Last Man in Tower

11 MAY

Three o’ clock: the heat at its annual worst.

Ram Khare, the guard, cooled himself with his checked hand kerchief, while reading aloud from a digest of the Bhagavad Gita scarred in places by the long fingernails which he pressed down on it.

… never over a man’s actions, said the Lord Krishna, but only over the fruit of a man’s actions, is…

A fly rubbed its legs near the holy book; two sticks of jasmine incense burned under an image of Lord Shiva, only partly masking the odour of rum inside the guard’s booth.

A tall man in a white shirt and black trousers — salesman, Ram Khare assumed — stood in front of the booth and entered his details into the ledger. The visitor put his pen back in his pocket. ‘Can I go in now?’

Ram Khare moved a thumb from his holy digest to the visitors’ register.

‘You haven’t filled in this last column.’

The visitor smiled; an upper tooth was chipped. Clicking the ballpoint pen back to life he wrote in the column headed Person(s) to see:

Hon’ble Sec

Turning to his right upon entering the building, as directed by Ram Khare, the visitor walked into a small room with an open door, where a bald man sat at a desk, one finger of his left hand poised over a typewriter.

‘… no-tice… to… the… res-ee-den-ts… of Vi-shraaam…’

His other hand held a sandwich over a scalloped paper plate brightened by comets of mint chutney. He bit into the sandwich, then typed with one finger as he ate, breathing laboriously, and murmuring between breaths: ‘… sub-ject… Gen-ral… Wa-ter… May-n-tenanse…’

The visitor knocked on the door with the back of his hand.

‘Is there a place to rent here?’

The man with the sandwich, Mr Kothari, Secretary of Vishram Tower A, paused with a finger over the old Remington.

‘There is,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

Ignoring the visitor, he continued typing, eating, and mumbling. There were three printed sheets on his desk, and he picked one up and read aloud: ‘… questionnaire from the Municipality. Have all the children in the Society received anti-polio drops? If so, kindly provide… if not, kindly…’

A small hammer sat near the typewriter. With the polio notice in one hand, the Secretary stood up with the hammer in the other hand and went to the noticeboard, whose glass face he opened. The visitor saw him pinning the notice into place with a nail, then driving the nail into the wooden board with three quick blows — tuck, tuck, tuck — before closing the glass. The hammer returned to its spot near the typewriter.

Back in his chair, the Secretary picked up the next piece of paper. ‘… complaint from Mrs Rego. Giant wasps are attacking… why am I paying monthly maintenance fees if the Society cannot hire the…’ He crushed it.

And then the final sheet. ‘… complaint from Mrs Rego. Ram Khare has been drinking again. He should be replaced with a sober, professional… Why am I paying monthly maintenance…’ He crushed it.

About to return to his typing, he remembered the visitor.

‘A place to buy, you said?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Rent.’

‘Good. What is your line of work?’

‘Chemicals.’

‘Good. Very good.’

Dark-skinned, tall, upright, in well-ironed Oxford-style shirt and pleated cotton trousers, the visitor gave the Secretary no reason to doubt that he was in a solid field like Drug & Chem.

‘Nothing is strictly speaking available now,’ the Secretary confessed, as the two men climbed the stairs. (‘Ninety-nine per cent of the time the lift works.’) ‘But, I can tell you, confidentially, that the owner of 3B is not fully happy with the present situation.’

An eczema of blue-skinned gods, bearded godmen, and haloed Christs covered the metal door of 3B — a testament to generations of ecumenical tenants who had each added a few icons of their own faith without removing those of any other — so that it was impossible to know if the present tenant was Hindu, Christian, or a member of a hybrid cult practised only in this building.

About to knock on the door, the Secretary checked himself — his fist was going to hit a sticker with the face of Jesus on it. Shifting his hand to find one of the few blank spots on the door, he knocked with care; after knocking again, he used his master key.

The cupboard doors had been left wide open; the floor an archipelago of newspapers and undergarments — the Secretary had to explain that 3B was currently rented to a most unsatisfactory single woman, a working journalist. The stranger looked at the peeling grey paint and the water-damage blotches on the wall; the Secretary got ready with the official line given to potential tenants — ‘in the monsoons the rainwater stains the walls, but does not reach the floor’. He got ready with official answers to all the usual tough questions — how many hours of water supply, how much noise from the planes at night, whether the electricity ‘tripped’.

Stepping over a variety of underwear, the stranger touched the wall, scratched on the flaking paint and sniffed. Turning to the Secretary, he took out a striped red notebook and wet a finger on his tongue.

‘I want a legal history of Towers A and B.’

‘A what?’

‘A summary of lawsuits filed, pending, or likely to arise in the future?’

‘There was a disagreement between the Abichandani brothers, true, over 1C. Solved out of court. We are not court-loving people here.’

‘Very good. Are there any “peculiar situations”?’

‘Peculiar…?’

‘I mean: family disputes ongoing or pending, pagdi system dealings, illegal sub-rentings, transfers of property under the informal method?’

‘None of that happens here.’

‘Murders and suicides? Assaults? Any and all other things that may make for bad luck, karma, or negative energy in the Vastu sense?’

‘Look here.’ Secretary Kothari folded his arms on his chest. The stranger seemed to want to know the moral history of every doorknob, rivet and nail in the Society. ‘Are you from the police?’

The visitor looked up from his notepad, as if he were surprised.

‘We live in a dangerous time, do we not?’

‘Dangerous,’ the Secretary conceded. ‘Very.’

‘Terrorists. Bombs in trains. Explosions.’

The Secretary couldn’t argue.

‘Families are coming apart. Criminals taking over politics.’

‘I understand now. Can you repeat your questions?’

When he was gone, the Secretary, though eager to resume his typing, found himself too nervous. He refreshed each day’s labours with two ready-made sandwiches, purchased in the morning and stored in the drawers of his desk. Unwrapping the second sandwich, he nibbled on it ahead of schedule.

He thought of the visitor’s jagged upper tooth.

‘Fellow might not even be in chemicals. Might not even have a job.’

But the anxiety must have been merely digestive in nature, for he felt better with each bite he took.

The residents of Vishram Tower A, thanks to the ledger in the guard’s booth, knew the basic facts about the strangers who visited them, something that could not necessarily be said about the people they had lived with for twenty or thirty years.

Late in the morning Mr Kothari (4A), their Secretary, got on his Bajaj scooter and left on ‘business’. Early in the afternoon, while all the others were still working, he drove back, the rear-view mirror of his scooter reflecting a quadrilateral of sunlight on to his upper breast like a certificate of clear conscience. From his movements his neighbours had deduced the existence of a ‘business’ that did not require a man’s presence for more than two or three hours a day and yet somehow funded a respectable existence. That was all they knew about Mr Kothari’s life outside their gates. If they asked, even in a round-about way, how he had saved up enough to buy the Bajaj, he would reply, as if it were explanation: ‘Not a Mercedes-Benz, is it? Just a scooter.’

He was the laziest Secretary they had ever had, which made him the best Secretary they had ever had. Asked to resolve disputes, Kothari listened to both parties, nodding his head and scratching sympathetic notes on scrap paper. Your son plays music late at night disturbing the entire floor, true. Yet he’s a musician, true. When the disputants left his office, he threw the paper into the waste bin. Jesus be praised! Allah be praised! SiddhiVinayak be —! Etc. People were forced to adjust; temporary compromises congealed. And life went on.

Kothari brushed his hair from ear to ear to hide his baldness, an act that hinted at vanity or stupidity; yet his eyes were slit-like beneath snowy eyebrows, and each time he grinned, whiskery laugh-lines gave him the look of a predatory lynx. His position carried no salary, yet he was ingratiating at each annual general meeting, virtually pleading for re-election with his palms folded in a namaste; no one could tell why this bland bald businessman wanted to sit in a dingy Secretary’s office and sink his face into files and folders for hours. He was so secretive, indeed, that you feared one day he would dissolve among his papers like a bar of Pears’ Soap. He had no known ‘nature’.

Mrs Puri (3C), who was the closest thing to a friend the Secretary had, insisted there was a ‘nature’. If you talked to him long enough, you would discover he feared China, worried about Jihadis on the suburban trains, and favoured a national identification card to flush out illegal Bangladeshi immigrants; but most had never known him to express any opinion, unless it was related to the game of cricket. Some believed that he was always on his guard because as a young man he had committed an indiscretion; his wife was rumoured to be his cousin, or from another community, or older than him by two years; or even, by the malicious, his ‘sister’. They had one son, Tinku, a noted player of carom and other indoor sports, fat and white-skinned, with an imbecilic smile pasted on his face at all times — although whether he was truly stupid, or whether, like his father, merely hiding his ‘nature’, was unclear.

The Secretary threw his sandwich wrapper into the waste bin. His breath was now a passion of raw onion and curried potato; he returned to work.

He was calculating the annual maintenance fees, which paid for the guard, Mary the cleaning lady, the seven-kinds-of-vermin man who came to fight invasions of wasps and honeybees, and the annual heavy repairs to the building’s roofing and general structure. For two years now Kothari had kept the maintenance bill constant at 1.55 rupees a square foot per tenant per month, which translated into an annual bill of (on average) 14,694 rupees per year per tenant, payable to the Society in one sum or two (in which case the second instalment was recalculated at 1.65 rupees a square foot). His ability to keep the maintenance bill steady, despite the pressure of inflation in a city like Mumbai, was considered his principal achievement as Secretary, even if some whispered that he pulled this off only by doing nothing at all to maintain the Society.

He burped, and looked up to see Mary, the Khachada-wali, who had been sweeping the corridor with her broom, standing outside his office.

A lean silent woman, barely five feet tall, Mary had big front teeth erupting out of her concave cheeks. Residents kept conversation with her to a minimum.

‘That man who asked all the questions is taking a long time to make up his mind,’ she said.

The Secretary went back to his figures. But Mary still stood at the doorway.

‘I mean, to ask the same set of questions for two days in a row. That’s curiosity.’

Now the Secretary looked up.

‘Two days? He wasn’t here yesterday.’

‘You weren’t here yesterday morning,’ the servant said. ‘He was here.’ She went back to her sweeping.

‘What did he want yesterday?’

‘The same thing he wanted today. Answers to lots and lots of questions.’

Mr Kothari’s bulbous nose contracted into a dark berry: he was frowning. He got up from his desk and came to the threshold of the office.

‘Who saw him here yesterday other than you?’

With a handkerchief over his nose he waited for Mary to stop sweeping, so he could repeat the question.

Mrs Puri was walking back to Vishram Society with her eighteen-year-old son Ramu, who kept turning to a stray dog that had followed them from the fruit and vegetable market.

Mrs Puri, who moved with a slight limp due to her weight, stopped, and took her son by the hand.

‘Oy, oy, oy, my Ramu. Slowly, slowly. We don’t want you falling into that.’

