Last Man in Tower (12 page)

‘Now all of you must excuse us. Shelley and I are going for our walk.’

Masterji, who had been sitting in the ‘prime’ chair, pretending not to watch Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen TV, got up in stages. He followed Mr and Mrs Pinto to the compound wall.

Behind him, he could hear the indiscreet Ibrahim Kudwa whispering: ‘What’s
his
position?’

Masterji slowed to hear the faithful Mrs Puri’s reply: ‘The moment his friends said, we don’t want the money, he said, me too.’

Even though he had opposed the offer, she was proud of him, and wanted everyone to know this.

‘He is an English gentleman. Only when the Pintos change their answer will he change his.’

Suppressing his smile, Masterji caught up with the Pintos. Shelley had her hand on her husband; he could hear her count her steps. When she counted ‘twenty’ she had passed the danger-zone: where the boys played their cricket game, and their smacked balls could hit her cheeks or stomach. Now she would smell hibiscus plants for twenty steps.

Mary, having done with her evening cleaning of the Society’s common areas, was beginning to water the plants in the garden. Picking up the green pipe that lay in coils in the garden all the day long like a hibernating snake, she fitted it to a tap near the compound wall; sluicing the water flow with a pressed thumb, she began slapping the hibiscus plants awake. One-two-three-four-five, holding the pipe in her right hand, Mary counted off the seconds of irrigation for each plant on the joints of her left hand, like a meditating brahmin. Small rainbows sprang to life within the arch of the sluiced water, disappeared when the water moved away, then reappeared on the dripping spider’s webs that interlinked the branches.

Mrs Pinto left the smell of hibiscus behind. Now came ‘the blood stretch’ – the ten yards where the stench of raw beef from the butcher’s shop behind the Society wafted in, mitigated somewhat by the flourish of jasmine flowers growing near the wall.

‘It’s your phone, Masterji.’ Mrs Pinto turned around.

She could pinpoint the exact cubicle within the building that a noise came from.

‘It must be Gaurav again. The moment he smells money on me, my son calls.’

Gaurav had called earlier in the morning. The first call he had made to his father in months. He explained that ‘Sangeeta Aunty’ had told him about the builder’s offer.

‘I wish Mrs Puri had not phoned him.’

‘Oh, she is like a second mother to the boy, Masterji. Let her call.’

Masterji winced; yet he could not deny the fact.

Everyone in Vishram knew of Mrs Puri’s closeness to the boy; it was one of the triumphs of their communal life – one of the cross-beams of affection that are meant to grow in any co-operative society. Even after Gaurav moved to Marine Lines for his work, Mrs Puri stayed in touch with him, sending him regular packages of peanut-
chikki
and other sweets. It was she who had called to tell him of his mother’s death.

Masterji said: ‘I told Gaurav, you are my son, this is your home, you can come see me whenever you want. But there is nothing to
discuss
. The Pintos have said no.’

And then, looking at Mrs Pinto through the corner of his eye, he waited in the hope that she too would call him an ‘English gentleman’.

Mr Pinto completed the circuit of the compound wall, and scraped his chappals on the gravel around the guard’s booth. He waited for his wife and Masterji with his thin hands on his hips, panting like the winner in a geriatric sprint.

‘Let’s do breathing exercises together,’ he said, and gave Shelley his arm. ‘It makes you feel young again.’

As the three of them practised inhaling-exhaling-inhaling, the Secretary walked past with a large microphone, which he planted near the black Cross.

At five o’clock, ‘Soda Pop’ Satish Shah, recently the terrorizer of parked cars on Malabar Hill, stood by the entrance of the most famous Hindu shrine in the city, the SiddhiVinayak temple at Prabhadevi, waiting for his father.

With the latest issue of
Muscle-Builder
magazine in his right hand, he was practising behind-the-head tricep curls with his left.

He paused, turned the page of the magazine, and practised more repetitions with his left hand.

With his right hand he touched his nose. It still hurt.

It had not been
his
idea to spray-paint the cars. He had told the other fellows: the police would never allow it in the city. Let’s go to the suburbs, Juhu, Bandra. A man could live like a king out there. But did they listen?

