Last Man in Tower

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.

16 DECEMBER

The lift opened: the chai boy stepped out into the car park with a tray full of teacups.

He stopped and stared.

The tall man in the white shirt was doing it again. Standing before his Hero Honda motorbike, he was talking into the rear-view mirror.

‘Mr Shah, I know you told me you didn’t want to talk about a certain event ever again, but yesterday I met that broker, and I…’

The tall man closed his eyes, and tried again.

‘Mr Shah, the real story behind… I know you told me never to mention it again, but I…’

The chai boy tiptoed around him; he took his tray of morning tea to the drivers waiting at the other end of the basement car park.

A quarter of an hour later, Shanmugham stood before his employer. Giri was in the kitchen, cutting something to pieces.

At his work desk, with the poster of the Eiffel Tower behind him, the boss was signing each page of a bundle of documents.

‘Did I ask you to come up, Shanmugham?’ he said without looking up. ‘Go down and wait for me. We have to go to Juhu immediately.’

The left-hand man did not move.

Shah looked up; he held a silver pen in his fingers.

‘We just had a call, Shanmugham. Satish has been arrested. Doing the same thing with the gang. This time in Juhu.’ He made a circular motion with his pen in his hand. ‘They sprayed some politician’s van. Giri is putting the money in the envelope. We won’t be able to keep it out of the newspapers this time.’

Shanmugham said what he had rehearsed for nearly twenty minutes in the basement: ‘Sir: in the matter of the murder at Vishram Society. I have been thinking about it for some time. It is not a suicide. In Vakola they say either Shah did it, or the neighbours did it. And you didn’t do it, since I didn’t do it. So the neighbours did it.’

Shah did not look up.

‘The newspapers said it was suicide. Go down and wait. We must go to Juhu.’

Shanmugham spoke to the poster of the Eiffel Tower over his boss’s head.

‘The police might be interested, sir, if someone told them that the people in Vishram did it. They might reopen the case. Look at the photographs of the corpse more carefully. The construction might be delayed.’

The silver pen dropped on to the table.

Shanmugham shivered; in another room, Shah’s mobile phone had begun to ring. Giri came in with the mobile phone, wiped it on his lungi, and placed it on his employer’s desk.

Shah, his eyes closed, listened to the voice on the phone.

‘I am on my way. I understand. I am on my way.’

He rubbed the phone on his forearm and held it out for Giri.

Giri stood in the threshold for a minute, looking at the two men. Then he went back to the kitchen to continue cutting his bread.

Shah’s jaw began working. He started to laugh.

‘Oh, you are a son of mine, Shanmugham. A real son.’

He tapped twice on his desk.

‘You listen to me: there is already one body in the foundations of the Shanghai, and there’s plenty of space there for another. Do you understand?’

Shah grinned. Shanmugham understood that he had one sharp tooth, but this man had a mouth full of them.

‘Do you understand?’

Shanmugham could not move. He felt his smallness in the den he had walked into: the den of real estate.

‘Shanmugham. Why are you wasting my time?’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Go down to the basement and wait in the car. We have to get the boy out of the police station.’

And Shanmugham went down to the basement.

At least, Shah thought, I got six good years out of this one. On the pad on his table, where he had written:

Beige marble.

Grilles on windows. (Fabergé egg pattern: pay up to one rupee extra per kg wrought iron. No more.)

he added:

Left-hand man

He straightened his clothes in the mirror, spat on to a finger, checked the colour of his insides, and went downstairs.

Juhu. Two half-built towers like twin phantoms behind a screen of trees, neither vanishing nor growing into clarity.

Dharmen Shah was sick of buildings.

He turned to his son and asked: ‘How many more times will you do this?’

‘Do what?’ Satish was looking out of the window of the moving car. He wore a light green shirt; his school uniform shirt, which he had changed out of, was in a plastic bundle by his feet.

‘Disgrace your family name.’

The boy laughed.

‘I disgrace your name?’ He stared at his father. ‘I read the papers, Father. I saw what happened in Vakola.’