A pit had materialized in front of Vishram Society. It swallowed everything but the heads and necks of the men digging inside it, and an occasional raised muddy arm. Pushing her son back, Mrs Puri looked in. The soil changed colour every two feet as it went down, from black to dark red to bone-grey at the very bottom, where she saw ancient cement piping, mottled and barnacled. Wormy red-and-yellow snippets of wire showed through the strata of mud. There was a sign sticking out of the pit, but it faced the wrong direction, and only when Mrs Puri went all the way around the hole did she see that it said:

WORK IN PROGRESS INCONVENIENCE IS REGRETTED BMC

Ramu followed her; the dog followed Ramu.

Mrs Puri saw the Secretary was at the guard’s booth, reading the register and holding a hand up against the early-evening sun.

‘Ram Khare, Ram Khare,’ he said, and turned the register around so it confronted the guard. ‘There is a record of the man today, Ram Khare. Here.’ He tapped the entry the inquisitive visitor had made. ‘But…’ He flipped the page. ‘… there is no record of him in here yesterday.’

‘What are we talking about?’ she asked.

Ramu took the stray dog with him to the black Cross, where he would play until his mother called him in.

When the Secretary described the man, she said: ‘Oh, yes. He came yesterday. In the morning. There was another one with him, too. A fat one. They asked all these questions. I answered some, and I told them to speak to Mr Pinto.’

The Secretary stared at the guard. Ram Khare scraped the ledger with his long fingernails.

‘If there is no record in here,’ he said, ‘then no such men came.’

‘What did they want to know?’ the Secretary asked Mrs Puri.

‘Whether it is a good place or a bad place. Whether the people are good. They wanted to rent a flat, I think.’

The fat man with the gold rings had impressed Mrs Puri. He had red lips and teeth blackened by gutka, which made you think he was lower class, yet his manners were polished, as if he were of breeding, or had acquired some in the course of life. The other man, the tall dark one, wore a nice white shirt and black trousers, exactly as the Secretary had described him. No, he said nothing about being in chemicals.

‘Maybe we should tell the police about this,’ the Secretary said. ‘I don’t understand why he came again today. There have been burglaries near the train station.’

Mrs Puri dismissed the possibility of danger.

‘Both of them were good men, polite, well dressed. The fat one had so many gold rings on his fingers.’

The Secretary turned, fired — ‘Men with gold rings are the biggest thieves in the world. Where have you been living all these years?’ — and walked away.

She folded her fat forearms over her chest.

‘Mrs Pinto,’ she shouted. ‘Please don’t let the Secretary escape.’

What the residents called their sansad — parliament — was now in session. White plastic chairs had been arranged around the entrance of Tower A, right in front of Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen, an arrangement that allowed those seated a glimpse, through an almond-shaped tear in the green kitchen curtain, of a small TV. The first ‘parliamentarians’ were about to sit on the plastic chairs, which would remain occupied until water returned to the building.

A small, slow, white-haired man, refined by age into a humanoid sparrow, lowered himself into a chair with a direct view of the TV through Mrs Saldanha’s torn curtain (the ‘prime’ chair). A retired accountant for the Britannia Biscuit Company, Mr Pinto (2A) had a weak vascular system and kept his mouth open when walking. His wife, almost blind in her old age, walked with her hand on his shoulder, although she knew the compound well enough to navigate it without her husband’s help; most evenings they walked as a pair, she with her blind eyes, and he with his open mouth, as if sucking sight and breath from the other. She sat next to her husband, with his help.

‘You have been asked to wait,’ said Mrs Pinto, as the Secretary tried to make his way around the plastic chairs into his office. She was the oldest woman in the Society; Mr Kothari had no choice but to stop.

Mrs Puri caught up with him.

‘Is it true, Kothari, what they say the early-morning cat found in 3B’s rubbish?’

The Secretary, not for the first time during his tenure, cursed the early-morning cat. This cat prowled the waste bins that the residents left out in the morning for Mary to collect, in the process spilling beans, bones, and whisky bottles alike. So the residents of the building knew from the rubbish who was a vegetarian and who merely claimed to be one; who was a rum-man and who a gin-man; and who had bought a pornographic magazine when on holiday in Singapore. The main aim of this cat — ginger and scrawny, according to some, black and glossy according to others — indeed, was to make sure there was no privacy in the building. Of late the ginger (or black) fellow had led Mrs Puri to a vile discovery when it knocked over the waste bin of 3B (the flat Kothari had shown to the inquisitive stranger).

‘Among young people today, it is a common thing for boy and girl to live without marriage,’ he said. ‘At the end, one says to the other, you go your way, I go my way. There is no sense of shame in the modern way of life, what do you expect me to do about it?’

(Mr Pinto, distracted by a stock market report on the TV, had to be filled in on the topic of discussion by his wife. ‘… the modern girl on our floor.’)

Turning to her left, Mrs Puri called: ‘Ramu, have you fed the dog?’

Ramu — his soft, pale face hinted at the presence of Down’s syndrome — looked perplexed. His mother and he left a bowl full of channa near the black Cross to feed stray animals that wandered into the Society; he looked about for the bowl. The dog had found it.

Now Mrs Puri turned back to the Secretary to make one thing clear: the modern, shame-free way of living counted for nothing with her.

‘I have a growing son—’ She dropped her voice. ‘I don’t want him living with the wrong kind of people. You should call Import-Export Hiranandani now.’

That Mr Hiranandani, the owner and original resident of 3B, a shrewd importer-exporter of obscure goods, known for his guile in slipping phosphates and peroxides through customs, had moved to a better neighbourhood (Khar West) was understandable; all of them dreamed of doing the same thing. Differences of wealth among the members did not go unnoticed — Mr Kudwa (4C) had taken his family last summer to Ladakh, rather than nearby Mahabaleshwar, as everyone else did, and Mr Ajwani the broker owned a Toyota Qualis — yet these were spikes and dips within the equalizing dinginess of Vishram. The real distinction was leaving the Society. They had come to their windows and cheered Mr Hiranandani when he departed with his family for Khar West; yet his behaviour since had been scandalous. Not checking the identity of this girl tenant, he had taken her deposit and handed her the keys to 3B, without asking the Secretary or his neighbours if they wanted an unmarried woman — a journalist, at that — on their floor. Mrs Puri was not one to pry — not one to ask what was happening within the privacy of a neighbour’s four walls — but when the condoms come tumbling on to your doorstep, well, then!

As they were talking, a trickle of waste water moved towards them.

A pipe from Mrs Saldanha’s ground-floor kitchen discharged into the open compound; although she had been chided often, she had never connected her kitchen sink into the main sewage — so the moment she began her cooking, it burped right at their feet. In every other way, Mrs Saldanha was a quiet, retreating woman — her husband, who was ‘working in Vizag’, had not been seen in Vishram for years — but in matters of water, brazen. Because she lived on the ground floor, she seemed to have it longer than anyone else did, and used it shamelessly when they could not. The emission of waste water into the compound only underlined her water-arrogance.

A glistening eel of water, its dark body now tinted with reddish earth, nosed its way towards the parliament. Mr Pinto lifted the front feet of the ‘prime’ chair and moved out of the sewage-eel’s path; and it was forgotten.

‘Have you seen anyone going into her room?’ the Secretary asked.

‘Of course not,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘I am not one to pry into my neighbours’ lives, am I?’

‘Ram Khare hasn’t told me he has seen any boy come into the building at night.’

‘What does that mean, Ram Khare has seen nothing?’ Mrs Puri protested. ‘A whole army could come in, and he would see nothing.’

The stray dog, having done crunching its channa, ran towards the parliament, trotted throught the water, slid under the chairs, and headed up the stairwell, as if pointing out to them the solution to their crisis.

The Secretary followed the dog.

Breathing heavily, one hand on the banister and one hand on her hip, Mrs Puri went up the stairs. Through the star-shaped holes in the wall she could see Mr Pinto standing by the black Cross to keep watch on Ramu until she returned.

She smelled the dog on the second landing of the stairs. Amber eyes shone in the dim stairwell; pale legs, impastoed with dry dung, shivered. Mrs Puri stepped over the sickly legs and walked to the third floor.

The Secretary was standing by Masterji’s door, with a finger on his lips. From inside the open door, they could hear voices.

‘… and my hand represents…?’

‘Yes, Masterji.’

‘Answer the question, boys: my hand represents…?’

‘The earth.’

‘Correct. For once.’

The bi-weekly science ‘top-up’ was in session. Mrs Puri joined the Secretary by the door, the only one in Vishram Society unmarked by religious icons.

‘This is the earth in infinite space. Home of Man. Follow me?’

Reverence for science and learning made the Secretary stand with folded hands. Mrs Puri pushed past him to the door. She closed an eye and spied in.

The living room was dark, the curtains were drawn; a table lamp was the only source of light.

A silhouette of a huge fist, looking like a dictator’s gesture, appeared on the wall.

A man stood next to the table lamp, making shadows on the wall. Four children sitting on a sofa watched the shadows he conjured; another sat on the floor.

‘And my second fist, which is going around the earth, is what?’

‘The sun, Masterji’ — one of the boys.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No, no, no. The sun is this. See—’ A click, and the room went entirely dark. ‘Earth without sun.’ Click. ‘Earth with sun. Understand? Lamp: sun.’

‘Yes, Masterji.’

‘All of you say it together.’

‘Yes, Masterji’ — three voices.

‘All of you.’

‘Yes, Masterji’ — four.

‘So my second, that is to say, my moving fist is —? Big white object seen at night if you look up.’

‘Moon.’

‘Correct. MOON. Earth’s satellite. How many satellites does the Earth have?’

‘Can we go now, Masterji?’

‘Only after we get to the eclipse. And what are you wriggling about for, Mohammad?’

‘Anand is pinching me, Masterji.’

‘Stop pinching him, Anand. This is physics, not fun. Now: how many satellites does…’

The boy on the floor said: ‘Question, Masterji.’

‘Yes?’

‘Masterji, what happened when the dinosaurs died out? Show us again how the meteor hit the earth.’

‘And tell us about global warming again, Masterji.’

‘You’re trying to avoid my question by asking your own. Do you think I taught in school for thirty-four years not to see through tricks like this?’

‘It’s not a trick, Masterji, it’s a—’

‘Enough for today. Class is over,’ Masterji said and clapped his hands.

‘We can go in now,’ the Secretary whispered. Mrs Puri pushed open the door and turned the lights on in the room.

The four boys who had been sitting on the sofa — Sunil Rego (1B), Anand Ganguly (5B), Raghav Ajwani (2C) and Mohammad Kudwa (4C) — got up. Tinku Kothari (4A), the fat son of the Secretary, struggled to his feet from the floor.

‘Enough, boys, go home!’ Mrs Puri clapped. ‘Masterji has to have dinner soon. Class is over. Go, go, go.’

