Screaming –
Thieves!
– and with a strength that he would not be able to reproduce in daylight, he had shoved one of the boys – who, staggering back, had hit the other one, who fell by the phone. The
Illustrated History of Science
went up high and then came down on the skull of the boy, who howled. It was by now a rout, and the two hooligans rushed out through the open door, where one tripped and tumbled down the stairs; by which time they were in a frenzy just to survive, realizing they had been sent to bully and threaten not a helpless old man, as they had been told, but a live ogre. They ran into the compound and leapt over the gate.

Masterji pushed the sofa against the door, to barricade it against a second attack. Purnima, he chanted, Purnima. He moved the chair against the sofa.

Then it seemed to him that this was the wrong thing to have done. He had to be able to run in and out if there was another attack, and the door should be open. He moved the sofa and the chair back to their places.

He let the water run into a pot; he turned on the gas, and brought water to a boil. He would pour it on their heads when they came back. On his knees, he examined the gas cylinder. Perhaps he could explode it in their faces?

Purnima
, he thought,
Purnima
. He tried to summon his wife’s face but no image came into his mind: he could not remember what she looked like. Gaurav, he called, Gaurav, but he could not remember his face, either… he saw only darkness, and then, emerging from that darkness, people, men of various races, standing in white shirts, close together. He recognized them: they were the commuters on the suburban train.

Now a ray of sun entered the compartment and their varied faces glowed like a single human light refracted into colours. He searched for the face of the day-labourer from Crawford Market; he could not find him, but there were others like him. The vibrating green cushions and the green-painted walls of the carriage were luminous around them. ‘Calm down, Masterji,’ the radiant men in the white shirts said, ‘for we are all with you.’ He understood now that he had not struck the two boys down:
they
had done it for him. Beyond the grille, the faces in the yellow second-class compartment turned to him, and said: ‘We are with you too.’ Around him they stood thick and close; he felt hands come into his hand; and every murmur, every whisper, every jarring of the train said:
You were never born and you will never die: you cannot hurt and cannot be hurt: you are invincible, immortal, indestructible.

Masterji unbolted the latch, left his door open, and slept.

3 OCTOBER

‘Sir.’ Nina, the Pintos’ maid, turned to her employer. ‘You should see for yourself who it is.’

Mr Pinto, rising from a breakfast of a masala three-egg omelette, served with buttered toast and tomato ketchup, came to the door dragging his brown leather sandals along the floor.

He saw who was at the door and turned around: ‘Nina,’ he cried. ‘Come back here.’

Masterji was standing outside.

‘I was sure in the night it was Mr Shah who had done it,’ Masterji said. ‘And I felt safe until the morning. But when I woke up, I thought, those boys did not break down the door. They had a spare key. Who gave them this spare key?’

Mr Pinto turned and gestured to the table.

‘Come have breakfast with us. It’s the three-egg omelette. Your favourite. Nina – one more omelette, at once. Come, Masterji, sit at the table.’

‘Did you know what was going to happen last night?’ Masterji asked. ‘Did the Secretary tell everyone to keep quiet when I screamed? That was something else I didn’t think about until this morning. No one came to help me.’

Mr Pinto gestured helplessly. ‘For our part, honestly, we heard nothing. We were asleep. Ask Shelley.’

Mrs Pinto, rising from the breakfast table, stood next to her husband, and took his hand in hers.

‘We wanted to save you, Masterji,’ she said in her rasping voice. ‘They told us if we kept quiet we would save you.’

‘Shelley, shut up. Go back to the table. We didn’t know anything, Masterji. We thank God that you are safe. Come in and eat now—’

‘You’re lying, Mr Pinto.’

Masterji pulled the front door from Mr Pinto’s grasp and closed it on himself. He pressed his forehead against the door. Rajeev and Raghav Ajwani, in their school uniforms, tried to tiptoe past him.

Hearing voices from below, Masterji went down the stairs.

Three women sat in the white plastic chairs.

Mrs Puri was speaking to the Secretary’s wife; Mrs Ganguly, bedecked in gold and silk, apparently on her way to a wedding ceremony, was listening.

‘So what if the Sisters at the Special School want Ramu to play David Slayer of Goliath in the pageant? What is it to me that David was a Christian and we are Hindus? Jesus and Krishna: two skin colours, same God. All my life I have gone in and out of churches like a happy bird.’

‘You’re right, Sangeeta,’ the Secretary’s wife responded. ‘What difference is there, deep down?’

Masterji went from Mrs Puri to Mrs Kothari to Mrs Ganguly, trying to find a face that revealed guilt when he stared at it. None paid the slightest attention to him.
Am I looking at good people or bad?
he thought.

Mrs Puri brushed a housefly from Mrs Kothari’s shoulder and continued.