‘I don’t know what you’ve read. That old teacher killed himself. He was mad.’

The boy spoke slowly. ‘All of us in the gang are builders’ sons. If you don’t let us do these things now,’ he said, ‘how will we become good builders when we grow up?’

Shah saw a platinum necklace around his son’s neck; the younger generation preferred it to gold.

Satish asked to be let down at Bandra; he wanted to eat lunch at Lucky’s. His father had taken his credit card from him at the Juhu station; now he gave it back here to the boy, along with a 500-rupee note.

Satish touched the note to his forehead in a salaam. ‘One day, Father, we’ll be proud of each other.’

On a pavement near the Mahim Dargah, Shah saw a dozen beggars, waiting for free bread and curry, sitting outside a cheap restaurant. Tired, lively, cunning, each dirty face seemed to glow. One blind man had his face turned skywards in a look of dumb ecstasy. Just a few feet away, a man with red bleary eyes, his head in his hands, appeared to be the most frightened thing in the world.

Shah watched their faces go past.

If only the traffic hadn’t been so light that evening the old teacher came to the Malabar Hill house. If only he had met face to face with that teacher, the matter would have ended right then. Blood need not have been spilled.

So why had they not met?

He had a vision of a blazing red curtain and a silhouette moving behind it: when the red curtain was torn away, he saw the faces of the beggars outside his car. All his life he had seen faces like these and thought: Clay. My clay. He had squeezed them into shape in his redevelopment projects, he had become rich off them. Now it seemed to him that these shining mysterious faces were the dark powers of his life. They made this thing happen. Not to get my Shanghai built. To get their city built. They have used me for their ends.

One of the beggars laughed. A choir of particulate matter shrilled inside Dharmen Shah’s lungs; he coughed again and again, and spat into a corner of the Mercedes.

Half an hour later, he lay shirtless on a cold bed. In the only place on earth where personalized service depresses you.

‘We changed the size of the bed to suit your body’ — the voice of the radiologist.

Doctors display such familiarity only with the chronically ill.

Face down he lay, the fat folds of his chest and belly pressed against cold hard cushion. An X-ray machine moved above him, taking pictures of the back of his skull.

The X-ray machine stopped moving, and the radiologist went into another room, grumbling: ‘I don’t know if I’ve got the pictures, since you moved…’

Shah, shirtless on a three-legged stool, waited like a schoolboy.

‘I’m sorry. We didn’t get the X-rays. You have five minutes.’

He came out into the outpatient waiting room of Breach Candy Hospital. Rosie was waiting for him, in her shortest shortest skirt.

‘Uncle.’ She clapped. ‘My uncle.’

Her nose was still bruised, a pale strip of skin revealed where the bandage must have sat for days.

‘I thought you weren’t coming, Rosie,’ he said as he sat down by her side. ‘I really did.’

‘Of course I wouldn’t leave you alone in the hospital, Uncle.’ Dropping her voice, she asked: ‘Is the skirt short enough?’

The other patients waiting outside the radiologist’s office stared at this fat man with the well-rounded girl in skimpy clothes with her arms around him. Shah knew they were staring and he didn’t give a shit. Shameless in health, shameless he was going to stay in illness.

‘It’ll warm the whole hospital.’

‘That’s the plan, Uncle.’ She winked. ‘They keep the AC on so high.’

He whispered into her ear.

‘You can go home, Rosie. A hospital is no place for a girl like you.’

Rosie didn’t bother to whisper.

‘My father was the son of a first wife. I never told you this, did I, Uncle? His mother died of blood cancer when he was eight. This country is full of first wife’s sons who ended up as losers. I like being around a winner.’

She kissed him on the cheek.

The wetness remained on Shah’s cheek and he recognized it for what it was: ambition. The girl didn’t just want a hair salon, she wanted everything: all his money, all his buildings. All his money above and below the earth. Marriage.

He wanted to laugh — a girl he had pulled out of jail! — and then he remembered the story Rosie had told him. The actress and the Punjabi producer. ‘Her blowjobs sing across the decades.’

