Last Man in Tower (22 page)

23 JULY

The lift at Vishram Society moved like a coffin on wheels. When a button was pressed, a loud click followed: ropes, levers, and chains went into action. Through the lattice of the metal shutter guarding the open elevator shaft, you could see a dark wooden rectangle – a counterweight – sliding down the wall, and a circular light on the top of the lift rising, as the large dark box scraped past to the floor above, carrying with it a sign: ‘
ITS YOUR SOCIETY. KEEP IT CLEAN
’.

Masterji saw the lift pass him before slamming its dark mass into the fourth floor. A latch clicked and the door opened, but he heard no one come out.

It was one of those phantom trips that the Otis sometimes took on its own – compensating for weeks of inertia with these spectral bursts of activity.

No children yet. He went back to his room, leaving the front door open.

It was seven o’clock on a Monday. Time for the first science top-up of the week. The ceiling lights were turned off in anticipation, and the lamp light projected on to the far wall.

Ten minutes later, Masterji ran down the stairs and found the boys playing cricket in the compound. Mohammad Kudwa was bowling; Anand Ganguly held a bat high. Sunil Rego was fielding at cover point.

‘Masterji, don’t stand there,’ Mohammad called out, ‘the ball might hit you.’

‘It’s time for class, Mohammad.’

The boy turned and grinned.

‘
Boycott
, Masterji.’

He released the ball towards Anand Ganguly, who leaned back and smacked it high and hard; it bounced off a grille at a fourth-floor window and returned to the ground.

‘Boycott?’ Masterji asked, stepping back to avoid the bouncing ball. ‘Is this a new excuse not to come to the top-up?’

He walked towards parliament, where he found Mrs Saldanha talking to Mrs Kudwa, who was tickling Mariam on her lap.

‘Your son is refusing to attend the top-up class, Mrs Kudwa. Are you aware of this?’

The two women at once got up from their chairs, went into the building, and stood by the noticeboard. There they continued to talk.

‘They are not speaking to us either,’ Mr Pinto said.

Masterji went up the stairs to 3C. Mrs Puri opened the door with her left hand, the fingers of her right bunched together and stained with the curd and rice she had been feeding Ramu. He was seated at the table in his apron; he gave his Masterji a big smile.

‘Sangeeta, what is going on?’

‘Ramu…’ She turned to her son and said (forcing a big smile on her face so he would not suspect the content of her words), ‘… tell your Masterji that the boycott is going on.’

‘Boycott?’ Masterji said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Ramu…’ Mrs Puri smiled again. ‘… Masterji, being a famous teacher, must know all about Gandhi and Nehru and what they did to the British. So tell him not to ask us what a boycott is.’

‘Gandhi and Nehru and… Mrs Puri, this is madness.’

‘
Madness?
’ Mrs Puri chuckled. Ramu, at the table, joined in the fun.

‘And refusing an offer of 250 per cent the market value of his flat is not madness, Ramu? Some people should not speak of madness, Ramu.’

‘I haven’t said no. I’m still thinking about Mr Shah’s proposal.’

Mrs Puri looked at her neighbour.

‘
Still
thinking? You’ve always been happy to share your deep thoughts with us, haven’t you, Masterji? Have we ever asked you to be Secretary of this Society? What does that tell you about how we felt about your deep thinking?’

‘I
haven’t
said no. But I won’t be forced into—’

Mrs Puri shut the door in his face. Returning to his flat, Masterji sat by the teakwood table and tapped the arms of his chair, as if he did not really believe that the boys would not come.

24 JULY

Masterji opened the door. His rubbish bin had been overturned.

Pieces of rubbish – the banana peel, for example – had been flung far from his doorstep, as if someone had kicked them there.

He got down on one knee and began gathering in the errant garbage.

A young woman’s foot scraped the banana peel towards him.

‘Leave it alone, Ms Meenakshi, I’ll clean it.’

‘I’m only trying to help.’

His neighbour’s sleek black jeans exposed inches of skin above the ankles, and she wore no socks; bunched together within the silver crisscrossing of her sandals, her plump white toes, incarnadined with lacquer, looked like
bonsai
cleavage. Once she got rid of the braces and bought better glasses, Masterji decided, she would make a very good marriage.

He put pressure on the wrong leg as he stood up: a sharp angular pain cut into his left knee like an accent over a French ‘e’.

Accent aigu
. He sketched it in the air: pleased that he could civilize his arthritis by connecting it to a beautiful language.

