Last Man in Tower

14 MAY

Yawning as he emerged from the car park of the Mirchandani Manor, Shanmugham walked out of the gate — the security guard, unsure whether this was a servant or friend of Mr Shah, stood up without saluting — and went down wide stone steps, passing old men doing stretching exercises, until he stood on fresh, clean sand.

Versova beach. He took a deep breath of early-morning ocean breeze. A few fishing boats were out on the ocean; he turned to the north to see the coconut palms in faraway Madh Island. Stretching his neck and raising his arms over his head he turned to the other side of the beach: and flinched.

He had forgotten about Versova in the mornings.

Here, in this beach in this posh northern suburb of Mumbai, half the sand was reserved for the rich, who defecated in their towers, the other half for slum dwellers, who did so near the waves. Residents of the slum that had encroached upon the beach were squatting by the water, defecating.

An invisible line went down the middle of the beach like an electrified fence; beyond this line, the bankers, models, and film producers of Versova were engaged in tai-chi, yoga, or spot-jogging. Behind the exercising crowd, a woman in a billowing red dress posed against rocks as a photographer snapped. Large silver-foiled boards held up around the model reflected light on to her body; and she forced her rouged face into another smile for the cameras. Homeless men stood in a semi-circle round the photo-shoot, from where they passed loud and accurate judgement on the model’s physique and posing skills.

Looking at the long waxed limbs that showed through the flutter of red cloth, Shanmugham sat, precariously, on two rocks.

He turned around to look at the Mirchandani Manor, which stood on a rocky embankment behind him: sleek, beige-coloured, with a pointed gable. The curtain was still drawn at the seventh-floor window. He had received a text message from the boss at 6.30 a.m.: he assumed that they would be leaving for Vishram by nine.

Good.

Mr Shah should have been there when the offer was made yesterday, shown his teeth, gained their trust, seduced them with smiles and handshakes, done the politician’s number with their babies, and left with a bow and a quotation from a holy book. That was how it had always been done until now. Delay, and lawyers and NGOs smell you out; the vultures swoop lower.

But look at the boss, locked up here in Versova, his other home, all of last evening and night. Just because that astrologer in Matunga had told him that yesterday evening, while auspicious for the offer to be presented, was inauspicious for a personal visit. The boss was growing more and more superstitious: no question of that. A year or two ago he would have insisted that the stars give him better times. Or perhaps it was not those stars, but the fading one on the seventh floor of the Mirchandani Manor that was keeping Mr Shah here — the Versova property inside the Versova property. Shanmugham, a married man, smirked.

Ah, Versova. The ultimate ‘number two’ suburb of the city. Succeed in Bollywood, and you are probably living in Juhu or in Bandra: fail, and you leave; but if you have neither succeeded nor failed, just survived in that grey, ambiguous, ‘number two’ way, you end up here.

Mr Shah was human. He had his physical needs. That Shanmugham understood.

He just wished the boss would not keep him in the dark about his astrological appointments — he had no idea if the astrologer had nominated morning, or evening, or night, as the time for them to go to Vishram. Until the time came, he was expected to stay close to the Manor.

One of the silver foils reflecting sunlight on the model had been sponsored by a bank; on the back, bold red lettering announced:

8.75 % COMPOUNDED CANARA CO-OPERATIVE BANK 365 DAYS FIXED DEPOSIT NO PENALTY WITHDRAWAL APPLY NOW!

Shanmugham went closer, was shooed away by the model’s minders, smiled, and hurried back to the rocks.

On his way up in life, he had discovered petty finance like other men discover cocaine. He subscribed to the Economic Times; watched CNBC TV; and played with stocks. But he was a married man, with children, and the bulk of his money was locked away in the safety of a bank deposit. 2.8 lakh rupees, in the Rajamani Co-operative Bank, at 8.65 per cent for 400 days. He had been proud of that rate — he had forced his manager to add 0.15 per cent on top of the bank’s normal lending rate.

A helicopter striped the beach with its noisy shadow. Shanmugham, on his knees, did mathematics on hot sand (8.65 per cent as against 8.75 per cent; 400 days as against 365), while the waves creamed on the shore like the extra compound interest he could be making on his principal at the Canara Co-operative Bank.

The ocean breaking below your window; a lizard on the ceiling staring at you with fat envious eyes; and in the next room, a woman, twenty-six years younger, brushing her freshly washed hair and sending waves of strawberry and aloe towards your nostrils.

Dharmen Shah yawned. He saw no reason to get out of his bed.

‘Woke up?’ Rosie called from her room. ‘Come and see what I’ve bought for you, Uncle. A surprise.’

‘Let me sleep, Rosie.’

‘Come.’

She took him by the hand and led him into the living room; there it lay propped against the sofa; a framed three-part poster that showed the Eiffel Tower being erected in stages.

‘For you, Mr Builder. To put up in your office.’

‘Very sweet of you, Rosie,’ Shah said, and put his hand on his heart. He was truly touched, even though the money was his.

‘Eiffel,’ he said, seated at the laminated dining table outside the kitchen, ‘was the same fellow who built the Statue of Liberty. What would we do with him in India? Ask: what is your caste, what is your family, what is your background? Sorry, go away.’

The fat man stretched his hands and flexed his toes. Rosie turned from the kitchen to see him yawning indulgently.

‘Rosie,’ he said. ‘Did I ever tell you that I was my father’s first wife’s son?’

‘No, Uncle. You never tell me about yourself.’

‘They pulled my mother out of a well one day. That is the very first memory I have.’

She came out of the kitchen and wiped her hands.

‘I was four years old. She jumped into the well in our house in Krishnapur.’

‘Why did she do it?’

He shrugged.

‘A year later I had a stepmother. She had four sons. They got all my father’s love. He would not even look at me with kindness. The worst part was this: he made me feel ashamed, Rosie. It was as if my mother’s suicide were my fault. He would glare at me if anyone ever mentioned it.’

‘And then?’

Then came the day he went to his father’s grocery store and asked: ‘May I have a bicycle, Father? It’s my sixteenth birthday’, to be told, ‘No’, even though a younger half-brother had received one. Understanding then that being second-best was what was expected of the sons of a first wife, he left home the next morning with twelve rupees and eighty paise that he had saved up. He walked, took the bus, took the train, ran out of money and walked again, till the sandals had fallen off his feet and he had to tie plantain leaves around them. Reached Bombay. He had never once returned to Krishnapur.

‘Not once?’

‘Why go back? In the village, a man lives as a social animal, Rosie: pleasing his father, grandfather, brothers, cousins. His caste. His community. A man is free here. In the city.’

Rosie waited for more, but he had gone silent; she got up from the table.

‘I’ll bring you the toast in a second, Uncle.’

‘Butter. Lots of it.’

‘Don’t I know? That’s the only thing on earth you love: fresh butter.’

In a little while he was licking butter off triangular pieces of toast at the table. Wiping her hands down the sides of her blue jeans, she watched from the kitchen.

‘Did something happen today, Uncle? You’re very talkative.’

‘Satish is in trouble. The second time this year.’

‘What kind of trouble, Uncle?’

‘Go get me more toast.’

Rosie returned with fresh bread, which she flicked with the back of her fingers on to his plate.

‘The Shanghai, Rosie. Did I tell you that’s the name of my new project?’

‘What happened to Satish, Uncle?’

‘I want to forget about him. I want to talk about my Shanghai.’

‘Bo-ring, Uncle. You know I don’t like construction talk. Some marmalade?’

‘Every man wants to be remembered, Rosie. I’m no different. Once you fall ill, you think about these things. I began as a contractor, then did slum redevelopments because the big developers did not want to get their hands dirty. If I had to kiss this politician’s arse, I did it; if I had to give that one bags of money for his elections, so be it. I climbed. Like a lizard I went up walls that were not mine to go up. I bought a home in Malabar Hill. I taught myself to build in style, Rosie. The Art Deco style of Marine Lines. The Gothic style of VT station. And I will put all the styles into this new one: the Shanghai. When it is done, when they see it, shining and modern, people will understand my life’s story.’