How there is nothing small, nothing ignoble in life. A man may not find love in the sacrament of marriage but he has found it with a woman he coupled with on his office sofa: just as a seed spat out by the gutter pipe, sucking on sewage, can grow into a great banyan.

‘Mr Shah?’ A crooked finger summoned him back into the X-ray room.

You don’t fool me, Shah thought, as the X-ray machine did its work again. You’re not going to save anyone. This was just the bureau cracy of extinction: its first round of paperwork. The cold of the metal bed penetrated multiple layers of butter-fed fat; he shivered.

‘Should I keep my eyes closed or open?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Just relax.’

‘I’ll close them, then.’

‘As you wish. Relax.’

He could feel Rosie’s fingers still warm on his own. He could smell her legs on his trousers. He thought again of the abandoned old mansion that he passed every day on his way down Malabar Hill, the green saplings breaking through the stone foliage. It was as if each green sapling were a message: Leave Mumbai with Rosie, find a city with clean air, have another son, a better one — you still have time, you still have…

Shah took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

… He saw the hawks again: circling with drawn claws, as they had been that sunlit morning in Doctor Nayak’s home above the Cooperage, locked in battle, the most beautiful creatures on a beautiful earth.

The hawks faded away, and he saw an island in the Arabian Sea — saw it as he had once, years ago, on a return flight from London which was held up by congestion at the airport and flew in circles: down there, the city in sunlight seemed like a postage stamp struck in silver, precise and shining and so easy to comprehend. He saw it all, from Juhu to Nariman Point: Bombay, the Jewel in the Jewel in the Crown. He saw south Bombay and Colaba: so closely packed with mirror-clad buildings that the land glittered. He saw Chowpatty beach; the two green ovals of the cricket stadia; the Air India building and the Express building behind, and the towers of Cuffe Parade…

The plane turned to the right. Now he saw the city dramatically walled in by green-red cliffs and plateaux. The air on one side of the cliffs was dark blue and dense; on the other, it was clear. If a man crossed those cliffs, he would find clean air — he would breathe.

The mucus in his chest rumbled. It voted for the clean side of the cliffs.

Dharmen Shah moved the plane back to the dirty side of the cliffs.

The plane was over Vakola now. He saw his Shanghai, most silver among the silver towers; and next to it another Shah tower; and next to it…

His diseased body began to move, despite the radiologist’s orders, on the cold bench, seizing more square inches for itself, dreaming, even here, of reclamation and warm space.

There had been another terrorist threat to the city, and the metal detector at the entrance to the Infiniti Mall in Andheri (West), installed months ago and left inactive ever since, was turned on at last.

It responded with such enthusiasm — beeping three times for each person — that every man and woman entering the mall became a high-risk terrorist threat. A quick frisking and opening of bags restored their name and good reputation, allowing them to ride the escalator to the Big Bazaar supermarket on the first floor, or the Landmark Book Store on the second.

‘Thirty-six rupees for a plate of bhelpuri!’

Mr Kothari, the former Secretary of Vishram Society Tower A, sat down at a table in the atrium of the food court with a heaped plate of bhelpuri. Tinku, holding his plate in one hand, pulled a chair from an adjacent table and joined his father.

‘It is a mall, Father, what do you expect?’ He began to scoop the food into him.

‘This place used to be just birds and trees.’ Kothari looked about the atrium. ‘Andheri.’

As if conjured by his nostalgia, a few sparrows flew into the food court.

His mouth full of puffed rice and diced onion, Tinku gaped.

‘Look who’s here, Father.’

‘Who? Oh, ignore them. Keep eating.’

‘Father, they’re coming here.’

‘A man can’t even enjoy his bhelpuri. Which he’s paid thirty-six…’

A piece of tomato slipped out of Kothari’s mouth as he smiled; he sucked it back in.

‘Forgotten your old neighbours already, haven’t you?’ Ibrahim Kudwa asked, as he came up to their table with little Mariam in his arms; Mumtaz, following him, was carrying two shopping bags. Kudwa dragged a metal chair over to their table.

