Last Man in Tower (39 page)

‘Kothari, don’t touch him,’ Ibrahim Kudwa warned.

Masterji, recognizing the voice of his protector, got up and began to turn in his direction.

‘Ibby,’ Mrs Kudwa said. ‘Ibby.’

At once, Ibrahim Kudwa lifted the hammer he had brought from the Secretary’s office, lunged forward, and hit Masterji on the crown of his head. Who, more from surprise than anything else, fell back into his chair with such force that it toppled over and his head landed hard on the floor. Masterji lay there like that, unable to move, though he saw things with clarity. Ibrahim Kudwa stared with an open mouth; the hammer dropped from his hand.
I should reach for the hammer
, Masterji thought, but the Secretary lunged and picked it up. Now he felt a weight on his chest: Kothari, pressing a knee on his torso, turned the hammer upside down and stubbed it on his forehead using both his hands. It hurt. He tried to shout, but he heard only a groan from his mouth. Now something, or someone, sat on his legs, and he lost control of them; he was aware that Kothari was pounding his forehead with the hammer again and again. The blows were landing somewhere far away, like stones falling on the surface of a lake he was deep inside. He thought of a line from the Mahabharata: ‘… King Dhritharashtra’s heart was like a forest lake, warm on the surface but icy at the bottom.’ Kothari stopped and took a breath.
Poor man’s arms must be aching by now
, Masterji thought. He was sure he had never seen anyone move as fast as Kothari was moving with the hammer, except for the boy at the McDonald’s on Linking Road when he lifted French fries from the hot oil, slammed them into the metal trough, and put the empty container back in the oil. Then the hammer hit his forehead again. ‘Kothari. Wait.’ Now Sanjiv Puri came from the bedroom with a large dark thing, which he lowered on to Masterji’s face. When the dark thing touched his nose, Masterji understood. Yes. The pillow from his bed. It pressed down on his nose and crushed his moustache: he understood that Sanjiv Puri was sitting on it. His legs thrashed: not to free themselves, but to take him down to the bottom of the lake faster. He was in very cool and black water now.

‘He’s unconscious. Sanjiv, enough. Get up.’

Sanjiv Puri looked at his wife, who was sitting on Masterji’s legs, and then at Ibrahim Kudwa, who was watching things with an open mouth.

‘Quickly. You take the feet, Kothari will take the head,’ Mrs Puri told her husband. ‘Ibby, pick up that hammer. Don’t leave it here.’

Kudwa, rubbing his forearms, stood still. ‘Oy, oy, oy,’ he said.

‘Wait,’ Sanjiv Puri said. ‘First put some more tape on his mouth. In case he wakes up.’

Kothari did so. Then the two men lifted Masterji’s body, and moved towards the door. Mr Puri winced: ‘I stepped on something.’ His wife kicked the Rubik’s Cube out of their path.

She opened the door for the men, and checked the corridor.

‘Wait for the lift. I’ve hit the button.’

‘It never works, let’s take the stairs, there’s two strong men here. He has lost a lot of weight.’

‘It was working in the morning. Wait.’

Mrs Puri jabbed the ‘call’ button again and again.

Sanjiv Puri had given up on the lift, and had begun moving with Masterji’s feet (his end of the dazed body) towards the stairs, when the machine clicked – the whirls and wheezes began – and a circle of light moved up towards them.

His wife held the door open from the outside until the three bodies were in. The Secretary managed to reach the button for the fifth floor. The two men saw, in the round white light on the roof of the lift, three tiny dark shapes. Wasps, which must have flown into the light a long time ago: six undecomposed wings.

When they reached the fifth floor, Sanjiv Puri prepared to press against the lift door; but it swung open of its own accord. His wife, despite her bulk, had come up the stairs faster than they had.

While they brought the body out of the lift, she pushed open the door leading to the roof terrace.

‘We’ll never take him up that way,’ the Secretary said, looking at the steep narrow staircase.

‘One step at a time. You can do it,’ Mrs Puri said, from above them. ‘One step at a time.’

The two men put the body down and changed positions. Sanjiv Puri, the stronger of the two, took the head this time. The Secretary followed with the feet. One step at a time. Pigeons scattered on the terrace as they came out.

‘Mrs Puri…’ the Secretary panted, ‘make sure no one is sitting down there in parliament…’

The wall of the terrace was three feet high. Mrs Puri looked down.

‘He’s opened his eyes. Do you have the hammer here?’

‘No, I left it in the room.’

‘Why didn’t you bring it up with you?’

