Last Man in Tower (7 page)

The door was open. Two black leather shoes had been left outside.

In the living room, a tableau as if from a stage comedy. In front of a giant bronze image of the Dancing Nataraja, Shah saw Giri, his housekeeper, alongside two men in khaki uniforms, one of whom sipped a glass of cold water. The other man in uniform had a hand on Satish, his son, and was admonishing the boy with his index finger, as if putting on a dumb show for his father’s sake.

The mucus in Shah’s chest rumbled.

‘Boss.’ Giri, who wore a tattered
banian
and blue lungi, came up to him. ‘He did it again. He was spray-painting cars outside the school; they caught him and brought him here. I told them to wait till you…’

The policeman who had his hand on Satish, appeared to be the senior of the two. He spoke. The other kept drinking his cold water.

‘First, we saw him doing this…’

The policeman made a circular motion to indicate the action of spraying. Shah listened. The fingers of his left hand rubbed the thick gold ring on the fingers of his right.

‘Then he did
this
. Then
this
. They finished painting the first car, and then they went to the next. It’s a gang, and each one of them has a gang-name. Your son’s name is Soda Pop.’

‘Soda Pop,’ Shah said.

The policeman who had been sipping water nodded. ‘… Pop.’

Plump, fair-skinned Satish exuded nonchalance, as if the matter concerned someone else.

‘Then Constable Hamid, sir’ – the policeman talking gestured to the one who was not – ‘he’s sitting in the police van, he said, isn’t that the developer Mr Shah’s son? And then, considering the excellent relations that our station has always had with you, sir, we thought…before it gets into the papers…’

The developer Mr Shah, having heard enough, wanted possession of the goods: with his fingers, he beckoned the boy. The policeman did not stop him; he strolled over to his father’s side.

‘His friends? Those other boys, who were doing this—’ Shah made the same circular motion. ‘What happens to them?’

‘They’ll all have to go to the police station. Their parents will have to come and release them. We’ll keep the names out of the papers.
This
time.’

Shah put his hand on his heart. ‘
So
grateful.’

Giri went at once into his master’s study. A wooden drawer opened, then closed. Giri had done this before, and knew exactly how much to put in the envelope.

He handed it to Shah, who felt its weight, approved, and handed it to the policeman who had done the talking: ‘For some chai and cold drinks at your police station, my friend. I know it’s very hot these days.’

Though the envelope had been accepted, neither of the policemen had left. The talkative one said: ‘My daughter’s birthday is coming up, sir. It’ll be a nice weekend for me.’

‘I’ll send her a birthday cake from the Taj. They have a nice pastry shop. It’ll arrive soon.’

‘Sir…’ The quiet policeman spoke.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, my daughter’s birthday is coming up too.’

Giri saw the policemen out with a smile; Shah stood chafing the thick gold rings on his index finger. The moment Giri closed the door, Shah jabbed the ring into his son’s nose.

‘Soda Pop’ flinched, squeezed his eyes closed, and held his face averted, as if preserving the force of the jab.

Soda Pop trembled; if he could, every part of his body said, he would have launched himself at his father and killed him right then.

Giri took him away to his room. ‘Let’s wash up, Baba. We’ll go to your room and drink some warm milk. That’s what we’ll do.’

Returning to the living room, Giri found his employer and Shanmugham on either side of the Dancing Nataraja, examining the white thing that shared the wooden table on which the bronze statue stood: a plaster-of-Paris model of a building, which a peon from Mr Shah’s office had brought to the flat two days ago.

‘Will you go and speak to the boy now?’ Giri asked. ‘Say something nice.’

Shah ran his palm down the side of the plaster-of-Paris model.

‘Bring me a plate with some toast, Giri,’ he said. ‘At once. And some for Shanmugham, too.’

Giri glared at Shanmugham as he went to the kitchen; he did not approve of the presence of employees during meals.

