Last Man in Tower (36 page)

‘Ms Swathi. Sit down, sit down. This is my neighbour, Mrs Puri.’

The girl was almost in tears.

‘I came looking for you earlier, sir. I have to speak to you now, it’s urgent.’

‘Yes?’ The broker leaned forward, his hands folded. Mrs Puri sighed.

She had almost convinced Ajwani, and then
this
happens.

The girl reminded the broker. He had helped her find a place in Hibiscus Society. She was supposed to move in today. He remembered, he remembered.

There had been a lift in the Hibiscus building when she had visited with him, but when she had gone there today, the lift was not working. It would not be repaired for three months, the landlord said. ‘How will my parents go up the stairs, Mr Ajwani? Mother had a hip replacement last year.’

Ajwani retreated into his chair. He pointed a finger behind his head.

‘I told you to worship Information, Ms Swathi. You should have asked about the lift back then. The landlord is within his rights to keep the deposit if you cancel the lease.’

She began to sob.

‘But we need that money, or how will we go looking for another place?’

Ajwani made a gesture of futility.

‘I suppose you’re also going to bring up the matter of the broker’s fee that you gave me.’

She nodded.

‘Sixteen thousand rupees. Like the landlord, I have every legal right to keep it.’

Ajwani’s foot left its chappal, and opened the lowest drawer of the desk. He leaned down and brought up a bundle of cash, from which he counted off 500-rupee notes. Mrs Puri stared.

The broker counted them again, moistening his right index finger on his tongue thirty-two times; then pushed the bundle of notes across the table.

‘I’ll phone the landlord. Go home, Ms Swathi. Call me tomorrow, around four o’clock.’

The girl looked at him, through her sobs, with surprise.

‘A rare thing in this modern age, Ms Swathi. The way you take care of your parents.’

Mrs Puri waited till the girl had left, and said: ‘This is why you never became rich, Ajwani. You waste your money. You should have kept the 16,000 rupees.’

The broker rubbed his metal and plastic rings. ‘Women I did well with, in life. Money, never.’

‘Then become rich now, Ajwani. Be like Mr Shah for once in your life. What you did today with a pole, do again tomorrow on the terrace.’

This was where they had left off.

‘I’m not frightened,’ Ajwani said. ‘Don’t think I am.’

About to speak, Mrs Puri saw Mani, and stopped.

The broker looked at his assistant. ‘Go outside and play with Ramu,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t leave the boy alone out there.’

Mani sighed. He stood outside the office and pointed at passing cars and trucks; Ramu held on to the little finger of his left hand. He was still sobbing because of the way the chick’s head had been crushed under Kothari Uncle’s foot.

After half an hour, Mrs Puri left with her boy.

As he watched the fat woman leave, Mani thought:
What
have
they been talking about?

When he pushed open the glass door, he found the office deserted; from the inner room beyond the Daisy Duck clock came the noise of a coconut being hacked open.

Lying next to Ramu’s blue aeroplane quilt, Sanjiv Puri, who had been drawing cartoons of lizards, white mice, and spiders, now began to sketch, as if by logical progression, politicians.

As he was putting the final touches to the wavy silver hair of his favourite, ex-president Abdul Kalam, he looked up.

The lights were on in the living room: his wife had come home with his son.

‘Ramu.’ He put down his sketchbook and held out his arms.

Mrs Puri said: ‘Play with your father later. He and I have to talk now.’

Closing Ramu’s bedroom door behind her, she spoke in a soft voice.

‘You can’t come to Ramu’s pageant tomorrow.’

‘Why not?’

‘Stay late in the office. Have dinner there. Use the internet. Don’t come home till after ten o’clock.’

He watched her as she went to the dining table, where she began folding Ramu’s freshly washed laundry.

‘Sangeeta…’ He stood by her. ‘What is happening that I can’t come to my own home until ten?’

She looked at him, and said nothing, and he understood.

‘Don’t be crazy. If they do it, Ajwani and the Secretary, well and good. Why should you dip your hands into it?’

‘Keep your voice down.’ Mrs Puri leaned her head in the direction of
you know who
. ‘Ajwani is doing it. Kothari is going to hide somewhere all day long – so if Shanmugham comes in the morning, he will not be able to tell him that the Confidence Group has withdrawn its offer. And unless their letter is not handed to the Secretary of a Society in person, they cannot say they have taken back their offer. That is the law. In the evening Ajwani will do it. I’ll phone him when Masterji goes up to the terrace. That’s all there is to it.’

‘But if anything goes wrong… it is a question of going to
jail
.’

