Last Man in Tower (41 page)

‘Flamingoes were for big men like my father. Those fellows are good enough for me.’ Kothari pointed to the sparrows hopping about the food court. ‘We are in the Capriconius Society. Behind the HDFC bank on Juhu-Versova Link Road. Good place. Good people.’

‘They want Papa to be the Secretary there too,’ Tinku said, as his father blushed.

‘Some bhelpuri for you, Ibrahim? Or you, Mumtaz? A bite for Mariam.’

‘Oh, no,’ Kudwa said. ‘I take three Antacids a day just to go to sleep. The wife has forbidden all outside food.’ He looked at her with a smile. ‘We have good people in our new Society too. In fact’ – he pointed to one of the shopping bags his wife was carrying – ‘I’m taking a gift for my neighbour’s son. A surprise.’

He beamed with pleasure. He noted that Kothari was wearing a new gold necklace – he tried to remember if the man had ever worn gold in his Vishram Society days.

‘But
where
do you live, Ibrahim?’

‘Bandra East. We have a family shop in hardware. I became a partner with my brother. There’s no future in technology, I tell you. Hammers. Nails. Screws. If you ever need any of these in bulk, please come to Kalanagar. Let me write down my address.’ He turned to Mumtaz; putting her bags down, she took out a ballpoint pen and wrote on a paper napkin.

When she had done as her husband told her, Mumtaz put the pen down and looked at Kothari.

‘Any news from the builder? The second instalment is already three weeks late.’

‘I phoned his office and left a message.’ Kothari folded the napkin with the Kudwas’ phone number. ‘If he doesn’t pay this instalment and the next one on time, we’ll go to court.’

‘What a fraud that man proved to be. Mr Shah. We trusted him.’

‘All builders are the same, Ibrahim, old-fashioned or new-fashioned. But the first instalment did come, and he did give us eight weeks’ rent while we looked for a new place. He
will
pay. Just likes to delay.’

‘Where is Mrs Puri these days, Ibrahim? Any idea?’

‘Goregaon. Gokuldam. In that new tower there. Nice place, new woodwork. They’ve hired a full-time nurse for the boy.’

‘That’s the future. Goregaon. So much empty space.’

Kudwa shook his head. ‘Between us, the boy’s health has suddenly become much worse. I don’t know what she will do if he… Gaurav comes to see her all the time, she says. He’s become like a son to her.’

Kothari dug his plastic spoon into his food.

‘And Mrs Rego?’ he asked. ‘Any word?’

‘We were never close,’ Kudwa said. ‘The Pintos of course are living with their son. He came back from America. Lost his business there.’

‘Everyone is coming back from America.’

Shifting Mariam to his left arm, Ibrahim Kudwa touched the table for attention.

‘Ajwani refused to take any of the money, did you hear? Not one rupee.’

Kothari sighed.

‘That man – all his life he was obsessed with money. Sat in his realestate office with a bundle of cash in his drawer to feel rich. And then when he actually gets a windfall, he says no. A
nothing
man.
Pucca
nothing.’

Kothari ate more bhelpuri.

Mumtaz Kudwa picked up her shopping bags; her husband stood up with Mariam.

‘Life is good,’ he said. ‘It is not perfect, but it is better with money.’

‘You have said it exactly right, Ibrahim. Goodbye, Mumtaz. Byebye, Mariam.’

On the escalator down, Kothari went over the bill for the food he and his son had just eaten; his lips worked.

‘… the bhelpuri was only twenty-six rupees, Tinku. They charged ten rupees for water. But we didn’t have bottled water.’

‘No,’ the boy agreed. ‘We didn’t have any water.’

Stepping down from the escalator, he said: ‘Let’s go and get the ten rupees back, Tinku.’

‘For ten rupees? All the way up?’

The two got on the other escalator and went back up to the food court.

‘It’s the
principle
. A man must stand up for his rights in this world. Your grandfather taught me that.’

