Last Man in Tower (14 page)

Back at the table, the star was out of breath, paunchy, and suddenly twenty years older. A guest asked for an autograph; the film star obliged on a napkin.

The napkin flew from the table. The builder had burst out coughing.

The film star was worth every rupee he charged to appear at such events: placing his hand on Shah’s, he grinned, as if nothing had happened.

‘They call me a dream-merchant, I am aware of this. But what am I, really? Just a small dream-merchant next to a big one.’ He pointed at the builder, who was wiping his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

‘When they come out of a film, people throw away the tickets, but the builder’s name is always on the building. It becomes part of the family name. I am a Hiranandani Towers man. He is a Raheja Complex man.’

The builder swallowed his spit and turned to the Secretary.

‘And what about you, Mr Kothari? Will you be a Raheja man or a Hiranandani man after 3 October? Or do you plan on spending all your money on expensive vices?’

The Secretary, who had been watching a platter of mutton kebabs, turned around. ‘My vices are sandwiches and cricket. Ask my wife.’

People laughed. The film star clapped and said, ‘Just like me.’

Which provoked much more laughter.

‘What do you do,
exactly
?’ Shah asked.

‘Business,’ Kothari said.

The builder coughed again.

Kothari handed him a napkin, and said, ‘I was in timber. Now I keep myself happy with some bonds, some stocks. I don’t have vices, but…’ He took a breath and puffed his chest, as if the attention were expanding his personality, ‘I do have a secret. I am moving, after 3 October, to Sewri.’

Shah, wiping his lips with the napkin, had to explain to the others.

‘In most redevelopment projects, as you know, the residents are offered a share in the new building. In the case of the Shanghai, however, the new place will be super-luxury. A mix of Rajput and Gothic styles, with a modern touch. There will be a garden at the front, with a fountain. Art Deco style. Each place will cost two crores or upwards. The current residents certainly have the option of purchasing in the Shanghai, but they will be better served by moving elsewhere.’

Then he turned to the Secretary and asked: ‘Sewri? Why not Bandra or Andheri? You’ll have the money now.’

‘The flamingoes, sir,’ the Secretary said. ‘You know about them, don’t you?’

Of course, Shah
knew
. Sewri in winter was visited by a flock of migratory flamingoes, and bird lovers came to watch with binoculars. But he did not
understand
.

‘Were you born here, Mr Shah?’ the Secretary asked.

‘I was born in Krishnapur in Gujarat. But I am a proud tax-paying resident of Mumbai.’

‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ the Secretary said quickly. ‘I have nothing against migrants, nothing. I meant, all of you at this table were born in India. Correct?’

‘Of course.’

‘Not me. Not me.’

The Secretary smiled. ‘I was born in Africa.’

His father, lured from Jamnagar to Kenya by an African-born cousin, had set up a grocery shop in Nairobi in the 1950s; the shop had prospered; a son had been born there. Ashvin Kothari spoke now of things even his wife had never heard. Of an African servant lady wiping a large porcelain dish and laying it on a table with a blue tablecloth; a market in Nairobi where his father was a big man; and then one more thing, a memory which blazed in his mind’s eye like a pink flame.

Flamingoes. A whole flock of them.

When he was not yet five, he had been taken to a lake in the country side full of the wild pink birds. His father had put his thumbs under his armpits and lifted him up so he could see to the horizon; the flamingoes rose all at once and he had screamed over his father’s head.

Shah listened. The dream-merchant listened. Waiters gathered round the table.

Now the Secretary felt something he had felt only once in his life, when as a ten-year-old schoolboy he had recited the famous lines from the Ramayana:

Do as you will, evil king:

I, for my part, know right from wrong

And will never follow you,

said the virtuous demon Maricha

When the lord of Lanka

Asked him to steal Rama’s wife

so perfectly at a poetry competition that everyone in the audience, even his father, had stood up to applaud. He sensed that same shimmer now around his bald head: his comb-over felt like a laurel wreath.

‘And then?’ Shah asked. ‘What happened to your father?’

Kothari smiled.

‘He found out that Africans did not like Indian men who did well.’

When he was eight years old, there was a threat to their business, and his father had sold it for a pittance to return to Jamnagar, to die there in a dingy shop full of green-gram and brinjal.

‘That was how they treated us then,’ the Bollywood actor remembered. ‘Idi Amin saying to the Indians, get up and get out.’

The builder coughed. ‘They look up to Indians in Africa now. We’re drilling for oil in Sudan.’

