Last Man in Tower (24 page)

When she closed the door on him, Masterji struck it with his fist.

‘You borrowed money from my wife, and never repaid it. Do you think I didn’t know?’

He walked down into the compound. In the darkness, distances were obscured; masses dissolved; lit window called out to lit window; he saw rhymes in light. One lamp went out in a nearby Society; another came on in Tower B.

Were
they
doing it?

An autorickshaw drove past the gate, heading towards the slums.

Woken up in his room at the back of the Society, Ram Khare, when the situation was explained to him, pouted his lower lip.

‘Speak to the Secretary. Phones are not the guard’s responsibility.’

He turned on his bedside lamp. His khaki shirt hung on a nail from the wall; old black-and-white photographs in which a bare-chested yoga teacher demonstrated the four stages of the
Dhanush-asana
were taped above his bed.

‘What does that mean, Ram Khare? We’re being threatened. It’s night-time: you’re the guard.’

A half-bottle of Old Monk rum stood on the only other piece of furniture in the room, a wicker table. Exhaling boozy breath, Ram Khare crossed his arms and scratched his back with long fingernails.

‘I warned you, sir. I warned you.’

He turned in bed, and, showing his visitor his back, bumpy with mosquito-bites, went back to sleep.

‘Why don’t you call Gaurav,’ Mr Pinto asked, when Masterji was back in their flat, the door safely locked behind him.

‘Ask him to come over and spend the night with us. In the morning we’ll go to the police.’

Masterji thought about it, and said: ‘We don’t need anyone’s help. We’re the triumvirate.’

He yanked the Pintos’ telephone cord out of the wall and threw it on the floor.

‘All three of us will sleep right here. First thing in the morning we’ll go to the police.’

Mr Pinto made up the sofa for him; Shelley came from the bedroom with a spare pillow in her blind arms.

Masterji went up to his living room and returned with a smile and a large blue book.

‘What’s that for?’ Mr Pinto asked.

‘It’s my
Illustrated History of Science
.’ Masterji made a motion of hitting someone on the head with the book. ‘Just in case.’

The produce stalls were now covered with gunny sacks, and the vendors were sleeping beside them. Mani, the assistant, sat outside the glass door of the Renaissance Real-Estate Agency, yawning.

The office was dark, and the broker’s laminated desk was deserted. Yet Mani knew that business was still going on; his boss might need him.

All the children at Vishram Society knew that below the Daisy Duck clock on the wall of Uncle Ajwani’s real-estate office was the door that led into an inner room. None of them had been in there, and it was variously speculated that the broker used the room to sell black-market pharmaceuticals, pornographic magazines, or national secrets.

Shanmugham had just been led through the dark office into the inner room; the broker shut the door behind him.

The inner room had a cot with no cover, and two wicker baskets, one full of coconuts, and the other full of coconut shells. Sawdust, masking tape, nails, a hammer lay on the floor. Avoiding the nails, Shanmugham sat down on the bare cot.

‘What do you use this room for?’

Ajwani pointed to the treasure hoard in the wicker basket. The coconuts were large and green; a curved black knife lay on top of them. ‘I buy them wholesale. Six rupees each. Much better than your Coke or Pepsi. Fresh and tasty.’

‘A room just for coconuts?’ Shanmugham frowned.

The broker slapped the cot. ‘Not just coconuts.’ He winked. ‘Do you want one now, by the way? Full of vitamins. Best thing for the health.’

‘The news, Ajwani. What did you call me here for? Have the old men agreed?’

Ajwani stirred the coconuts with his foot.

‘No, things have become worse. Tinku Kothari, the Secretary’s son – hungry eyes – saw them at the school today. He spoke to the old librarian and got the facts. They were looking up the numbers of Masterji’s old students and calling them from the library phone.’

‘Is this a problem?’

‘No. People respect a man like Masterji. No one loves him. No one will help him.’

‘So why did you call me here, Ajwani?’

‘Because that wasn’t the only thing the librarian told Tinku. He said: they are going to see a lawyer. Tomorrow.’

‘Where?’

‘That I don’t know. They may bring something back with them. Business card, brochure. It will end up in their rubbish.’

‘Let’s call them right now.
You
call them. You’re so good at it.’

Ajwani chuckled. He picked up an imaginary phone receiver and lowered his voice an octave. ‘Old man, sign the paper. Or we’ll break your head. We’ll play with your wife. They were more frightened when I spoke to them.’ Ajwani beamed. ‘Admit it.’