Ms Meenakshi leaned on her doorway, grinning and exposing her braces.

‘That woman must hate you even more than she hates me.’ She leaned her head towards Mrs Puri’s door. ‘She just
looks
through my rubbish.’

‘This is the early-morning cat, Ms Meenakshi,’ Masterji said, massaging his knee-cap. ‘Mrs Puri has not done this.’

His neighbour adjusted her hexagonal glasses before closing her door. ‘Then why is your rubbish bin the only one that has been overturned?’

At one o’clock that day, Ibrahim Kudwa, uninvited, came and joined the Pintos’ table for lunch.

Perhaps because Kudwa, the only Muslim in the building, was considered a fair-minded man by the others – or perhaps because, being the owner of a not-so-busy internet café, he could leave his business in the afternoon – he had been designated a ‘neutral’ in the dispute, and sent, in this capacity, by the rest of the Society. Halfway through lunch, when Nina, the maid-servant, was serving steaming
appams
, he said: ‘Masterji, I don’t approve of this thing. This boycott.’

‘Thank you, Ibrahim.’

‘But Masterji… understand
why
people are doing this. There is so much anguish in the building over your strange actions. You say you’ll sign, then you go to see your son, and say you won’t sign.’

‘I never said
yes
, Ibrahim.’ Masterji wagged his finger. ‘I said
maybe
.’

‘Let me teach you something today, Masterji: there is no
maybe
in this matter. We think you should go and meet Mr Shah in his house. Have a talk with him. He holds teachers in high regard.’

Ibrahim Kudwa washed his mouth and wiped his lips and beard on the Pintos’ hand-towel. He put the towel back on its rack and stared at it.

‘Masterji, when the builder’s offer was made, I suffered, because I did not know what to do with the money – I took an Antacid to sleep. Now that there is the possibility of the money I never had being taken away from me – I need two Antacids to sleep.’

He wiped his hands again and left, apparently abandoning whatever remained of his neutrality on the wet hand-towel.

‘Boycott – it’s just a word,’ Masterji told Mr Pinto. ‘Remember the time Sangeeta’s Aquaguard machine leaked water into Ajwani’s kitchen, and from there into Abichandani’s kitchen? Remember how they stopped talking to her until she paid for the repairs? She never agreed to it. After two weeks they were talking to her again.’

After an hour, he went down the stairs, kicked aside the stray dog, and sat on the ‘prime’ chair in front of Mrs Saldanha’s window. The small TV was on in her kitchen, a ghostly quadrilateral behind the green curtain; a slice of the newsreader’s face showed through the almond-shaped tear like a kernel of truth. As he watched, Mrs Saldanha came to the window and closed its wooden shutters.

Masterji surveyed the compound of his Society as if nothing had happened.

On his way up the stairs, he saw the sick dog lying once again on the landing. At least it looked at him the same way as it had before. He let it lie there.

He was looking so intently at the dog that he almost missed the handwritten sign that had been stuck with Scotch tape to the wall above it.

Some facts about ‘a certain person’ who has received respect from us for thirty years. But why? Now we find out the truth.

1. Because he was a retired teacher, he got respect from all of us. He offered to help children with exams, true. But what kind of help? He would talk about the parts of the sun, like the corona, and the dense core of hydrogen and helium, and so on, far beyond the strict requirements of the syllabus, which meant that when the exam papers appeared, the children found nothing of use in his tutorials. So to go to him for tuition, or private lessons, was the ‘kiss of death’.

2. For DEEPAVALI, CHRISTMAS, OR EID, he has never given one rupee in baksheesh to Ram Khare. He is always saying, I have no money, I am retired, but is this true? Do we not know otherwise?

3. Even though he liked to boast loudly ‘he had no TV’, every evening he would sit in front of Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen in the exact position where he would block everyone else’s view and then he would watch TV.

4. NEVER GIVES TIPS, for large waste material left outside the door, to the Khachada-wali.

SO WHY HAVE WE RESPECTED HIM BLINDLY?

He read it twice before he could understand it. Tear it down? He withdrew his hand. A man is not what his neighbours say he is. Laugh and let it go.

When he bent to his sink a few minutes later to wash his face, the water burned his eyes and nose.

But a man
is
what his neighbours say he is.