It was not a ‘class’, though conducted with such dignity, but an after-class science ‘top-up’ — meant to do to a normal schoolchild what a steroidal injection does to a merely healthy athlete.

Anand Ganguly picked up his cricket bat, which was propped up against the old fridge; Mohammad Kudwa took his blue cricket cap, emblazoned with the star of India, from above the glass cabinet full of silver trophies, medals, and certificates attesting to Masterji’s excellence as a teacher.

‘What a surprise to see you here,’ Masterji said. ‘I hardly have visitors these days. Adult visitors, that is.’

Mrs Puri checked to see if the lights were off in 3B — of course they were, young people of that lifestyle are never home before ten — and closed the door. She explained, in low tones, the problem caused by Masterji’s neighbour and what had been found in her rubbish by the early-morning cat.

‘There is a boy who goes into and comes out of that room with her,’ Masterji conceded. He turned to the Secretary. ‘But she works, doesn’t she?’

‘Journalist.’

‘Those people are known for their number two activities,’ Mrs Puri said.

‘She seems to me, though I have only seen her from a distance, a decent girl.’

Masterji continued, his voice gaining authority from the echoes of ‘sun, moon, eclipse, physics’ that still seemed to ring through it: ‘When this building first came up, there were no Hindus allowed here, it is a fact. Then there were meant to be no Muslims, it is a fact. All proved to be good people when given a chance. Now, young people, unmarried girls, they should also be given a chance. We don’t want to become a building full of retirees and blind people. If this girl and her boyfriend have done something inappropriate, we should speak to them. However…’ He looked at Mrs Puri. ‘… we have no business with her rubbish.’

Mrs Puri winced. She wouldn’t tolerate this kind of talk from anyone else.

She looked around the flat, which she had not visited in a while, still expecting to see Purnima, Masterji’s quiet, efficient wife, and one of her best friends in Vishram. Now that Purnima was gone — dead for more than six months — Mrs Puri observed signs of austerity, even disrepair. One of the two wall-clocks was broken. A pale rectangle on the wall above the empty TV stand commemorated the ancient Sanyo that Masterji had sold after her death, rejecting it as an indulgence. (What an error, Mrs Puri thought. A widower without a TV will go mad.) Water stains blossomed on the ceiling; the pipes on the fourth floor leaked. Each year in September Purnima had paid for a man from the slums to scrub and whitewash them. This year, unscrubbed, the stains were spreading like ghostly evidence of her absence.

Now that Mrs Puri’s issue was dismissed, the Secretary raised his own, more valid, concern. He told Masterji about the inquisitive stranger who had come twice to the Society. Should they make a report to the police?

Masterji stared at the Secretary. ‘What can this man steal from us, Kothari?’

He went to the sink that stood in a corner of the room — a mirror above it, a framed picture of Galileo (‘Founder of Modern Physics’) above the mirror — and turned the tap; there was a thin flow of water.

‘Is this what he is going to steal from us? Our plumbing?’

Each year, the contractor who cleaned the overhead tank did his work sloppily — and the silt from the tank blocked the pipes in all the rooms directly below it.

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:

WORK IN PROGRESS INCONVENIENCE IS REGRETTED BMC

had been crossed out and rewritten:

INCONVENIENCE IN PROGRESS WORK IS REGRETTED 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.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice if someone gave us 81 lakh rupees?’ Mrs Puri said, after Ritika was out of earshot.

Ajwani the broker, who was punching away at his mobile phone, looked up and smiled sardonically. Then he returned to punching at his mobile.

The value of their own homes was uncertain. The last attempted sale had been seven years ago, when Mr Costello (5C) put his fifth-floor place on sale after his son had jumped from the terrace; no one had purchased the flat, and it was still under lock and key while the owner had himself moved to the Gulf.

‘The poor in this city were never poor, and now they…’ Mrs Puri moved her head to the right — Mrs Saldanha’s daughter, Radhika, had entered her mother’s kitchen in a most thoughtless manner, obstructing the parliamentarians’ view of the TV. ‘… are becoming rich. Free electricity in the slums and 24-hour cable. Only we are stuck.’

‘Careful,’ Mr Pinto whispered. ‘Battleship is here. Careful.’

Mrs Rego — the ‘Battleship’ for her wide grey skirts, formidable girth, and stentorian voice — was returning home with her children.

With a ‘Hello, Uncle, Hello, Aunty’, Sunil and Sarah Rego went up the stairs. Their mother, without a word to the others, sat down and watched the TV.

‘Have you heard, Mrs Rego, about the 81 lakh offer? For a one-room in the slums?’

The Battleship said nothing.

‘Even a Communist like you must be interested in this,’ Mrs Puri said with a smile.

The Battleship spoke without turning her face.

‘What is the definition of a dying city, Mrs Puri? I will tell you, as you do not know: a city that ceases to surprise you. And that is what this Bombay has become. Show people a little cash, and they’ll jump, dance, run naked in the streets. That Muslim man is never going to see his money. These developers and builders are mafia. The other day they shot a member of the city corporation dead. It was in the papers.’

Mr Pinto and his wife slipped away like doves before a thunderstorm.

But it did not start at once.

The TV presenter, as if to add to the atmosphere of gloom, mentioned that the water shortage was likely to get worse unless the monsoons arrived — for once — on time.

‘Too many people come into the city, it’s a fact,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Everyone wants to suck on our…’ She touched her breasts.

The Battleship turned to her.

‘And did you drop to Bombay from heaven, Mrs Puri? Isn’t your family from Delhi?’

‘My parents were born in Delhi, Mrs Rego, but I was born right here. There was enough space in those days. Now it’s full. The Shiv Sena is right, outsiders should stop coming here.’

‘Without migrants, this city would be dust. We are ruled by fascists, Mrs Puri, but everything is second-rate here, even our fascists. They don’t give us trains, don’t give us roads. All they do is beat up hardworking migrants.’

‘I don’t know what a fascist does, but I know what a Communist does. You don’t like developers who make people rich, but you like the beggars who get off at Victoria Terminus every day.’

‘I am a Christian, Mrs Puri. We are meant to care for the poor.’

Mrs Puri — debating champion at KC College — was about to finish her opponent off with a riposte, but Ramu came to his mother’s ear and whispered.

‘There’s no water coming up the pipes, Ramu,’ she said. ‘No water tonight, dear. I told you, didn’t I?’

Ramu’s lower lip covered his upper, and bulged up towards his nose: his mother knew this as a sign that he was thinking. He pointed to the pipes that went up the sides of Vishram Society’s walls.

‘Quiet, Ramu. Mummy is speaking to Communist aunty.’

‘I am not a Communist, and I am not anyone’s aunty, Mrs Puri.’

Mrs Kothari, the Secretary’s wife, put her head out of the window and shouted: ‘Water!’

It was an unscheduled blessing from the Municipality, a rare kindness. The fighting adjourned; both women had to obey a higher imperative — fresh water.

Where is Masterji? Mrs Puri wondered, as she went up the stairs. He should have returned from seeing his grandson by now. After giving Ramu his evening bath, she made sure to collect an extra bucket of water for the old man, in case the Municipality, for giving them water they were not meant to have, punished them by annulling their morning water supply. That was, after all, how the people who ran Mumbai thought.

Despite dismissing the idea that the inquisitive stranger might represent any danger, Masterji woke up realizing he had spent a part of the night dreaming of the man.

In this dream, which he powerfully recollected several minutes after waking up, the stranger (whose face appeared as a black playing-card) had smelled of sulphur; posed riddles to the members of the Society (including Masterji); grown wings, laughed, and flown out of a window, while all of them ran after him, shouting, trying to knock him down with a long stick. Masterji puzzled over his dream, until he realized that some of its images had been borrowed from the book he had been reading late into the night; he picked it up and continued reading:

The Soul’s Passageway after Death

(Vikas Publications, Benaras)

In its first year out of the body, the soul travels slowly and at a low altitude, burdened by the sins of its worldly existence. It flies over green fields, ploughed fields, and small dams and dykes. It has wings like an eagle’s at this stage of its voyage. In the second year it begins to ascend over the oceans. This flight will take it all of the second year, and a part of the third year too. It will see the ocean change colour, from blue to dark blue, until it is almost a kind of black. The darkening of the colour of the ocean will alert the soul to its entry into the third year of its long flight…

With eyes closed, imagine a human soul with your wife’s face — and with wings like an eagle… yes, eyes, nose, cheeks like your wife’s, wing-span like an eagle’s, suspended in mid-flight over the ocean…

In all, the flight of the soul after death lasts seven hundred and seventy-seven years. The prayers and pious thoughts offered by relatives and loved ones from the world of the living will greatly affect the course, length, and comfort of this journey…

Yogesh Murthy, called ‘Masterji’, sixty-one years old, distinguished emeritus teacher of St Catherine’s High School, yawned, and stretched his legs: The Soul’s Passageway after Death landed on the teakwood table.

He went back to bed. In the old days, his wife’s tea and talk and the perfume from the fresh flowers in her hair would wake him up. He sniffed the air for scents of jasmine.

Hai-ya! Hai-ya!

The screams came from somewhere below, and to his right. The two sons of Ajwani, the broker, began the morning by practising tae kwon-do in full uniform in their living room. Ajwani’s boys were the athletic champions of the Society; the elder, Rajeev, had won a great victory in the martial arts competition last year. As a gesture of the Society’s gratitude, he was allowed to dip his hand in kerosene and leave a memento of his victorious body on the front wall, where it could still be seen (or so everyone was sure), just above Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen window.

Now to the left, a loud voice, flipping diphthongs up and down. ‘Oy, oy, oyoyoyoy, my Ramu — come here… Turn that way, my prince, ayay…’ What was Ramu going to take to school for lunch, Masterji wondered, yawning, and turning to the side.

A noise from the kitchen. The very noise Purnima used to make when chopping onions. He tiptoed into the kitchen to catch a ghost, if one was there. An old calendar was tapping on the wall. It was Purnima’s private calendar, illustrated with an image of the goddess Lakshmi tipping over a pot full of gold coins, and with key dates circled and marked in her private shorthand; she had consulted it to the day she had been admitted to the hospital (12 October; circled), so he had not replaced it with a new calendar at the start of the year.

He would have to walk a bit today with his grandson; in anticipation, he wrapped a pink orthopaedic cloth tightly around his arthritic left knee before putting his trousers on. Back at his teakwood table, he picked up The Soul’s Passageway after Death.

The bell rang: bushy-haired and bearded, Ibrahim Kudwa, the cyber-café owner from 4C, with dandruff sprinkled like spots of wisdom on the shoulders of his green kurta.