‘You never told me to…’

‘Oh, stop it,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Get the work done.’

The two men staggered with the body, which had begun to squirm, to the edge of the terrace; on a count of three, they heaved it up and pushed.

‘Why isn’t it going over?’

‘He’s awake again. He’s holding on to the terrace with his hand. Push harder. Push.’

Watching the struggle, Mrs Puri joined in, and pressed her back and buttocks against the stone that had blocked her happiness for so long.

Now, when he opened his eyes, he could not tell if he were dead or alive; these men seemed to be demons, though kindly, who were forcing his body to budge from some place between life and death where it was stuck.

And this was because he was neither good nor bad enough; and neither strong nor weak enough. He had lost his hands; he had lost his legs; he could not speak. Yet everything he had to do was right here, in his head. He thought of Gaurav, his son, his living flesh. ‘Help me,’ he said.

And then he realized that the thing that was blocking his passage was cleared, and he was falling; his body had begun its short earthly flight – which it completed almost instantaneously – before Yogesh Murthy’s soul was released for its much longer flight over the oceans of the other world.

Down on the ground it lay, sprawled, in perfect imitation of a suicide’s corpse.

Loose strands of hair fell down the sides of Kothari’s bald head; he rearranged them into a comb-over.

‘We have to go back and find that hammer, Mrs Puri. And where is Ibrahim? Is he still in the room? What is he doing there? Mrs Puri, are you listening to me?’

‘He’s still alive,’ she said. ‘He’s moving down there.’

The Secretary was out of breath. So Sanjiv Puri ran down the stairs to the fifth floor, took the lift, and burst out of the entranceway. He stood by the body, turned his head upwards and shook it. The movement had stopped. It was just a death spasm.

A corona of dark liquid surrounded the head; Mrs Puri thought she saw things coming out of the skull. It was done.

‘Scotch tape…’ she hissed at her husband from the terrace. ‘The Scotch tape on his mouth. Quick-ly. Ram Khare is coming back.’

A special night. He usually had a quarter of Old Monk rum in his room, but tonight he had gone into a bar and said: ‘Whisky. Royal Stag.’

Why not? It was the evening of 5 October. The fight in his Society had to be over now. Even if you thought that the builder had delayed by one day, that was yesterday. Any man who gave his word that he would not extend the deadline would lose face if he did so after today.

The TV screen in the bar was playing a movie featuring Praveena Kumari, a famous ‘sex bomb’ of the 1980s, now making a come-back in a film called
Dance, Dance
. Ram Khare had never been a fan. Not curvy enough.

He had his whisky and asked for another.

The truth be told
, he thought,
I was always hoping that Masterji would defeat the builder. Where would I find work at another building at my age?

Now he was hungry.

A fine meal of chow mein, fried in a large black wok, at a street-side stand run by Gurkhas. Ram Khare sat on a bench next to the wok, and ate with a plastic fork, splashing a vivid green sauce and ketchup on the chow mein.

Done with his dinner, he washed his mouth and headed back to Vishram.

He had unlatched the gate and was walking to his booth, when he saw a human being lying near the entranceway of the Society.

Catherine D’Mello-Myer’s flat in the Bandra Reclamation was a warm anarchy of left-wing academic journals and foreign toys.

Her three children and their two cousins had rampaged through the kitchen and the bathroom before she ordered them into the TV room, where they had turned on the Sony PlayStation.

Now she sat at the dinner table with her sister and the sweet imbecile boy holding his green sign saying ‘NO NOISE’. His sword had become a piece of crushed cardboard on the floor.

Catherine had never seen her sister like this.

Mrs Rego sat at the table with her right hand lying on a black mobile phone.

Frank, Catherine’s American husband, looked out from their bedroom. He gestured with his head towards the children screaming at their PlayStation.

She glared at him.

Some things men could not understand. Her sister had never done this before – come here at such short notice, bringing along her children and this neighbour’s son.

Catherine knew she had never done enough for poor Georgina.

She understood that an important call was going to be made from that mobile phone. Her job was to take care of the children until the call was made, and Frank could go to hell.

‘Come, Ramu,’ she said, drawing the imbecile boy away from her sister. She touched him and withdrew her hand almost at once.

‘Georgina,’ she whispered. ‘I think he’s soiled his trousers.’

The boy parted his lips, and began to emit a soft, high-pitched whine.

Mrs Rego picked up her mobile phone and dialled.

‘Is that you, Mrs Puri?’ she asked, when the call was answered.

Catherine came closer to listen.