In old buildings truth is a communal thing, a consensus of opinion. Vishram Society had retained mementoes, over forty-eight years, of all those who had lived in it; each resident had left a physical record of himself here, like the kerosene handprint made by Rajeev Ajwani on the front wall on the day of his great tae kwon-do victory. If you knew how to read Vishram’s walls, you would find them covered with handprints. These prints were permanent, but they could move; a person’s record was alterable. Now Masterji felt the opinion of him that was engraved into the building – in its peeling paint and 48-year-old brickwork – shift. As it moved, so did something within his body.

He could not say, looking at his wet face and dripping moustache, how much of what was written in the poster was untrue.

He went down and read it again. Nothing about the Pintos in it: they were hoping to drive a wedge between them. He ripped it down.

But that evening another appeared glued to the lift door, different in handwriting, similar in its complaints (‘never taught English to students even though he knew Shakespeare and other big writers who were part of the examinations’) – and then there was one on Ram Khare’s guard-booth (‘Put your own poster up,’ he said, when Masterji protested). Though he tore each one down, he knew another would go up: the black handprints were multiplying.

31 JULY

In the old days, you had caste, and you had religion: they taught you how to eat, marry, live, and die. But in Bombay caste and religion had faded away, and what had replaced them, as far as he could tell, was the idea of being respectable and living among similar people. All his adult life Masterji had done so; but now, in the space of just a few days, he had shattered the husk of a respectable life and tasted its bitter kernel.

It was nearly 8 a.m. He was still in bed, listening to savages screaming below him.

Down in 2C, Rajeev and Raghav Ajwani practised tae kwon-do under their father’s supervision.

He imagined he could hear similar noises from all the rooms of his Society: all of them were jabbing fists and lancing kicks to gouge him out of Vishram.

Now he heard the Secretary’s footsteps from above. He was sure they were louder than they had been for the past twenty-five years.

He did not want to get up; did not want to walk down the stairs and read the new notices they had posted about him.

If, in the early days of the ‘boycott’, there was an apologetic smile on the Secretary’s lips when he evaded Masterji’s attempts to make small talk, now there were neither smiles nor apologies.

They treat me like they would treat an untouchable in the old days
, he thought: even at the thought of his shadow falling on them, his neighbours cringed and withdrew.

Degree by degree, they were turning their faces from him, until, as he passed the parliament, he confronted a row of turned backs.

If, in defiance, he sat among them, they got up and left. The moment he went up the stairs, they would regather. Then the taunts began. Always directed at him, never at the Pintos.

‘… if only Purnima were alive, wouldn’t she be ashamed of him?’

‘… his own son. A man who does not care for his own son, what do you…’

So this is what they mean by the word:
boycott
. Even in his bed he felt it, their contempt, like the heat radiating from a brick wall on a summer night.

He went down to the bottom of the stairwell. Through the octagonal stars of the grille, he saw Ajwani, pacing about the compound, talking on his mobile phone – to a client, no doubt.

I could never do that
, Masterji thought:
negotiate
.
Use the ‘personal touch’
. He had none of the small-bored implements of personality that other men did; no good at charm and fake smile, he never bartered or traded in the normal human way. Which is why he had only two real friends. And for the sake of those two friends he was rejecting a windfall. Not so long ago they had called him an English gentleman for doing this. These very people.

He struck the grille with his fist.

It was a ‘top-up’ day; he looked at the round water stains on the ceiling of his living room and saw asteroids and white dwarves. In the cursive mildew he read
E
=
mc
²
.

He straightened out the books in his cabinet (where had all the Agatha Christies vanished?), dusted the teakwood table, tried to limit his use of the Rubik’s Cube by hiding it on a shelf of his wife’s cupboard, and drew the blinds and lay in bed.

He closed his eyes.

He did not see her until too late. The old fish-seller had a leathery face, cunning with wrinkles, and she walked with a basket on her head. Closer and closer she came towards him, grinning all the time: and just as she passed him he saw that a large wet tail was poking out of her basket.

He awoke to find his face and arms smelling like fish. He swatted the pillows off his bed and got up.

I’ve slept during the day
, he thought. Around him the living room trembled, like a cage from which light had just sprung out. It was thirty-five minutes past four.

To expunge the sin of afternoon indolence, his first lapse since childhood, he washed his face in cold water three times, slapped his cheeks, and decided to walk all the way to the train station and back.

Tinku Kothari, the Secretary’s son, dressed in a crumpled school uniform, stood outside his door. Masterji paused with the key in his hand.

‘They’re calling you.’

‘Who?’