‘Did you see the sign, Masterji?’ Kudwa pointed to the window. ‘In the hole they made outside. I changed the sign from “inconvenience is in progress, work is regretted”, to the other way.’ Kudwa slapped his forehead. ‘Sorry, I changed it from “work is in progress, inconvenience is regretted”, to the other way round. I thought you would like to know.’

‘Very impressive,’ Masterji said, and patted his beaming neighbour. In the kitchen, the old calendar began tapping on the wall, and Masterji forgot to offer his visitor even a cup of tea.

By midday, he was at the Byculla Zoo, leading his grandson hand in hand, from cage to cage. The two of them had seen a lioness, two black bears covered in fresh grass, an alligator in emerald water, elephants, hippos, cobras and pythons.

The boy had questions: what is the name of that in the water? — who is the tiger yawning at? — why are the birds yellow? Masterji enjoyed giving names to the animals, and added a humorous story to explain why each one left his native land and came to Mumbai. ‘Do you think of your grandmother?’ he asked from time to time.

The two of them stopped in front of a rectangular cage with bars, and a low tin roof; an animal moved from one end to the other. The idlers who had turned up to the zoo, even the lovers, stopped at the cage. A green tarpaulin on the roofing made a phosphorescent glow through which the dark animal came, jauntily, as if chuckling, its tongue hanging out, until it stood up on a red guano-stained stone bench and reared its head; then it got down, turned, went to the other end of the cage and reared its head before turning back. It was filthy — it was majestic: the grey fleece, the dark dog-like grinning face, the powerful striped lower limbs. Men and women watched it. Perhaps this mongrel beast looked like one of those, half politician and half criminal, who ruled the city, vile and necessary.

‘What is its name?’

Masterji could not say. The syllables were there, on the tip of his tongue. But when he tried to speak they moved the other way, as if magnetically repulsed. He shrugged.

At once the boy seemed frightened, as if his grandfather’s power, which lay in naming these animals, had ended.

To cheer him up, Masterji bought him some peanuts (though his daughter-in-law had told him not to feed the boy), and they ate on the grass; Masterji thought he was in a happy time of his life. The battles were over, the heat and light were dimmed.

Before it is too late, he thought, running his fingers through his grandson’s curly hair, I must tell this boy all that we have been through. His grandmother and I. Life in Bombay in the old days. War in 1965 with Pakistan. War in 1971. The day they killed Indira Gandhi. So much more.

‘More peanuts?’ he asked.

The boy shook his head, and looked at his grandfather hopefully.

Sonal, his daughter-in-law, was waiting at the gate. She smiled as he talked, on their drive into the city. Half an hour later, in his son’s flat in Marine Lines, Sonal served Masterji tea and bad news: Gaurav, his son, had just sent her a text message. He would not be coming home until midnight. Busy day at the office. ‘Why don’t you wait?’ she suggested. ‘You can stay overnight. It’s your home, after all…’

‘I’ll wait,’ he said. He tapped his fingers on the arms of his chair. ‘I’ll wait.’

‘Do you think of her a lot, Masterji?’ Sonal asked.

His fingers tapped faster on the chair, and he said: ‘All the time.’ The words just burst out after that.

‘Gaurav will remember when his grandfather died, in 1991, and she went to Suratkal to perform the last rites with her brothers. When she came back to Mumbai, she said nothing for days. Then she confessed. “They locked me up in a room and made me sign a paper.” Her own brothers! They threatened her until she signed over her father’s property and gold to them.’

Even now the memory stopped his breath. He had gone to see a lawyer at once. Four hundred rupees as a retainer, paid in cash upfront. He had come home and talked it over with Purnima.

‘We’ll never put them behind bars, I told her. The law in this country takes for ever to do anything. Is it worth wasting all that money? She thought about it and said, “All right, let it drop.” Sometimes I would look back on the incident and ask myself, should I have paid for that lawyer? But whenever I brought it up with her, she just did this’ — he shrugged — ‘and said that thing. Her favourite saying. “Man is like a goat tied to a pole.” Meaning, all of us have some free will but not too much. One shouldn’t judge oneself harshly.’

‘That is so beautiful. She was a wonderful woman, wasn’t she?’ Sonal got up. ‘I am sorry — I have to check on my father for a minute.’

Her father, once a respected banker, now suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s; he lived with his daughter, and was fed, bathed, and clothed by her. As Sonal slipped into an inner room, Masterji silently commended her filial devotion. So rare in an age like this. He tapped his knee and tried to remember the name of that striped animal in the cage. Ronak was taking a nap in his bedroom. He wanted to remember before the boy woke up.

Sonal came out of her father’s room with a large blue book which she placed on the table in front of Masterji.

‘The boy doesn’t read much; he plays cricket.’ She smiled. ‘It is better that you keep this yourself, since you are fond of books.’

Masterji opened the blue book. The Illustrated History of Science. Purchased a decade ago at the Strand Book Shop in the city, maintained impeccably, until two weeks ago given to his grandson as a gift.

He got up from his chair with the book. ‘I’ll go back now.’

‘At this hour?’ Sonal frowned. ‘The train will be packed. Wait an hour here. It’s your home, after all.’

‘What am I, a foreigner? I’ll survive.’

‘Are you sure you want to take the train at this…’ There was a gurgling from the inner room, and Sonal turned in its direction. ‘One minute,’ she said. ‘My father needs attention again.’

‘I’m leaving,’ Masterji shouted after putting on his shoes. He stood waiting for a response from Sonal, then closed the door behind him and took the elevator down.

With his blue book in his hand he walked past the old buildings of Marine Lines, some of the oldest in the city — past porticos never penetrated by the sun, and lit up at all times of day by yellow electric bulbs, stone eaves broken by saplings, and placental mounds of sewage and dark earth piled up on wet roads. Along the side of the Marine Lines train station he walked towards Churchgate.

He tried not to think of the Illustrated History of Science in his hands. Was that flat so small they couldn’t keep even one book of his in it? The boy’s own grandfather — and they had to shove my gift back in my hands?

He opened the blue book, and saw an illustration of Galileo.

‘Hyena,’ he said suddenly, and closed the book. That was the word he had not been able to find for Ronak; the striped animal in the cage.

‘Hyena. My own daughter-in-law is a hyena to me.’

Don’t think badly of her. He heard Purnima’s voice. It is your ugliest habit, she had always warned him. The way you get angry with people, caricature them, mock their voices, manners, ideas; the way you shrink flesh-and-blood humans into fireflies to hold in your palm. She would cut his rage short by touching his brow (once holding a glass of ice-cold water to it) or by sending him out on an errand. Now who was there to control his anger?

He touched the Illustrated History of Science to his forehead and thought of her.

It was dark by the time he reached the Oval Maidan. The illuminated clock on the Rajabai Tower, its face clouded by generations of grime and neglect, looked like a second moon, more articulate, speaking directly to men. He thought of his wife in this open space; he felt her calm here. Perhaps that calm was all he had ever had; behind it he had posed as a rational creature, a wise man for his pupils at St Catherine’s and his neighbours.

He did not want to go home. He did not want to lie down on that bed again.

He looked at the clock. After his wife’s death, Mr Pinto came to him and said: ‘You will eat with us from now on.’ Three times a day he went down the stairs to sit at the Pintos’ dining table, covered with a red-and-white checkerboard oilcloth they had brought back from Chicago. They did not have to announce that food was served. He heard the rattling of cutlery, the shaking of the chairs, and, with the clairvoyance provided by hunger, he could look through his floor and see Mrs Pinto’s maid Nina placing porcelain vessels steaming with prawn curry on the table. Raised as a strict vegetarian, Masterji had learned the taste of animals and fish in Bombay; exchanging his wife’s lentil-and-vegetable regimen for the Pintos’ carnivorous diet was the only good thing, he said to himself, that had come of her death. The Pintos asked for nothing in return, but he came back every evening from the market with a fistful of coriander or ginger to deposit on their table.

They would be delaying their dinner for him; he should find a payphone at once.

A loose page of the Times of India lay on the pavement. A former student of his named Noronha wrote a column for the paper; for this reason he never trod on it. He took a sudden sideways step to avoid the paper. The pavement began to slide away like sand. His left knee throbbed; things darkened. Spots twinkled in the darkness, like mica in a slab of granite. ‘You’re going to faint,’ a voice seemed to shout from afar, and he reached out to it for support; his hand alighted on something solid, a lamp post. He closed his eyes and concentrated on standing still.

He leaned against the lamp post. Breathing in and out. Now he heard the sound of wood being chopped from somewhere in the Oval Maidan. The blows of the axe came with metronomic regularity, like the hour hand in a grandfather clock: underneath them, he heard the nervous ticking of his own wristwatch, like splinters flying from the log. The two sounds quickened, as if in competition.

It was nearly nine o’clock when he felt strong enough to leave the lamp post.

Churchgate train station: the shadows of the tall ceiling-fans tremulous, like water lilies, as hundreds of shoes tramped on them. It had been years since Masterji had taken the Western Line in rush hour. The train to Santa Cruz was just pulling in. He turned his face as a women’s compartment passed them. Even before the train stopped, passengers had begun jumping in, landing with thuds, nearly falling over, recovering, scrambling for seats. Not an inch of free green cushion by the time Masterji got in. Wait. In a corner, he did spot a vacant patch of green, but he was kept away by a man’s hand — ah, yes, he remembered now: the infamous evening train ‘card mafia’. They were reserving a seat for a friend who always sat there to play with them. Masterji held on to a pole for support. With one hand he opened the blue book and turned the pages to find the section on Galileo. The card mafia, their team complete, were now playing their game, which would last them the hour and a quarter to Borivali or Virar; their cards had, on their reverse side, the hands of a clock at various angles, giving the impression of time passing with great fury as they were dealt out. Marine Lines — Charni Road — Grant Road — Mumbai Central — Elphinstone Road. Middle-aged accountants, stockbrokers, insurance salesmen kept coming in at each stop. Like an abdominal muscle the human mass in the train contracted.

Now for the worst. The lights turned on in the train as it came to a halt. Dadar station. Footfalls and pushing: in the dim first-class compartment men multiplied like isotopes. A pot belly pressed against Masterji — how rock-like a pot belly can feel! The smell of another’s shirt became the smell of his shirt. He remembered a line from his college Hamlet. The thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to? Shakespeare underestimated the trauma of life in Mumbai by a big margin.

The pressure on him lessened. Through the barred windows of the moving train, he saw firecrackers exploding in the sky. Bodies relaxed; faces glowed with the light from outside. Rockets shot out of begrimed buildings. Was it a religious festival? Hindu, or Muslim, or Parsi, or Jain, or Roman Catholic? Or something more mysterious: an un planned confluence of private euphoria — weddings, engagements, birthdays, other incendiary celebrations, all occurring in tandem.