Tinku, who was starting to yawn, turned in surprise: his unmusical father was humming a famous Beatles song and slapping the escalator with the back of his hand.

23 DECEMBER

On any evening Juhu beach is overwhelmed with cricket matches of poor style and great vigour; on a Sunday, perhaps a hundred matches are in progress along the length of the sand. All face a fatal constraint: the ocean. Anyone who hits the ball directly into the water is declared out – a uniform rule across the beach. A good, honest pull-shot to a bad ball, and a batsman has just dismissed himself. To survive, you must abandon classical form. What is squirming, quicksilver, heterodox thrives.

‘A million people are batting along this beach. Play with some style. Stand out,’ Mrs Rego shouted.

She stood in her grey coat at the wicket, an umpire-commentator-coach of the match in progress.

Timothy, Mary’s son, was batting at the stick-wicket; Kumar, tallest of the regulars at the Tamil temple, ran in to bowl.

Mary, sitting on the sand, the game’s only spectator and cheerleader, turned for a moment to look at the water’s edge.

It was low tide, and the sea had receded far from the normal shoreline, leaving a glassy, marshy in-between zone. Reflected in the wet sand, two nearly naked boys ran about the marsh; they jumped into the waves and splashed each other. The sunlight made their dark bodies shine blackly, as if coated in a slick of oil; in some private ecstasy, they began rolling in and out of the water, barely in this world at all.

Mary now saw a familiar figure walking along the surf. The bottoms of his trousers were rolled up, and he carried his shoes over his shoulder, where they stained his shirt.

She waved.

‘Mr Ajwani.’

‘Mary! How nice to see you.’

He sat by her side.

‘Did you come to watch your son playing cricket?’

‘Yes, sir. I don’t like to see him wasting time on cricket, but Madam – I mean Mrs Rego – insisted he be here.’

Ajwani nodded.

‘How is your place by the
nullah
? More threats of demolition?’

‘No, sir. My home stands. I found work in one of the buildings by the train station. An Ultimex building. The pay is better than at Vishram, sir. And they give me a nice blue uniform to wear.’

The two of them ducked. The red ball had shot two inches past Ajwani’s nose – it soared over the glassy sand and detonated in the ocean.

‘Timothy is out!’ Mrs Rego cried.

She saw Ajwani sitting alongside Mary.

He saw the hostility in her eyes – they had not spoken once since that night – and he knew at once, ‘she too was in it.’

‘Let me stay, Mrs Rego,’ he said. ‘It is one of the rules of Juhu beach: you can’t say no to any stranger who wants to watch you play.’

Mrs Rego sighed, and looked for the ball.

The two boys who had been rolling about in the water now rushed towards the ball; it came back, in a high red arc, as the cricketers cheered. Up in the sky, a plane cut across the ball’s trajectory – and the cricketers let out a second cheer, a sustained one.

The plane had caught the angle of the setting light, and looked radiant and intimate before it went over the ocean.

The game continued. Mrs Rego kept offering the boys ‘tips’ on batting ‘with style’. Ajwani and Mary cheered impartially for all the batsmen.

The setting sun brought more people. The smell of humans overwhelmed the smell of the sea. Vendors waved green and yellow fluorescent wires in the darkening air to catch the attention of children. Particoloured fans were arranged on long wooden frames to whirl in the sea breeze, green plastic soldiers crawled over the sand, and mechanical frogs moved with a croaking noise. Small men stood with black trays of skinned peanuts warmed by live coals suspended around their necks; tables of coconuts and pickles were set up under umbrellas; boys bathed in their underwear and Muslim women took dips in sodden black burqas. Glowing machines talked to you about your weight and destiny for a couple of rupees.

The cricket game had degenerated. On the promise of merely burying Timothy in sand, Dharmendar and Vijay had proceeded to carve breasts and genitals in the sand over him, and had written in English: ‘FUK ME’.

‘You could at least spell it right!’ Mrs Rego tried to look stern for as long as possible before helping the others to rescue the trapped boy.