The fat boy went down the stairs. Still holding the key in his palm, Masterji followed the boy through the gates of Vishram; every now and then, Tinku would turn around, like a dark finger that was summoning him. Masterji thought he smelled more and more strongly of fish’s tail. He followed the boy to Ibrahim Kudwa’s cyber-café.

Tinku ran in and shouted: ‘Uncle! He’s here!’

Arjun, the Christianized assistant, had climbed up to the glass lunette above the doorway of the café to fix a loose rivet with a screwdriver. From up there he looked down, monkey-like, on the fat boy who had run into the café.
How all creatures
, Masterji thought, watching Arjun,
have their niche in this world. Just two weeks ago I was like him. I had somewhere to perch among the windows and grilles of Vishram.

A Mercedes was parked not far from the doorway of the internet café.

Kudwa came to the doorway. Ajwani stood by his side; he knew the two had just been talking about him. Now, Ajwani and Kudwa seemed to say with their eyes, they could – if he entered the café, if he accepted the logic of the boycott – give him back his place in the hierarchy of Vishram Society. Ajwani, a natural-born middle-man, could broker the deal: at a rate of so much rage forsaken, of so much pride swallowed, he would be readmitted into the common life of his Society.

‘Mr Shah has sent his car for you; he is waiting in his Malabar Hill home. You have
nothing
to fear. He admires teachers.’

Masterji could barely ask: ‘What is all this about?’

‘I’ve been asked to bring you to Mr Shah’s house. We will drop you back to Vishram, Masterji. The driver is right here.’

Tinku Kothari, standing on the threshold of the café, watched Masterji.

‘Is there a bathroom in there?’ he asked – he could still smell the dream-fish on his moustache and fingertips.

‘Arjun has a toilet in the back,’ Kudwa said. ‘It’s not very clean, but…’ Monkey-like Arjun, from the lunette, indicated with his screwdriver the way.

He was standing before the toilet bowl when the engine of the Mercedes came to life, and once that noise started, he simply could not urinate.

Everything in the moving car was sumptuous – the air-conditioned air, the soft cushions, the floral fragrance – and all of it added to Masterji’s discomfort.

He sat in the back, his arms between his knees.

Ajwani, seated by the driver, turned every few minutes, and smiled.

‘Is everything okay back there?’

‘Why would it not be?’

He was sure he reeked of fish, all the way from his moustache-tips to his fingertips, and this shamed and weakened him. He closed his eyes and settled back for the long ride into the city.

‘Why is there no traffic today?’ he heard Ajwani asking. ‘Is it a holiday?’

‘No, sir. We’re almost alone on the roads.’

‘I know that: but why?’

Some time passed, and then he heard Ajwani say: ‘There
really
is no traffic. I don’t understand.’

Masterji opened his eyes: as if by magic, they were already at the foot of Malabar Hill.

Resplendent in his circle of fire, his foot pressing down on the demon of ignorance, the bronze Nataraja stood on the table in the living room. The plaster-of-Paris model of the Shanghai sat at the god’s feet, in ambiguous relationship, of either deference or challenge, to his power.

In a corner of the room, far from the gaze of the bronze Nataraja statue, Shanmugham opened the glass panels of his employer’s drinks cabinet. Three rows of clean crystal glasses filled the wooden shelves above the cabinet.

All the pots and pans in the kitchen shook in a bout of metallic nervousness: Giri was hacking at something with a cleaver.

Shanmugham closed the cabinet door.

His phone rang. It was Ajwani: they had reached the building.

‘But Mr Shah has just left,’ Shanmugham said. ‘He’s gone to his boy’s school for a meeting. You’re not supposed to be here for an other hour.’

‘There was no traffic. I’ve never seen a thing like it. Should we go up and down Malabar Hill? Stop at Hanging Gardens?’

‘No. Come in, and wait here for Mr Shah. I’ll text him that you’re early.’

He waited for them in the doorway under the golden Ganesha medallion. When the old teacher stepped out of the lift, Shanmugham noticed that he had a slight limp. Arthritic in one leg. A weakness. He namasted the old man with great warmth and ushered him into the living room.

‘Can I get you something to drink, Masterji? We have Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola…’

Ajwani came in behind them.

‘Black Label for me,’ he said.

‘Only Mr Shah can open his drinks cabinet. You’ll have to wait.’ Shanmugham turned to his other guest. ‘Are you sure, nothing for you? Not even a Pepsi?’

Masterji sat hunched over on the beige sofa, looking at the floor.

‘I have to go to the toilet,’ he said, getting up.