At Bandra, he realized he had only one stop left, and began pushing his way to the door — I’m getting out too, old man. You should be patient. When the train stopped he was three feet away from the door; he was pushed from behind and pushed those ahead of him. But now a reverse tide hit them all: men barged in from the platform. Those who wanted to get out at Santa Cruz wriggled, pressed, cursed, refused to give up, but the superior desperation of those wanting to get in won the day. The train moved; Masterji had missed his stop. ‘Uncle, I’ll make room for you,’ one young man who had seen his plight moved back. ‘Get out at Vile Parle and take the next train back.’ When the train slowed, the mass of departing commuters shouted, in one voice: ‘Move!’ And nothing stopped them this time; they swept Masterji along with them on to the platform. Catching the Churchgate-bound train, he went back to Santa Cruz, where the station was so packed he had to climb the stairs leading out one step at a time.

He was released by the crowd into harsh light and strong fragrance. On the bridge that led out from the station, under bare electric bulbs, men sold orange and green perfumes in large bottles next to spreads of lemons, tennis shoes, keychains, wallets, chikoos. A boy handed him a cyclostyled advertisement on yellow paper as he left the bridge.

He dropped the advertisement and walked down the stairs, avoiding the one-armed beggar, into a welcome-carpet of fructose. In the market by the station, mango-sellers waited for the returning commuters: ripe and bursting, each mango was like a heartfelt apology from the city for the state of its trains. Masterji smelled the mangoes and accepted the apology.

Near the mango-sellers, a man who had his head and arms sticking through the holes of a cardboard sign that said: ‘Fight seven kinds of vermin’, with appropriate illustrations below (cockroaches, honey bees, mongoose, ants, termites, lice, mosquitoes), saluted Masterji. This pest control man often came to Vishram to knock down, with a long bamboo pole, an impromptu beehive or a wasps’ nest on the roofing. Extending his hand through the illustrated cardboard sign he wore, he seized the old teacher’s arm.

‘Masterji. Someone was asking about Vishram Society in the market.’

‘Asking what?’

‘What kind of people lived in it, what their reputation was, did they fight with each other and with others, lots and lots of questions. He was a tall fellow, Masterji.’

‘Did he wear a white shirt and black trousers?’

‘Yes, I think so. I told him that any Society with a man like Masterji in it is a good Society.’

‘Thank you, my friend,’ Masterji said, having forgotten the pest control man’s name.

So the Secretary was right, something is going on, Masterji thought. He had a vision of the green cage in the zoo again; he smelled something animal and insolent. Maybe they should go to the police in the morning.

When he reached Vishram, the gate was padlocked. Walking with care over the recently filled-up construction hole, he slapped the heavy chains and lock against the gate. ‘Ram Khare!’ he shouted. ‘Ram Khare, it’s me!’

The guard came from his room in the back of the building and unlocked the chain. ‘It’s past ten o’clock, Masterji. Be a little patient.’

The stairwell smelled. He found the stray dog lying on the first landing of the stairs, its body shivering, foam at the mouth. Did no one care that this dog could be sick? The animal had lost a layer of subcutaneous fat, and its ribcage was monstrously articulated, like the maw of another beast that was consuming it.

Masterji prodded at the dog’s ribs with his foot; when it did not move, he kicked. It yelped and rocketed down the stairs.

Waiting for a few seconds to make sure the dog did not return, he continued up to the third floor, where, as he was turning the key to his room, he heard a click behind him. The door of 3B opened wide — light, laughter, music — a young man stepped out.

Ms Meenakshi, the journalist, loose-haired and wearing her nightie, had her hand on the young man’s shoulder as he took a big step into the hallway, which caused him to bump into the old school-teacher. ‘Sorry,’ the boy said. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

He had bathed a few minutes ago, and Masterji smelled fresh soap.

‘Can’t you watch yourself?’ he shouted.

The boy grinned.

Before he knew what he was doing, Masterji had pushed the grinning thing. The boy fell back, banged his head into the door of 3B, and slid to the floor.

As Masterji watched, the young man rose to his feet, his fist clenched. Before either man could do anything, the girl began to scream.

13 MAY

What is Bombay?

From the thirteenth floor, a window answers: banyan, maidan, stone, tile, tower, dome, sea, hawk, amaltas in bloom, smog on the horizon, gothic phantasmagoria (Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Building) emerging from the smog.

Dharmen Shah watches the hawk. It has been hovering outside the window, held aloft by a mysterious current — a thrashing of sunlit wings — and it is on the sill. In its claws a mouse, or a large part of one. Entrails wink out of grey fur: a ruby inside ore. A second later, another hawk is also on the sill.

Opening the window, Shah leaned out as far as he could: the two birds were flying in a vindictive whirl around each other. The dead mouse, left behind on the sill, was oozing blood and grease.

Shah’s mouth filled with saliva. He had eaten a packet of milk biscuits in the past twelve hours.

Consoling his belly with a massage, Shah moved to the next window. He ate the view from here: the football field that occupied most of the Cooperage, the green Oval Maidan beside it, the gable and deep-arched entranceway of the University, the Rajabai Tower, and the High Court of Bombay. Amidst the coconut palms and mango trees, the red blossoms of a gulmohar burned like love bites on the summer’s day.

A stubby, gold-ringed index finger sketched round the Rajabai Tower and dragged it all the way to the other end of the Oval Maidan. There: it would fit much better there.

Shah looked down. On the road directly below the window, a woman was talking on a mobile phone. He craned his neck to see what she was wearing below her waist.

‘It’s a girl, isn’t it, Dharmen?’

Doctor Nayak came into the room with an X-ray photograph in his hand.

‘That’s the only thing that would get your neck out of the window.’

The doctor flipped the photograph, and held it up against the view of the city.

Dharmen Shah’s skull glowed. The X-ray had been taken less than an hour ago at the hospital. Shah saw something milky-white chuckling inside his cranium, a ghost grinning through his wide-open jaw. The doctor slid the X-ray back into its folder. He indicated for his guest and patient to use the sofa.

‘Why do you think I called you here to my home after the tests? I have cancelled three morning appointments for this.’

Shah, with hands massaging his belly, grinned. ‘Real estate.’ He stayed by the window.

‘Not this time, Dharmen. I wanted to say things that are better said in the house than at the hospital. In the hope that you might listen this time.’

‘So grateful.’

‘It is a bit worse each time I see you, Dharmen. That thing that is growing in your chest and head. Chronic bronchitis. Worse and worse each time. You have infected mucus in your lungs and in your sinuses. The next stage is that you have trouble breathing. We may have to put you in a hospital bed. Do you want things to come to that?’

‘And why would things come to that?’ Shah knocked on the window. ‘Despite the fact that I take every blood test, X-ray, and medical pill that you recommend. After starving myself the previous night.’

Youthful and square-jawed, Doctor Nayak sported a black moustache above a tuft of goatee: when he grinned he looked like the Jack of Spades.

‘You’re a big, spoilt child, Dharmen. You don’t do what your doctor tells you to do, and you think he won’t find out as long as you turn up for blood tests and X-rays. I’ve been warning you for months. It’s the construction business that is doing this to you. All the dust you inhale. The stress and strain.’

‘I’ve been at construction sites for twenty-five years, Nayak. The problem began only a year or two ago.’

‘It’s all those old buildings you’re around. The ones you break up. Materials were used then that are banned now. Asbestos, cheap paint. They get into your lungs. Then these places you like going to, these slums.’

‘The place is called Vakola.’

‘I’ve seen it. Very polluted. Diesel in the air, dust. The system is weakened by pollution over time.’

‘What is this, then?’ Dharmen Shah drummed on his stomach. He pinched his thick forearms. ‘What is this, then? Isn’t this good health?’

‘Listen to me. I gave up three paying appointments for this. You’re picking up fevers, coughs, stomach illnesses. Your immune system is weakening. Leave Bombay,’ said the doctor. ‘At least for a part of each year. Go to the Himalayas. Simla. Abroad. The one thing money can’t buy here is clean air.’

The fat man reached into his shirt pocket. Straightening out a cheaply printed brochure, he handed it to Doctor Nayak.

The ‘King’ of the Suburban Builders, J. J. Chacko, MD of the Ultimex Group, has astounded all his observers, friends, and peers, by acquiring a prime construction plot in Vakola, Santa Cruz (East) at an audacious rate that constitutes the HIGHEST PRICE ever paid for a redevelopment project in this suburb, despite the vigilant and audacious efforts of various competitors to bag the prize instead.

Mr Chacko exclusively discloses to ‘Mumbai Real Estate News’ that an architect from Hong Kong, the noted land of modernism, will be called in to design the world-class apartments; Mr Chacko also believes he will add a park and shopping mall to the area in a few months’ time. Hotels, plazas, gardens, happy families will follow.

Ultimex Group’s motto is ‘The Very Best’ and it has been progressing all over the city of Mumbai. On the personal front, Mr Chacko, visionary, Ultimex Group, is not a known figure, preferring to keep away from the glamour scene of So-Bo (south Bombay) social life. He is ‘mischievous’, ‘shy’, and ‘a family man with simple pleasures’, says one private friend. He is nimble in his thoughts, and sly, like the man of the future; he is a great philanthropist, winner of thirteen gold medals, plaques, dedicatory poems, and paper-based awards for his humanitarian achievement in the field of social work.

He is also passionate about chess and carom.

The doctor read the brochure, and turned it over, and read it again.

‘So?’

‘So that’s J. J. Chacko, head of the Ultimex Group. The area around the Vakola train station is in his pocket. Has three buildings on that side already. He’s coming over to my side now. Know what he did the other day? Paid eighty-one lakhs for a one-room in a slum. Just so everyone would talk about him. In my own territory. Even sends me this brochure in the mail.’

‘So?’

Shah took back the piece of paper, folded it, and replaced it in his pocket. He patted it.

‘How can I take a holiday when J. J. Chacko doesn’t? Does his doctor tell him to slow down?’

Doctor Nayak’s forehead filled with lines.

‘I don’t care if he kills himself. But you can’t go straight into another project. Are you doing this for Satish? What could he want more than for his father to live a long life?’

Dharmen Shah drew a line on the window with his finger.

‘There is a golden line in this city: a line that makes men rich.’

Now he dotted three points on it.

‘You have Santa Cruz airport there, you have the Bandra-Kurla Complex there and you have the Dharavi slums there. Why is this line golden? Air travel is booming. More planes, more visitors. Then’ — he moved his finger — ‘the financial centre at Bandra-Kurla is expanding by the hour. Then the government is starting redevelopment in Dharavi. Asia’s biggest slum will become Asia’s richest slum. This area is boiling with money. People arrive daily and have nowhere to live. Except’ — he dotted his golden line in the centre — ‘here. Vakola. The Fountainhead and Excelsior will be ready by November this year. I’ve sold most of the units in them already. But the main show is next year. The Shanghai.’

Doctor Nayak, who had been yawning, closed his mouth shut. He grinned.