‘Didn’t I pray at St Antony’s and then at St Andrew’s and then at Mount Mary that the doctors should be wrong about Ramu? Just as I prayed in SiddhiVinayak temple, Mrs Kothari.’

‘You are a liberal person, Sangeeta. A person of the future.’

‘Did all of you know what was going to happen last night?’ Masterji asked. ‘Am I the only human being in this building?’

Mrs Puri continued to talk to the Secretary’s wife.

‘I make no distinction between Hindu and Muslim and Christian in this country.’

‘So true, Sangeeta. Let the heart be good, that’s what I say.’

‘I agree with you one hundred per cent,’ Mrs Ganguly joined in. ‘I never vote for the Shiv Sena.’

Now Masterji saw Tinku Kothari, the Secretary’s son. Squished into a plastic chair with his miniature carom board, the fat boy was playing by himself, alternately striking black and beige pieces. With his fingers tensed to hit the blue striker, he paused, turning his eyes sideways to Masterji.

He was chuckling. His jelly-like flesh rippled beneath his tight green T-shirt with its golden caption,
Come to Ladakh, land of monasteries
. The grins of Tibetan monks on the boy’s T-shirt widened.

The blue striker scattered the carom pieces. One black piece ricocheted over the board’s edge, and rolled through parliament, until it touched Masterji’s foot: he shivered.

He went up the stairs to his living room and waited for his old friend. If only Shelley would persuade that stubborn old accountant to knock on the door and say one word. ‘Sorry.’

Just one word.

He waited for half an hour. Then he got up and reached for the No-Argument book, still wrapped in a blue rubber band, lying on top of
The Soul’s Passageway after Death
in the bookshelf.

He undid the rubber band. He tore the pages out of the No-Argument book one by one, then tore each page into four pieces, and then tore each piece into smaller pieces.

Down in 2A, Mr Pinto, sitting at his dining table, turned to the window to watch the snowfall of paper pieces: all that was left of a 32-year-old friendship.

A scraping noise began in the compound. Mary was sweeping the confetti into a plastic bag. Masterji watched. He was waiting for her to look up at him, he was waiting for one friendly face within his Society. But she did not look.

He understood: she was ashamed. She too had known of what was going to happen.

A shadow fell over Mary’s bent back: a hawk went gliding over her into one of the open windows of Tower B.

‘Come to
this
tower!’ Masterji called out.

From his window he watched as the hawk, as if at his command, came out of Tower B and flew back.

And not just you.

Pigeon, crow, hummingbird; spider, scorpion, silverfish, termite and red ant; bats, bees, stinging wasps, clouds of anopheles mosquitoes.

Come, all of you: and protect me from human beings.

The cricket game at the Tamil temple had ended. A good game for Timothy; his mother had not caught him playing, and he had scored the most runs this afternoon.

Kumar, tallest of the boys who played with Timothy, had not had a good game. His shift as a cleaner at the Konkan Kinara, a cheap restaurant near the Santa Cruz train station, would start soon, and he was walking through the wasteland around Vakola to his home in one of the slums behind the Bandra-Kurla Complex. He was limping this evening; with the cricket bat in his hand, he slashed at the tall grass to either side of the mud path. A few paces ahead of him, Dharmendar, the cycle mechanic’s assistant, walked with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground.

From the tall grass, a small dark creature in a blue safari suit leapt out at them.

‘Ajwani Uncle,’ Kumar said.

The broker slapped Dharmendar on the head. ‘The simplest of jobs.’ A second slap. ‘All you had to do was scare an old man. A 61-year-old man.’

Ajwani’s forehead bulged and his scalp retracted. The tendons in his neck became taut. His spit came out in a spray; he swore.

Kumar put down his cricket bat, and stood by Dharmendar’s side, to indicate his share of the responsibility. He bowed his head: Ajwani disdained to slap it. He wiped his palms on his safari suit, as if he had soiled them by touching one so unworthy.

‘You had the key, you had to go in and put a hand over his mouth and give him a message. And you couldn’t do that.’

‘He was… very fierce, Ajwani Uncle.’

The broker scowled. ‘And now you’re playing
cricket
.’

‘Forgive us, Uncle,’ Kumar said. ‘We’re no good for work like this.’

A plane with the red-and-white Air India colours rose into the sky. Below its roar, Ajwani cursed and spat into the grass.

‘How many boys wait for a call like this? A chance to make some easy money. The beginning of a career in real estate. And I had to pick the two of you. Kumar: didn’t I find your family a place in the slums? Was there any other way you could have got a roof over your heads for 2,500 rupees a month?’

‘No, Uncle.’

‘And you, Dharmendar: didn’t I help your mother find a job as a maid in Silver Trophy Society? Didn’t I go there and speak to the Secretary personally?’

‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘And you boys let me down like this. Running from a 61-year-old…’ He shook his head. ‘And now the police will be here. After me.’

‘Forgive us, Uncle.’

‘What happened to the key I gave you?’ Ajwani gestured for it with his fingers.

‘We lost the key,’ Kumar said.

‘When we were running out of the building, Uncle.’

‘Lost the key!’ Ajwani shouted. ‘When the police come to arrest me, I should give them your names and say it was your idea.’

‘We’ll go to jail for you, Uncle. You are like a father to—’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Ajwani said. ‘Shut up.’

Almost choking with disgust, he walked back to the market and crossed the road to his office.

When Mani returned to the Renaissance Real-Estate office, he found his boss lying on the cot in the inner room, with one foot stretched out and playing with the coconuts in the wicker basket.

‘Why, Mani? Why did I give the job to those boys? I know so many people along the highway. I should have gone to a real goonda. Someone with experience.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Mani sat in a corner and watched the boss.

‘I have failed in everything I’ve put my hand to, Mani. I bought Infosys shares in 2000. Four days later the Nasdaq crashed. Even in real estate I keep buying at the wrong time. I am just a comedian in my own movie.’ His eyes filled with tears; his voice broke. ‘Get out of here, Mani.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And take care of my children when the police come to question me, Mani.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Picking up the black curved knife, the broker sliced open a coconut, drank its water, then got down on the floor and did twenty-five push-ups in an attempt to improve his morale.

At three o’clock, when Mani came back to the inner room, he was still lying on the cot, looking at the ceiling.

‘The way he dealt with those two useless boys, Mani. There’s guts in a 61-year-old doing that. Even in an enemy I admire courage.’

Now that he had done this terrible thing to Masterji, Ajwani felt closer than ever before to the stern sanctimonious old teacher, whom he had neither liked nor trusted all these years.

To wake up every morning white and hot and angry. To become a young man again at the age of sixty-one. What must it feel like? Ajwani clenched his fist.

At four o’clock, he called the Secretary’s office.

Kothari’s voice was relaxed. ‘You have nothing to worry about. He hasn’t gone to the police.’

‘He isn’t going to file a complaint against us?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t understand…’

‘I’ve been thinking about it all morning,’ the Secretary said. ‘Like you, I sat here shaking in my office. But the police never came. Why didn’t Masterji call them?’

‘That’s what I asked you, Kothari.’

‘Because,’ the voice on the phone dropped to a whisper, ‘he knows
he’s
the guilty one. Not going to the police, what does it mean? Full confession. He accepts responsibility for everything that has gone wrong in this Society. And to think we once respected the man. Now listen, Ajwani. The deadline ended yesterday. At midnight. Correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘But no one has come from the builder’s office. To tell us that it is over, and Tower A is no longer wanted by the Confidence Group.’

‘What does it mean?’ Ajwani whispered back. ‘Is Shah giving us more time? He said he would never do that.’

‘I don’t know what it means,’ the Secretary said. ‘But look – all of us have signed and dated our agreement forms before October 3. Correct? If Shanmugham comes tomorrow and says, it is over, we can always say, but we
did
sign the forms.
You
did not come yesterday.’

Ajwani exhaled. Yes, it could still work. Nothing had been lost just yet.

‘But this means…’

‘This means,’ the Secretary continued for him, ‘we have to try something even more simple with Masterji.
Tonight
.’

‘Not tonight,’ Ajwani said. ‘I need a day. I have to plan things.’

The voice on the other end of the phone paused.

‘And you call
me
a nothing man, Ajwani?’

‘Why do I have to do everything? Do it yourself this time!’ the broker shouted. He slammed the phone down.

You stink. You people.

He could smell them from his room too well. He burned the candle, he burned an incense stick, he sprayed a perfume about the rooms, but he could still smell them.

I’ll go up as high as possible
, Masterji thought.

So he climbed the stairs and went out on to the terrace again. Standing at the edge, he looked down on the black Cross, which was being garlanded by Mrs Saldanha.

She must be praying I should die
, he thought.

He circled about the terrace. After a while, he saw small faces down in the compound, staring up: Ajwani, Mrs Puri, and the Secretary were watching him.

Those who had tried to attack him in his room the previous night now gaped at him from down there, as if
he
were a thing to fear. How monstrous a child’s face with a torch-light must seem to a poisonous spider. He smiled.

The smile faded.

They were pointing at him and whispering into each other’s ears.

‘Go down at once,’ he told himself. ‘By staying up here you are only giving them an excuse to do something worse to you.’

Half an hour later he was still up there: with his hands clasped behind his back, walking in circles around the terrace, as helpless to stop moving as those down below were to stop watching.