‘I was just telling Tinku it was time to give you a call — when look who turns up.’

‘You’re looking good, son.’ Kudwa patted Tinku on the back. ‘Healthy.’

The fat boy winced: he knew what this meant.

As Kothari petted Mariam’s cheeks, her father asked: ‘Where do you live these days?’

‘Right here. Andheri West.’

‘But…’ Kudwa frowned. ‘… there are no flamingoes in Andheri West.’

‘Flamingoes were for big men like my father. Those fellows are good enough for me.’ Kothari pointed to the sparrows hopping about the food court. ‘We are in the Capriconius Society. Behind the HDFC bank on Juhu-Versova Link Road. Good place. Good people.’

‘They want Papa to be the Secretary there too,’ Tinku said, as his father blushed.

‘Some bhelpuri for you, Ibrahim? Or you, Mumtaz? A bite for Mariam.’

‘Oh, no,’ Kudwa said. ‘I take three Antacids a day just to go to sleep. The wife has forbidden all outside food.’ He looked at her with a smile. ‘We have good people in our new Society too. In fact’ — he pointed to one of the shopping bags his wife was carrying — ‘I’m taking a gift for my neighbour’s son. A surprise.’

He beamed with pleasure. He noted that Kothari was wearing a new gold necklace — he tried to remember if the man had ever worn gold in his Vishram Society days.

‘But where do you live, Ibrahim?’

‘Bandra East. We have a family shop in hardware. I became a partner with my brother. There’s no future in technology, I tell you. Hammers. Nails. Screws. If you ever need any of these in bulk, please come to Kalanagar. Let me write down my address.’ He turned to Mumtaz; putting her bags down, she took out a ballpoint pen and wrote on a paper napkin.

When she had done as her husband told her, Mumtaz put the pen down and looked at Kothari.

‘Any news from the builder? The second instalment is already three weeks late.’

‘I phoned his office and left a message.’ Kothari folded the napkin with the Kudwas’ phone number. ‘If he doesn’t pay this instalment and the next one on time, we’ll go to court.’

‘What a fraud that man proved to be. Mr Shah. We trusted him.’

‘All builders are the same, Ibrahim, old-fashioned or new-fashioned. But the first instalment did come, and he did give us eight weeks’ rent while we looked for a new place. He will pay. Just likes to delay.’

‘Where is Mrs Puri these days, Ibrahim? Any idea?’

‘Goregaon. Gokuldam. In that new tower there. Nice place, new woodwork. They’ve hired a full-time nurse for the boy.’

‘That’s the future. Goregaon. So much empty space.’

Kudwa shook his head. ‘Between us, the boy’s health has suddenly become much worse. I don’t know what she will do if he… Gaurav comes to see her all the time, she says. He’s become like a son to her.’

Kothari dug his plastic spoon into his food.

‘And Mrs Rego?’ he asked. ‘Any word?’

‘We were never close,’ Kudwa said. ‘The Pintos of course are living with their son. He came back from America. Lost his business there.’

‘Everyone is coming back from America.’

Shifting Mariam to his left arm, Ibrahim Kudwa touched the table for attention.

‘Ajwani refused to take any of the money, did you hear? Not one rupee.’

Kothari sighed.

‘That man — all his life he was obsessed with money. Sat in his realestate office with a bundle of cash in his drawer to feel rich. And then when he actually gets a windfall, he says no. A nothing man. Pucca nothing.’

Kothari ate more bhelpuri.

Mumtaz Kudwa picked up her shopping bags; her husband stood up with Mariam.

‘Life is good,’ he said. ‘It is not perfect, but it is better with money.’

‘You have said it exactly right, Ibrahim. Goodbye, Mumtaz. Byebye, Mariam.’

On the escalator down, Kothari went over the bill for the food he and his son had just eaten; his lips worked.

‘… the bhelpuri was only twenty-six rupees, Tinku. They charged ten rupees for water. But we didn’t have bottled water.’

‘No,’ the boy agreed. ‘We didn’t have any water.’