When he got to the city, knowing no one here, he had stood in line outside a Jain temple in Kalbadevi and been fed there twice a day; a store owner pitied his feet and threw him his own chappals; he began working as a delivery boy for that store owner, and within a year he was managing a store himself.

In a socialist economy, the small businessman has to be a thief to prosper. Before he was twenty he was smuggling goods from Dubai and Pakistan. Yes, what compunction did he have about dealing with the enemy, when he was treated as a bastard in his own country? The pirateering felt natural; on the back of trucks marked as ‘emergency wheat supplies’, he shipped in cartons of foreign-made watches and alarm clocks into Gujarat and Bombay. But then the Constitution of India was suspended; the Emergency was imposed — the police given orders to arrest all blackmarketeers, smugglers, and tax-dodgers. Even if you hated that period, you had to admire the guts: the only time when anyone showed any will power in this country. He had to get rid of his black money — Man has risen from the earth, he thought, he may as well put his money back into the earth. A construction company was formed — with an English name, of course: it was part of the new world of talent-and-nothing-else. Smuggling was for small men, he found out; the real money in this world lies on the legitimate side of things. Starting out as a contractor for another builder on Mira Road, he soon realized that much as he loved cement and steel, he loved people more. The human being was his clay to squeeze. Poorer human beings, to begin with. He entered the business of ‘redeveloping’ chawls and slums — buying out the tenants of ageing structures so that skyscrapers and shopping malls could take their place; a task requiring brutality and charm in equal measure, and which proved too subtle for most builders — but one he negotiated with skills from his smuggler years, allying himself with politicians, policemen, and thugs to bribe and bounce people out of their homes. With an instinct for fairness that taught him to prefer (unlike many others in his profession) the use of generosity over violence, he earned a reputation as a man who made other men rich, always preferring to entice a recalcitrant tenant out of a building with a cheque rather than with a knife, and waiting until there was no other option but to order Shanmugham (as he had done in his most recent redevelopment project, in Sion) to go all the way: to shove a man’s head out of a window and indicate that the rest of him would follow in three seconds — unless a signature appeared on the appropriate document. (It did.)

Rosie fed more bread into the toaster. Shah heard the click of the toaster and thought of her with gratitude, bringer of toast and floral perfume into his life, this chubby girl from the provinces — All the way from Ranchi, would you believe it? He licked his fingers and waited for more bread. How little it takes to be happy in life: soft white beds, buttered toast, and plump young girls, three pleasures that are essentially interchangeable.

In the shower the hot water flowed through gilded fittings; he stood on green onyx and felt the warmth on his scalp.

His wife had died five years ago. After a year in which he kept to himself, he had started taking women to hotel rooms. Then he built his own hotel here, in the seventh floor of this Versova building. Down pillows and cushions, pure white bedsheets of 2.8 micron pore size to repel allergens. Lights that turn themselves on as you clap your hands: so you don’t even have to move from bed. The flat in Malabar Hill was messier, subject to Giri’s crankiness; and it was home, things broke. This place with the sea view had palace-of-sin plushness.

‘How is your spit today, Uncle?’ — Rosie shouted at the bathroom. It was a role every mistress sooner or later took to playing, that of surrogate mother.

‘Clear, Rosie.’

He coughed and spat, then dipped his finger in the spit and inspected it. Last December it had been much darker, and sometimes flecked with red.

‘Don’t lie to me, Uncle. I can hear the cough. Like the thunder they use in films.’

‘If I had designed the human body, I’d have done a much better job, Rosie. The materials used are not the best. Corners have been cut. The structure collapses too soon.’ He laughed. ‘But I’m fine, Rosie. By the grace of Lord SiddhiVinayak I’m fine.’

By the grace of the Lord. Rosie knew exactly what that meant. By my own grace. Just like a film producer who says, once you’ve sucked his cock, ‘By the grace of God, you’ll get a small role in this film.’

She sighed, and cleared the greasy plates from the table.

Six months earlier: Shah had been waiting in a restaurant for an order of chow mein that his mistress of the time, Nannu, had wanted him to bring her, personally; she was in one of her hysterical moods. The pretty girl in the tank-top had smiled at him, walked up to him without an invitation, and stuck out her hand: ‘My name is Rosie. Yours?’ He had known, at once, what was on offer. This was Versova, after all. ‘Thank you,’ he had smiled and left. Nannu was lighter-skinned.

Next morning — one of those small things that add up to make life grand — opening the newspaper, he saw this in a side-column: ‘Aspiring model arrested in Oshiwara gym. Accused of stealing from women’s locker.’ He read the name of the girl: ‘Rosie.’ A challenge thrown down to his will power. He had cancelled the morning’s meetings, driven down to the Oshiwara gym; settled in cash with the gym owner; gone to the police station, freed her, and looking at her, her shoulders, hair, still, after a day in the lock-up, in good shape, had decided, ‘She’ll do.’ Nannu was given three days to clear out of this flat; after which he moved Rosie in here, telling her she could continue to do what she came to Bombay for: try and make it in the movies. No need for petty hustling as long as she lived with him; just one great hustle and humiliation to accept. One or two mornings a week she went to see a producer about an itty-bitty role in a new production; sometimes had her hopes of success renewed, at other times worried about ageing, felt she would never make it, and asked for ‘help’ in setting up a hair-dressing studio of her own, which Shah promised she would receive. At the end of their relationship. But until then, if she made eyes at anyone else, she would fly head-first into the Indian Ocean.

When he came out of the shower, she was singing songs in a foreign language.

‘Opera,’ she shouted in response to his question. There was a new craze for Italian opera in Bollywood, and she was trying out bits of songs. They were called ‘aria’.

‘Ariya,’ he said, rubbing his hair with a soft white towel. ‘Is that how it’s said?’

‘Aaa-ria, Uncle. Don’t pronounce things like a Gujarati village goat.’

‘Ha, ha. But I am a Gujarati village goat, Rosie.’

Another of her moods; and he enjoyed all of them. ‘Get a room with a sea view. One wall is always new,’ they said in real estate. Get a woman who changes and you have a dozen women. He relished the smell of Pears’ Soap on his skin; he wanted her in his arms.

‘Why don’t you introduce me to Satish, Uncle? I’m in his age group, I can talk to him if he’s in trouble,’ she asked, when he emerged, still rubbing his hair.

‘I’ll bring you a model of the Shanghai, Rosie. It’s so beautiful, you should see it. Gothic, Italian, Indian, Art Deco styles, all in one. My whole life story is in it.’

‘Why don’t you introduce me to Satish, Uncle?’

He bent down and rubbed more vigorously, so the moisture from his hair irritated her face.

‘I’m not your prostitute! I’m not your property! I don’t give a shit about your fucking money!’

With his head bent to the floor, covered in his towel, he heard feet thump on the floor, and a door going Slam! He rubbed his hair and asked the floor (dark green tiles with embedded white flakes, a favourite pattern, used in all his buildings): why, when she is worried about your interest in her, will a woman do the very things that will cause your interest to drop further?

Sitting on his chair, watching his ocean, swaying from his hip, Shah hummed his favourite Kishore Kumar song. Aa chal ke tujhe, mein… Leaning back from the chair, he pressed down on the bed with a finger, feeling the 2.8 micron pore width bedding on the premium spring mattress: he lifted the finger with a pinprick of recharging will power.

The path to a new building in Mumbai sparkled with small stones — police, litigation, greed — and he would need every ounce of his body fat to crush those stones, one by one. Before every new project, like a religious ritual, he had to come here, to this flat, to whichever girl he was with at that moment, Nannu or Smita or Rosie, to inhale her perfume, eat toast, watch the ocean, touch the golden fittings in the toilet. In the presence of luxury his capacity for violence was always heightened.

