Last Man in Tower (4 page)

The Secretary responded with one of his pacifying smiles. ‘I’ll have the plumber sent over next time I see him, Masterji.’

The door creaked open: Sunil Rego had returned.

The boy left his slippers at the threshold and entered holding a long rectangular scroll. Masterji saw the words ‘
TUBERCULOSIS AWARENESS WEEK FUND-RAISING DRIVE
’ written on the top.

Fourteen-year-old Sunil Rego’s mother was a social worker, a formidable woman of left-wing inclinations nicknamed ‘The Battleship’ within the Society. The son was already proving to be a little gunboat.

‘Masterji, TB is an illness that we can overcome together if we all—’

The old teacher shook his head. ‘I live on a pension, Sunil: ask someone else for a donation.’

Embarrassed that he had to say this in front of the others, Masterji pushed the boy, perhaps too hard, out of the room.

*

After dinner, Mrs Puri, folding Ramu’s laundry on the dining table, looked at a dozen ripe mangoes. Her husband was watching a replay of a classic India versus Australia cricket match on TV. He had bought the mangoes as a treat for Ramu, who was asleep under his aeroplane quilt.

Closing the door behind her, she walked up the stairs, and pushed at the door to Masterji’s flat with her left hand. Her right hand pressed three mangoes against her chest.

The door was open, as she expected. Masterji had his feet on the small teakwood table in the living room, and was playing with a multi-coloured toy that she took a whole second to identify.

‘A Rubik’s Cube,’ she marvelled. ‘I haven’t seen one in years and years.’

He held it up for her to see better.

‘I found it in one of the old cupboards. I think it was Gaurav’s. Works.’

‘Surprise, Masterji.’ She turned the mangoes in her right arm towards his gaze.

He put the Rubik’s Cube down on the teakwood table.

‘You shouldn’t have, Sangeeta.’

‘Take them. You have taught our children for thirty years. Shall I cut them for you?’

He shook his head.

‘I don’t have sweets every day – once a week: and today is not that day.’

He would not bend on this, she knew.

‘When are you going to see Ronak?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow.’ He smiled. ‘In the afternoon. We’re going to Byculla Zoo.’

‘Well, take them for him then. A gift from his grandfather.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The boy shouldn’t be spoiled with mangoes. You are too generous in every way, Sangeeta. I see that there is a stray dog lying on the stairs now. It seems to be ill – there is a smell from it. I hope you didn’t bring it into the Society, as you have done before.’

‘Oh, no, Masterji,’ she said, tapping on the mangoes. ‘Not me. It was probably Mrs Rego again.’

Though she had not actually given Masterji the mangoes, Mrs Puri felt the same sense of neighbourly entitlement that would have resulted from the act, and moved to his bookshelf.

‘Are you becoming religious, Masterji?’

‘Certainly not,’ he said.

Sliding out a thin paperback from the shelf, she showed it to him as evidence; on the cover was an image of the divine eagle Garuda flying over the seven oceans.

The Soul’s Passageway after Death
.

She read aloud from it: ‘In its first year out of the body, the soul travels slowly and at a low altitude, burdened by the sins of its…’

‘Purnima’s first anniversary is not so far away. She wanted me to read about God when she was gone…’

‘Do you think about her often, Masterji?’

He shrugged.

For his retirement, Masterji had hoped to re-read his collection of murder mysteries, and history books of old Rome (Suetonius,
The Twelve Caesars
; Tacitus,
The Annals
; Plutarch,
Illustrious Figures of the Roman Republic
) and old Bombay (
A Brief Life of Mountstuart Elphinstone
;
The Stages of the Creation of the City of Bombay, fully illustrated
). An
Advanced French Grammar (with Questions and Answers Provided)
, bought so he could teach his children at home, also stood on the shelf. But since the murder novels were in demand throughout the Society, and neighbours borrowed them frequently (and returned them infrequently), he would soon be left only with history and foreign grammar.