The ocean was a brimming violet: twilight glowed over Juhu.

‘All right, boys, collect the bat and ball and come here,’ Mrs Rego shouted. ‘It’s time for a speech.’

‘Speech? Why does there always have to be a speech, Mrs Rego?’

‘We have to make a speech about Masterji. Do you think his son is going to remember him? We have to do it. In fact,
you
are going to start, Timothy.’

The other boys gathered in a semi-circle around Timothy. Ajwani sat next to Mary.

Timothy grinned. ‘I once saw Masterji sitting under a tree near the temple. He was eating all the fruit…’

‘Timothy!’ Mrs Rego said.

The boys clapped and whistled: ‘Great speech!’

‘Sit down, Timothy.’ Mrs Rego pointed to Ajwani.

‘
You
speak now.’

‘Me?’ The broker wanted to laugh, but he understood that she was serious. Everyone sitting here – in fact, everyone in this beach – had had some involvement in the affair. His share was larger than that of most others.

Wiping the sand off his trousers, he stood up. He faced the semi-circle of four boys and two women.

‘Friends, our late Masterji—’

‘The late Mr Yogesh Murthy,’ Mrs Rego corrected.

‘… late Mr Yogesh Murthy, was my neighbour, but I don’t have much information about his life. He was born I think in the south and came here I think after his marriage. Wherever he came from, he came, and became a typical man of this city. What do I mean by that?’ Ajwani looked at the ocean. ‘I mean he became a new kind of man. I think about him more now than I did when he was my neighbour.’

He hoped that they would understand.

Mrs Rego stood up, and everyone turned to her.

‘Boys: I would like to say hip-hip-hooray for Mr Ajwani – for his fine speech. Now I want everyone to clap for him. Will you clap, boys?’

‘Hip-hip-hooray! Aj-waaa-ni!’

‘Boys, I have a few more words for you.’

‘Don’t you always?’ – laughter.

The semi-circle shifted and moved so that Mrs Rego was now in its centre.

‘Boys, where Masterji was born, where he studied – these things don’t matter now. What matters is this. He did what he believed to be right. He had a conscience. No matter what people said to him or did to him he never changed his mind, and never betrayed his conscience. He was free to the end.’

‘Enough, Aunty.’

‘Shut up, and don’t call me Aunty. Now: all of you keep quiet.’

And some of them did.

‘Boys, some years ago I went to Delhi and met a man who had never seen the ocean in his life, and thought, what’s a life like that worth? We will always have the ocean and that is why we live in the true capital of this country. All we need are a few more good men like Masterji and this island, this Mumbai of ours, it will be paradise on earth. As it used to be, when I was a girl in Bandra. When I see you boys sitting here before me, I know that there are future Masterjis among you, and this city will again be what it was, the greatest on earth. And so, gentlemen of the cricket team, so as not to keep this speech going on any longer, let us all stand up, and put our hands together, and give a hip-hip-hooray in memory of our late Masterji, whom we promise to remember and honour.’

‘Hip-hip-hooray!’ they shouted together.

The cricketers had been good boys and now they wanted their reward. A sugarcane stand had been spotted nearby.

‘You too,’ Mrs Rego said. Ajwani accepted. They walked in a group towards the sugarcane juice stand at the end of the beach. Mrs Rego, overriding the broker’s protests, was paying for all the drinks. She counted heads so that she could order the right number of glasses. Suddenly she let out a shriek.

A lizard was running down her skirt.

‘
Who
did that?’

Timothy and Dharmendar looked at each other, and everyone else giggled. Ajwani dispatched the plastic lizard towards the beach with a kick. Mrs Rego resumed counting heads.

‘What will you do now, Mr Ajwani?’ she asked, as she drank her juice.

‘At first, I thought of leaving real estate entirely,’ he said. ‘But then I thought, there are honest men in this business too. Let me add to their number.’

With one eye closed, she looked into her glass, and then put it back on the stall.

‘Is it true, what they say: that you refused to take the builder’s money?’

