Last Man in Tower (15 page)

BOOK THREE

Four or Five Seconds of Feeling Like a Millionaire

4 JUNE

Vittal, the old librarian at St Catherine’s School, was probably the only man in Vakola still unaware of the good news. Masterji was glad to be in his presence. Exercising his privilege as a retired teacher, he came to the school library every Monday to read the
Times of India
for free.

‘We don’t see the likes of you any more, Masterji,’ Vittal said, as he bent low to arrange volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
on the bookshelf. ‘Young people don’t want to go into teaching. Computers or banking for them. Money, money, money.’

Masterji turned the pages of the newspaper. ‘No sense of public service, is there?’

The librarian blew his nose into a handkerchief, moving his head from side to side.

‘Remember when we were young. We had to walk to school every morning. Study by candlelight during exam-time. Now the computers do their work for them.’

Masterji laughed. ‘I don’t know anything about computers or the internet, Vittal. I don’t even have a mobile phone.’

‘Oh, that’s extreme, Masterji,’ the librarian said. He took a shiny red object from his pocket and smiled proudly.

‘Nokia.’

Masterji turned the pages of his newspaper.

‘Why does a physics teacher need these things, Vittal? The facts of life do not change: high tide is followed by low tide, and the equinox is still the equinox.’

He tapped a finger on his paper, and drew Vittal’s attention to a proposal to restore Crawford Market to pristine glory.

‘The sculptures outside the market were done by Kipling’s father. Lockwood Kipling. Did you know that?’

Vittal stretched his back.

‘Know nothing about Mumbai, Masterji. Not a genius like you. If you were a young man today, working at a foreign bank, playing with stocks, God knows how much money you would be making.’

‘What would I spend it on?’ Masterji folded the paper with a smile. He beckoned to the librarian.

‘Vittal…’ he whispered. ‘Purnima’s one-year death anniversary is around the corner. I want to call Trivedi about it.’

‘Of course.’

It was a little conspiratorial luxury the old teacher enjoyed here; Vittal allowed him (provided no one was watching) to use the black payphone for free.

A student in white-and-navy-blue uniform sneaked in through the side-door as Masterji dialled. He gaped at the two old men as if he had discovered two palaeosauruses.

In the market, Masterji walked with his head to the ground, sniffing citrus and apple, raw shit (from the roosters in the chicken coops), raw carrot and cauliflower.

‘Great man! Look up!’

Under the banyan tree in whose shade the business of the market was conducted, a vendor was waving at Masterji, from behind a stall full of onions.

Chubby, with a bulbous nose and knobby lumps on his dark forehead, he looked like an anthropomorphic advertisement for his produce.

‘I’ve seen you for a long long time.’ The onion-seller found a small red stool and placed it before Masterji. ‘But I never knew until now that you were a great one. There is something special about all of you in Vishram. The Confidence Group didn’t pick you for no reason.’

Fruit- and vegetable-vendors drew towards the red stool, looking its occupant up and down with wonder, as if he had been struck by lightning and survived.

‘My greatness – if there be any – is to do with my students,’ Masterji explained.

He pointed to the discarded newspapers that the onion-seller had piled on his cart, to wrap his produce in: ‘You’ll find an article written by a man named Noronha in the
Times
. My student. Oh, I take no credit for Noronha. A smart boy, so hard-working – used to walk to school every day from Kalina. Boys were hard-working in the old days. I wonder where those days have gone…’

One of the vendors, a big swarthy man whose plump face was dotted with white stubble, turned to the onion-seller and asked loudly: ‘Ram Niwas, there’s a man here asking for “the old days”. Are you selling them? Because I’m not. I’m selling only potatoes.’

And then he laughed at his own joke, before returning to his potatoes.

A horn sounded through the market. A man on a scooter was waving at Masterji.

‘My wife told me you called – I came at once, came at once looking for you.’

Everyone in Vakola was familiar with the sight of Shankar Trivedi’s shirtless, mesomorphic torso – a white shawl draped over the shoulders – dramatically entering or leaving a building on a red Honda scooter, like an angel of birth or death. He had been recruited by Purnima to conduct, each year, the memorial service for their daughter Sandhya; a service that Masterji, for his wife’s sake, had always attended. When Purnima died, it was Trivedi who had performed the last rites, with coconuts and incense, at a temple in Bandra.

Drawing the old teacher away from the vendors, he pumped Masterji’s hand in his. ‘Congratulations, congratulations,’ he said.