Mrs Puri claimed one of the last Agatha Christies from the bookshelf and smiled – there were a few Erle Stanley Gardners too, but she was not
that
bored.

‘Does it say on my door, Agatha Christie lending library?’ Masterji asked. ‘I won’t have any books to read if people keep borrowing them.’

‘I’m taking this for my husband. Not that I don’t read, Masterji. I was such a reader in my college days.’ She raised her hand over her head, to indicate its extent. ‘Where is the time now, with the boy to look after? I’ll bring it back next week, I promise you.’

‘Fine.’ He had begun playing with the Cube again. ‘Just bring the book back. Which one is it?’

Mrs Puri turned the cover around so he could read the title:
Murder on the Orient Express
.

Yogesh Murthy, known as Masterji, was one of the first Hindus allowed into Vishram on account of his noble profession and dignified bearing. He was lean, moustached, and of medium height: in physical terms, a typical representative of the earlier generation. Good with languages (he spoke six), generous with books, passionate about education. An adornment to his Society.

Barely had the buntings of his retirement party (catered with samosa and masala chai, and attended by three generations of students) been cut from the auditorium of St Catherine’s the previous May than his wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – a side-effect, it was speculated, of years of medication for her rheumatoid arthritis. She died in October. She was his second death; a daughter, Sandhya, had fallen from a train over a decade ago. On the positive side of the ledger, Gaurav, his only surviving child, a banker, was now ‘put up’ in a good flat in South Mumbai – Marine Lines – by his employer (who had paid the six-month down-deposit for his flat and even took care, it was said, of half of each month’s rent); so Masterji’s story was, in a sense, over – career ended with retirement party (catered), wife passed away without unreasonable suffering, and child having migrated to the golden citadel of inner-city Bombay. What would he do with his remaining time – the cigarette stub of years left to a man already in his sixties? After the loss of his wife, he had continued to keep himself clean and his home tidy; had continued to teach children, to lend murder mysteries, to take his evening walks around the compound at the right pace and to buy his vegetables in appropriate quantities from the market. Controlling appetites and sorrows, he had accepted his lot with dignity, and this elevated his standing among his neighbours, who had all, in one way or the other, and usually in the matter of children or spouses, been blighted by fate. They knew they were complainers, and that he, though he had suffered more than his fair share, bore it.

12 MAY

‘Oyoyoy, my Ramu. Out of bed now. Or Mummy will whack your bottom harder. Up, or the Friendly Duck will say, Ramu is a lazy lazy fellow.’

Mrs Puri coaxed Ramu into a bath half filled with warm (
never
hot) water, and let him play with his Friendly Duck and Spiderman for a few minutes. Mr Puri, an accountant, left for work an hour before Ramu woke up, with a metal lunch box that his wife had packed. It was a long trip for him – auto, train, change of train at Dadar, and then a shared taxi from Victoria Terminus to Nariman Point, from where he would call Ramu punctually at noon to inquire about the state of the Friendly Duck’s health that day.

‘Rum-pum-pum,’ the naked, dripping boy said, while she scrubbed his pale, downy legs. (Good for the circulation, according to
Reader’s Digest
.) ‘Rum-pum-pum.’ There was a time, not so long ago, when he would bathe and dry himself off with a towel in minutes – and she had had dreams of his being able to dress himself one day.

‘We should learn a new word today, Ramu. Here, what’s this word in Masterji’s novel? Ex-press. Say it.’

‘Rum-pum-pum.’