Shanmugham picked up a coconut and tapped it with his finger. ‘You’re a natural at this, Ajwani. You should be working for us full-time. You and your wife.’

‘Wife? She just text-messages me when Masterji enters or leaves his room. I’m the one making the calls. It’s good that you’re giving me a sweetener, but I’d do it anyway. I
like
this work.’

The broker’s face broadened with pleasure. Even though they were alone in the room, he moved closer to the Tamilian, and lowered his voice.

‘Tell me what you’ve done. A few things you’ve done.’

With his fingers poised above the coconut, Shanmugham looked up.

‘What do you mean, done?’

Ajwani winked. ‘You know. For Mr Shah. Things like this. Phone calls, threats,
action
. Tell me a few stories.’

‘You don’t do these things yourself,’ Shanmugham said. ‘Usually get someone else. Some eager fellow from the slums. No shortage.’

‘Tell me. I won’t tell anyone. I promise.’

A corner of Shanmugham’s lip rose; his tongue cleaned his angular tooth. ‘We’re partners now. Why not?’ He rotated the coconut in his hands.

Three years ago. A tough redevelopment project in Chembur. One old man had refused to sell his flat. Mr Shah said: ‘Get him out of there, Shanmugham.’ He had hired two boys to smash chairs to pieces outside his window. No implements. The old man stared out of his window and watched them break wood with their bare hands and feet all day long. When he looked out, they grinned and showed him their teeth. He sold out after a couple of days.

‘That’s clever,’ Ajwani said. ‘Very clever. The police can’t do a thing to you.’

Shanmugham dropped the coconut on to the pile; then he gave the basket a kick. ‘Always use your brains, the boss says.’

The nuts trembled together.

‘There was once a Muslim man in a chawl, a Khan. This fellow fancied himself tough. Boss made him an offer to leave. Generous offer. “I have no pity for a greedy man,” Boss said. I paid a boy to sit on the steps of a building opposite and watch this Khan. That was all. Just watch him. This Khan who would not have left if threatened by a gang of goondas signed and left the building within a week.’

Ajwani rubbed his hands together.

‘You’re a genius at this, Mr Shanmugham.’

‘It can’t always be brains, though. Sometimes, you just have to…’

Picking up the curved black knife that lay on the coconuts, Shanmugham stuck it into a green nut. Ajwani shivered.

‘Tell me. Please. What have you done? Broken a leg?’ He dropped his voice. ‘
Killed
a man?’

Shanmugham looked at the black knife.

‘Just a year ago. A project in Sion. One old man kept saying no, no. We kept offering money, and it was always no, no. Boss was getting angry.’

‘So?’ Ajwani came as close as he could.

So, in a bolt of rage and calculation, six-foot-two-inch-tall Shanmugham ran up the stairs of the building, kicked open a door, grabbed something that was playing backgammon with its grandson, shoved its head out of a window, saying:
Sign, mother-fucker
.

‘You really did that?’ Ajwani stared at the black knife.

Shanmugham nodded. He took the knife out of the coconut. ‘The old man signed on the spot. I was scared, I tell you that. I thought I might go to jail. But… the truth is, even if they say no,
deep down
’ – he pointed the knife at Ajwani – ‘they want money. Once you make them sign, they’re grateful to you. Never go to the police. So all I’m doing is making them aware of their own inner intentions.’

He threw the knife back into the pile of coconuts.

Ajwani gazed in admiration at Shanmugham’s hands. ‘What else have you done for Mr Shah?’

‘Anything he wants. The call can come any time, day or night. You have to be ready.’

He told Ajwani of the time a famous politician had phoned the Confidence office, and quoted a figure, in cash, that would have to be transported that evening to his election headquarters. Shah and Shanmugham had driven to a warehouse in Parel where five-hundred-rupee notes were counted by machines, tied into bricks and loaded into an SUV – the cash, filling the vehicle’s front and back seats, was covered with a white bedsheet. Shanmugham, with no more than a hundred and seventy-five rupees for food and drink, drove the SUV across the state border, to the politician’s henchmen. Safely delivered. The politician won the election.

‘I could have been like you. An
action
man.’ Ajwani gouged out his lower lip and shook his head. ‘If I had met a man like Mr Shah in time. Instead, I’m…

‘But tell me.’ He tapped the Tamilian’s forearm. ‘There must be girls in your business. Pretty girls. Dance bar girls?’