Shah kept looking at the plaster-of-Paris model. His eyes went down to the inscription on its base:

C
ONFIDENCE
S
HANGHAI
V
AKOLA
, S
ANTA
C
RUZ
(E) S
UPER
L
UXURY
A
PARTMENTS
‘F
ROM
M
Y
F
AMILY TO
Y
OURS
’

‘Look at it, Shanmugham,’ he said. ‘Just look at it. Won’t it be beautiful when it comes up?’

From the moment the car turned on to the bridge at Bandra, Shah had kept his eyes closed.

He felt his pulse quickening. His lungs became lighter. It was as if he had not coughed in years.

The Mercedes came to a halt; he heard someone opening the door for him.

‘Sir.’

He stepped out, holding Shanmugham’s hands. He had still not opened his eyes; he wanted to defer the pleasure for as long as possible.

He could already hear the two of them: the Confidence Excelsior and the Confidence Fountainhead. Rumbling, the way the boy had been inside his mother’s womb, in the last months before delivery.

He walked over truck tyre ruts, hardened and ridged like fossilized vertebrae. He felt crushed granite stones under his feet, which gave away to smooth sand, studded with fragments of brick. The noise grew around him.

Now he opened his eyes.

Cement mixers were churning like cannons aimed at the two buildings; women in colourful saris took troughs full of wet mortar up the floors of the Fountainhead. Further down the road, he saw the Excelsior, more skeletal, covered with nets and scaffoldings, ribs of dark wooden beams propping up each unbuilt floor.

A small village had sprung up around the construction work: migrants from north India, the workers had re-created the old home. Cows swatting away flies, broth in an aluminium vessel boiling over, a small shrine of a red god. Hitching up his trousers, Shah walked up to the cow; he touched its forehead three times for good luck and touched his own.

A group of day-labourers were waiting for him.

‘How is the cement pouring today?’ he asked.

‘Very well, sir.’

‘Then why are you people standing here, wasting time?’

He counted the men. Six. They wore
banians
and white dhotis, and their bodies were filmed over with construction dust. The contractor in charge of work at the Fountainhead came running.

‘They say, sir, the heat… they want to go and tend their fields…’

Shah clicked his tongue.

‘I want them to speak for themselves.’

One of the group of mutineers, a small man with neatly parted hair, explained.

‘We can’t work in these conditions, sahib, please forgive us. We will finish the day’s work honestly, and leave in the evening. Ask the contractor. We have been your best workers until now.’

Shah looked up at the Fountainhead, and then at the Excelsior, and raised his eyes to the sun.

‘I know it is hot. The coconut palms are turning brown. The cows don’t want to stand even if you put food in front of them. I know it is hot. But we have only a month before it starts raining, and we must finish pouring concrete now. If we don’t, I will lose a month and a half – two months, if the rains are heavy. And time is one thing I cannot lose.’

He spat something thick, pink, and
gutka
-stained. He stroked the cow again, and spoke.

‘You may think, looking at me, he is a rich man, what does he know about the heat? Let me tell you.’

Using the hand which had been rubbing the cow, he pointed a finger at the men: ‘This Dharmen Shah of yours knows what it is to work and walk and sweat in the heat. He did not grow up in luxury like other rich men. He grew up in a village called Krishnapur in Gujarat. When he came to Bombay he had just twelve rupees and eighty paise on him and he came in summer. He took the train, he took the bus, and when he had no more money for the bus, he walked. His chappals wore away and he tied leaves around his feet and he kept walking. And you know what he found when he came to Bombay?’

Two fifty
, Shanmugham thought.
Don’t offer them more than 250
.