He knocked on her door: ‘I’ll count to five, Rosie.’

‘No. I’ll never come out. You never take me to your home. Never—’

‘One,’ he counted. ‘Two. Three. Four.’

A woman’s face peeped from behind the opened door.

An hour later, Mr Shah washed his face, hands, and chest in her bathroom. From the window he spotted a man in white shirt and black trousers down by the beach, sitting on rocks and doodling on the sand as he waited for his master’s phone call.

No assistant had done the job as long as this one had without giving in to fear or greed. But this Shanmugham was special. A thorough-bred Doberman.

He called Giri on his mobile phone.

‘I’m going to SiddhiVinayak temple at five o’clock and then to my Society in Vakola. Tell the boy to be at the temple. On time.’

Rosie lay on her right side, her face hidden in her arms. He lay down beside her, and clapped, turning the light in her room on. He clapped again — it went off — and again — until Rosie slapped his shoulder and said, ‘Stop acting like a child.’

Shanmugham, still sitting on the rock, had picked up a stone and was pounding it into the hot sand, again and again.

He had been tricked. Tricked.

By his own bank manager.

He remembered that greasy old white-haired man’s exact words — since he was such a valued customer, he would be getting a ‘little extra’ on top of the scheduled interest rates (‘the best rate legally obtainable in this city, I promise you’); and now he had discovered that a beach umbrella was advertising a higher interest rate!

Throwing the stone away, Shanmugham got up from the rock, and brushed the sand off his trousers.

After lunch at a Punjabi dhaba where he had to wash his hands with water from a plastic jug, he watched young women run on treadmills inside a gym called ‘Barbarian’, drank a fresh coconut by the side of a road at two o’clock and ate pistachio ice cream from a porcelain plate at a restaurant at three.

He divided the slab of ice cream into sixteen parts, and ate one part at a time, to prolong his stay at the restaurant. By the fourteenth piece of ice cream, he was certain that the middle-aged man in shorts was that actor who used to be famous ten years ago. Amrish Puri.

Not Amrish. He punished a piece of ice cream by squashing it with his spoon. Om Puri.

Chewing the fifteenth piece, he thought: I am eating ice cream at a restaurant where a film actor strolls in for the same thing.

He would never have dreamed such a thing possible till that day, six years ago, when in his dingy real-estate office in Chembur he heard that a builder was looking for a labour contractor. They had met in a nearby south Indian restaurant. Mr Shah had been pouring tea into his saucer.

‘A simple question.’ The fat man had shown him two gold-ringed fingers. ‘Two rooms. One is four by five, one is ten by two. Both are twenty square feet. Correct?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Shanmugham said.

‘So they both cost the same to build. Correct?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Explain.’ Shah slurped tea from the saucer.

‘The ten-by-two room is thirty-three per cent more expensive, sir. Four plus five is nine, nine nine is eighteen feet of wall to build. Ten plus two twelve, twelve twelve is twenty-four feet of walls to build. You don’t build floors, you build walls.’

‘You’re the first man today who has got the answer right. I’ve fired my labour contractor. Do you know how to get me workers for a job?’

‘No, but by the evening I will,’ Shanmugham had said.

Six months later, Shah had told him at a construction site: ‘The other day you broke up a fight between the workers. I was watching. You know how to hit a man.’

‘I am sorry, sir,’ Shanmugham looked at the ground. ‘I won’t do it again.’

‘Don’t say sorry,’ Shah had said. ‘This is not politics we are in: this is construction. We have to speak the truth in this business, or nothing will ever get built. Do you know what a left-hand man is?’

Shanmugham had not known at the time.

‘Doesn’t matter. You’re a quick learner,’ Shah had said. ‘You can be my new left-hand man from Monday. But today, I must fire you from my company, and you must tear up all your business cards. If we ever get involved with the police, I have to say that I dismissed you.’

Pushing aside his ice cream, Shanmugham took a small black book out of his pocket, and found a clean white page. Drawing a box with seven columns and twenty rows, he made a small calendar: the last date was October 3. Next to it he wrote: ‘Shanghai.’

He turned the pages. The first few pages of the book were covered with Mr Shah’s wise sayings, which he had been recording for months.

When it comes to work — hurry, hurry, hurry. When it comes to payment — delay, delay, delay.

Caste, religion, family background nothing. Talent everything.

Be 10 per cent more generous to people than you feel like being.

He clicked a black ballpoint pen and added one of his own:

Do not trust connections made with bank…

When the sixteenth piece of ice cream melted, he paid his bill and left with a last glance at the actor.

He stopped in the shade of a small park.

A stray black dog loped by the park, a bright red patch of flesh shining near its left buttock. Shanmugham thought of a bank manager with grey oiled hair. Of ‘a little extra’. With an eye closed, he aimed a sharp rock at the open wound.

His mobile phone began to beep.

At four o’clock, Mrs Pinto’s left arm reached for solid wall. Her chappal found the first step.

When her eyesight had begun to dim, over a decade ago, Mrs Pinto had kept a strict count of the steps (even retracing her path when she lost the count), but that was no longer necessary.

The walls had sprouted eyes for her.

She knew she had taken three steps down when she reached ‘the Diamond’: a rhomboidal crevice in the fourth step. Seven steps and two landings later came ‘the Bad Tooth’. Sliding along the wall her palm encountered a molar-shaped patch in the plaster, which felt like the back of her teeth when they had cavities in them. This meant she had almost reached the second floor. She angled her body again.

She sensed dim radiance: the evening sun blazing into the entranceway.

‘Is anybody there?’ she called. ‘Be careful when you run; Shelley Pinto is coming down, step by step she is coming down.’

Just five steps to go now to the ground floor: she heard her husband’s weak voice from the plastic-chair parliament.

‘… if one person says no, you can’t tear down the Society. That’s the whole idea of a Co-operative Housing Society. One for all, all for one.’

I wish he had said something smarter than that, she thought.

Last night, the moment he had come up the stairs with Masterji and told her of the thing posted on the noticeboard, she had wanted to cry. Their plans for the rest of their lives were set into Vishram Society. What did they need money for? A fixed deposit in the HDFC bank’s Versova branch paid them Rs 4,000 a month, taking care of all expenses; both children were settled in America — a good, Christian country — one in Michigan, the other in Buffalo. The children were far away, but they had Vishram all around them, warm, human, familiar; it was the protective keratin they had secreted from the hardships of their lives. It guided Shelley down its stairs and around its fragrant garden. How would she find her way in a strange new building? Mr Pinto and his wife had sat on the sofa, hand in hand, feeling more in love than they had in years. And when Masterji said, ‘If it’s no from you, it’s no from me’, Shelley Pinto had begun to cry. A husband by her side, and a wise man for a friend.

All day long, whether eating breakfast with Masterji or lying in bed, she had heard the buzz of discussion around Vishram. What if the others overpowered them and carried her off to a building with strange walls and neither ‘the Diamond’ nor ‘the Bad Tooth’ nor her million other eyes? Her heart beat faster. She forgot how many steps lay before her and the ground floor.

The powerful voice of Mrs Rego revived her.

‘It’s an illusion, Mr Pinto. I know about these builders. They won’t ever pay up.’

We have the Battleship on our side, Mrs Pinto thought. How can we lose?

‘We knew all these years you were strange, Mrs Rego, but we did not realize you were actually mad,’ Mrs Puri fired back at the Battleship.

Now Mrs Pinto’s heart sank. Mrs Puri is on their side. How can we win?

‘This is a democracy, Mrs Puri. No one will silence me. Not you, not all the builders of the world.’