Treading on the old newspapers lying on the floor, Ramu, now fully dressed, headed into the dining room. The Puris’ 834 sq ft of living space was a maelstrom of newsprint. The sofas had been lost to
India Today
and
Femina
magazines, while the dining table was submerged under office papers, loan applications, electricity bills, savings bank statements, and Ramu’s cartoon drawing books. The face of the fridge in the dining room was a collage of philantrophic stickers (‘Fight Global Warming: Lights out for one hour this week’) and crumpling notes with long-expired messages. There were cupboards in each room; their doors gave way suddenly to let books and newspapers gush out with traumatic force, like eggs from the slit-open belly of a fish. Every few weeks, Mr Puri would scatter magazines while searching for a bank cheque or letter and shout: ‘Why don’t we clean this house up!’ But the mess grew. The enveloping junk only enhanced the domestic glow from the neat beds and the well-stocked fridge, for (as outsiders instinctively understood) this dingy, dirty flat was an Aladdin’s cave of private riches. The Puris owned no property and little gold. What they had to show for their life was in the form of paper, and how comforting that all of it was within arm’s reach, even Mr Puri’s old, old
Shankar’s Weekly
magazines, full of cartoons mocking Prime Minister Nehru, borrowed from a friend when he dreamed of becoming a professional caricaturist.

As his mother put Ramu’s shiny black shoes on her knees, one after the other, to tie his laces, he sneezed. Down below in 2C, Mrs Ajwani, the broker’s wife, was spraying herself generously with synthetic deodorant. Done with the laces, Mrs Puri spat on the shoes and gave them a final polish with a thick index finger, before she took Ramu to the toilet, so he could admire his good looks. The moment the boy stood before the mirror, the toilet filled with gurgling noise, as if a jealous devil were cursing. Directly overhead in 4C, Ibrahim Kudwa was performing extraordinary exercises with salt water, designed to strengthen his weak stomach. Mrs Puri countered with some gargling of her own; Ramu pressed his head into her tummy and chuckled into his mother’s fatty folds.

‘Bye, watchman!’ Mrs Puri shouted, on Ramu’s behalf, as they left the Society. Ram Khare, reading his digest of the Bhagavad Gita, waved without looking up.

Ramu disliked heat, so Mrs Puri made him walk along the edge of the alley, where king coconut palms shaded them. The palms were an oddity, a botanical experiment conducted by the late Mr Alvares, whose mansion, full of unusual trees and plants, had been sold by his heirs to make room for the three florally named concrete blocks, ‘Hibiscus’, ‘Marigold’, and ‘White Rose’.

Mrs Puri tickled her son’s ear.

‘Say “Mar-i-gold”, Ramu. You could say lots of things in English, don’t you remember? Mar-i…?’

‘Rum-pum-pum.’

‘Where did you learn this thing, Ramu, this “Rum-pum-pum”?’

She looked at her boy. Eighteen years old. Never growing, yet somehow picking up new things all the time – just like the city he lived in.

As they neared the church, Ramu began to play with the gold bangles on his mother’s hand.

The school bus was waiting for them in front of the church. Before helping Ramu board its steps, Mrs Puri loaded him with a home-made sign: it showed a big green horn with a red diagonal going through it and the legend ‘NO NOISE’. Once again, Mrs Puri made his classmates promise, as she did every morning, to be quiet; and then she waved, as the bus departed, at Ramu, who could not wave back (since he was pressing the NO NOISE sign to his chest), but said what he had to say to his mother with his eyes.

Mrs Puri hobbled back to Vishram. Walking around the big construction hole in front of the gate, which the workers were now filling up with shovels, she noticed that the sign:

W
ORK IN
P
ROGRESS
I
NCONVENIENCE IS
R
EGRETTED
BMC

had been crossed out and rewritten:

I
NCONVENIENCE IN
P
ROGRESS
W
ORK IS
R
EGRETTED
BMC

Age had accumulated in fatty rings around Mrs Puri, but her laughter came from a slim girl within: a joyous, high-pitched, ascending ivory staircase of mirth. The shovels stopped moving; the men looked at her.

‘Who wrote this joke on the sign?’ she asked. They went back to filling the hole.

‘Ram Khare! Look up from your book. Who did
that
to the municipal sign?’