‘That again. That city is going to kill you, Dharmen.’

‘You should have come with me, Nayak. Roads as far as the eye can see, skyscrapers, everything clean, beautiful.’ Shah hit the window; it trembled. ‘Those Chinese have all the will power in the world. And here we haven’t had ten minutes of will power since Independence.’

The doctor, with a chuckle, got up from his sofa and went to the window. He stretched.

‘The experience of Shanghai being to a middle-aged Indian businessman what the experience of sex is to a teenager. You can’t keep comparing us to the Chinese, Dharmen.’

Shah turned to look at him.

‘How else will we improve? Look at the trains in this city. Look at the roads. The law courts. Nothing works, nothing moves; it takes ten years to build a bridge.’

‘Enough. Enough. Have some breakfast with us, Dharmen. Vishala wants to thank you. You arranged that deal for her friend in Prabha Devi.’ Nayak placed his hand on the fat man’s shoulder. ‘You’re starting to grow on her. Stay. I’ll cancel a fourth appointment for you.’

Dharmen Shah was gazing out of the window.

The hawks rematerialized. Still in combat, blown towards the building by a sudden gust, they came straight at the window and slammed into it, before another current lifted them, as if at a cliff face, vertically up.

‘Bloody nuisance,’ Doctor Nayak said. ‘Leave shit on the windows, fight all day long. Someone should…’ He pulled an imaginary trigger. ‘… and knock them off. One by one.’

*

Punching the buttons on his mobile phone, Shah walked through the basement car park until a spectral voice began echoing under the low ceiling.

‘Mr Secretary, members of Vishram Society…’

Shah slipped the mobile phone into his pocket and walked with stealth.

A tall dark man in a white shirt and black trousers stood at the open door of the basement lift. Facing its half-mirror, he raised his left hand towards it.

‘Mr Secretary, members of Vishram Society, Towers A and B, all your dreams are about to come true.’

The man shifted the angle of his jaw: a broken upper tooth now showed prominently in the mirror.

‘Mr Secretary, members of…’

A boy in dirty khaki, a tea tray in his hand, poked the man from behind, asking to be allowed into the lift.

The man spun around with a raised hand. ‘Sister-fucker, don’t touch me.’

The tea boy stepped back, shifting the tray with its leaping glasses to his left hand.

Shah cleared his throat.

‘Shanmugham,’ he said, ‘let the boy use the lift.’

With a ‘yes, sir’, the tall man hurried to a grey Mercedes-Benz, whose door he opened for his coughing employer.

On Marine Drive.

Coconut palms bent by the ocean breeze and pigeons in sudden flight added to the sensation of speed on the long straight dash down the avenue. A satin patch of sun gleamed on Back Bay.

‘Has everything but the deadline in it,’ Shanmugham said, turning from the front passenger seat of the Mercedes-Benz to show his boss a printed page. The driver changed gears as a red light finally snared them.

‘I went over it word for word last night, sir. Made sure every comma was right.’

Ignoring the letter, Mr Shah opened a little blue metal box, and flicked what was inside with a plastic spoonlet into his bright red mouth. Small black teeth chewed the gutka: he had lost a few.

‘Don’t worry about words, Shanmugham. Tell me about the people.’

‘You saw them, sir.’

‘Only once.’

‘Solid people. Tower B is modern. Finance, high-tech, computers. Tower A is old. Teachers, accountants, brokers. Both are solid.’

‘Teachers?’ The fat man winced. ‘What else about this Society? Has anything bad happened there?’

‘One suicide, sir. Many years ago. A boy jumped from the roof. They didn’t tell me, but I found out from the neighbours.’

‘Just one suicide?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’ll manage.’

At the traffic lights before Malabar Hill, a headless cat lay on the road; from the neck up, it was just a smear of pink pulp imprinted with a tyre tread, an exclamation mark of blood. The builder’s heart went out to it. In a world of trucks and heavy traffic, the little cat had not been given a fair chance. But what about you, Dharmen, the pulverized animal asked. You’re next, aren’t you?

He lowered the window and spat at the corpse.

He dreamed of breakfast. Eight pieces of toast, sliced diagonally, piled into a porcelain dish; a jar of Kissan’s Mixed-Fruit Jam; a jar of Kissan’s Marmalade; a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup; and, suspended in a lobed bowl of water to keep it soft, an iceberg of homemade butter.

The Mercedes drove up Malabar Hill; the ocean glinted to Shanmugham’s left.

As the driver adjusted his gears, they stalled outside an old ruined mansion. Fresh saplings had broken through the exquisitely carved stone leaves and flowers on the nineteenth-century cornice, and a sign hammered into the front wall said:

MUMBAI MUNICIPAL CORPORATION THIS BUILDING IS DANGEROUS, DILAPIDATED, AND UNFIT FOR HUMANS TO BE AROUND. NO ONE SHOULD ENTER IT.

As the car accelerated past, light from the ocean echoed through the ruined mansion.

Shanmugham saw four massive banyan trees growing in the compound of one grand building, their aerial roots clinging as if glued to the boundary wall: four escutcheons of the House of Shah.

The lift took them to the eighth floor.

‘We’ll go to the construction site right after breakfast,’ Shah told his assistant, as they walked towards his flat. ‘The contractor told me this morning that everything was all right and there was no need for me to be there. You know what that means.’

A medallion of a golden Lord Ganesha sat on the lintel above the builder’s home.

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:

CONFIDENCE SHANGHAI VAKOLA, SANTA CRUZ (E) SUPER LUXURY APARTMENTS ‘FROM MY FAMILY TO YOURS’

‘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.

ULTIMEX GROUP IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE FUTURE SITE OF ‘ULTIMEX MILANO’ A NEW CONCEPT IN HOUSING SUPER LUXURY APARTMENTS

‘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.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Mr Shah went alone to the Excelsior. The work had fallen behind schedule here, so Shanmugham knew that his boss would have plenty to do for the next few hours.

He sat in the shade of the stunted tree, his mobile phone in his right hand.

The three workers’ children sat on the sand pile, watching him with open mouths.

Showing them a closed fist, Shanmugham said: ‘Mr Secretary, members of Vishram Society, all your dreams are…’

A water buffalo drew near the children.

Shanmugham left the site, had lunch on the main road, returned, and waited near the sand. The children came back to watch. He practised again on them. Taking out his blue-checked handkerchief, which his wife laid folded for him every morning on the breakfast table, he wiped his face: temples, nose, and then the back of his neck, down to the first sharp knob of his spine. He folded the handkerchief back into the square his wife had made. Then, lunging forward, he showed the children his jagged tooth: Aaaargh!

They ran.

He left the site, had tea near the main road, and returned to the pile of sand. The children came back to watch. The water buffalo moved near the sand, turning its long curved horns from side to side; a crow glided to the earth in between the buffalo’s horns, and sucked a worm raw out of a hole.

Some time after five o’clock, Shanmugham reached his hand into his pocket and fumbled: his mobile phone had beeped. Mr Shah, standing on the third floor of the Excelsior, was waving at him.

The message had arrived from the astrologer in Matunga.

Leaving his group of spectators seated on their sand pile, Shanmugham sprinted from the construction site, down the mud path, past the Gold Coin and Silver Trophy Societies, past the Tamil temple in front of which boys were playing cricket (hopping to avoid the red cricket ball), and arrived, panting, at Vishram Society, where he placed his hands on the guard’s booth and said: ‘I want to see your Secretary again.’

Ram Khare, who had been fanning himself with his checked handkerchief as he recited from his holy digest, looked up at his visitor and dropped the handkerchief.

He followed the visitor all the way to the Secretary’s office, standing outside and watching as the man put his hands on either side of the Remington typewriter and said: ‘Mr Secretary: I have to make a confession to you. I am not the man I said I was, when I came to see you the other day. My name is, indeed, Shanmugham: that much is true. But I come as a representative of one of Mumbai’s leading realestate development companies, namely, the Confidence Group, and of its managing director, the esteemed Mr Dharmen Shah. Let me tell you now why I had to deceive you the other day. First read this letter that I am placing, with all due respect and reverence, on your desk; while you read it, I will wait here with my…’

The foundation of the 32-year-old friendship between Masterji and Mr Pinto was the ‘No-Argument book’ — a notebook in which every financial transaction between them had been faithfully recorded. In July 1975, the first time they had had lunch together, Mr Pinto, an accountant for the Britannia Biscuit company, had proposed an actuarial conscience to watch over their snacks and coffees. Realizing that petty fights, mainly over money, had disrupted his other friendships, and determined that this one should be saved, Masterji had accepted.

Mr Pinto was making his latest entry into the ‘No-Argument’ — the sixteenth of its kind since the original notebook of ’75.

‘Fill it out later. I can see the waiter.’

‘Okay,’ Mr Pinto said. ‘But you owe me two and a half rupees.’

‘Two and a half?’

‘For the newspaper.’

‘Which one?’

‘Hindustan Times. You made me buy it last Saturday because you wanted to read a column by some former student of yours.’

‘Nonsense,’ Masterji said. ‘I have no students writing for that paper.’

Mr Pinto knew that Masterji had not bought the Hindustan Times; a life-long accountant, he deflected a variety of worries into money talk. What he had really meant to bring up was something else: the previous night’s incident. Masterji’s behaviour in pushing the modern girl’s boyfriend, for no good reason — the girl’s screaming had brought people from around the building to the third floor — was so contrary to his usual ‘nature’ that people in Vishram had talked all day long about the incident, retelling and embellishing it. A man deprived in quick order of both occupation and wife was in a dangerous place, some felt. Ajwani, the broker, had even asked how safe was it to leave their children in a darkened room with him any more? Mrs Puri’s stout rebuttal (‘—ashamed of yourself!’) had put an end to such talk.

Mr Pinto knew that it was his duty to let his friend know what they were saying about him in the Society. ‘But it is best to raise such matters after dinner,’ he decided.

Putting away the No-Argument book, he prepared himself for what the Biryani Emperor of Bombay had to offer.

A good biryani needs excitement. A touch of mystery. At Café Noorani near Haji Ali, the waiter comes out with a plate with an oval heap of steaming rice, speckled with yellow and red grains; the chicken was somewhere inside, true, but you had to dig into it with the fork — what aroma! — to find those marinated red chunks.

In contrast — Mr Pinto stuck his fork into his plate — look at this. Two paltry brown chicken pieces, by the side of lukewarm rice. Not a vegetable in sight.

The ‘Biryani Emperor’ was set in between shops selling bright silk saris, which added to the diners’ awareness of the excitement missing from the food. This was a Sunday night; and for the two friends Sunday night was always biryani night. Conservative in most other things, they were reckless on biryani night, trying out a new place each week. Mr Pinto had found the ‘Biryani Emperor of Bombay’ much written about in the papers, even numbered among the ‘the ten best-kept secrets of Mumbai’ in one newspaper.