‘I’m just saying, Mrs Rego, even a Communist must understand that when someone comes and offers us Rs 20,000 a square foot we should say yes. Once you think of all the repairs we need to make to the building, to each individual flat, before it can be sold — new paint, new doors — it is closer to 250 per cent of market value. And think of the time it takes to find a buyer in a neighbourhood like this. Mr Costello waited six months, gave up, and went to Qatar. This is cash in hand.’

‘But will this Mr Shah actually pay?’ Ibrahim Kudwa’s voice.

Good. Ibrahim Kudwa, the cyber-café owner, was the average man in the building. If he was sceptical, everyone was sceptical.

‘Look,’ Mr Pinto said, when his wife came out into parliament, groping for a chair. The main item of evidence.

‘How will she survive in another Society?’

Aware that people were looking at her, Mrs Pinto held her smile for all to see.

‘Just wait until this man comes here and speaks to us,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Is that too much to ask of all of you?’

Ibrahim Kudwa came up to Mrs Pinto and whispered: ‘I wanted to tell you about the sign that I changed outside the Society. They’ve filled up the hole now, but there was a sign there. It said: “Work in progress, inconvenience regretted”, but I changed it to “Inconvenience in progress, work regretted”.’

‘That’s very clever, Ibrahim,’ she whispered back. ‘Very clever.’

She could almost hear the blood rushing proudly to his cheeks. Ibrahim Kudwa reminded her of Sylvester, a pet dog that she had once had. Always needed an ‘attaboy’, and a pat on the head.

‘Now all of you must excuse us. Shelley and I are going for our walk.’

Masterji, who had been sitting in the ‘prime’ chair, pretending not to watch Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen TV, got up in stages. He followed Mr and Mrs Pinto to the compound wall.

Behind him, he could hear the indiscreet Ibrahim Kudwa whispering: ‘What’s his position?’

Masterji slowed to hear the faithful Mrs Puri’s reply: ‘The moment his friends said, we don’t want the money, he said, me too.’

Even though he had opposed the offer, she was proud of him, and wanted everyone to know this.

‘He is an English gentleman. Only when the Pintos change their answer will he change his.’

Suppressing his smile, Masterji caught up with the Pintos. Shelley had her hand on her husband; he could hear her count her steps. When she counted ‘twenty’ she had passed the danger-zone: where the boys played their cricket game, and their smacked balls could hit her cheeks or stomach. Now she would smell hibiscus plants for twenty steps.

Mary, having done with her evening cleaning of the Society’s common areas, was beginning to water the plants in the garden. Picking up the green pipe that lay in coils in the garden all the day long like a hibernating snake, she fitted it to a tap near the compound wall; sluicing the water flow with a pressed thumb, she began slapping the hibiscus plants awake. One-two-three-four-five, holding the pipe in her right hand, Mary counted off the seconds of irrigation for each plant on the joints of her left hand, like a meditating brahmin. Small rainbows sprang to life within the arch of the sluiced water, disappeared when the water moved away, then reappeared on the dripping spider’s webs that interlinked the branches.

Mrs Pinto left the smell of hibiscus behind. Now came ‘the blood stretch’ — the ten yards where the stench of raw beef from the butcher’s shop behind the Society wafted in, mitigated somewhat by the flourish of jasmine flowers growing near the wall.

‘It’s your phone, Masterji.’ Mrs Pinto turned around.

She could pinpoint the exact cubicle within the building that a noise came from.

‘It must be Gaurav again. The moment he smells money on me, my son calls.’

Gaurav had called earlier in the morning. The first call he had made to his father in months. He explained that ‘Sangeeta Aunty’ had told him about the builder’s offer.

‘I wish Mrs Puri had not phoned him.’

‘Oh, she is like a second mother to the boy, Masterji. Let her call.’

Masterji winced; yet he could not deny the fact.

Everyone in Vishram knew of Mrs Puri’s closeness to the boy; it was one of the triumphs of their communal life — one of the cross-beams of affection that are meant to grow in any co-operative society. Even after Gaurav moved to Marine Lines for his work, Mrs Puri stayed in touch with him, sending him regular packages of peanut-chikki and other sweets. It was she who had called to tell him of his mother’s death.

Masterji said: ‘I told Gaurav, you are my son, this is your home, you can come see me whenever you want. But there is nothing to discuss. The Pintos have said no.’

And then, looking at Mrs Pinto through the corner of his eye, he waited in the hope that she too would call him an ‘English gentleman’.

Mr Pinto completed the circuit of the compound wall, and scraped his chappals on the gravel around the guard’s booth. He waited for his wife and Masterji with his thin hands on his hips, panting like the winner in a geriatric sprint.

‘Let’s do breathing exercises together,’ he said, and gave Shelley his arm. ‘It makes you feel young again.’

As the three of them practised inhaling-exhaling-inhaling, the Secretary walked past with a large microphone, which he planted near the black Cross.

At five o’clock, ‘Soda Pop’ Satish Shah, recently the terrorizer of parked cars on Malabar Hill, stood by the entrance of the most famous Hindu shrine in the city, the SiddhiVinayak temple at Prabhadevi, waiting for his father.

With the latest issue of Muscle-Builder magazine in his right hand, he was practising behind-the-head tricep curls with his left.

He paused, turned the page of the magazine, and practised more repetitions with his left hand.

With his right hand he touched his nose. It still hurt.

It had not been his idea to spray-paint the cars. He had told the other fellows: the police would never allow it in the city. Let’s go to the suburbs, Juhu, Bandra. A man could live like a king out there. But did they listen?

In any case, what had they done? Just spray a few cars and a van. It was nothing compared to what his father did in his line of work.

The bastard works in construction, Satish thought, and he has the guts to tell me I am the bad one in the family.

Thinking about his father, he goaded himself into practising his tricep curls faster. He thought about the way that man chewed gutka like a villager. The way he wore so many gold rings. The way he pronounced English, no better than Giri did. ‘Cho-chyal Enimalz. Cho-chyal.’

Satish felt someone seize him by the arm.

‘This is not a thing to be doing here. You should be praying to God and remembering your mother.’

Shah straightened out his son’s arm, and pushed him into the temple. Shanmugham followed.

The temple was crowded, as it is at any hour of the day, yet the Lord Ganesha was receptive to free-market logic, and an ‘express’ line, for anyone who could pay fifty rupees a head, sped the three of them into the sanctum.

‘You’ll be seventeen in a few days. Do you know what I was doing when I was your age? Have you thought about those people whose cars you damaged? You will never again hang out with that gang. Understand?’

‘Yes, Father.’

In his fat fingers his father held a cheque. Satish, by craning his neck as he moved in the queue behind his father, could see that it was a donation of one lakh and one rupees, drawn on the Industrial Development Bank of India. A petition to God to improve his moral character? No, probably for a new building his father was starting today. A Confidence Group project could only begin after two divine interventions: a call from a Tamil astrologer in Matunga with a precise time to lay the foundation stone, and a visit here, to the shrine of Ganesha, whose image was the official emblem of the Confidence Group, embossed on to every formal communication and every building.

They were in sight of the sanctum. Within gilded columns, the red image of the deity was surrounded by four Brahmins, bare-chested, with enormous light-skinned pot bellies filmed over with downy hair: a purdah of human fat around His image. This was the final challenge to the devotees — only a faith that was 100 per cent pure would penetrate through this to reach the Lord.

Satish saw his father joining his palms over his head. Behind Mr Shah, Shanmugham did the same. ‘How cute: he thinks my father is God.’ The chanting of the devotees grew louder — they were right in front of the sanctum now — and Shah turned and glared at his son: ‘Pray.’

Satish closed his eyes, bowed his head, and tried to think of something he really wanted.

‘Please Lord Ganesha,’ he prayed, ‘make my father’s new project fail and I’ll write you a much bigger cheque when I have money.’

At six twenty, with the builder expected at any moment, the compound of Vishram Society glowed with rows of white chairs facing the black Cross.