She stopped, a blue towel over her forearm. ‘And living in this building for the rest of my life is
better
than going to jail?’ She flipped the towel over and folded it.

Her husband said nothing.

Ramu popped his head out of his room, and Mummy and Daddy smiled and told him to go back to bed.

‘My fingers still smell,’ she whispered. ‘That man made me dirty my fingers. With my own son’s… He made me do that. I can never forgive him.’

Mr Puri whispered: ‘But tomorrow is Ramu’s pageant.’

‘So it’s perfect,’ Mrs Puri said, pushing the towels to one side, to start work on Ramu’s underwear. ‘No one will suspect me on a day like tomorrow. I will have to stay back at the school hall to help dismantle the pageant. Someone will remember me. Someone will get the time confused. I’m not asking you to do anything. Just stay away from home. That’s all.’

Mr Puri went to the sofa, where he slapped magazines and newspapers on to the ground with his palm; then he walked over to the kitchen, where he stripped things off the fridge door, and then he shouted: ‘No. I won’t do it.’

His wife stood holding Ramu’s underwear against her chest. She stared.

‘No.’ He took a step towards her. ‘I’m not leaving you alone tomorrow. I’m staying here. With you.’

Letting the underwear fall, she put her fingers around her husband’s neck, and – ‘Oy, oy, oy’ – kissed the crown of his head.

Ramu, opening his bedroom door just a bit, gaped at the show of affection between Mummy and Daddy.

Mrs Puri blushed; she pushed the boy back into his room and bolted the door from the outside.

‘He isn’t in his room now,’ she said, putting her ear to the wall to check for any sound. ‘So he’s still up on the roof, then. He went up there yesterday and he went today. He will probably go tomorrow too. Ajwani will have to do it then. Up there.’

‘Kothari?’

‘He will say what we want him to say. When it’s all over. He promised me that much.’

Mr Puri nodded. ‘It could work,’ he said. ‘Could work.’

The sketchbook on which he had been doodling lizards and politicians lay on the table; he tore out a page.

‘Here. We should write it down here. What time he goes up to the terrace and what time he comes down. This will help us tomorrow.’

‘Ramu! Stop pushing the door!’ Mrs Puri raised her voice; the bedroom door stopped rattling.

‘Write it down?’ she asked her husband.

‘Why not? It’s how they do it in the movies. In the English movies. They always plan the previous day. Let’s take this seriously,’ Mr Puri said, as if he had been the one to come up with the whole idea.

He put his ear to the wall.

‘His door has opened.’ He turned to his wife and whispered: ‘What time is it?’

So I have failed you again, Purnima
. Masterji removed his shoes, went to his bed and lay down, his arm over his face.

He controlled his tears.

His shirt was wet from walking round and round the terrace; when he turned in the bed, it stuck to his back and made him shiver. A husband who survives his wife must perform her memorial rites. But all of them had got together to strip away even this final satisfaction from him.

He bit his forearm.

How obvious now that Mr Pinto had
wanted
someone to threaten him outside the compound wall that evening. How obvious now that he and Shelley wanted the money. How obvious that the Secretary had been lying all this time about responsibility and flamingoes; he wanted money. He had been cheating them for years; he had been stealing from the funds. How obvious that Mrs Puri wanted money for herself, not for Ramu.

He covered his face in his blanket and breathed in. The game he played as a child: if you cannot see them, they cannot see you. You are safe in this darkness with your own breathing.

Look down
– he heard a whisper.

What is down there?
he whispered back.

Look at me
.

Under his blanket, Masterji felt himself sliding: trapdoors had opened beneath his bed.

Now he was again on the builder’s terrace on Malabar Hill, watching the darkening ocean. He heard blows like the blows of an axe. The water was ramming into Breach Candy – into the original wall that held the tides out of the great breach of Bombay.

He saw its horns rising out of the dark water: the bull in the ocean, the white bull of the ocean charging into the wall.

Now he could see the original breach in the sea wall reopen: and the waters flooding in – waves rising over prime real estate, wiping out buildings and skyscrapers. Now the white angry bull, emerging horns-first from the waves, charges. The waves have come to the edge of the towers, and flooded into them. Muscles of water smash into the Brabourne Stadium and into the Cricket Club of India; a hoof of tide has brought down the Bombay University…

A finger snapped in the darkness, and a voice said: ‘Get up.’

He opened his eyes; he was too weak to move. Again the finger snapped: ‘Up.’

I cannot go back to bed. If I lie down, I will curse my neighbours and my city again.