Stepping down from the escalator, he said: ‘Let’s go and get the ten rupees back, Tinku.’

‘For ten rupees? All the way up?’

The two got on the other escalator and went back up to the food court.

‘It’s the principle. A man must stand up for his rights in this world. Your grandfather taught me that.’

Tinku, who was starting to yawn, turned in surprise: his unmusical father was humming a famous Beatles song and slapping the escalator with the back of his hand.

23 DECEMBER

On any evening Juhu beach is overwhelmed with cricket matches of poor style and great vigour; on a Sunday, perhaps a hundred matches are in progress along the length of the sand. All face a fatal constraint: the ocean. Anyone who hits the ball directly into the water is declared out — a uniform rule across the beach. A good, honest pull-shot to a bad ball, and a batsman has just dismissed himself. To survive, you must abandon classical form. What is squirming, quicksilver, heterodox thrives.

‘A million people are batting along this beach. Play with some style. Stand out,’ Mrs Rego shouted.

She stood in her grey coat at the wicket, an umpire-commentator-coach of the match in progress.

Timothy, Mary’s son, was batting at the stick-wicket; Kumar, tallest of the regulars at the Tamil temple, ran in to bowl.

Mary, sitting on the sand, the game’s only spectator and cheerleader, turned for a moment to look at the water’s edge.

It was low tide, and the sea had receded far from the normal shoreline, leaving a glassy, marshy in-between zone. Reflected in the wet sand, two nearly naked boys ran about the marsh; they jumped into the waves and splashed each other. The sunlight made their dark bodies shine blackly, as if coated in a slick of oil; in some private ecstasy, they began rolling in and out of the water, barely in this world at all.

Mary now saw a familiar figure walking along the surf. The bottoms of his trousers were rolled up, and he carried his shoes over his shoulder, where they stained his shirt.

She waved.

‘Mr Ajwani.’

‘Mary! How nice to see you.’

He sat by her side.

‘Did you come to watch your son playing cricket?’

‘Yes, sir. I don’t like to see him wasting time on cricket, but Madam — I mean Mrs Rego — insisted he be here.’

Ajwani nodded.

‘How is your place by the nullah? More threats of demolition?’

‘No, sir. My home stands. I found work in one of the buildings by the train station. An Ultimex building. The pay is better than at Vishram, sir. And they give me a nice blue uniform to wear.’

The two of them ducked. The red ball had shot two inches past Ajwani’s nose — it soared over the glassy sand and detonated in the ocean.

‘Timothy is out!’ Mrs Rego cried.

She saw Ajwani sitting alongside Mary.

He saw the hostility in her eyes — they had not spoken once since that night — and he knew at once, ‘she too was in it.’

‘Let me stay, Mrs Rego,’ he said. ‘It is one of the rules of Juhu beach: you can’t say no to any stranger who wants to watch you play.’

Mrs Rego sighed, and looked for the ball.

The two boys who had been rolling about in the water now rushed towards the ball; it came back, in a high red arc, as the cricketers cheered. Up in the sky, a plane cut across the ball’s trajectory — and the cricketers let out a second cheer, a sustained one.

The plane had caught the angle of the setting light, and looked radiant and intimate before it went over the ocean.

The game continued. Mrs Rego kept offering the boys ‘tips’ on batting ‘with style’. Ajwani and Mary cheered impartially for all the batsmen.

The setting sun brought more people. The smell of humans overwhelmed the smell of the sea. Vendors waved green and yellow fluorescent wires in the darkening air to catch the attention of children. Particoloured fans were arranged on long wooden frames to whirl in the sea breeze, green plastic soldiers crawled over the sand, and mechanical frogs moved with a croaking noise. Small men stood with black trays of skinned peanuts warmed by live coals suspended around their necks; tables of coconuts and pickles were set up under umbrellas; boys bathed in their underwear and Muslim women took dips in sodden black burqas. Glowing machines talked to you about your weight and destiny for a couple of rupees.

The cricket game had degenerated. On the promise of merely burying Timothy in sand, Dharmendar and Vijay had proceeded to carve breasts and genitals in the sand over him, and had written in English: ‘FUK ME’.