The event had raised the metabolism of the old Society. The lamps over the entranceway had been turned so they would shine on the plastic chairs. The microphone near the black Cross, borrowed from Gold Coin Society, had been attached to a speaker, borrowed from Hibiscus Society. The members of both Vishram Societies were filling the seats. Secretary Kothari stood by the Cross along with Mr Ravi, the Secretary of Tower B.

Looking down from his window, Masterji saw Mr Pinto sitting in the middle of the array of chairs, his hand on the vacant white seat next to him, looking up.

Masterji raised his right hand — coming, coming.

The phone rang again. It was Gaurav, for the second time in an hour.

‘No, the real-estate developer hasn’t come. Of course I’m going down to listen to him. Yes, I’ll keep an open mind. Now: goodbye, and tell Ronak his grandfather will take him to the aquarium one of these days.’

Back at the window, Masterji saw the person he had been waiting for. He had guessed that a journalist wouldn’t miss an event like this. She moved through the crowd, taking care not to tread on the feet of older and slower people.

He waited with his ear to the door: listening for footsteps on the stairs. He had to do this: had to apologize to the girl. What did his neighbours call him? English gentleman.

‘Ms Meenakshi,’ he said, opening the door. ‘Would you wait a minute? Just a minute?’

His neighbour, who had already put her key into the door of 3B, did not stop.

‘I’m sorry for the other night. I shouldn’t have pushed your friend. The young man. Please tell him I’m sorry.’

Her face partly hidden behind her door, the girl looked at him.

‘Why did you do it? He wasn’t harming you.’

‘Would you come into my room for a minute, Ms Meenakshi? It’ll be easier for you to understand in here. I was a teacher at St Catherine’s School for thirty-four years. My students have good jobs throughout the city. You may have heard of Noronha, the writer for the Times. You have nothing to fear.’

*

He showed her the glass cabinet, filled with the little silver trophies and citations in golden letters that testified to his three decades of service; the photograph of his farewell party at St Catherine’s, signed by two dozen old boys; and the small framed photo, next to it, of a pale, oval-faced woman in a blue sari.

‘My late wife.’

The girl moved towards the photograph. She wore braces, and her dark steel-rimmed glasses echoed the metal on her teeth. The frames were hexagonal. Masterji counted the number of edges a second time. An ungainly shape: why had it ever come into fashion?

Reading the date below the photograph, she said,

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s been almost a year now. I’m used to it. She would have liked you, Ms Meenakshi. My daughter would have been your age. Your name is Meenakshi, isn’t it?’

She nodded.

‘Where is your daughter these days? In Mumbai?’ she asked.

‘She died many years before her mother did.’

‘I keep saying the wrong thing.’

‘Don’t worry, Ms Meenakshi. If you don’t ask about people, you don’t find out about people. Here,’ Masterji said, ‘this is her drawing book. I just found it yesterday inside my cupboard.’

He wiped the dust off the book — ‘SANDHYA MURTHY SKETCH & PRACTICE JOURNAL’ — and turned the pages for her.

‘That’s our local church. Isn’t it?’

‘Yes. St Antony’s. And this drawing is of the Dhobi-ghat, see the people washing. No, not the famous one in Mahalakshmi. The one right here. And this is a lovely drawing. This parrot. The best my daughter ever did. She was nineteen years old. Only nineteen.’

He could see from Ms Meenakshi’s eyes that she wanted to know how the artist’s life had ended. He closed the album.

‘I don’t wish to bore you, Ms Meenakshi. I wanted to apologize, that was all. When men grow old, contrary to what you may have heard, they do not become wiser. Are you going down to see Mr Shah?’

Her eyebrows arched.

‘Aren’t you? He’s giving you all this money.’

‘He says he’s giving us all this money. You must know about developers. You’re a journalist, aren’t you?’

‘No. Public Relations.’

‘What does that mean, exactly? All the young people now want to be in Public Relations.’

‘I’ll come back one day and explain.’

Thanking her for her graciousness in accepting his apology, and inviting her over another day for some ginger tea, he closed the door.

Down below, the hubbub grew. The Secretary’s voice boomed over the microphone: ‘Can everyone hear me? Testing, testing. Can everyone…’

Masterji sat down. Why should he go down? Just because some rich man was coming? He hated these formal gatherings of the Society: every time they held an annual general meeting, the bickering among his neighbours, the petty accusations — ‘your son pisses on the compound wall’, ‘your husband’s gargling wakes me up in the morning’ — always embarrassed him.

He expected another bloodbath this evening, Mrs Rego and Mrs Puri shouting at each other like women at the fish market.

With his feet on the teakwood table, he turned the pages of Sandhya’s album until he reached the parrot. The sketch was incomplete; perhaps she had still been working on it when… He placed his fingers on the edges of the drawing, which felt as if they were still growing. Her living thought.

Where is your daughter these days?

The same place she has been for eleven years.

She had been on her way to college, when someone had pushed her out of the train. A packed compartment in the women’s first class in the morning — someone had elbowed her out. She had fallen head first on to the tracks, and lain there like that. Not one of her fellow passengers stopped the train. They didn’t want to be late for their work. All of them women, good women. Secretaries. Bank clerks. Sales managers. She had bled to death.

This child that he had made, the tracks had unmade. Her brains, oozing from her broken head, because the passengers did not want to be late. Surely in the men’s compartment someone would have pulled the emergency chain, jumped out, surely someone would have…

For three months he could not take the train. He used to take one bus after the other, and walk when there was no bus around. His revolt had to end eventually. He was helpless before Necessity. But he could never look again at a women’s compartment. Who said the world would be a better place run by women? At least men were honest about themselves, he thought.

He turned the page.

She had drawn the hibiscus plants that grew by the back of the compound, and the little spider’s webs between their leaves, shiny and oval and gliding over one another like parallel Milky Ways. Father and daughter, in the old days, had often stopped in the garden to look at the webs and talk of the differences between men and spiders. He remembered one difference they had agreed on. A spider’s mind is outside him; every new thought shoots off at once in a strand of silk. A man’s mind is inside. You never know what he’s thinking. Another difference. A spider can live without a family, all alone, in the web he makes.

A smattering of applause from below; the builder must have arrived.

Mr Pinto is holding a chair for me. With Sandhya’s sketchbook in his hand, he stood by the window.

A fat man with a gold necklace stood by the black Cross between the two Secretaries.

‘… to me you are now members of my own family. I say this, and the proof is in the motto of the Confidence Group: from my family to…’

Poor Mr Pinto had given up his fight to protect the vacant seat. Someone from Tower B had taken it.

Standing at the window, he turned the pages of the sketchbook back and forth. Parrots, churches, washing, trees, Sandhya’s school dress, her face, her brushed and shampooed hair, as if they were corpuscles of sunlit water, bobbed up and down around him. Every now and then, in the distracted way that a man busy at the office might overhear the odd snippet of cricket commentary from a colleague’s desk, he heard voices from the meeting.

‘… I speak for everyone here, Mr Shah, when I ask: are you serious about this offer? Will you honour it in all its details?’

‘… it is normal for developers to offer members of the existing Society units in the new building. Why are you not…’

‘Why are the residents of Tower B, which is newer and in better condition in every way, not getting a higher rate per square foot than…’

He turned to the last page. Here she had scribbled in pencil: ‘Je tien. Vous tenez. Il tient. Vous Tenez. Nous…’ Practising the French that he had been teaching her at home, two evenings a week. Masterji scraped on the ‘tien’ with a finger and looked around for a red pen. He did not want his daughter speaking incorrect French for all of eternity.

A piercing voice — the Battleship’s — made him turn to the window:

‘We do not want your money, whether it is 200 per cent or 250 per cent. This is our home and no one can ask us to leave it.’

Silence from down below. The Battleship and both her children had risen to their feet.

‘By our Lord Jesus Christ I will fight you. I know builders, and they are all liars and criminals. Better you leave now. Right now.’