‘I’m a married man,’ Shanmugham said. ‘My wife would cut my throat.’

Which made them both laugh.

The broker got up from the cot. ‘Let’s finish this phone call business now.’

‘Not from your phone—’ Shanmugham produced a small red mobile phone. ‘This one has a SIM card that they can’t trace.’

He threw it to the broker.

‘Old man,’ Ajwani said into the phone. ‘Old man, are you there? Pick up the phone, old man…’ He shook his head and gave the mobile back.

Shanmugham got up from the cot, smacking dust off his trousers.

‘That’s it for phone calls.’

‘What happens next?’ the broker asked, as they left the office through a back door. ‘Are you going to send boys to break wood outside the Society?’

Shanmugham tied the straps of his helmet. ‘Some things,’ he said, ‘you don’t tell even your first cousins.’

Kicking the Hero Honda to life, he drove off into the night.

2 AUGUST

The banging noise on the door woke Masterji. Seizing the
Illustrated History of Science
, he got up from the sofa, and checked the safety catch. He stood by the door with the book raised in both hands.

The Pintos waited at the threshold of their dark bedroom.

‘Not here,’ Mrs Pinto whispered. ‘Upstairs. They’re banging on
your
door.’

Mr Pinto reached for the light switch.

‘Wait,’ Masterji said.

Now they heard footsteps coming down the stairs.

‘Let’s call the police. Someone please call the…’

‘Yes,’ Masterji said from the door. ‘Call them.’

‘But Masterji pulled the phone cord out of the wall. You have to put it back in, Mr Pinto.’

The footsteps grew louder. Mr Pinto got down on his knees and slapped at the wall. ‘I can’t find the plug…’

‘Quickly, Mr Pinto, quickly.’

‘Keep quiet, Shelley.’

‘Don’t fight!’ – Masterji from the door. ‘And both of you keep quiet.’

The banging started on the Pintos’ door.

‘Stop that at once, or I’ll call the police!’ Masterji shouted.

There was a jangling of bangles from outside, and then:

‘Ramu, tell your Masterji who it is.’

‘Oh, God. Sangeeta.’ Masterji lowered the
Illustrated History of Science
. He turned on the light. ‘Why are you here at
this
hour?’

‘Ramu, tell your Masterji we are all walking to SiddhiVinayak temple. We’ll pray for his heart to soften. Now come, Ramu,’ she said, ‘and no noise: we don’t want to wake up the good people.’

The Puris were taking that boy on foot to SiddhiVinayak? How would Ramu walk such a distance?

He almost opened the door to plead with Mrs Puri not to do this to Ramu.

It was three in the morning. Another three and a half hours before it was light and they could go to the police station. With the
Illustrated History of Science
lying on his ribs, he closed his eyes and stretched out on the sofa.

Six and a half hours later, he was walking with Mr Pinto down the main road.

‘I know we’re late. Don’t blame me. If you still had your scooter we could have gone to the station in five minutes.’

Masterji said nothing. Walking was good on a day like this. With each step he took, the threat of violence receded. He had lived in Vakola for thirty years, his bones had become arthritic on these very pavements. Who could threaten him here?

‘It’s the fortunate men of Vishram!’

Bare-chested Trivedi, the Gold Coin priest, came towards them with embracing arms. He had just performed a little cleansing ritual at the police station, he explained. Someone had died in the station years ago, and they called him in once a year to purge the ghost.

‘Let me buy you a coffee or tea. A coconut?’

‘Tea,’ Mr Pinto said.

‘We have to go,’ Masterji whispered. ‘We’re late already.’

‘Just a few minutes,’ Mr Pinto said.

He followed the priest to a roadside tea shop, beside which a burly man in a
banian
stood pressing clothes with a coal-fired iron. A metal trough full of spent coals rested by the side of his ironing board.

With a glass of chai in his hand, Pinto motioned for Masterji to join him and Trivedi at the tea shop.

It had been a morning full of delays, Mr Pinto at every stage misplacing something – his glasses, umbrella. Now, watching the trembling tea glass in his old friend’s hand, Masterji understood.

‘I’ll go into the station and file the complaint. You can go home alone, Mr Pinto. It’s perfectly safe in daylight.’

The police station of Vakola stands right at the traffic signal leading in from the highway, giving the impression you are coming into a suburb where the law is securely in charge.

From the chastening aromas of coal and laundry outside the station, Masterji walked into an atmosphere of burning incense and marigold flowers.