He opened the door and went down the stairs. The moonlight pierced the octahedronal stars of the grille; it seemed as bright as the moon he had seen that night, so many years ago, in Simla.

Pinned by a moonbeam, he leaned against the wall.

The Republic, the High Court, and the Registered Co-operative Society might be fraudulent, but the hallways of his building were not without law; something he had obeyed for sixty-one years still governed him here.

He returned to his home; he closed the door behind him.

Opening his wife’s green
almirah
, Masterji knelt before the shelf with the wedding sari, and thought of Purnima.

Low, white, and nearly full, the moon moved over Vakola.

Ajwani could not stay at home on a night like this. He had walked along the highway, sat under a lamp post, then walked again, before taking an autorickshaw to Andheri, where he had dinner.

It was past eleven o’clock. After a beer at a cheap bar, he was returning along the highway in an autorickshaw. The night air lashed his face. He passed packed, box-like slum houses along the highway. Dozens of lives revealed themselves to him in seconds: a woman combing her long hair, a boy wearing a white skullcap reading a book by a powerful table lamp, a couple watching a serial on television. The autorickshaw sped over a concrete bridge. Below him, homeless men slept, bathed, played cards, fed children, stared into the distance. They were the prisoners of Necessity; he flew.

Tomorrow by this time I will be different from all of them
, he thought: and his hands became dark fists.

5 OCTOBER

When Masterji opened his eyes, he was still kneeling before the open green
almirah
. Sunlight had entered the room.

It was a new day: the anniversary of Purnima’s death.

My legs are going to hurt
, he thought, searching for something to hold on to, as he raised himself up.

He walked over the underwear lying around the washing machine and went into the living room.

It was his wife’s first anniversary, but Trivedi had refused to do the rites. Where could he get them done at the last minute?

As he brushed his teeth, it seemed to him that the face in the mirror, enriched by wisdom from the foaming toothpaste, was offering him a series of counter-arguments: so what if Trivedi said no? Why a temple, why a priest? Physics experiments could be done by oneself at home: the existence of the sun and the moon, the roundness of the earth, the varying velocities of sound in solids and liquids, all these could be demonstrated in a small room.

True, he acknowledged, as he washed his face and mouth at the sink, very true.

He cupped the weak flow from the tap in his palm. It seemed that water was a part of all Hindu religious ceremonies. The Christians used it too. Muslims gargled and cleaned themselves before their
namaaz
.

He clutched a handful of water and went to the window. Sunlight too was congenial to religion. He opened the window and sprinkled water in the direction of the morning sun. Something was usually said to accompany this sprinkling. People used holy languages for this purpose. Sanskrit. Arabic. Latin. But the words came out of him in English. He said: ‘I miss you, my wife.’

He sprinkled more water.

‘Forgive me for not being a better husband.’

He sprinkled the last of the water into the light.

‘Forgive me for not protecting you from the things I should have protected you from.’

One drop of water had fallen on Masterji’s fingertip; it glowed in the morning light like a pearl.

The iridescent drop spoke to him, saying:
I am what you are made of. And in the end I am what you return to.
In between there were puzzling things a man had to do. Marry. Teach. Have children. And then his obligations were done and he would become drops of water again, free of life and its rainbow of restrictions. Death said to Master ji:
Fear me not. Purnima your wife is more beautiful than ever, she is a drop of shining water. And Sandhya your daughter is right by her side.

The creeper from the Secretary’s home had grown down to Masterji’s window again; tender, translucent in the morning light, its blind pale tip curled up, apparently searching for him, like Sandhya’s infant finger, the first time he came close to her.

He fed it the water drop.

Something was usually done for others in remembrance rituals. When he had performed his father’s last rites in Suratkal, they had left steaming rice balls on a plantain leaf for the crows.

He came down to the compound, where Mrs Puri was clapping to keep time for Ramu; with a gold-foil sword in his hand, the boy, whose cheeks had been rouged, walked four measured steps, swished his sword, and bowed before an imaginary audience. Masterji remembered: the annual pageant.

‘Good luck, Ramu,’ he said.

Ramu, despite his mother’s stern gaze, thrust his golden sword at Masterji.

Ajwani woke up and found himself under arrest.

Two
samurai
had taken his arms in theirs. ‘Tae kwon-do time, Papa’ – little Raghav brought his fist right up to his father’s face. ‘You’ve over-slept.’

In brilliant white outfits embellished with Korean symbols and a small Indian flag in the upper right-hand corner, the boys arranged themselves before the dining table in kicking-and-punching positions. Though not formally trained in the martial arts, Ajwani understood the basic principles of strength and speed well enough.