It was one thing to oppose the deal, but why this personal attack? Did she know this Mr Shah to call him a liar? He closed the window.

He saw the Rubik’s Cube lying on the teakwood table. It was stiff with age, and rotating the colours took effort, as if he were working the jaws of a small animal.

Half an hour later, when Mr Pinto walked in through the open door, he found Masterji asleep at the table, his daughter’s sketchbook on the floor, its pages fluttering in the breeze from the window.

He shut the door, and went back down to 2A, where his wife lay in bed.

‘Asleep, Shelley. In his chair. I fought so hard to keep his seat for him.’

‘Mr Pinto. Don’t be so petty. When we said no to the offer, he said no at once.’

He grumbled.

‘Now go up and wake him. He hasn’t had any dinner.’

Mr Pinto looked out of the window. The crowd below had gathered in two nuclei; some residents stood around Mrs Rego (‘all builders are liars, and this one is no different’) and another group, right below his window, were listening to Ajwani, the broker.

‘Our place is 812 square feet. At 20,000 rupees a square foot, that is…’

Ajwani sketched the number of zeros in the air.

‘And mine is bigger than yours, Ajwani,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Twenty-two square feet bigger. That means I get…’

With a thick finger she superimposed her figure on Ajwani’s figure. Now Ibrahim Kudwa added his on top of hers.

‘But mine is slightly bigger than yours, Mrs Puri…’

Mr Pinto shook his head.

‘Aren’t they going to work tomorrow?’ he whispered to his wife. ‘Don’t their children have to go to school? They’ve forgotten everything because of this money.’

‘They’re very excited, Mr Pinto. They’re going to agree to the proposal and throw us out of the building.’

‘What a thing to say, Shelley! This is a Registered Co-operative Society. Not a jungle. If even one person says no that means that the Society cannot be demolished. Let’s have dinner now.’

His wife got up from the bed.

‘Don’t be angry. Please go upstairs and wake Masterji. We should all have some soup and bread.’

‘All right,’ Mr Pinto said, and put on his shoes.

The black Mercedes had been stuck in traffic near the Vakola highway for half an hour. ‘Something’s bothering you, Shanmugham.’

He turned from the front seat to face his employer.

‘No, Mr Shah.’

‘Don’t lie. I watched you while I was talking to those people in Vishram. You kept rubbing your hands.’

‘Nineteen thousand rupees a square foot, sir. Tower A was built in 1959 or 1960, sir. Ten thousand is a very good rate for a place like that.’

His employer chuckled.

‘Shanmugham. Six years you’ve worked for me and still you are an idiot. I’ve underpaid by a thousand rupees a square foot.’

The traffic jam began to clear; Shah looked at his assistant’s eyes in the driver’s mirror.

‘Those people would be thrilled at an offer of 10,000 a square foot. So 20,000 is unbelievable. Correct? And 19,000 is the same as 20,000 in a man’s mind.’ He hummed an old Hindi film song.

‘Turn left,’ Shanmugham told the driver, when they got on to the highway to Bandra. ‘Quickly. Turn left. Down the service road, until I tell you to stop.’

‘It’s still 200 per cent of the market rate, sir. We’ll have to sell the Shanghai at 25,000 a square foot — more — to make any profit. This is the east, sir. Who will pay that much money to live here?’

‘You can’t insult these people, Shanmugham. You can’t offer them ten per cent or fifteen per cent above market value. You’re asking them to give up their homes, the only homes some of them have ever had. You have to respect human greed.’

The driver now pulled on to the wasteland by the side of the highway.

‘The Secretary said he’d join us here, sir. He’ll give us a call when he reaches the highway.’

‘Let’s get out of the car, Shanmugham. I hate sitting still.’

A tall building stood at the end of the wasteland, bearing the letters ‘YATT’ in white, and a red arc below, like the finishing touch to a signature. Beyond it was the weak glow of Vakola. A few curious faces. Men crossing the wilderness to a row of huts in the distance.

‘See where they’ve set up a few tents—’ Shah pointed to a spot near the bushes. ‘In five days that will become an entire slum. No property deeds, no titles, legal rights. What a hunger for land.’ He rubbed his palms together, scraping his rings against one another. ‘I’ve got it too. Your boss — as you know — is a villager. He has no college degree, Shanmugham: he chews gutka, like a villager. But hunger is an excellence. Look’ — he pointed to the hotel — ‘they’ve lost the “H”. How careless posh people are. If it were my hotel I would have had the manager shot.’

Shah now pointed his finger northward, two or three times, to emphasize some place far, far away in that direction.

‘In 1978, when I was still learning this business, a friend, a broker, offered me a whole floor in a new project in Cuffe Parade. Name of Maker Towers. Three fifty rupees a square foot was the rate. It would be a new kind of construction, a small city, built on reclaimed land. I went to see the building and the area. I phoned my friend, and said: “No.” Why? That building was coming up where there had been sea just five years ago — and I thought, the land is the land and the water is the water. One day the water will swallow this land back. A square foot in Maker Towers would be worth today, what, 2,000 or 3,000 times my initial investment. That land is now worth more than land in London, more than land in New York. One day, ten years later, I came by Maker Towers, and I saw that building, how solid it looked, how many people had bought flats in it, and I thought: “I was beaten. Someone was dreaming bigger than me.” And there and then, I promised Lord SiddhiVinayak: “I am never going to underestimate this city again.” Mumbai’s future is here in the east, Shanmugham. This is where the space is, and once the new roads and new metro lines come up, the east will grow. We’ll get 25,000, maybe 30,000 a square foot for the Shanghai. Even more for the next thing we build. Vishram is an old Society. But it is the most famous building in the area. We’ll take it and we’ll break it — and everyone will know. Vakola is ours.’

He smiled at his assistant. ‘For six years we’ve been together. You’re like a son to me, Shanmugham. A son. Will you do this new job for me?’

For six years, at the start of each new project, Shah had asked him the same question, and for six years Shanmugham had answered this question in the same way. He extended his arm, showing a locked fist to his boss, and then opened it.

‘I’ve got this Society in my palm, sir. I know these people inside out.’

A homeless man, one of those sleeping under the concrete bridge that went over the highway, had been watching the two of them from beneath the protection of a blanket. Seeing the tall one in the white shirt walking towards him, he ducked under it.

Shanmugham signalled to a slow-moving autorickshaw.

A few seconds later, Kothari, the Secretary, came back with him to where the builder waited.

‘Sorry. Couldn’t bring my scooter. Had to take an auto. And what traffic.’

Shah swept the apology away.

‘If I were to leave every time a man got stuck in traffic, I would never meet anyone in this city. You didn’t tell anyone you were coming here?’

‘I was told not to tell anyone.’ The Secretary looked at Shanmugham. ‘Even my wife doesn’t know. Even I don’t know why I’m here.’

‘Nothing secret going on. My son’s birthday is next week, but we’re having the celebration tonight. I just wanted you to join me for some food. Some drinks if you like.’

Kothari breathed out. ‘Of course. How nice of you. Will we be waiting for Mr Ravi — the Secretary of Tower B?’

‘No. He isn’t invited.’

The car doors slammed, and then they were on their way into the city. Kothari sat slumped, hands between his knees.

‘Have you been to Malabar Hill before?’ the builder asked.

‘To the Hanging Gardens once or twice. No other reason.’

‘I’ve lived in Malabar Hill twelve years. And I’ve never been to the Hanging Gardens.’

Both of them laughed. The Secretary straightened his back and breathed out.

The barbecued mutton melted under his tongue like hot chocolate.

The Secretary opened his eyes, dried them with an index finger, and looked for the chicken kebabs. On a silver tray, floating about the far side of Mr Shah’s terrace. All the other guests were there: in suits, silk shirts, sleeveless saris and sherwanis, sitting at ebony tables lit by fat candles.