In any case, what
had
they done? Just spray a few cars and a van. It was nothing compared to what his father did in
his
line of work.

The bastard works in construction
, Satish thought,
and he has the guts to tell me I am the bad one in the family
.

Thinking about his father, he goaded himself into practising his tricep curls faster. He thought about the way that man chewed
gutka
like a villager. The way he wore so many gold rings. The way he pronounced English, no better than Giri did. ‘Cho-chyal Enimalz. Cho-chyal.’

Satish felt someone seize him by the arm.

‘This is not a thing to be doing here. You should be praying to God and remembering your mother.’

Shah straightened out his son’s arm, and pushed him into the temple. Shanmugham followed.

The temple was crowded, as it is at any hour of the day, yet the Lord Ganesha was receptive to free-market logic, and an ‘express’ line, for anyone who could pay fifty rupees a head, sped the three of them into the sanctum.

‘You’ll be seventeen in a few days. Do you know what I was doing when I was your age? Have you thought about those people whose cars you damaged? You will never again hang out with that gang. Understand?’

‘Yes, Father.’

In his fat fingers his father held a cheque. Satish, by craning his neck as he moved in the queue behind his father, could see that it was a donation of one lakh and one rupees, drawn on the Industrial Development Bank of India. A petition to God to improve his moral character? No, probably for a new building his father was starting today. A Confidence Group project could only begin after two divine interventions: a call from a Tamil astrologer in Matunga with a precise time to lay the foundation stone, and a visit here, to the shrine of Ganesha, whose image was the official emblem of the Confidence Group, embossed on to every formal communication and every building.

They were in sight of the sanctum. Within gilded columns, the red image of the deity was surrounded by four Brahmins, bare-chested, with enormous light-skinned pot bellies filmed over with downy hair: a purdah of human fat around His image. This was the final challenge to the devotees – only a faith that was 100 per cent pure would penetrate through
this
to reach the Lord.

Satish saw his father joining his palms over his head. Behind Mr Shah, Shanmugham did the same. ‘How cute: he thinks my father is God.’ The chanting of the devotees grew louder – they were right in front of the sanctum now – and Shah turned and glared at his son: ‘Pray.’

Satish closed his eyes, bowed his head, and tried to think of something he really wanted.

‘Please Lord Ganesha,’ he prayed, ‘make my father’s new project fail and I’ll write you a much bigger cheque when I have money.’

At six twenty, with the builder expected at any moment, the compound of Vishram Society glowed with rows of white chairs facing the black Cross.

The event had raised the metabolism of the old Society. The lamps over the entranceway had been turned so they would shine on the plastic chairs. The microphone near the black Cross, borrowed from Gold Coin Society, had been attached to a speaker, borrowed from Hibiscus Society. The members of both Vishram Societies were filling the seats. Secretary Kothari stood by the Cross along with Mr Ravi, the Secretary of Tower B.

Looking down from his window, Masterji saw Mr Pinto sitting in the middle of the array of chairs, his hand on the vacant white seat next to him, looking up.

Masterji raised his right hand –
coming, coming
.

The phone rang again. It was Gaurav, for the second time in an hour.

‘No, the real-estate developer hasn’t come. Of course I’m going down to listen to him. Yes, I’ll keep an open mind. Now: goodbye, and tell Ronak his grandfather will take him to the aquarium one of these days.’

Back at the window, Masterji saw the person he had been waiting for. He had guessed that a journalist wouldn’t miss an event like this. She moved through the crowd, taking care not to tread on the feet of older and slower people.

He waited with his ear to the door: listening for footsteps on the stairs. He
had
to do this:
had
to apologize to the girl. What did his neighbours call him? English gentleman.

‘Ms Meenakshi,’ he said, opening the door. ‘Would you wait a minute? Just a minute?’

His neighbour, who had already put her key into the door of 3B, did not stop.

‘I’m sorry for the other night. I shouldn’t have pushed your friend. The young man. Please tell him I’m sorry.’

Her face partly hidden behind her door, the girl looked at him.

‘
Why
did you do it? He wasn’t harming you.’