A quarter of an hour later, with a valedictory flourish of dance steps, the dream-merchant bowed and vanished. Mr Shah looked at his guests and at once they knew it was time to leave. By the same power, Kothari was made to know he was not to leave. He sat at the table as hands came to shake the builder’s; some of them shook his hand too.

‘Do you know why I did not invite Mr Ravi of Tower B here tonight?’

The guests had left. Shah watched the waiters clear the buffet.

Kothari sensed that Mr Shah, who had changed from a vivacious host into a sick man with a cough in the course of the evening, was now about to turn into yet another man. He shook his head. ‘No, sir.’

‘His building won’t make any trouble: it’s full of young people. Reasonable people. So you are the key man, Mr Kothari. Do you follow me?’

‘Not exactly.’

The birthday boy joined the table, sitting between his father and the Secretary.

The builder moved his son out of his line of sight. He spoke softly.

‘In my experience, some older people oppose a redevelopment project because they are frightened of any kind of change. Some just want more money. And then there is one kind of person, the most dangerous, who says no because he is full of negative will power: because he does not enjoy life and does not want others to enjoy life. When these people speak, you must speak louder and clearer than they do. I will not forget it; I repay kindness with kindness of my own.’

The waiters, having removed the food, were now taking away the totemic bottle of Johnnie Walker.

‘My father used to say,’ Kothari cleared his voice, ‘my father… the one who was in Africa, he used to say, a man who lives for himself is no better than an animal. All my life I did nothing for anyone but myself. I even married late because I preferred to live alone. My wife is a good woman. She made me become the Secretary of Vishram: so I would do something for others. I am grateful for any… extra kindness you show me. But I cannot accept until I ask you this: what about everyone else in Vishram Society? Will you keep your word to them and pay each one his rightful share?’

Shah said nothing for a beat, then reached out and took the Secretary’s hand.

‘I am honoured, Mr Kothari, to be doing business with a man like you. Honoured. I understand why you are worried about me. Perfectly understand. In the old days, a builder in this city thought he could get rich only if he cheated his customers. He would cheat them as a matter of routine – on cement, on steel rods, on finishing. Every monsoon one of his buildings collapsed. Most of those you saw here today were old builders.’ He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘They would strip you in a second if
they
were doing this redevelopment. But now there is a new builder in the city. We want to win, yes, but believe me, Mr Kothari: we also want our customers to win. The more winning there is, the better; because we think Mumbai will again be one of the world’s great cities. Ask at
any
of my projects about Mr Shah’s reputation. Find a single customer of mine who has a complaint. I am not one of the old builders of Mumbai.’

The Secretary sucked his lips and nodded. Satisfied.

Shah was still holding his hand; he felt the pressure grow.

‘But I tell you one thing, Mr Kothari. Old builder or new, the basic nature of my business has not changed. Do you know what a builder is?’

‘A man who builds houses,’ Kothari said, hoping his hand would be released.

‘No. Architects build houses. Engineers build roads.’

Kothari turned around for help. Shanmugham was looking at the night sky; the birthday boy was jerking his right arm back and forth behind his head for some reason.

Shah held up a gold-ringed index finger.

‘The builder is the one man in Bombay who
never
loses a fight.’

With this he let go of Kothari’s hand.

‘Why were you gone so long?’ Mrs Kothari asked, as her husband joined her in bed. ‘People kept asking for you, but I didn’t tell anyone you were at the builder’s house.’

Saying the name of Lord Krishna three times, the Secretary switched off the bed lamp.

‘Did his car drop you off? What is his home like? Gold fittings in the bathroom? Is there a jacuzzi?’

Her husband covered his face in the blanket and said nothing.

In the darkness he saw a flock of pink birds flying around him. He felt his father’s fingers pressing on his – and then all the wasted decades in between fell away, and they were together once again at the lake in Kenya.

Ashvin Kothari fell asleep with tears on his cheeks.

18 MAY

Like an army that had been coming closer for months and was now storming a citadel, they went into the Fountainhead and the Excelsior with bricks on their heads.

It was the final surge of work before the monsoons. Those day-labourers who had wilted in the heat and fled to their villages were replaced by those offloaded from buses at ever-rising cost: the day rate for men was now 370 rupees. Heat or no heat, humidity or no humidity, all the civil work – walls, floors, columns – must be done before the rains.

Once again, as he had been every hot morning, Dharmen Shah was here, dipping his silk trousers in the slush and muck, pointing fingers at things and shouting at men. He stood by the roaring cement grinder, as women in bright saris and diamond nose-rings bent down and rose up with troughs of wet dark cement on their heads.