Kothari waved, so that the waiter would make an excursion to where he stood, alone, against the balcony. He felt the bald head beneath his comb-over becoming damp — spicy, that mutton. Rubbing his hands, he turned around to suck in cool air from the city: a panorama of glowing towers that stretched all the way to the distant dome of Haji Ali.

‘Paneer, sir?’

A waiter brought a silver tray full of those paneer cubes that seemed to have little cucumber-bits inside. Clutching three cubes in his hand, Kothari said, ‘Son, won’t you call that mutton man back here?’

With each deposit of rich food in his stomach, Kothari became less conscious of his 70 per cent polyester 30 per cent cotton shirt, bought near Andheri train station for 210 rupees, and of his banian, bought for thirty-five rupees a pack of six, that glowed underneath like in an X-ray.

Oh, that gorgeous buffet table, which launched satellites of silver trays filled with kebabs.

In the centre of the table he saw a vision of a Johnnie Walker Black Label, five or six times the size of a normal bottle, suspended upside-down from a metal rack and ending in a little plastic tap on which a bow-tied attendant had a finger permanently placed.

‘Mr Kothari! There you are!’ The builder waved at him from the table.

Soon the Secretary found himself one of the charms auxiliary to the Johnnie Walker; Shah introduced him to each person who came up for a drink, saying, ‘This is Mr Kothari.’

Each one of the guests appeared to run a construction company. One of them, after shaking his hand, asked: ‘Which Group do you represent?’

‘Vishram,’ the Secretary replied.

The man nodded knowingly, as if recognizing the name. ‘A good Group. Good work you fellows are doing.’

Now the Secretary found himself led to one of the tables, where he sat next to a chubby unhappy teenager in a golden jacket, whom he took for the birthday boy.

The host was speaking into a cordless mike.

‘I want to thank all of you for coming here to attend my son’s birthday. The community to which we belong, the builders’ community, is known to be a close-knit one, and your presence here demonstrates this continuing closeness.’ (Scattered applause.) ‘I will come to your tables to thank each of you personally. But first, as a surprise treat, I am honoured to present a man who brings back lots of memories for all of us: the original dream-merchant himself.’

Music blared on the loudspeakers. To the rhythm of the audience’s clapping, a man in a grey suit got up from one of the tables, and came to the buffet table. A once-famous actor, now in his forties, a professional guest at birthday parties and weddings. With a forced smile, he turned a few steps with his right hand up in the air. A young girl in a red dress joined him in the dancing, and guests whistled. A mobile phone flashed its camera.

Back at the table, the star was out of breath, paunchy, and suddenly twenty years older. A guest asked for an autograph; the film star obliged on a napkin.

The napkin flew from the table. The builder had burst out coughing.

The film star was worth every rupee he charged to appear at such events: placing his hand on Shah’s, he grinned, as if nothing had happened.

‘They call me a dream-merchant, I am aware of this. But what am I, really? Just a small dream-merchant next to a big one.’ He pointed at the builder, who was wiping his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

‘When they come out of a film, people throw away the tickets, but the builder’s name is always on the building. It becomes part of the family name. I am a Hiranandani Towers man. He is a Raheja Complex man.’

The builder swallowed his spit and turned to the Secretary.

‘And what about you, Mr Kothari? Will you be a Raheja man or a Hiranandani man after 3 October? Or do you plan on spending all your money on expensive vices?’

The Secretary, who had been watching a platter of mutton kebabs, turned around. ‘My vices are sandwiches and cricket. Ask my wife.’

People laughed. The film star clapped and said, ‘Just like me.’

Which provoked much more laughter.

‘What do you do, exactly?’ Shah asked.

‘Business,’ Kothari said.

The builder coughed again.

Kothari handed him a napkin, and said, ‘I was in timber. Now I keep myself happy with some bonds, some stocks. I don’t have vices, but…’ He took a breath and puffed his chest, as if the attention were expanding his personality, ‘I do have a secret. I am moving, after 3 October, to Sewri.’

Shah, wiping his lips with the napkin, had to explain to the others.

‘In most redevelopment projects, as you know, the residents are offered a share in the new building. In the case of the Shanghai, however, the new place will be super-luxury. A mix of Rajput and Gothic styles, with a modern touch. There will be a garden at the front, with a fountain. Art Deco style. Each place will cost two crores or upwards. The current residents certainly have the option of purchasing in the Shanghai, but they will be better served by moving elsewhere.’

Then he turned to the Secretary and asked: ‘Sewri? Why not Bandra or Andheri? You’ll have the money now.’

‘The flamingoes, sir,’ the Secretary said. ‘You know about them, don’t you?’

Of course, Shah knew. Sewri in winter was visited by a flock of migratory flamingoes, and bird lovers came to watch with binoculars. But he did not understand.

‘Were you born here, Mr Shah?’ the Secretary asked.

‘I was born in Krishnapur in Gujarat. But I am a proud tax-paying resident of Mumbai.’

‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ the Secretary said quickly. ‘I have nothing against migrants, nothing. I meant, all of you at this table were born in India. Correct?’

‘Of course.’

‘Not me. Not me.’

The Secretary smiled. ‘I was born in Africa.’

His father, lured from Jamnagar to Kenya by an African-born cousin, had set up a grocery shop in Nairobi in the 1950s; the shop had prospered; a son had been born there. Ashvin Kothari spoke now of things even his wife had never heard. Of an African servant lady wiping a large porcelain dish and laying it on a table with a blue tablecloth; a market in Nairobi where his father was a big man; and then one more thing, a memory which blazed in his mind’s eye like a pink flame.

Flamingoes. A whole flock of them.

When he was not yet five, he had been taken to a lake in the country side full of the wild pink birds. His father had put his thumbs under his armpits and lifted him up so he could see to the horizon; the flamingoes rose all at once and he had screamed over his father’s head.

Shah listened. The dream-merchant listened. Waiters gathered round the table.

Now the Secretary felt something he had felt only once in his life, when as a ten-year-old schoolboy he had recited the famous lines from the Ramayana:

Do as you will, evil king:

I, for my part, know right from wrong

And will never follow you,

said the virtuous demon Maricha

When the lord of Lanka

Asked him to steal Rama’s wife

so perfectly at a poetry competition that everyone in the audience, even his father, had stood up to applaud. He sensed that same shimmer now around his bald head: his comb-over felt like a laurel wreath.

‘And then?’ Shah asked. ‘What happened to your father?’

Kothari smiled.

‘He found out that Africans did not like Indian men who did well.’

When he was eight years old, there was a threat to their business, and his father had sold it for a pittance to return to Jamnagar, to die there in a dingy shop full of green-gram and brinjal.

‘That was how they treated us then,’ the Bollywood actor remembered. ‘Idi Amin saying to the Indians, get up and get out.’

The builder coughed. ‘They look up to Indians in Africa now. We’re drilling for oil in Sudan.’

A quarter of an hour later, with a valedictory flourish of dance steps, the dream-merchant bowed and vanished. Mr Shah looked at his guests and at once they knew it was time to leave. By the same power, Kothari was made to know he was not to leave. He sat at the table as hands came to shake the builder’s; some of them shook his hand too.

‘Do you know why I did not invite Mr Ravi of Tower B here tonight?’

The guests had left. Shah watched the waiters clear the buffet.

Kothari sensed that Mr Shah, who had changed from a vivacious host into a sick man with a cough in the course of the evening, was now about to turn into yet another man. He shook his head. ‘No, sir.’

‘His building won’t make any trouble: it’s full of young people. Reasonable people. So you are the key man, Mr Kothari. Do you follow me?’

‘Not exactly.’

The birthday boy joined the table, sitting between his father and the Secretary.

The builder moved his son out of his line of sight. He spoke softly.