‘Mr Ibrahim Kudwa,’ the guard said, without looking up. ‘He asked me what I thought of the joke and I said, I can’t read English, sir. Is it a good joke?’

‘We are impotent people in an impotent city, Ram Khare, as Ibby often says. Jokes are the only weapon we have.’

‘Truly, madam.’ Khare turned the page of his book. ‘There will be no water supply this evening, by the way. These men hit a water pipe when working and they have to shut down the supply for a few hours. The Secretary will put up a sign on the board after he gets back from his business.’

Mrs Puri wiped her face with a handkerchief. Breathe in. Breathe out. She turned around from the guard’s booth and retraced her steps out of the gate.

The warning about the water cut had reminded her of Masterji’s blocked taps.

Any good Society survives on a circulation of favours; it is like the children’s game where each passes the ‘touch’ on to his neighbour. If Mrs Puri needed a man’s helping hand when her husband was at work, the Secretary, who was good with a hammer and nail, helped out; just last week he had struck a nail into the wall for a new rope-line for her wet clothes. In return, she knew she had to take responsibility for Masterji’s needs.

When her boy was diagnosed with Down’s syndrome, Sangeeta Puri, before telling her mother or sister, had told her immediate neighbours. Masterji, listening to the news with a hand on his wife’s shoulder, had begun to cry. She still remembered those tears falling down his cheeks: a man who had never wept on any other day, even when there was a death in his family. For years he had given her suggestions from medical journals and newspapers, to halt – or even reverse – Ramu’s ‘delay’. Everything she had done to stir Ramu’s inert neurons into life, she had discussed first with Masterji: consultations with foreign-trained specialists, oil massages, innovative mental and physical exercises, shock doses of shark liver oil and cod liver oil; Masterji, despite his well-known atheism, had even approved of her trips to holy shrines to seek divine favour on Ramu’s slow brain.

And there was another matter. Six months before her death, Purnima had lent Mrs Puri five hundred rupees, which she had in turn lent to a relative. Masterji had not been told about this by Purnima, who often shielded her financial indiscretions (as he would judge them) from his temper.

So, becoming Ms Responsibility once more, Mrs Puri headed for the slums.

There were two ways in which the residents of Vishram Society had, historically, dealt with the existence of slums in Vakola. One was to leave the gate of Vishram every morning, process to the main road, and pretend there was no other world near by. The other was the pragmatic approach – taken by Mr Ajwani, the broker, and also by Mrs Puri. Down in the slums, she had discovered many men of talent, experts at small household tasks. Had she not once seen a plumber there?

So now she walked down the mud road, past two other middle-class buildings – Silver Trophy and Gold Coin – and into the slums, which, branching out from here, encroached on to public land belonging to the Airport Authority of India, and expanded like pincers to the very edge of the runway, so that the first sight of a visitor arriving in Mumbai might well be of a boy from one of these shanties, flying a kite or hitting a cricket ball tossed by his friends.

Smelling woodsmoke and kerosene, Mrs Puri passed a row of single-room huts, each with its tin door open. Women sat outside, combing each other’s hair, talking, watching over the pots of steaming rice; a rooster strutted across the roofs. Where had Mrs Puri seen that plumber? Further down the road, two giant half-built towers covered in scaffolding – she had not seen them before – only multiplied her confusion.

Suddenly, the roar of an engine: white and tubular and glistening, like a sea snake leaping up, a plane shot over a small Tamil temple.
This
was the landmark she had been trying to remember: this temple. Somewhere here she had seen that plumber.

A group of boys were playing cricket at the temple: a guardian demon’s face painted on the outer wall (its black mouth opened wide enough to swallow all the world’s malefactors) served as the wicket.

All this animal power, all this screaming from the cricketers: oh, how a mother’s heart ached. These boys with their rippling limbs and sinewy elbows were growing into men. And not one of them
half
as good-looking as her Ramu.