Shah put his foot on a pile of concrete tubes. ‘Faster, son,’ he told one of the workers. ‘I’m paying you good money. I want to see you work.’

Shanmugham, running his fingers up and down the spine of a green financial prospectus, stood behind the boss.

Shah directed his assisant’s attention to two teenagers breaking in half a long corrugated metal rod.

‘Work. Hard work. A beautiful thing to see.’

The two muscled boys had rested the rod on a metal triangle; one of them raised a mallet. He brought it down. With each blow, the long rod trembled. Behind the boy swinging the mallet, a bag of cement rose into the upper floors of the Confidence Excelsior on a pulley.

‘I’ve heard that Chacko never comes to his construction sites. He doesn’t like the smell of cement and steel. What a third-rate builder he is.’

On the lift up to the fourth floor of the Excelsior, Shanmugham opened up his financial prospectus. Out of it he slid a small black book and opened its pages.

‘I spoke to the Secretary, sir.’ He read from the black book. ‘As of now, four people in Vishram are saying no to the offer. Four in Tower A. Everyone in Tower B has said yes.’

‘What is this black book?’ Mr Shah took it from his assistant and turned it over.

‘It has dates, and things we deal with, and wise sayings I hear from you. My wife encourages me to write things down, sir.’

Shah flipped through it.

‘If only my son paid this much attention to what I say.’ He returned the book to his assistant. ‘You told me once there were teachers in Vishram Society. Are they among those who are saying no?’

They stepped off the lift.

‘There is only one teacher, sir. And he
is
one of those saying no.’

‘I knew it, Shanmugham. I don’t like teachers. Write that down in your book.’

A worker’s family was spending the nights on the unfinished fourth floor, which one day a technology executive or a businessman would occupy. Shah touched the workers’ washing, which hung in the alcoves where Versace would soon hang; their little bars of soap and detergent did the work that expensive perfumes would soon do. And they probably did it better. Shah smiled; he wished Satish were here by his side, so he could show him little things like this. Folding a twenty-rupee note, he left it near a bar of soap as a surprise for the worker’s wife.

An open-backed truck fought its way through the muck of the construction site loaded with marble tiles. At the edge of the floor, Shah squatted down and shouted:

‘Don’t unload the tiles!’ He gestured at the workers. ‘Don’t touch them!’

On the way down, Shanmugham stood as far away as he could from his employer, who was on the mobile phone.

‘“Beige”. I wrote it down. In case you were too stupid to know what the word meant. You’ve sent “Off-white”. You think I have time to waste like this? Everything has a schedule here. Everything is going to be delayed because of you. I want the correct shade of marble loaded and brought here by the end of the day!’

Reaching the ground Shah marched over to the truck and yelled at his workers, who had already begun to unload the marble. They blinked at him. He cursed them. They reloaded the marble. The diesel fumes of the departing truck spurted into Shah’s face. He was still coughing a minute later.

Shanmugham accompanied him to the blasted tree that grew by the row of workers’ huts. One of the workers’ children was brushing his teeth by the water pump under the tree. Seeing the fat coughing man, he stepped back.

Shah sat by the water pump. Shanmugham saw, like first rain on the ground, red dots speckling the white scum of toothpaste on the ground.

‘Sir, we should take you to the hospital…’

Shah shook his head. ‘It has happened before, Shanmugham. It goes away in a few minutes.’

A cow sat nearby, whipping flies away with its tail. The worker’s son stared at the two men; toothpaste dripped from his mouth.

‘Come, sir. Let’s go to Breach Candy Hospital. I’ll call Doctor Nayak.’

‘Nayak will frighten me again, and tell me to stop coming here. We have to finish the civil work before the rains come. That will happen only if I am here every single morning.’

Shanmugham knew it was true: the master’s fat-bellied body was a human version of the cement mixers that churned and set the workers in motion.

‘Mr J. J. Chacko,’ Shah said. ‘Right here. Under my nose.’

He looked over at the large plot of land, right opposite the Excelsior, with the big Ultimex sign on it.

‘Do you know when he’s starting work? Is there a date?’

‘No date, sir. But he’ll start building some time in October.’

‘Let’s go back.’ Shah rose to his feet. ‘I don’t want the workers thinking something is wrong.’

He pointed a finger at his left-hand man’s chest.

‘I want each of those
Nos
to become a
Yes
, Shanmugham. At once.’