‘You could at least spell it right!’ Mrs Rego tried to look stern for as long as possible before helping the others to rescue the trapped boy.

The ocean was a brimming violet: twilight glowed over Juhu.

‘All right, boys, collect the bat and ball and come here,’ Mrs Rego shouted. ‘It’s time for a speech.’

‘Speech? Why does there always have to be a speech, Mrs Rego?’

‘We have to make a speech about Masterji. Do you think his son is going to remember him? We have to do it. In fact, you are going to start, Timothy.’

The other boys gathered in a semi-circle around Timothy. Ajwani sat next to Mary.

Timothy grinned. ‘I once saw Masterji sitting under a tree near the temple. He was eating all the fruit…’

‘Timothy!’ Mrs Rego said.

The boys clapped and whistled: ‘Great speech!’

‘Sit down, Timothy.’ Mrs Rego pointed to Ajwani.

‘You speak now.’

‘Me?’ The broker wanted to laugh, but he understood that she was serious. Everyone sitting here — in fact, everyone in this beach — had had some involvement in the affair. His share was larger than that of most others.

Wiping the sand off his trousers, he stood up. He faced the semi-circle of four boys and two women.

‘Friends, our late Masterji—’

‘The late Mr Yogesh Murthy,’ Mrs Rego corrected.

‘… late Mr Yogesh Murthy, was my neighbour, but I don’t have much information about his life. He was born I think in the south and came here I think after his marriage. Wherever he came from, he came, and became a typical man of this city. What do I mean by that?’ Ajwani looked at the ocean. ‘I mean he became a new kind of man. I think about him more now than I did when he was my neighbour.’

He hoped that they would understand.

Mrs Rego stood up, and everyone turned to her.

‘Boys: I would like to say hip-hip-hooray for Mr Ajwani — for his fine speech. Now I want everyone to clap for him. Will you clap, boys?’

‘Hip-hip-hooray! Aj-waaa-ni!’

‘Boys, I have a few more words for you.’

‘Don’t you always?’ — laughter.

The semi-circle shifted and moved so that Mrs Rego was now in its centre.

‘Boys, where Masterji was born, where he studied — these things don’t matter now. What matters is this. He did what he believed to be right. He had a conscience. No matter what people said to him or did to him he never changed his mind, and never betrayed his conscience. He was free to the end.’

‘Enough, Aunty.’

‘Shut up, and don’t call me Aunty. Now: all of you keep quiet.’

And some of them did.

‘Boys, some years ago I went to Delhi and met a man who had never seen the ocean in his life, and thought, what’s a life like that worth? We will always have the ocean and that is why we live in the true capital of this country. All we need are a few more good men like Masterji and this island, this Mumbai of ours, it will be paradise on earth. As it used to be, when I was a girl in Bandra. When I see you boys sitting here before me, I know that there are future Masterjis among you, and this city will again be what it was, the greatest on earth. And so, gentlemen of the cricket team, so as not to keep this speech going on any longer, let us all stand up, and put our hands together, and give a hip-hip-hooray in memory of our late Masterji, whom we promise to remember and honour.’

‘Hip-hip-hooray!’ they shouted together.

The cricketers had been good boys and now they wanted their reward. A sugarcane stand had been spotted nearby.

‘You too,’ Mrs Rego said. Ajwani accepted. They walked in a group towards the sugarcane juice stand at the end of the beach. Mrs Rego, overriding the broker’s protests, was paying for all the drinks. She counted heads so that she could order the right number of glasses. Suddenly she let out a shriek.

A lizard was running down her skirt.

‘Who did that?’

Timothy and Dharmendar looked at each other, and everyone else giggled. Ajwani dispatched the plastic lizard towards the beach with a kick. Mrs Rego resumed counting heads.

‘What will you do now, Mr Ajwani?’ she asked, as she drank her juice.

‘At first, I thought of leaving real estate entirely,’ he said. ‘But then I thought, there are honest men in this business too. Let me add to their number.’