‘Trivedi, Purnima’s one-year death anniversary is coming up. October the 5th. It is five months away, but I wanted to make sure you mark it on your calendar. A very important day for me, Trivedi.’

The priest let go of Masterji’s hand: he gaped.

‘Masterji: when your daughter passed away, who performed the rites for her?’

‘You did, Trivedi.’

‘When your wife passed away, who performed the rites for her?’

‘You did, Trivedi.’

‘And when my son needed a science “top-up”, who taught him?’

‘I did, Trivedi.’

‘So what’s this talk of appointment and disappointment, Masterji? It’ll be an
honour
to perform your late wife’s first-year Samskara. Don’t worry.’

Trivedi offered to buy Masterji a little something for the heat – a coconut. Masterji knew the priest as a tight-fisted, even unscrupulous man – there was always some unpleasantness over the bill for his ceremonies – and he succumbed to the sheer novelty of the offer; with Trivedi walking his scooter, they went to the coconut-man who sat near the entrance to St Catherine’s with a black knife and a large wicker basket that groaned with coconuts.

As the coconut-man began tapping on the green nuts to sound out the water in each, Masterji watched Trivedi’s face. The priest, in between births, marriages, and deaths, gave lessons in the proper recitation of Sanskrit verse to paying pupils. The well-oiled moustache that sat on his lips was itself a fine line of poetry: supple and balanced, robustly black with a tinge of grey at the edges, punctuated in the middle by a perfect
caesura
. Trivedi was curling its ends and smiling, but the truth was leaking out of his eyes and nose.

He was almost on the verge of tears.

Burning with jealousy
, Masterji thought. Indeed, it now seemed to him that a good portion of everyone’s professed admiration for Vishram all these years had been a kind of condescension for an old, crumbling building. And now they had been startled into real respect for its inhabitants.

‘I’ll give you good news, Trivedi,’ he said, taking pity on the man.

With a curved knife the coconut-man slashed open the mouth of one of the nuts.

The priest’s eyes grew large.

‘This Shah is going to make an offer for our place too?’

‘No. The good news for you is that there is no good news for us. The Pintos have said no. Shelley won’t be able to find her way around any other building.’

‘Twenty thousand rupees per square foot! You could buy her new eyes with so much money.’ Trivedi grinned. ‘You’re teasing me, aren’t you, Masterji?’

The market filled with noise: a funeral procession began to move, clamorously, towards the highway.

The coconut man handed each of them a sliced-open nut, brimming with fresh water and pierced by a pink straw.

Masterji knew he ought to refuse: the nut was meant for a man who would take Mr Shah’s money.

‘… of course you must be joking, Masterji… will you really say no? Once the deadline comes near, will you really really…’

He took the brimming coconut in his hands and felt its weight.
When you’re rich, you don’t have to give people things
, he thought.
They give you things.

How wonderful.

Sucked through a straw, the cool sweet water was a bitter thrill: he understood, for four or five seconds, what it was to be a millionaire.

Bald, moist, chocolate-dark, the drummer’s head glistened in the mid-morning light; behind him, a swaying man blew on a
nadaswaram
. Four teenagers carried the wooden bier; two followed them striking bronze cymbals. On the bier lay the body of an old woman draped in a bright green sari, her nostrils stopped with cotton balls. A boy at the head of the procession broke out, every few steps, into jubilant dance.

Standing in the Vakola market with folded arms, Ajwani, the broker in Vishram Society, watched Shanmugham, a few steps away, watching the funeral procession with folded arms.

The Confidence Group man wore his standard white-over-black uniform; under his arm he held what looked like a financial prospectus.

Shanmugham turned and noticed Ajwani noticing.

The broker approached him with a smile.

‘I’m from Vishram Society. Name is Ajwani.’

Shanmugham returned the smile. ‘I know. Ramesh. Tower A. You own the Toyota Qualis.’

Soon the two men were sitting together at a nearby restaurant. Ajwani dispatched a mouse from under their table with a kick; he made a sign to the waiter.

He picked up the green prospectus that Shanmugham had laid on the table and flicked through its pages.

‘Mutual Funds… I used to play the market in the nineties. Technology companies. I bought Infosys shares. Made no money. You won’t, either.’

‘I
have
,’ Shanmugham said.

‘Then you’ll lose it all. Men like us don’t become rich from shares.’

Ajwani slid the prospectus across the table; he looked his interlocutor in the eye.