‘Biryani Emperor of Bombay. What a fraud, Masterji.’

Not hearing a response from his friend, he looked up. He saw Masterji staring at the ceiling of the restaurant.

‘Is it a rat?’

Masterji nodded.

‘Where?’

The roof of the Biryani Emperor was held up by rafters of wood, and a rodent had materialized on one of them.

‘Boy!’ Masterji shouted. ‘Look at that thing up there on the wood.’

The ‘boy’ — the middle-aged waiter — looked up. Undeterred by all the attention, the sly rat kept moving along the rafter, like a leopard on a branch. The ‘boy’ yawned.

Masterji pushed his biryani, not even half eaten, in the direction of the boy.

‘I have a rule. I can’t eat this.’

It was true: he had a ‘one-rat rule’ — never revisit a place where a single rat has been observed.

‘You and your rule.’ Mr Pinto helped himself to some of his friend’s biryani.

‘I don’t like competing for my food with animals. Look at him up there: like a Caesar.’

‘A man has to bend his rules a little to enjoy life in Mumbai,’ Mr Pinto said, chewing. ‘Just a little. Now and then.’

Masterji could not take his eye off the rodent Caesar. He did not notice that his arm was tipping over a glass.

As the waiter came to pick up the pieces, Mr Pinto took out the No-Argument book and added to Masterji’s debit list: ‘Fine for broken glass at (so-called) Biryani Emperor. Rs 10.’

Having paid for food and the broken glass, the two were walking back to Vishram Society.

‘Rats have always fought humans in this city, Mr Pinto. In the nineteenth century there were plagues here. Even today they outnumber us: six rats for every human in Bombay. They have so many species and we have just one. Rattus norvegicus. Rattus rattus. Bandicota bengalensis. We must not let them take over the city again.’

Mr Pinto said nothing. He wished again that Masterji had his Bajaj scooter with him, so they wouldn’t have to walk back on a full stomach. He blamed his wife Shelley for this. After Purnima’s death, she had suggested Masterji follow the advice in a Reader’s Digest article and renounce something to remember the deceased person by.

‘For example,’ she had said, ‘you can give up eating brinjals. And each time you crave a brinjal, you’ll remember Purnima.’

Masterji thought about it. ‘I will give up my scooter.’

‘No no,’ she protested. ‘That’s extreme. Brinjals will do.’

Masterji relished the extreme: the scooter went.

A fifteen-minute walk later, the two old men reached their local market, a row of blue wooden stalls, lit by white tube-lights or naked yellow bulbs, in which the most disparate trades were conducted side by side: a chicken shop smelling of poultry shit and raw meat, a sugar cane-vendor’s stall haloed in raw sucrose, a Xerox machine in a stationery shop yawning flashes of blinding light, and a barber’s salon, busy even at this hour, stinking of shaving cream and gossip.

Mr Pinto finally summoned up the courage.

‘Masterji,’ he said, ‘why don’t you have yourself checked at Mahim Hinduja hospital? They do a full-body check-up.’

‘Checked? For what?’

‘It begins with D, Masterji.’

‘Nonsense. I have perfect control over my bowels. I have always had strong lower organs.’

Mr Pinto looked at his shoes and said: ‘Diabetes.’

‘Mr Pinto. I don’t drink much, don’t eat much, I don’t even have television. How can I get diabetes?’

‘You are losing your temper. The other night it happened with the modern girl’s boyfriend. Everyone in the Society has been talking. And you go to the toilet all the time. We hear it from below.’

‘How dare you, Mr Pinto. Spying on me. I’ll go to the bathroom when I want to. It is a free country.’

They walked back to Vishram in silence. Ram Khare, the guard, came running up to them: ‘Have you heard the news, sir?’

‘What news?’ Mr Pinto asked.

‘The Secretary is at Ajwani’s office now, sir — go there and hear the news for yourself,’ Khare said. ‘There’s gold for all of you! Gold!’

‘He’s drinking again,’ Mr Pinto whispered. They left the raving guard behind them and walked up the stairs.

The old accountant said: ‘Come to our room and have a small peg, Masterji.’

‘Not tonight, Mr Pinto.’

‘We have the Amaretto. Tony’s gift. Let’s have a peg. A peg each.’

Mr Pinto had a wonderful liqueur, brought by his son Tony on his most recent visit from America, and sipped only on treasured nights. Masterji understood that this was in the nature of an apology, and touched his friend’s shoulder, before walking up to his own flat.

Vakola at night: the red neon cross of St Antony’s church glows over the main road. Vendors of paani-puri bhelpuri, and gulab jamuns suspended in sugar syrup feed the tidal waves of tired humans coming in from the train station. Plastic watches, metal locks, toys for children, sandals and T-shirts punctuate the offerings of food.

Across the road, the lights are on at the Renaissance Real-Estate Agency.

Vakola is not a suburb where real-estate brokers become rich. At least four operate just along the main road. Of these, Renaissance is the most attractive; spacious, bright, its glass door painted with an image of Lord Krishna playing his flute in the magic gardens of Brindavan.

Inside, seated at his steel desk, Ramesh Ajwani, looked up from a copy of the real-estate pages of the Times of India. Mani, his assistant, had opened the glass door to allow a young woman to enter.

Ajwani removed his half-moon glasses, and motioned for the visitor to sit.

How nice, he thought, to find a young woman in this modern day who can wear a sari well.

A radiant sky-blue, cut perhaps a bit low.

Her English was better than his; he noted this with pleasure.

A two-bedroom for herself, a working woman, unmarried, with both parents living with her. One-year rental lease of the renewable nature. Range of Rs 15,000 to 20,000.

Ajwani, as was his habit, added 10 per cent to the upper range of the figure quoted, and thought at once of a set of places to show her. He put his hands on his table and leaned in to the woman.

‘You seem to think I am a broker, miss?’

Ajwani’s dark, pockmarked face was so unusual for his community that clients routinely mistook him for a South Indian — a good thing, he felt, because South Indians, unlike Sindhis, are known as an honest people. He was stocky, thick-necked, wore blue or cream safari suits, and smelled of Johnson’s Baby Powder.

The woman in the sky-blue sari recovered. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘I am not.’

Parallel engraved lines slanted high on Ajwani’s cheeks, like facial gills, adding a touch of menace to his grin.

‘I will not do what every other broker in this city does. I will not lie to you. Will not say a building is “virtually new” if it is forty years old; will not gloss over peculiarities in the neighbours, seepages and leakages in roof or walls. I believe in accurate information — for myself and for my clients. Please look at the wall. My three gods are up there.’

The young woman saw a full-length framed portrait of the Sai Baba and another one of the god Balaji in his 24-carat-gold costume at Tirupati.

‘The third one is my most important god. Do you know his name? Please take a closer look at him. Go to the wall, please.’

The woman in the blue sari did as she was told; in between the deities she saw a small printed list.

KNOW YOUR FACTS

One BHK (Bedroom Hall Kitchen)

Two BHK (Two Bedroom Hall Kitchen)

Three BHK (Three Bedroom Hall Kitchen)

Deposit: Multiple of rent — up to six months

‘Token’ Money — must be paid

NOC (No Objection Certificate, from Secretary of Society) — must be given

Police Clearance Certificate (from local station) — broker will obtain.

Passport-size photo (x2) — needed. Proof of Employment — a must

Carpet area; Built-up area; Super built-up area — know the difference

Leave-and-Licence Agreement: who pays for stamp paper? Decide first

Types of renters: Family, Single Bachelor, Company Bachelor, NRI, Foreign Passport — who are you?

Standing behind the broker, she noticed that his right foot, having slipped out of its slipper, was opening and closing the lowest drawer of his desk in a clear state of excitement.

‘Do you know the name of this god, miss? He is called “Information”. Make him your master too. Now, please sit down.’

Waiting for her to return to her seat, he turned a framed diptych of photographs around to her.

‘R and R, my two boys. Rajeev and Raghav. Just like me. R for Ramesh. Also my brokerage, R for Renaissance. And notice they are both wearing tae kwon-do outfits. Fitness is my fourth god.’

While the young lady admired the diptych, he leaned in.

‘Miss Swathi, this Ajwani of yours is neat, happy, ugly, crude, truthful, mongoose-faced.’ He emphasized each adjective with his hands, which were covered with cheap rings. ‘And these are his virtues.’

The girl tried hard to suppress the urge, then put her hand on her mouth, and succumbed. She shook with laughter; the broker beamed.

‘I also enjoy making people laugh. Especially young women. Their laughter is the sweet…’

Just then the glass door of the Renaissance Real-Estate Agency opened. Secretary Kothari walked in with another man — tall, dark, dressed like a salesman in a white shirt and black trousers.

‘What is it, Kothari?’ Ajwani asked. ‘I’m with a client.’

‘It’s urgent,’ the Secretary said.

Ajwani was talking to a young woman in a sky-blue sari that exposed her navel. Nothing could be more urgent right now.

‘We are looking for a two-bedroom for her parents and herself. I’ll come and see you in your office when we have finished our work, Kothari. And you, sir, I’m not interested in any more insurance, thank you very much.’

‘Ajwani, Ajwani.’ The Secretary put his fists on the desk. His voice trembled. ‘All your dreams are about to come true, Ajwani.’

The man who looked like an insurance salesman sat down, and slid a piece of paper over the laminated table towards the broker.

Ajwani put on his half-moon glasses; then he picked up the paper and began reading.

A small Hindu temple stood at an intersection just beyond the fruit and vegetable market. Beggars crouched about it; dappled brown goats wandered around it; Mrs Puri prayed.

Move it, God. The stone that blocks Ramu’s mind. That was how she had always pictured it: a boulder had locked her Ramu’s mind inside a cave. At least stop it from rolling backwards and pushing him deeper into the cave. Who will take care of him when he grows old?

When it came to places of worship in Mumbai Mrs Puri was an expert; Muslim, Christian and Hindu, she had been to each of them for her Ramu. Haji Ali, Mount Mary, SiddhiVinayak, Mahalakshmi, you name it, she had prayed there.

She gave a rupee each to the supplicants squatting by the temple, making sure they earned their money — ‘Ramesh Puri. We call him Ramu. Pray for him with all your strength’ — and went to the market to buy fresh vegetables for dinner.

Curved green stems bearing yellow bananas were suspended from the ceilings of the grocery shops; glitzy plastic satchels of instant Chinese noodles and malt powder twinkled beside the bananas like nouveau-riche cousins. Two Catholic priests, head to toe in white cassocks, stood at the counter of a grocery store, learning about the Reliance Company’s prepaid mobile phone plans from the owner. Mrs Puri overheard. Reliance? Oh, no. Vodafone had much better reception here. She was about to save the two holy men from being swindled, when:

‘Good evening, Sangeeta-ji.’