‘Would you come into my room for a minute, Ms Meenakshi? It’ll be easier for you to understand in here. I was a teacher at St Catherine’s School for thirty-four years. My students have good jobs throughout the city. You may have heard of Noronha, the writer for the
Times
. You have nothing to fear.’

*

He showed her the glass cabinet, filled with the little silver trophies and citations in golden letters that testified to his three decades of service; the photograph of his farewell party at St Catherine’s, signed by two dozen old boys; and the small framed photo, next to it, of a pale, oval-faced woman in a blue sari.

‘My late wife.’

The girl moved towards the photograph. She wore braces, and her dark steel-rimmed glasses echoed the metal on her teeth. The frames were hexagonal. Masterji counted the number of edges a second time. An ungainly shape: why had it ever come into fashion?

Reading the date below the photograph, she said,

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s been almost a year now. I’m used to it. She would have liked you, Ms Meenakshi. My daughter would have been your age. Your name
is
Meenakshi, isn’t it?’

She nodded.

‘Where is your daughter these days? In Mumbai?’ she asked.

‘She died many years before her mother did.’

‘I keep saying the wrong thing.’

‘Don’t worry, Ms Meenakshi. If you don’t ask about people, you don’t find out about people. Here,’ Masterji said, ‘this is her drawing book. I just found it yesterday inside my cupboard.’

He wiped the dust off the book – ‘
SANDHYA MURTHY SKETCH & PRACTICE JOURNAL
’ – and turned the pages for her.

‘That’s our local church. Isn’t it?’

‘Yes. St Antony’s. And this drawing is of the Dhobi-ghat, see the people washing. No, not the famous one in Mahalakshmi. The one right here. And
this
is a lovely drawing. This parrot. The best my daughter ever did. She was nineteen years old. Only nineteen.’

He could see from Ms Meenakshi’s eyes that she wanted to know how the artist’s life had ended. He closed the album.

‘I don’t wish to bore you, Ms Meenakshi. I wanted to apologize, that was all. When men grow old, contrary to what you may have heard, they do not become wiser. Are you going down to see Mr Shah?’

Her eyebrows arched.

‘Aren’t
you
? He’s giving you all this money.’

‘He
says
he’s giving us all this money. You must know about developers. You’re a journalist, aren’t you?’

‘No. Public Relations.’

‘What does that mean, exactly? All the young people now want to be in Public Relations.’

‘I’ll come back one day and explain.’

Thanking her for her graciousness in accepting his apology, and inviting her over another day for some ginger tea, he closed the door.

Down below, the hubbub grew. The Secretary’s voice boomed over the microphone: ‘Can everyone hear me? Testing, testing. Can everyone…’

Masterji sat down. Why
should
he go down? Just because some rich man was coming? He hated these formal gatherings of the Society: every time they held an annual general meeting, the bickering among his neighbours, the petty accusations – ‘your son pisses on the compound wall’, ‘your husband’s gargling wakes me up in the morning’ – always embarrassed him.

He expected another bloodbath this evening, Mrs Rego and Mrs Puri shouting at each other like women at the fish market.

With his feet on the teakwood table, he turned the pages of Sandhya’s album until he reached the parrot. The sketch was incomplete; perhaps she had still been working on it when… He placed his fingers on the edges of the drawing, which felt as if they were still growing. Her living thought.

Where is your daughter these days?

The same place she has been for eleven years.

She had been on her way to college, when someone had pushed her out of the train. A packed compartment in the women’s first class in the morning – someone had elbowed her out. She had fallen head first on to the tracks, and lain there like that. Not one of her fellow passengers stopped the train. They didn’t want to be late for their work. All of them women, good women. Secretaries. Bank clerks. Sales managers. She had bled to death.

This child that he had made, the tracks had unmade. Her brains, oozing from her broken head, because the passengers did not want to be late. Surely in the men’s compartment someone would have pulled the emergency chain, jumped out, surely someone would have…

For three months he could not take the train. He used to take one bus after the other, and walk when there was no bus around. His revolt had to end eventually. He was helpless before Necessity. But he could never look again at a women’s compartment.
Who said the world would be a better place run by women? At least men were honest about themselves
, he thought.