‘I want to ask you, Mr Shanmugham: what is your title in the Confidence Group?’

‘Don’t have one. I am helping out as a personal favour to Mr Shah.’

‘No, you’re not.’ The broker clamped his hand down on the prospectus. ‘Every builder has one special man in his company. This man has no business card to hand out, no title, he is not even on the company payroll. But he is the builder’s left hand. He does what the builder’s right hand does not want to know about. If there is trouble, he contacts the police or the mafia. If there is money to be paid to a politician, he carries the bag. If someone’s knuckles have to be broken, he breaks them.
You
are Mr Shah’s left hand.’

Shanmugham retrieved his prospectus from beneath the broker’s hand.

‘I’ve never heard of that term before. Left-hand man.’

The waiter put two cups of tea on their table.

‘Bring me a bowl of sugar,’ Ajwani said.

He courteously moved Shanmugham’s tea a bit closer to him.

‘Have you heard the saying, a broker is first cousin to a builder? I’ve seen redevelopments all my life. The builder always has a man on the inside. He gives you information about the other members of the Society. You give him a bribe. Unfortunately, you picked the wrong man this time.’

Shanmugham, who had begun blowing on his tea to cool it, stopped.

The broker continued: ‘It’s usually the Secretary who is picked. The Secretary of Tower B, Mr Ravi, is a good man. But
our
Secretary is a
nothing
man.’

‘Nothing man?’ Shanmugham asked his tea.

‘Didn’t have a son till he was nearly fifty years old. He can’t do
this
.’ Ajwani raised a finger. ‘All he has done for days is say,
Africa, Africa, Africa
.’

‘Then
who
can help us?’

Ajwani shrugged.

‘Let me ask you this. How many people in Vishram Tower A are saying no to the offer?’

‘Four.’

Ajwani tapped the table with his mobile phone.

‘Wrong. Only one person really opposes it. The other three don’t know what they want.’

‘Which one?’

The waiter placed the sugar on the table; Ajwani tucked his mobile phone into his pocket. He smiled.

‘The deadline is too tight, Mr Shanmugham. A project like this will take two years, minimum. Why is your boss pushing so hard?’

Shanmugham’s eyes glistened. He drank his tea and moved the empty glass back to the centre of the table.

‘Which one?’

Reaching for the sugar, Ajwani took a spoonful, and held it poised over his cup. ‘You want information from me…’ He vibrated the spoon. ‘… for nothing. That’s greed. Give me a sweetener. Another thousand rupees a square foot.’

Shanmugham rose to his feet.

‘I came to Vakola to deliver boxes of sweets to your Society. You will find one for you at the gate, Mr Ajwani. Other than that, I have nothing to give you.’

The broker stirred the sugar into his tea.

‘You will never get Vishram Society to accept your offer without my help.’

*

Stopping at the gate of the building, Ajwani discovered that Shanmugham had been telling the truth about the sweets.

Red boxes, each with an image of Lord SiddhiVinayak. Inside each one was 300 grams of dough-and-cashew sweets, cut into diamond-shaped slices. A handwritten letter strapped to every box. Signed. ‘From my family to yours. Dharmen Shah. MD, Confidence Group.’

‘I gave your box to your wife,’ Ram Khare said.

Ajwani pointed to the stack by the guard’s side. ‘Why are there four boxes there?’

‘Four people said they didn’t want the sweets,’ the guard said. ‘Can you believe that?’

Ajwani peered at the boxes. ‘Which four?’

A sunny smile from Ibrahim Kudwa’s bearded face was a sure thing as one of his neighbours passed the jumble of wire, vegetation, brick, cheap roofing, and peeling paint that went by the title SPEED-TEK CYBER ZONE CYBER CAFÉ. The trunk of the banyan by the cybercafé had been painted white, in simulation of snow. Kudwa’s long-time assistant, Arjun, had apparently converted to Christianity some years ago; last Christmas, he won the banyan tree over to his religion and placed a private crib with toy figures, arranged in a splendour of cotton-snow, at its foot. Other evidence of Christmas could be found in the large five-pronged star, surrounded by bunting, that Arjun had hung over the roof of the café; months later, it was still there, un expected, colossal, the bunting fraying, and, with the light behind it in the morning, looking like a symbol of the Apocalypse. As if drawn to the mystic star, a Hindu holy man sometimes sat outside the café. Mr Kudwa saw no objection to his doing so; indeed he had even encouraged the man with the occasional two-rupee coin.