‘The guest-room toilet is out of order. But if you have no objection’ – Shanmugham paused, and added with a significant smile, ‘you can use Mr Shah’s. That’s his bedroom there.’

Entering a dark room with a double-bed, Masterji located the toilet and closed the door behind him.

Here, at last, he could urinate.

If someone could see me now
, he thought,
wouldn’t they say, this is exactly what Masterji had planned from the start. To carry on a show so convincing even his son, his neighbours, would be taken in by it: and then allow himself to be driven here, in a chauffeured car, to the builder’s home, drink his water, piss in his piss-pot, and be “persuaded” by him, for a few extra lakhs?

He splashed water on his face. His eyebrows were damp and matted. He changed his pose to see his face from another angle.

Closing the toilet door behind him, he walked on tiptoe. The two of them were whispering on the sofa like old friends.

‘… I’m telling you, no traffic of any kind. What can I…’

‘And did you
have
to talk of drinks in the old man’s presence?’

‘He drinks. He’s quite modern. I know him, he’s my neighbour.’

‘Why is he taking so long, by the way?’

‘He pissed just before we headed out. He has that disease, which is called D-something. It weakens the lower organs.’

‘Diarrhoea?’

‘No, sir. Another D-word.’

‘Dementia?’

‘Not that.’ Ajwani tapped his forehead. ‘Listen, pour me something, won’t you? I am the man doing all the work here, remember that. And tell your boss’ – he dropped his voice – ‘one lakh is not enough as a sweetener. I want
two
. In cash.’

The two stopped talking. On a table in the corner of the room Masterji saw a sheaf of papers lying under a golden paperknife. What was the story about Mrs Rego’s Uncle Coelho and the builder who stole his property… didn’t it involve a knife?

‘May I recommend the view from the terrace, Masterji? It is the best view of the city you have ever seen, I guarantee it.’

‘Of course Masterji will appreciate the view,’ Ajwani giggled. ‘Such a
sweetened
view it is of Bombay.’

Masterji followed the men through glass doors on to a rectangular balustraded terrace, where the sea breeze blew into his hair. An agglomeration of skyscrapers, billboards, and glowing blocks spread before the old teacher’s wondering eyes. He had never seen Bombay like this.

A cloud of electric light enveloped the buildings like incense. Noise: a high keening pitch that was not traffic and not people talking but something else, something Masterji could not identify. A huge sign – ‘LG’ – stood behind the main bulk of towers; beyond it, he recognized the white glow from the Haji Ali shrine. To his left was dark ocean.

‘Breach Candy,’ Masterji reached for it with his finger. ‘This used to be the dividing line between Malabar Hill and Worli island. During high tide the water came in through there. The British called it the Great Breach of Bombay. I’ve seen it in old maps.’

‘Masterji knows everything. About the sun and moon, the history of Bombay, so much useful information.’

Ajwani turned and whispered to Shanmugham, who leaned down towards the short broker and listened.

His hands on the balustrade of the terrace, Masterji looked at the towers under construction in the dark. He thought of the shining knife on the desk. Each building seemed to be illuminated by its price in rupees per square foot, glowing like a halo around it. By its brightness he located the richest building in the vista.

‘Why have you come before us?’ the towers asked. Each glowing thing in the vista before him seemed like the secret of someone’s heart: one of them out there represented his own. An honest man? He had fooled his Society, the Pintos, even himself, but here on the open terrace he was stripped of all his lies. He had come here, frightened by the boycott, not oblivious to the possibilities of money, ready to betray the Pintos. Ready to betray the memories of his dead wife and dead daughter that were in the walls and paint and nails of Vishram Society.

‘Construction,’ Shanmugham said, coming close to Masterji. ‘Do you know how many cranes there are below us right now? The work continues all night. Dozens of buildings are coming up around us. And when all the work is finished… my God. This part of the city is going to be like New York. You must have been there, sir, to New York?’

He shook his head.

‘You can now,’ Ajwani smiled. ‘A holiday.’

‘No.’ Masterji leaned forward. ‘Oh, no, I won’t go. I won’t go anywhere. I won’t leave Vishram Society ever again.’

He saw Shanmugham turning to Ajwani, who rolled his eyes.

‘Masterji…’ the builder’s assistant came close. ‘Masterji. May I talk to you, man to man?’

Masterji smelled something bad from the man’s mouth, and thought of the green-covered cage at the zoo.

‘There’s a term we use in the business. A sweetener. Another thousand rupees per square foot? We don’t reward teachers enough in this country.’