With one eye closed, she looked into her glass, and then put it back on the stall.

‘Is it true, what they say: that you refused to take the builder’s money?’

He licked his lips and set his glass down by hers.

‘At first. But I have a family. Two sons. A wife.’

A bearded man came up to the sugarcane juice stall; he peered at Mrs Rego and then smiled.

‘You’re the social worker who does good things in the slums, aren’t you?’

Mrs Rego hesitated, then nodded.

‘I’ve seen you in your office, madam,’ the bearded man said. ‘I too used to be from Vakola. I lived in a slum: it’s where the Ultimex Group are now building their tower. Ultimex Milano.’

Ajwani and Mrs Rego peered at the bearded man. He was wearing a white Muslim skullcap.

‘Are you… the fortunate man? The eighty-one-lakhs man?’

‘By the grace of Allah, sir, you could say that was me. I don’t have any money on me, now. Bought a two-bedroom in Kurla in a pucca building. A small Maruti-Suzuki too.’

‘You don’t look unhappy at all,’ Mrs Rego said.

‘Why should I be unhappy?’ The fortunate man laughed. ‘My children have never had a real home. Four daughters I have. Fate is good to many people these days. There’s a man here in Juhu, living in a slum, who has been offered sixty-three lakhs by a real-estate developer to move out. He’s a connection of a connection of mine, and I came to talk to him. About how to deal with these builders.’

The workers at the sugarcane stand had overheard, and now they asked the fortunate man for details; a nearby newspaper-vendor came to listen in. A fellow in a slum? Sixty-three lakhs? Nearby? Which slum? Which fellow? Are you sure it was sixty-three?

Mrs Rego and Ajwani watched the bearded man, who had freckles on his large nose, perhaps from measles, wondering if those were the marks by which fortunate humans were identified.

Done with their sugarcane juice, the boys walked from the beach to the main road. Vijay, revitalized by the juice, had caught Dharmendar in a head-lock.

Mrs Rego wished she hadn’t had the juice: the sudden sugar, as it always did, made her feel depressed. She licked her lips and spat away what remained of the sweet juice — the finest compensation the city could offer these boys for the dreams it wouldn’t make real.

‘What will become of them, Mr Ajwani? Such fine boys, all of them… ’

‘What do you mean, what will become of them?’

‘I mean, Mr Ajwani, all this talent, all this energy: do these boys have any idea of what lies ahead for them? Disappointment. That’s all.’

The broker stopped. ‘How can you say this, Mrs Rego? You have always helped others.’

She stopped by his side. Her face contracted into something smaller and darker with grief.

Ajwani smiled; the parallel lines on his cheeks deepened.

‘I have learned something about life, Mrs Rego. You and I were trapped: but we wanted to be trapped. These boys will live in a better world. Look over there.’

‘Where?’ She asked.

A bus passed by with an advertisement for a film called Dance, Dance; autorickshaws and scooters followed it. When they had passed, Mrs Rego saw a group of white-uniformed dabba-wallahs with their pointed caps, seated in a ring, playing cards on the pavement.

‘The light is not good. I can’t see what you’re…’

After a while, Mrs Rego saw, or thought she saw, what her former neighbour was pointing at.

Past the traffic, on the other side of the road, she saw the boundary wall of an old Juhu housing society, displaying three generations of torture devices: primitive coloured bottle-glass shards, stuck into the entire length of the wall, and over them a layer of rusty barbed wire with its ends tied into jagged knots, and over that, rolled into giant coils, a shinier barbed wire with large square metal studs, like she had seen in action movies around American military installations, less crudely threatening than the rusty layer but unmistakably more lethal. Behind these overlapping wires she saw banyan trees; all of which were hemmed in by the fencing; except for one greying ancient, whose aerial roots, squirming through barbed wire and broken glass, dripped down the wall like primordial ooze until their bright growing tips, nearly touching the pavement, brushed against a homeless family cooking rice in the shade; and with each root-tip that had beaten the barbed wire the old banyan said: Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free.

Vakola, Mumbai

March 2007–October 2009