It was his first visit to the station in nearly a decade; in the mid-1990s Purnima’s handbag had been snatched just outside the school on a Saturday afternoon – such an unusual event that it had led to neighbourhood talk of a ‘crime wave’; he and Purnima had come here, and spoken to sympathetic officers; a First Information Report (FIR) with the details of the crime had been filled out by a policeman over carbon paper, and that appeared to have been the bulk of the investigative work done. The bag was never recovered; nor did the crime wave materialize.

He saw a drunk, half asleep; a foreign tourist who had clearly not slept in a long time; two vendors from the market who had probably been behind on their payments to the station; and then the men with vague, varied, and never-ending business who populate any police station.

‘Masterji,’ a pot-bellied constable saluted him. ‘Did your wife lose her handbag again?’

He remembered that he had taught this constable’s son. (Ashok? Ashwin?)

He sat down and explained his situation. The constable heard his story and made sure that the senior inspector at the station, a man named Nagarkar, heard it too.

‘These calls are hard to trace,’ the inspector said, ‘but I will send a man over – that’s usually all it takes, to frighten these builders and their goondas. This isn’t a neighbourhood where a teacher can be threatened.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Masterji put his hand on his heart. ‘An old teacher is grateful.’

The inspector smiled. ‘We’ll help you, we’ll help you. But, Masterji. Really.’

Masterji stared.

‘Really what, sir?’

‘You’re holding out to the very end, aren’t you?’

Now he understood: the policemen thought this was about money. They were not the police force of the Indian Penal Code, but of the iron law of Necessity: of the notion that every man has his price – a generous figure, to be sure, but one he
must
accept. Say –
I have no figure
– a cell door swings open, and you find yourself in with the drunks and thugs. Above the head man’s desk, he saw a glass-framed portrait of Lord SiddhiVinayak, blood-red and pot-bellied, like the living incarnation of Necessity.

The inspector grinned. ‘Your Society’s famous man is here, by the way.’

Masterji turned in his chair; at the entrance to the station stood Ajwani.

The entire station warmed at his appearance. Any person looking to rent in a good building had to furnish, by law, a Clearance Certificate from the local police station to his prospective Society. In a less-than-
pucca
neighbourhood like Vakola, people were always turning up at Ajwani’s office without authentic drivers’ licences, voter ID cards, or PAN cards; men with flashy mobile phones and silk shirts who could afford any rent demanded of them yet could not prove (as the Clearance Certificate required) that they were employed by a respectable company.

The broker came here to procure the necessary certificates for these men, in exchange for the necessary sums of money. With a smile and a hundred-rupee note, he invented legitimate occupations and respectable business offices for his clients; conjured wives for un married men, and husbands and children for single women. The real-estate broker was a master of fiction.

This is the real business of this station
, Masterji thought.
I should get out of here at once
.

It was too late. Ajwani had spotted him; he saw the broker’s eye ripening with knowledge.

*

Mr Pinto’s white hair was loose in the wind, and he kept patting it back into place. He was still sitting on the bench at the roadside stall.

The burly man who had been pressing clothes near the tea stall had finished his work, which was piled on to his ironing board; kneeling down, he opened the jaws of his enormous pressing iron. The black coals that filled it began to fume; Masterji watched an exposed part of the machinery of heat and smoke that ran his world.

Mr Pinto got up.

‘How did it go, Masterji? I was going to come, but I thought you might not want…’

Masterji held back the words of reproach. Who could blame Mr Pinto for being frightened? He was just an old man who knew he was an old man.

‘I told you not to worry, Mr Pinto.’

A group of schoolgirls wearing white Muslim headscarves over their navy-blue uniforms stood by the side of the road, waving little Indian flags, tittering and gossiping. They appeared to be rehearsing for Independence Day; their teachers, dressed in green salwar kameez, tried to impose order on them.

THEY still believe in Independence Day
, Masterji thought, looking at the excited little schoolchildren.

‘We live in a Republic, Mr Pinto.’ He placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘A man has his resources here. Now watch my hand.’

Mr Pinto watched his friend’s fingers as they emerged one by one from his fists:

Police.

Media.

Law and order.

Social workers.

Family.

Students and old boys.

Masterji was doing what he did best: teaching. What is there in the world of which a man can say: ‘This is on my side?’ All of these. Mr Pinto’s resources, as a citizen of the Republic of India, were more than adequate to any and all threats at hand. The sun and the moon were in their right orbits.