‘Gold.’ Mr Shah now showed the mutineers all his fingers and all his rings. ‘And the hotter it becomes, the more gold there is in the air. I will increase your pay…’ He squeezed his fingers back in and tingled them as he frowned. ‘… to… 300 rupees per day per man. That’s a hundred rupees more than you are getting now, and more than you’ll get anywhere else in Santa Cruz. You say you want to go home. Don’t I know what you’ll do? Work your farms? No. You’ll lie on a charpoy in the shade, smoke, play with a child. When the sun sets, you’ll drink. You’ll run out of money, come back on 15 June, when it’s raining, and beg me for work. Open your ears: the contractor will remember each worker who leaves now when the boss needed him most. No man who does not work for Shah when it is hot will work for him when it is cool. I will send buses around Maharashtra to pick up villagers and bring them here. It may double my expenses but I will do it. But if you stay and work, I’ll pay you 300 rupees, day after day. I’m tossing gold in the air. Who will grab it?’

The workers looked at one another: indecision rippled over them, and then the one with the neatly parted hair said: ‘Sahib, do you mean what you said, 300 a day? Even the women?’

‘Even the women. Even the children.’ Shah spat again and licked his lips. ‘Even your dogs and cats if they put bricks on their heads and carry them for me.’

‘We will stay for you, sahib,’ the worker said.

And though none of the other men in
banians
and dhotis looked happy, they seemed powerless to resist.

‘Good. Get to work at once. The rains are coming closer to Bombay every second we waste.’

When they were out of earshot, the contractor whispered: ‘Are you really going to pay the women the same, sir? Three hundred?’

‘How much are you giving them now?’

‘One twenty-five. If they’re hefty, 150.’

‘Give the women 200,’ Shah said. ‘The fat ones 220. But the men get 300 as I said.’

‘And you—’ he jabbed a gold-ringed finger at the contractor’s chest. ‘Next time something is wrong at the site, don’t tell me: “All is well, sir.” Does it hurt your mouth if the truth comes out of it once a year?’

‘Forgive me, sir,’ the contractor said.

‘They’re social animals, you understand. If one complains, all will complain. I need to know as soon as there is trouble.’

‘Forgive me, sir.’

Shah walked with Shanmugham from the Fountainhead to his other building.

Shanmugham felt his shirt sticking to his back. His employer’s shirt was wet too, but it seemed to him that these were spots not of moisture, but of molten butter. The man who had been sick in the morning now glowed with health. Shanmugham could barely keep up with him.

They were at a group of workers’ huts in between the two building projects. A stunted gulmohar tree stood here with criss-crossing branches, like a man who has got his arms in a tangle by pointing in every direction at once. A water pump dripped in its shade. A heap of sand was piled up on one side of the tree, with crushed stones on the other side. Two of the workers’ children had pitched a tyre on a low branch, on which they swung until their feet dug into the sand. Another had picked up an axe, with which he attacked the sand, sneezing each time his wobbling blows connected.

The builder stopped by the water pump to read a message on his mobile phone.

‘That was from Giri.’ He put his phone into his pocket. ‘I would have cancelled the birthday party for Satish but the invitations have gone out. The boy has agreed to be there, and behave himself.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You have children don’t you, Shanmugham?’

‘Yes, sir. Two sons.’

‘I hope they never become to you, Shanmugham, the curse mine is to me.’

‘Shall I go now, sir? To Vishram Society – to make the offer?’

‘You wait until I tell you to go. The astrologer is going to call me and give me the exact time. This won’t be an easy project, Shanmugham. We need every chance we can get. The stars might help us.’

Shah pointed with his mobile phone across the road. A plane went overhead; waiting until its boom passed, he said: ‘Look at his guts, Shanmugham. Right under my nose he buys that place.’

Across the road, a giant billboard had come up next to the ramshackle brick houses with corrugated tin roofs held down by rocks.

U
LTIMEX
G
ROUP IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE FUTURE SITE OF
‘U
LTIMEX
M
ILANO
’ A N
EW
C
ONCEPT IN
H
OUSING
S
UPER
L
UXURY
A
PARTMENTS

‘Do you know when he’s going to start work?’

‘No word yet, sir.’

‘People will laugh at me if he finishes his building first, Shanmugham.’