‘Hey-a! Hey-a!’

The two of them kicked; Father watched from the sofa, yawning.

‘Harder. Much harder.’

Then the three of them sat down at the green dinner table for a breakfast of their mother’s toast.

Now in their blue ties and white school uniforms, Rajeev and Raghav lined up for the spoon full of shark liver oil that their father held out for them. Wetting his fingers at the kitchen tap, he wiped shark liver oil from each boy’s lips and sprinkled his face to make him laugh.

‘All right. Off to school.’

Ajwani’s wife, a heavy swarthy woman, was frying something in sunflower oil in the kitchen. She shouted out: ‘Will you bring some
basmati
rice in the evening?’

‘If I remember,’ he shouted back, and slapped his armpits with Johnson’s Baby Powder, before putting on a safari suit, and shutting the door behind him.

Halfway down the stairwell, he stopped and did a set of push-ups leaning against the banister.

Some time after 10 a.m., Masterji returned from the market with a packet of sweets.

He walked past the gate of Vishram Society, down to the Tamil temple. He remembered it from the evening he had gone through the slums to see Mr Shah’s new buildings.

The sanctum of the temple was locked, and two old women in saris sat on its square verandah, in the centre of which a tree grew.

He put the sweet-box before the old women. ‘Please think of my departed wife, Purnima, who died a year ago.’

Ripping open the plastic packaging around the sweets the old women began eating. He sat on the verandah with them. Through the grille door with the shiny padlock, he could see the small black Ganesha idol inside the dim temple, anointed with oil and kumkum and half buried under marigolds.

He watched the old women gobble; he felt their filling stomachs refuelling her flight. Their belches and grunts were a benediction on Purnima’s soul. Through the grille door, he watched the Ganesha, a distant cousin of the red idol at SiddhiVinayak. He was a jolly god, Ganesha, always game for a bit of mischief, and when the wind blew Masterji thought he heard someone whisper: ‘I’ve been on your side the whole time, you old atheist.’

A blind man sat outside the temple with a tray that held flowers of four colours, strung into small garlands. A few red petals had flown from his tray and floated on a sunken manhole cover that had filled up with black water. Masterji thought of the beautiful bronze tray with petals floating on it that he had seen at Gaurav’s home.

Water buffaloes came near the temple, coated in dust and dung, their dark bulging bellies spangled by flies.

Leaning back against the wall of the temple, he saw, through the coconut trees, Mr Shah’s two buildings. The work appeared to be complete: a continuous row of windows sparkled down the side of each building. Soon, catching the angle of the setting sun, the buildings would flash like side-by-side comets. He remembered the blue tarpaulin that had covered their structures when he had last seen them; that must have been in June or July. He became aware of the passage of time, and it occurred to him that the deadline had really passed now. The fifth of October.

‘It is over,’ he said softly. And then, he got up and said, in the direction of Mr Shah’s two buildings: ‘You have lost.’

The tree in the courtyard began to shake. A boy was up in the branches, while a girl held out her blue skirt to collect what he was throwing down.

‘What are you doing up there, fellow?’

The boy smiled and half opened his hand, revealing three tiny green fruits.

‘And who’re
you
?’ he asked the girl.

She spoke into her skirt.

‘What was that?’

‘Sister.’

Masterji closed an eye against the sun and looked at the boy. ‘Throw me one, and I won’t tell the priest you’re taking his fruit.’

The boy let one of the fruits slip from his palm; Masterji caught and chewed on it. Citrus-like and sour, it reminded him of things he had once climbed trees for. That was before his thread ceremony in Suratkal at the age of fourteen, a full day’s business of chanting Sanskrit in front of a sacred fire and blinking and coughing in the wood smoke, at the end of which a lean, geriatric, crow-like priest spoke to him the formulaic words of wisdom for coming-of-age Brahmin boys: ‘This means no more climbing trees for fruit, my son. No more stoning dogs, my son. No more teasing girls, my son.’ Then the priest had concluded by saying: ‘And now you are a man.’

But that had not been true. Only now, at the age of sixty-one, did he finally feel like a man.

‘Help us down, Grandfather,’ the boy said, and Masterji steadied his waist as he climbed down the branches. The boy and his sister divided the spoils; Masterji watched and wished Ronak were here.

He thought of that evening at Crawford Market, when he had seen the light behind the buildings and pledged to fight Mr Shah.

But that fight was over. The deadline had passed, and that builder would go somewhere else. What was he expected to do from now on?