Ibrahim Kudwa (4C) passed her on his Honda Activa scooter with a wave. His wife had her arms around his waist, and his ten-year-old son Mohammad sat in front of him in his martial-arts outfit (GOJURU TAE KWON-DO); inside his bulky, billowing white kurta, Kudwa had the look of a bleached kangaroo carrying its entire family in its pouches.

Mrs Puri felt lighter. She envied Kudwa his happy family life — just as she knew he in secret envied Ajwani for owning a Toyota Qualis; just as Ajwani probably envied someone else; and this chain of envy linked them, showing each what was lacking in life, but offering also the consolation that happiness was present right next door, in the life of a neighbour, an element of the same Society.

She returned to Vishram with brinjals and beetroots.

The Secretary and Mr Ajwani were standing by the black Cross with folded palms. A man in a white shirt and black trousers — she recognized him as one of the two who had come the other day asking all the questions — was punching a mobile phone behind them.

‘Mrs Puri,’ the Secretary’s voice trembled. ‘Quickly. Up to your room. Your husband wants to tell you himself.’

Her heart contracted. God, what have you done to my family this time? What new horror?

Mrs Rego stood athwart the entrance of the Society.

‘This is an illusion, Mrs Puri. You must understand that. The money will never come.’

‘Let me go,’ Mrs Puri almost pushed the Battleship aside. She ran up the stairs to her Ramu. The door to her flat was open. Her husband and her boy were sitting together in the dark.

‘All of us… all of us… all of us in this building…’ Mr Puri said, when she turned on the light.

‘Yes?’ she whispered. She soothed Ramu’s brow with her palm. ‘Yes?’

‘We’ve paid our taxes, and we’ve helped each other, and we’ve gone to SiddhiVinayak and Mount Mary church and Mahim church…’

‘Yes?’

‘… and now all of us in this building, all of us good people, have been blessed by the Hand of God.’

And then her husband told her why the Secretary, Ajwani, and the strange man were standing by the black Cross, and why the Battleship was attempting to block the entrance.

Rum-pum-pum. Ramu, catching the excitement, walked round his parents. Rum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum.

Mr Puri watched his wife. ‘Well? What do you think?’

‘If this is really true,’ she said, ‘it will be the first miracle of my life.’

For the past three decades, the residents of Vishram Society 3A (Murthy) and 2A (Pinto) had been four people with one set of sleeping habits. If one couple went to bed early the other couple turned off their television and went to bed. If one couple chose to sing along to Lata Mangeshkar late into the night the other couple also sang along to Lata Mangeshkar late into the night.

Tonight Mr Pinto was enjoying a bout of insomnia. He stared at his ceiling. For thirty years that ceiling — with the chandelier hanging from the centre like a glowing fountain of intelligence — had been an image of his neighbour and friend’s mind.

‘Why is he walking about so much, Shelley? It’s past ten o’clock.’

Mrs Pinto lay next to him. Because of her near blindness, she did not accompany her husband and Masterji on their biryani outings.

‘Nothing to worry,’ she said.

‘Are you sure he has diabetes? He hasn’t seen a doctor yet.’

Mrs Pinto, who could not see the chandelier, concentrated on the footsteps, which went from one end of the room to the other, then stopped (a moment’s pause at the window) before turning around.

‘It’s not diabetes, Mr Pinto.’

‘Then what?’

Mrs Pinto was wiser about men. At her age, the body has become an automatic machine that moves in predictable tics, short repeated motions; but the mind is still capable of all its eccentric leaps. She guessed, from the pattern of the footsteps, the truth about the man up there.

‘The evenings, they must be terrible.’

So many months on his own, without a hand to touch in the dark.

Mrs Pinto turned around in bed so she wouldn’t have to listen.

‘He’s not the only one moving about,’ her husband said. ‘Can you hear? Something’s happening in the building.’

A glow-in-the-dark portrait of the Lord Balaji at Tirupati, his late wife’s favourite deity, hung from a hook on the wall of Masterji’s bedroom. A semi-automatic washing machine sat near the god’s portrait, while a cotton mattress for visitors, rolled up like a striped pink earthworm, was stacked on a small chair next to the machine. A square window with iron bars looked out on to the black Cross in the garden.

The wall was lined with built-in cupboard doors: but this was false cupboarding, meant to imitate the home of a man with more money — behind the doors were six green metal Godrej almirahs, where Purnima had stored everything from her wedding jewellery to the ledgers in which she did the household accounting. Masterji had only been allowed to watch as she went through a thick set of keys, found the right one, opened an almirah, and took out what she wanted. He knew that one shelf in an almirah was for her saris; one was for saris in which bundles of coins and notes were hidden; one was for saris in which chequebooks were wrapped; one was for documents relating to their children’s education; one for their finances. A month after her death, Gaurav had called to ask for her diamond necklace, the one she had bought at the Vummidi store in Chennai; Sonal was eager that her mother-in-law’s jewels shouldn’t be lost. Masterji said he did not remember any such necklace, but promised to look in the cupboards. His son’s coldness, he was sure, had started from this time.

Masterji opened one cupboard, and stared at the Godrej almirah inside, on which he saw himself reflected. A narrow full-length mirror had been set into the body of the almirah. Hundreds of red dots (brick red, mud red, and blood red) covered the mirror’s upper half; his wife used to stick one of these bindis on her forehead each time she left the house. Masterji thought the mirror made him look like a man with diseased skin, or a flowering tree.

In the kitchen the old calendar began to tap against the wall: once again he had the sensation that his wife was right there, chopping onions.

A key had been left in the lock of the almirah; he turned it to find the shelves empty, except for one that was paved with newspaper and defended by camphor mothballs, with just an old silk sari lying in it.

Her wedding sari.

He closed his eyes and brought his hands near the gold border of the sari. He breathed in the camphor-tinted air from the shelf. He thought of the time he had not defended her from her brothers in Suratkal. The old calendar began to hit the wall faster, tap-tap-tap, and now he was sure that Purnima was speaking to him. Tap-tap-tap. She did not want to know about the past. She wanted to know about the girl next door. The journalist.

He breathed in more camphor-tinted air for strength, and confessed. A human being at sixty-one is shining lusts in between old bones, Purnima. The girl next door disturbed him, it was true. He thought his wife would be angry, but she was some place beyond anger now. The calendar tapped again: she was telling him not to agitate himself. She understood now that a man cannot punish himself for his desires, which are sent to him from another world, and she knew he must have felt the same feelings for other women — his colleagues at school, perhaps even some who lived in Vishram Society — but he had repressed those urges and stayed true to her, and this self-control was meritorious, something that helped her on her journey over the oceans. Why, she asked, now that she was dead, did he feel shame at being aroused? Shame and guilt, he replied, with a candour he could never have summoned when Purnima was alive, they had been more than half of a man’s life. For his generation, or for his type of man within that generation, this was always the case. True, she said, true, beating her wings and rising over the ocean. She understood that her husband’s life had bent to black magnetic poles marked ‘Shame’ and ‘Guilt’: yet one of the grey wavelengths in between must be Conscience. That faint line was the one he should find. To guide him through what was coming next.

The vapours of mothballs, old newspaper, and silk sari made him drowsy.

Instead of the image of his wife’s soul, Masterji saw himself, with the body of an eagle, flying over an ocean: as if his own death, and subsequent trial, had already begun.

When he heard a loud, steady knocking on the door, his first thought was that it must be a summoner come to take him to his trial.

He opened the door to find Mr Pinto.

‘Why didn’t you ring?’

‘It’s not working—’ Mr Pinto pressed the bell to prove it.

Now Masterji was conscious of voices in the compound, and feet in the stairwell. From the compound, he could hear the Battleship shouting: ‘Illusion! Illusion!’

The two old men went down the stairs, to the noticeboard, where half a dozen people had gathered. Masterji saw Ibrahim Kudwa, his wife Mumtaz, Mrs Saldanha, her daughter Radhika, and Mrs Abichandani from the first floor, along with the Secretary, who was saying, ‘How could I tell anyone sooner? I found out only this evening.’

Masterji asked in a soft voice that people move to the side, until he was close enough to read the notice pinned on the central panel.

General Offer of Redevelopment: To Vishram Societies, A and B. Proposal Made by Confidence Group (Headquarters Navnirman Building, Parel, Mumbai).

Attention: Secretaries, Society A and B, and all residents

In consideration of the proposed development of a new super-luxury residential project on the current site of the Vishram Societies A and B, the Confidence Group makes an offer to the Vishram Societies (A and B Tower) for the outright purchase of all flats in the said Societies on the following basis:

It being noted that the two Societies consist of apartments, both one-bedroom and two-bedroom, ranging in size from 450 square feet to 950 square feet, and of an average size of 790 square feet; also that the prevailing rate in Vakola is of the range of Rs 8,000 to 12,000 a square foot, which may even be lower in the case of a building of the age and condition of Vishram Society, a generous offer is made to all owners at the uniform rate of Rs 19,000 a square foot.

For instance, an owner of a flat of size 800 square foot will receive a payment of 1.52 crore (1,52,00,000) rupees before tax. This is opposed to a market-rate of likely 60 to 70 lakhs (60,00,000 to 70,00,000) maximum, and that too only after the residents have paid for the repair, repainting, etc of flat and Society. Numerous other financial and tax advantages to the offer will be stated by the Managing Director of Confidence Group, Mr Dharmen Shah, when he comes in person to your Society to address the residents.

If the residents accept this generous offer, the said sum is payable in three instalments. One instalment upon your signing the agreement, one upon the vacating of the building, and one payable within three months into the nominated bank account. In addition, eight weeks’ rent, calculated on the basis of average rental rates in the Vakola area for a decent-quality two-bedroom flat, will be paid to each family, so they can stay nearby while they search for a new home. All payments will be made by cheque. Nominated Accounts may be in any nationalized bank (likes of Corporation Bank, Punjab National Bank etc.) or recognized and reputable private bank (likes of HSBC, HDFC, Karur Vysya, etc.). Please check with Builder for list of acceptable banks.

About the Confidence Group: Our motto is: ‘From my family to yours.’ Founded in 1978, we are one of Mumbai’s leading developers, with new projects also under development in Thane and Pune. MD of the Confidence Group, Mr Shah, is the recipient of numerous gold medals and paper-based awards for excellence. He has been cited by the Rotary Club for his charitable contributions and philanthropic vision of humanity. A family man at heart, he avoids the high society and glamorous life and concentrates on the quality of his work and accomplishments. He is also passionate about chess and carom. You may visit his numerous projects and accomplishments via the prospectus of Confidence Group, which has been left with the Secretaries of the Societies.

Important: The last date for the acceptance of the offer is the day after Gandhi Jayanti: 3 October. (Non-negotiable.) The offer will not be extended one minute beyond this date.