‘No, it’s Mr Puri,’ a man’s voice said. ‘My wife will call you in half an hour. The police are asking her some questions – there has been an unfortunate incident at the building. Is Ramu safe?’

Frank, opening the door of the bedroom to send another message, saw Mrs Rego break down and sob, while her sister stood over her, patting her back and whispering: ‘Georgina, now, now…’

*

Bowing to the golden Ganesha on the lintel, Shanmugham walked through the open door of his employer’s home in Malabar Hill.

He heard Kishore Kumar’s “Ek Aise Gagan Ke Tale” on a tape recorder.

The living room was deserted. A plate full of chewed crusts lay on the dining table; he recognized the marks of his employer’s teeth on the toast.

The fragrance of
gutka
guided him to the bedroom.

Dharmen Shah lay in a nest of printed papers, scratching on a pad with a pencil. The plaster-of-Paris model of the Confidence Shanghai sat beside him near the bedside lamp.

‘What?’

Shanmugham did not know how to say it. He felt a strange fear of incriminating himself with any word he might use.

Looking up from his calculations, Shah saw his assistant’s hand rising up in a fist.

The fist opened.

‘How?’

‘He fell, sir. From the terrace. About one hour ago. They say it’s suicide.’

Shah opened his red mouth. Eyes closed, he pressed his head back against the white pillow. ‘I thought it would be a push down the stairs, or a beating at night. That’s all.’

He caressed the soft pillow.

‘I forgot we were dealing with good people, Shanmugham.’

Scattering papers, the fat man climbed off the bed.

‘You drive back to Vakola. Find out from your connection in the police station what is happening with their investigation. I’ll call the astrologer in Matunga and get an auspicious date to start the demolition.’

7 OCTOBER

MUMBAI SUN

S
UICIDE IN
S
ANTA
C
RUZ
(E
AST
)?

By a staff reporter

Mr Yogesh Murthy, a retired teacher at the famous St Catherine’s School in the neighbourhood, allegedly committed suicide last night from the rooftop of ‘Vishram’ Society in Vakola, Santa Cruz (E).

While there is no suspicion of foul play in the matter, the Santa Cruz police said they are not ruling out any possibility at this stage. An investigation is underway.

It is believed, however, that the deceased had slipped into a state of extreme depression following the death of his wife almost exactly a year ago. Residents of the neighbourhood say that he had been progressively losing his mind under the pressure of diabetes and old age, withdrawing into his room, talking to himself, engaging in anti-social behaviour and fighting with his entire Society over a proposed offer of redevelopment, which he alone opposed. Dr C. K. Panickar, a clinical psychiatrist at Bandra’s Lilavati Hospital, says he had shown classic symptoms of mental deterioration. ‘Paranoia, passive-aggressive developments, and even schizophrenia cannot be ruled out given the subject’s behaviour in his final days,’ he suggests.

The deceased is survived by a son, Gaurav, who lives in Marine Lines, and a grandson, Ronak.

EPILOGUE

Murder and Wonder

15 DECEMBER

The little dark man in the blue safari suit walked through the vegetable stalls, disappointed that no one looked at him this morning as if he were a murderer.

For nearly two months the watermelon and pineapple sellers had discussed how that broker from Vishram, Ajwani, the one who sat across the road in that little real-estate office with the glass door, had arranged for one of his underworld contacts to kill Masterji; no – how he had done it himself, tiptoeing into Vishram under the cover of darkness and lifting the old teacher up on his thick arms to the terrace. They would turn around to find Ramesh Ajwani there, always with a smile, saying: ‘What is the price for brinjals today?’

And they would start to haggle with him: for being a murderer does not necessarily get one a better rate with the brinjals.

He had been the first suspect. Nagarkar, the senior inspector, had summoned him to the station the morning after the death; he knew that Ajwani had connections to shady characters throughout Vakola. (The kinds of clients he had bribed them to get clearance certificates for!) For half a day the inspector grilled him below the portrait of Lord SiddhiVinayak. But his story held. A dozen people remembered seeing the broker outside the Dadar train station at various hours of the night of Masterji’s death; he was said to have suffered an attack of indigestion, and to have lain there, writhing and incoherent.

‘If you didn’t do it, then who did?’ the inspector asked. ‘Do you really expect me to believe it was suicide?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ajwani said. ‘I came home after midnight. I was not well. The police were already there.’