The residue of citrus on his tongue had turned bitter. He covered his face with his hands, and closed his eyes.

Mrs Puri applied mascara, fluttering her lashes to even the colour. In a corner, Ramu fluttered his eyelashes too.

Boxing with him all the way, Rum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum, Mrs Puri led him down to 1B and pressed the bell.

When Mrs Rego opened her door, Mrs Puri stopped boxing with Ramu, and asked: ‘Didn’t you tell me you were going to your sister’s place this evening? The one who lives in Bandra?’

‘No… I didn’t tell you that.’

Mrs Puri smiled.

‘You
should
go to see her, Mrs Rego. And you should take my Ramu with you, too.’

‘But… I promised the boys who play cricket at the Tamil temple I would take them to the beach.’

‘This is a favour I ask of you as a neighbour. Have I ever asked you, in all these years, to take care of Ramu?’

Mrs Rego looked from Ramu to his mother, waiting for an explanation.

‘Ramu has to be David, Slayer of Goliath, in the school pageant. I will have to stay back to help them remove the stage decorations until nine o’clock.’

‘But Ramu can stay with me right here.’

Mrs Puri put her hand on her neighbour’s shoulder.

‘I want you to go to your sister’s house. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it?’

The five-second rule. As children in Bandra, Mrs Rego and her sister Catherine had played it each time a chicken leg or a slice of mango had fallen to the floor. Pick it up before a count of five and you did not have to worry about germs. You would stay safe. She remembered this now.

Saying, ‘I’d be happy to do this for you’ – one, two, three, four – Mrs Rego closed the door.

‘Be brave, Ramu. I have to leave you with Communist Aunty. Mummy must help the other Mummys clean the stage after the pageant – or who else will take responsibility?’

Ramu hid inside his aeroplane quilt and sulked with the Friendly Duck.

Sitting beside her son, Mrs Puri checked her mobile phone, which had just beeped. Ajwani had sent her a text message: ‘Going city. Back 6 clock.’

She knew exactly which part of the city he was going to.

Falkland Road.

Her brother Vikram had been in the Navy, and in the mess they had been issued with bottles of Old Monk rum every week. It brought the heat into the blood. Men performing bold physical action needed heat.

In her mind’s eye she saw Ajwani crouching on the terrace, now moving fleetfoot behind Masterji, until the time came for the push. Heat: a man needed it for these things. If he had to go to Falkland Road for his heat, then so be it.

An arm slid out from the aeroplane quilt and bunched the bangles on Mrs Puri’s forearm together, until her wrist was plated with gold like a warrior’s. She shook her arm, and the bangles trinkled down; the sweet music drew Ramu, beaming like sunrise, out of his quilt.

Up and down his mother’s forearm he rubbed her golden bangles. Her flesh grew warm and the hairs on her forearm were singed from the friction.

Mrs Puri wanted to wince. She smiled and let her son continue to play.

Mumtaz Kudwa called her husband some time after noon to say she had overheard Mrs Puri asking Mrs Rego to take care of Ramu in the evening. And then the Secretary knocked on the door to say that no one was to leave the building after nine o’clock.

‘What are they going to do to Masterji this time?’ Kudwa asked his wife.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought they would have told you.’

‘They always leave me out. They didn’t tell me when they got the duplicate keys done… what do you think I should do – should I go to Sangeeta-ji and ask her what is going on?’

Mumtaz started to say something but stopped, and settled on the old formula: ‘It’s up to you. You’re the man of the house.’

Typical
, he thought, stroking Mariam’s hair as he sat in his cybercafé, typical. A man has a right to expect his wife to make a decision for him now and then, but not Ibrahim Kudwa. As alone after marriage as he was before marriage.

On a corner of his table was the black helmet of his new Bajaj Pulsar. He wished he had listened to Mumtaz and waited until the deadline before buying the bike: if they didn’t get the money now, how would he pay its monthly instalments?

If only you were older
, he thought, bouncing Mariam on his knee.
If only
you
could tell your father what to do
.

He looked at the helmet.

Now he saw it creeping over his table again: the black swamp. He heard his neighbours standing behind him, and yelling for him to reach into it.

Little Mariam cried. Her father had banged his fist on his desk and shouted: ‘No.’

Giving instructions to Arjun, his assistant, to double-lock the door, he shut his internet café and went home with his daughter.

Something very bad was going to happen to his Society this evening: unless he stopped it from happening.

After eating lunch in his office at two o’clock, Ajwani had taken the train into the city; he had brought along his copy of the
Times of India
real-estate classifieds to read on the journey.