‘Mummy,’ one of the cricketers shouted. ‘Mummy, it’s Mrs Puri Aunty.’

Mary, the cleaning lady of Vishram Society, stood up from the roots of a tree in the temple courtyard, wiping her hands on her skirt.

‘This is my son,’ she pointed to the cricketer. ‘Timothy. Spends too much time here, playing.’

Inside the Society, relations between Mary and Mrs Puri were frosty (‘yes, it
is
part of your job to catch that early-morning cat’), but the distance from Vishram and the presence of Mary’s boy permitted a relaxation in mistress–servant tensions.

‘Nice-looking boy. Growing tall and strong.’ Mrs Puri smiled. ‘Mary, that plumber who lives here, I need to find him for some work in Masterji’s flat.’

‘Madam—’

‘There are problems with his pipe. Also his ceiling needs to be scrubbed. I’ll go from flat to flat and make a collection for the plumber’s fee.’

‘Madam, you won’t find anyone today. Because of the big news. They’ve all gone to see the Muslim man’s hut.’

‘What big news is this, Mary?’

‘Haven’t you heard, madam?’ She smiled. ‘God has visited the slums today.’

In the evening, the ‘big news’ was confirmed by Ritika, an old college mate of Mrs Puri and a resident of Tower B, who came over to parliament.

Their higher average income, lower average age, and a sense of being ‘somehow more modern’ meant that Tower B residents kept to themselves, used their own gate, and celebrated their religious festivals separately.

Only Ritika, a show-off even in college, ever came over to Tower A, usually to brag about something. Her husband, a doctor who had a clinic near the highway, had just spoken to the Muslim man in the slums, who was a patient of his.

Mrs Puri did not like Ritika getting such attention – who had beaten whom in the debating competition in college? – but she sat on a plastic chair in between Ajwani the broker and Kothari the Secretary and listened.

Mr J. J. Chacko, the boss of the Ultimex Group, had made an offer of 81 lakh rupees (81,00,000) to that Muslim man for his one-room hut. It was just down the road from Vishram. Had they seen where the two new buildings were coming up? That was the Confidence Group. J. J. Chacko was their big rival. So he was buying all the land right opposite the two new buildings. He already owned everything around the one-room hut; this one stubborn old Muslim kept saying
No, No, No
, so Mr Chacko bludgeoned him with this astronomical offer, calculated on God alone knows what basis.

‘Everyone, please wait a minute. I’ll find out if this is true.’

Amiable and dark, Ramesh Ajwani was known within Vishram to be a typical member of his tribe of real-estate brokers. Ethics not to be trusted, information not to be doubted. He was a small man in a blue safari suit. He punched at his mobile phone; they waited; after a minute, it beeped.

Ajwani looked at the text message and said: ‘True.’

They sighed.

The residents of Vishram Society, even if they kept away from the slums, were aware of changes happening there ever since the Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC), the new financial hub of the city, had opened right next to it. Bombay, like a practitioner of yoga, was folding in on itself, as its centre moved from the south, where there was no room to grow, to this swamp land near the airport. New financial buildings were opening every month in the BKC – American Express, ICICI Bank, HSBC, Citibank, you name it – and the lucre in their vaults, like butter on a hotplate, was melting and trickling into the slums, enriching some and scorching others among the slum-dwellers. A few lucky hut-owners were becoming millionaires, as a bank or a developer made an extraordinary offer for their little plot of land; others were being crushed – bulldozers were on the move, shanties were being levelled, slum clearance projects were going ahead. As wealth came to some, and misery to others, stories of gold and tears reached Vishram Society like echoes from a distant battlefield. Here, among the plastic chairs of their parliament, the lives of the residents were slow and regular. They had the security of titles and legal deeds that could not be revoked, and their aspirations were limited to a patient rise in life earned through universities and interviews in grey suit and tie. It was not in their karma to know either gold or tears; they were respectable.