The Secretary was the next to be summoned to the station. But three witnesses put him in Ajwani’s real-estate office at the hour of Masterji’s death. One was Mani, the broker’s assistant, and the other two were Ibrahim Kudwa and Mr Puri, two of his neighbours, both respectable men. Every resident of Vishram Society, it turned out, could prove that he or she had been somewhere else at that time. The only ones who were in the building when Masterji fell off the roof were an ancient couple, the Pintos, who seemed barely capable of either sight or movement.

The builder? Nagarkar knew that Shah was a smart man: too smart to become involved if he would be an immediate suspect. So Masterji became the prime suspect in his own murder. Many people, both in Vishram and in the neighbourhood at large, gave evidence that the teacher had been growing senile and unpredictable for a while. His wife’s death and his diabetes had made him depressed. In the end the Inspector decided, since he did not like unsolved mysteries, that it must have been suicide.

Ajwani knew it was not. For one week he had not spoken to anyone else in Vishram. Then he moved his son and wife to a rental flat by the train station. He was not going to live with those people again.

How they had done it he was not sure. Maybe Mr and Mrs Puri had done it on their own; the Secretary may have helped. Maybe it was just a push. But no, some part of him knew that Masterji would have struggled. A born fighter, that old man. They must have drugged him, or maybe hit him; whatever they did, either because the skull cracked in the fall, or because the doctor who examined the corpse was incompetent or bored, nothing had been detected.

He came to the fruit and vegetable market twice a day, three times a day if he could. He bargained for carrots and guavas and abuse; this was part of his penance. He hoped that the vendors would surround him one day and thrust their fingers into his ribcage; then pelt him with tomatoes and potatoes and push chillies into his eyes. He wanted to go home stained and accused of murder.

For two months after his death, Masterji was a residue of dark glamour on the Vakola market, a layer of ash over the produce. Then other scandals and other mysteries came. The vendors forgot him; Ajwani had become just another customer.

He walked away from the market, hands behind his back, until he heard hammers chipping away at stone and brick.

Vishram Society was overrun by workmen like a block of sugar by black ants. The roof had fallen in; men sat on the exposed beams and stood all along the stairs, hacking at wood with saws, and hammering at walls and beams. TNT could not be used in a neighbourhood this densely populated; the destruction had to be done by human hands. The men who had been working on the Confidence Excelsior and the Fountainhead were now chipping, peeling, and smashing Vishram; the women carried the debris on troughs on their heads and dumped it into the back of a truck.

Every few hours, the truck drove down the road, and poured its contents as filling into the foundations of the Ultimex Milano. The metal skeleton beneath the paint and plaster would be sent to workshops around Falkland Road to be broken up and recycled. Even in death, Vishram Society was being of service to Vakola and Mumbai.

As each hammer struck Vishram, the building fumed, emitting white puffs from its sides, like an angry man in the
Tom and Jerry
cartoons that Ajwani’s sons watched in the mornings. It looked like some slow torture for all the trouble that the building had given Mr Shah. Some of the Christian workers had wanted to save the black Cross, but it was gone, probably crushed into the foundations of the Milano. Soon all that would remain of Vishram Society would be the old banyan; and each time there was a wind, its leaves brushed against the abandoned guard’s booth like a child trying to stir a dead thing to life.

Ajwani leaned against the tree and touched its trunk.

‘Rich man! Where have you been?’

A tall and lean man, brushing white dust from his white shirt and black trousers, had come up to him.

‘You haven’t signed the Confidence Group papers,’ Shanmugham said, ‘and without it we can’t give you the money.’

Ajwani stepped back from the tree.

Shanmugham raised a leg and patted white dust off his trousers.

‘One and a half crores of rupees. All of you are now rich men, and what do I get, Mr Ajwani? Nothing.’

Mr Shah had not given him a bonus or an extra. Not even a pat on the head, not even what a dog would get for chasing a stick. All the boss had said was: ‘Now I want you to make sure that the demolition does not fall one day behind, Shanmugham. Time is money.’

For months he had been the man handing out red boxes of sweets to the residents of Vishram: where was
his
red box?

Moving close to the broker, he lowered his voice.

‘I’ve been thinking about what you said. That day in your inner room, when we sat with the coconuts. About how some clever left-hand men actually manage to…’

Shanmugham started. The broker was walking away briskly, arms swinging, as if he were about to break into a run.

‘Come back, Mr Ajwani! If you don’t sign your papers, you won’t get the money!’

What was wrong with the man?

With one eye closed, Shanmugham looked at the old banyan’s leaves: sunlight oozed through the dark canopy like raw white honey. He picked up a stone and threw it at the light.