They would start with the law. The police had been friendly, true, but you could not just say to them: ‘Fight evil’; the law was a code, a kind of white magic. A lawyer would bring his magic lamp, and only then would the Genie of the Law do their bidding.

Over lunch, Mr Pinto said that he knew of a lawyer. A connection had used him in a property dispute.

‘Not a rupee is charged unless there is a settlement in the matter. This is guaranteed. His address is somewhere here.’

Nina served them a speciality from her native South Canara, jackfruit seeds boiled to succulence and served in a red curry with coriander. Masterji wanted to praise Nina, but repressed the impulse lest she ask for a pay rise from the Pintos.

Raised to good spirits by the jackfruit seeds, Masterji sat down at Mr Pinto’s writing table, and took out his Sheaffer pen, a gift from his daughter-in-law two years ago.

Mr Pinto prepared the envelopes; Masterji wrote three letters to English-language newspapers and two to Hindi newspapers.

Dear Editor,

It being said that we live in a Republic, the question arises whether a man in his own home can be threatened, and that too on the eve of Independence Day…

Nina made them ginger tea; Mr Pinto stuck stamps on the envelopes and sealed them, and Masterji, after drinking the tea, began another letter, this one to his most famous ex-pupil.

My dear Avinash Noronha,

Remembering well your fine character in your schooling days, I know you cannot have forgotten your alma mater, St Catherine’s High School in Vakola, nor your old teacher of physics, Yogesh A. Murthy. It is with such pride that I read your weekly columns in the
Times of India,
and your timely
warnings against the spread of corruption and apathy. Little will it surprise you, hence, to know that this tide of decay has now reached your old neighbourhood and threatens your old…

‘Nina will post them on her way home,’ Mr Pinto said.

‘And this is just the start,’ Masterji added. They had not been able to find any of his ex-students at home when they had telephoned, but he planned to write letters of appeal to all those old boys who had signed the photograph of his farewell party.

Mr Pinto approved of this plan; he would go to the school library and get their mailing addresses from old Vittal. But he wanted Masterji to go and see the lawyer first.

‘What do we have to lose? It’s a free consultation. And his office is right here, near Bandra train station.’

Masterji agreed. ‘You stay with Shelley,’ he said. ‘I’ll go on my own.’

‘Don’t take the train to Bandra, take an auto,’ Mr Pinto said.

He put a hundred-rupee note into Masterji’s shirt pocket.

‘Okay,’ Masterji said, patting his pocket, ‘we’ll enter it in the No-Argument when I get back. Fifty rupees: what I owe you.’

‘No.’ Mr Pinto looked at the thing in his friend’s pocket. ‘We won’t enter that in the book. You owe me nothing.’

Masterji understood: this must be Mr Pinto’s way of apologizing.

As his rickshaw fought its way to Bandra through the Khar subway, Masterji thought:
I wonder how Ramu is doing, poor boy
.

For maximum chance of winning favour from the red elephant-god, the temple of SiddhiVinayak must be visited, the devout believe, on foot: the farther from the temple you live, the longer your journey, the greater the accumulation of virtue.

The Puris had so often talked about walking to SiddhiVinayak in the past eighteen years that some of their neighbours believed they had done so, and Mr Ganguly had even asked Mrs Puri for advice on how to make the trip.

These things catch up with you, for the gods are not blind.

Mrs Puri calculated the trip from Vakola to Prabhadevi would take them about four hours. Everything depended on Ramu. If things became really bad they would have to make him pee or shit on the road, like some street urchin. But he had to come along: that was the sacrifice she was going to make to Lord Ganesha. Not enough that she and her husband should ache from the walk. God would see that she was even prepared to make her son suffer: the thing she had fought for eighteen years to prevent.

They walked down the highway into the city. The sky brightened. Streaks of red ran through an orange dawn, as if the skin had been peeled from heaven. A man inside a tea stall struck a match; a blue flame ignited above his portable gas cylinder.

Every few minutes, Ramu whispered into his mother’s ear.

‘Be brave, my boy. The temple is just around the corner.’

If he stopped, she pinched him. If he stopped again, she let him rest a minute or two, and – ‘Oy, oy, oy!’ – they were off.

Two hours later, somewhere beyond Mahim, they sat down at a roadside tea stall. Mrs Puri poured tea into a saucer for the boy. Ramu, high on caffeine, lost in his delirium of fatigue and pain, began to rave until his mother patted his head and soothed him with her voice.