He licked his lips and set his glass down by hers.

‘At first. But I have a family. Two sons. A wife.’

A bearded man came up to the sugarcane juice stall; he peered at Mrs Rego and then smiled.

‘You’re the social worker who does good things in the slums, aren’t you?’

Mrs Rego hesitated, then nodded.

‘I’ve seen you in your office, madam,’ the bearded man said. ‘I too used to be from Vakola. I lived in a slum: it’s where the Ultimex Group are now building their tower. Ultimex Milano.’

Ajwani and Mrs Rego peered at the bearded man. He was wearing a white Muslim skullcap.

‘Are you… the fortunate man? The eighty-one-lakhs man?’

‘By the grace of Allah, sir, you could say that was me. I don’t have any money on me, now. Bought a two-bedroom in Kurla in a
pucca
building. A small Maruti-Suzuki too.’

‘You don’t look unhappy at all,’ Mrs Rego said.

‘Why should I be unhappy?’ The fortunate man laughed. ‘My children have never had a real home. Four daughters I have. Fate is good to many people these days. There’s a man here in Juhu, living in a slum, who has been offered sixty-three lakhs by a real-estate developer to move out. He’s a connection of a connection of mine, and I came to talk to him. About how to deal with these builders.’

The workers at the sugarcane stand had overheard, and now they asked the fortunate man for details; a nearby newspaper-vendor came to listen in. A fellow in a slum? Sixty-three lakhs? Nearby? Which slum? Which fellow? Are you sure it was
sixty
-three?

Mrs Rego and Ajwani watched the bearded man, who had freckles on his large nose, perhaps from measles, wondering if those were the marks by which fortunate humans were identified.

Done with their sugarcane juice, the boys walked from the beach to the main road. Vijay, revitalized by the juice, had caught Dharmendar in a head-lock.

Mrs Rego wished she hadn’t had the juice: the sudden sugar, as it always did, made her feel depressed. She licked her lips and spat away what remained of the sweet juice – the finest compensation the city could offer these boys for the dreams it wouldn’t make real.

‘What will become of them, Mr Ajwani? Such fine boys, all of them… ’

‘What do you mean, what will become of them?’

‘I mean, Mr Ajwani, all this talent, all this energy: do these boys have any idea of what lies ahead for them? Disappointment. That’s all.’

The broker stopped. ‘How can
you
say this, Mrs Rego? You have always helped others.’

She stopped by his side. Her face contracted into something smaller and darker with grief.

Ajwani smiled; the parallel lines on his cheeks deepened.

‘I have learned something about life, Mrs Rego. You and I were trapped: but we
wanted
to be trapped. These boys will live in a better world. Look over there.’

‘Where?’ She asked.

A bus passed by with an advertisement for a film called
Dance, Dance
; autorickshaws and scooters followed it. When they had passed, Mrs Rego saw a group of white-uniformed
dabba
-wallahs with their pointed caps, seated in a ring, playing cards on the pavement.

‘The light is not good. I can’t see what you’re…’

After a while, Mrs Rego saw, or thought she saw, what her former neighbour was pointing at.

Past the traffic, on the other side of the road, she saw the boundary wall of an old Juhu housing society, displaying three generations of torture devices: primitive coloured bottle-glass shards, stuck into the entire length of the wall, and over them a layer of rusty barbed wire with its ends tied into jagged knots, and over that, rolled into giant coils, a shinier barbed wire with large square metal studs, like she had seen in action movies around American military installations, less crudely threatening than the rusty layer but unmistakably more lethal. Behind these overlapping wires she saw banyan trees; all of which were hemmed in by the fencing; except for one greying ancient, whose aerial roots, squirming through barbed wire and broken glass, dripped down the wall like primordial ooze until their bright growing tips, nearly touching the pavement, brushed against a homeless family cooking rice in the shade; and with each root-tip that had beaten the barbed wire the old banyan said:
Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free
.

Vakola, Mumbai
March 2007–October 2009