‘In my experience, some older people oppose a redevelopment project because they are frightened of any kind of change. Some just want more money. And then there is one kind of person, the most dangerous, who says no because he is full of negative will power: because he does not enjoy life and does not want others to enjoy life. When these people speak, you must speak louder and clearer than they do. I will not forget it; I repay kindness with kindness of my own.’

The waiters, having removed the food, were now taking away the totemic bottle of Johnnie Walker.

‘My father used to say,’ Kothari cleared his voice, ‘my father… the one who was in Africa, he used to say, a man who lives for himself is no better than an animal. All my life I did nothing for anyone but myself. I even married late because I preferred to live alone. My wife is a good woman. She made me become the Secretary of Vishram: so I would do something for others. I am grateful for any… extra kindness you show me. But I cannot accept until I ask you this: what about everyone else in Vishram Society? Will you keep your word to them and pay each one his rightful share?’

Shah said nothing for a beat, then reached out and took the Secretary’s hand.

‘I am honoured, Mr Kothari, to be doing business with a man like you. Honoured. I understand why you are worried about me. Perfectly understand. In the old days, a builder in this city thought he could get rich only if he cheated his customers. He would cheat them as a matter of routine — on cement, on steel rods, on finishing. Every monsoon one of his buildings collapsed. Most of those you saw here today were old builders.’ He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘They would strip you in a second if they were doing this redevelopment. But now there is a new builder in the city. We want to win, yes, but believe me, Mr Kothari: we also want our customers to win. The more winning there is, the better; because we think Mumbai will again be one of the world’s great cities. Ask at any of my projects about Mr Shah’s reputation. Find a single customer of mine who has a complaint. I am not one of the old builders of Mumbai.’

The Secretary sucked his lips and nodded. Satisfied.

Shah was still holding his hand; he felt the pressure grow.

‘But I tell you one thing, Mr Kothari. Old builder or new, the basic nature of my business has not changed. Do you know what a builder is?’

‘A man who builds houses,’ Kothari said, hoping his hand would be released.

‘No. Architects build houses. Engineers build roads.’

Kothari turned around for help. Shanmugham was looking at the night sky; the birthday boy was jerking his right arm back and forth behind his head for some reason.

Shah held up a gold-ringed index finger.

‘The builder is the one man in Bombay who never loses a fight.’

With this he let go of Kothari’s hand.

‘Why were you gone so long?’ Mrs Kothari asked, as her husband joined her in bed. ‘People kept asking for you, but I didn’t tell anyone you were at the builder’s house.’

Saying the name of Lord Krishna three times, the Secretary switched off the bed lamp.

‘Did his car drop you off? What is his home like? Gold fittings in the bathroom? Is there a jacuzzi?’

Her husband covered his face in the blanket and said nothing.

In the darkness he saw a flock of pink birds flying around him. He felt his father’s fingers pressing on his — and then all the wasted decades in between fell away, and they were together once again at the lake in Kenya.

Ashvin Kothari fell asleep with tears on his cheeks.

18 MAY

Like an army that had been coming closer for months and was now storming a citadel, they went into the Fountainhead and the Excelsior with bricks on their heads.

It was the final surge of work before the monsoons. Those day-labourers who had wilted in the heat and fled to their villages were replaced by those offloaded from buses at ever-rising cost: the day rate for men was now 370 rupees. Heat or no heat, humidity or no humidity, all the civil work — walls, floors, columns — must be done before the rains.

Once again, as he had been every hot morning, Dharmen Shah was here, dipping his silk trousers in the slush and muck, pointing fingers at things and shouting at men. He stood by the roaring cement grinder, as women in bright saris and diamond nose-rings bent down and rose up with troughs of wet dark cement on their heads.

Shah put his foot on a pile of concrete tubes. ‘Faster, son,’ he told one of the workers. ‘I’m paying you good money. I want to see you work.’

Shanmugham, running his fingers up and down the spine of a green financial prospectus, stood behind the boss.

Shah directed his assisant’s attention to two teenagers breaking in half a long corrugated metal rod.

‘Work. Hard work. A beautiful thing to see.’

The two muscled boys had rested the rod on a metal triangle; one of them raised a mallet. He brought it down. With each blow, the long rod trembled. Behind the boy swinging the mallet, a bag of cement rose into the upper floors of the Confidence Excelsior on a pulley.

‘I’ve heard that Chacko never comes to his construction sites. He doesn’t like the smell of cement and steel. What a third-rate builder he is.’

On the lift up to the fourth floor of the Excelsior, Shanmugham opened up his financial prospectus. Out of it he slid a small black book and opened its pages.

‘I spoke to the Secretary, sir.’ He read from the black book. ‘As of now, four people in Vishram are saying no to the offer. Four in Tower A. Everyone in Tower B has said yes.’

‘What is this black book?’ Mr Shah took it from his assistant and turned it over.

‘It has dates, and things we deal with, and wise sayings I hear from you. My wife encourages me to write things down, sir.’

Shah flipped through it.

‘If only my son paid this much attention to what I say.’ He returned the book to his assistant. ‘You told me once there were teachers in Vishram Society. Are they among those who are saying no?’

They stepped off the lift.

‘There is only one teacher, sir. And he is one of those saying no.’

‘I knew it, Shanmugham. I don’t like teachers. Write that down in your book.’

A worker’s family was spending the nights on the unfinished fourth floor, which one day a technology executive or a businessman would occupy. Shah touched the workers’ washing, which hung in the alcoves where Versace would soon hang; their little bars of soap and detergent did the work that expensive perfumes would soon do. And they probably did it better. Shah smiled; he wished Satish were here by his side, so he could show him little things like this. Folding a twenty-rupee note, he left it near a bar of soap as a surprise for the worker’s wife.

An open-backed truck fought its way through the muck of the construction site loaded with marble tiles. At the edge of the floor, Shah squatted down and shouted:

‘Don’t unload the tiles!’ He gestured at the workers. ‘Don’t touch them!’

On the way down, Shanmugham stood as far away as he could from his employer, who was on the mobile phone.

‘“Beige”. I wrote it down. In case you were too stupid to know what the word meant. You’ve sent “Off-white”. You think I have time to waste like this? Everything has a schedule here. Everything is going to be delayed because of you. I want the correct shade of marble loaded and brought here by the end of the day!’

Reaching the ground Shah marched over to the truck and yelled at his workers, who had already begun to unload the marble. They blinked at him. He cursed them. They reloaded the marble. The diesel fumes of the departing truck spurted into Shah’s face. He was still coughing a minute later.

Shanmugham accompanied him to the blasted tree that grew by the row of workers’ huts. One of the workers’ children was brushing his teeth by the water pump under the tree. Seeing the fat coughing man, he stepped back.

Shah sat by the water pump. Shanmugham saw, like first rain on the ground, red dots speckling the white scum of toothpaste on the ground.

‘Sir, we should take you to the hospital…’

Shah shook his head. ‘It has happened before, Shanmugham. It goes away in a few minutes.’

A cow sat nearby, whipping flies away with its tail. The worker’s son stared at the two men; toothpaste dripped from his mouth.

‘Come, sir. Let’s go to Breach Candy Hospital. I’ll call Doctor Nayak.’

‘Nayak will frighten me again, and tell me to stop coming here. We have to finish the civil work before the rains come. That will happen only if I am here every single morning.’

Shanmugham knew it was true: the master’s fat-bellied body was a human version of the cement mixers that churned and set the workers in motion.

‘Mr J. J. Chacko,’ Shah said. ‘Right here. Under my nose.’

He looked over at the large plot of land, right opposite the Excelsior, with the big Ultimex sign on it.

‘Do you know when he’s starting work? Is there a date?’

‘No date, sir. But he’ll start building some time in October.’

‘Let’s go back.’ Shah rose to his feet. ‘I don’t want the workers thinking something is wrong.’

He pointed a finger at his left-hand man’s chest.

‘I want each of those Nos to become a Yes, Shanmugham. At once.’