Last Man in Tower

4 JUNE

Vittal, the old librarian at St Catherine’s School, was probably the only man in Vakola still unaware of the good news. Masterji was glad to be in his presence. Exercising his privilege as a retired teacher, he came to the school library every Monday to read the Times of India for free.

‘We don’t see the likes of you any more, Masterji,’ Vittal said, as he bent low to arrange volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelf. ‘Young people don’t want to go into teaching. Computers or banking for them. Money, money, money.’

Masterji turned the pages of the newspaper. ‘No sense of public service, is there?’

The librarian blew his nose into a handkerchief, moving his head from side to side.

‘Remember when we were young. We had to walk to school every morning. Study by candlelight during exam-time. Now the computers do their work for them.’

Masterji laughed. ‘I don’t know anything about computers or the internet, Vittal. I don’t even have a mobile phone.’

‘Oh, that’s extreme, Masterji,’ the librarian said. He took a shiny red object from his pocket and smiled proudly.

‘Nokia.’

Masterji turned the pages of his newspaper.

‘Why does a physics teacher need these things, Vittal? The facts of life do not change: high tide is followed by low tide, and the equinox is still the equinox.’

He tapped a finger on his paper, and drew Vittal’s attention to a proposal to restore Crawford Market to pristine glory.

‘The sculptures outside the market were done by Kipling’s father. Lockwood Kipling. Did you know that?’

Vittal stretched his back.

‘Know nothing about Mumbai, Masterji. Not a genius like you. If you were a young man today, working at a foreign bank, playing with stocks, God knows how much money you would be making.’

‘What would I spend it on?’ Masterji folded the paper with a smile. He beckoned to the librarian.

‘Vittal…’ he whispered. ‘Purnima’s one-year death anniversary is around the corner. I want to call Trivedi about it.’

‘Of course.’

It was a little conspiratorial luxury the old teacher enjoyed here; Vittal allowed him (provided no one was watching) to use the black payphone for free.

A student in white-and-navy-blue uniform sneaked in through the side-door as Masterji dialled. He gaped at the two old men as if he had discovered two palaeosauruses.

In the market, Masterji walked with his head to the ground, sniffing citrus and apple, raw shit (from the roosters in the chicken coops), raw carrot and cauliflower.

‘Great man! Look up!’

Under the banyan tree in whose shade the business of the market was conducted, a vendor was waving at Masterji, from behind a stall full of onions.

Chubby, with a bulbous nose and knobby lumps on his dark forehead, he looked like an anthropomorphic advertisement for his produce.

‘I’ve seen you for a long long time.’ The onion-seller found a small red stool and placed it before Masterji. ‘But I never knew until now that you were a great one. There is something special about all of you in Vishram. The Confidence Group didn’t pick you for no reason.’

Fruit- and vegetable-vendors drew towards the red stool, looking its occupant up and down with wonder, as if he had been struck by lightning and survived.

‘My greatness — if there be any — is to do with my students,’ Masterji explained.

He pointed to the discarded newspapers that the onion-seller had piled on his cart, to wrap his produce in: ‘You’ll find an article written by a man named Noronha in the Times. My student. Oh, I take no credit for Noronha. A smart boy, so hard-working — used to walk to school every day from Kalina. Boys were hard-working in the old days. I wonder where those days have gone…’

One of the vendors, a big swarthy man whose plump face was dotted with white stubble, turned to the onion-seller and asked loudly: ‘Ram Niwas, there’s a man here asking for “the old days”. Are you selling them? Because I’m not. I’m selling only potatoes.’

And then he laughed at his own joke, before returning to his potatoes.

A horn sounded through the market. A man on a scooter was waving at Masterji.

‘My wife told me you called — I came at once, came at once looking for you.’

Everyone in Vakola was familiar with the sight of Shankar Trivedi’s shirtless, mesomorphic torso — a white shawl draped over the shoulders — dramatically entering or leaving a building on a red Honda scooter, like an angel of birth or death. He had been recruited by Purnima to conduct, each year, the memorial service for their daughter Sandhya; a service that Masterji, for his wife’s sake, had always attended. When Purnima died, it was Trivedi who had performed the last rites, with coconuts and incense, at a temple in Bandra.

Drawing the old teacher away from the vendors, he pumped Masterji’s hand in his. ‘Congratulations, congratulations,’ he said.

‘Trivedi, Purnima’s one-year death anniversary is coming up. October the 5th. It is five months away, but I wanted to make sure you mark it on your calendar. A very important day for me, Trivedi.’

The priest let go of Masterji’s hand: he gaped.

‘Masterji: when your daughter passed away, who performed the rites for her?’

‘You did, Trivedi.’

‘When your wife passed away, who performed the rites for her?’

‘You did, Trivedi.’

‘And when my son needed a science “top-up”, who taught him?’

‘I did, Trivedi.’

‘So what’s this talk of appointment and disappointment, Masterji? It’ll be an honour to perform your late wife’s first-year Samskara. Don’t worry.’

Trivedi offered to buy Masterji a little something for the heat — a coconut. Masterji knew the priest as a tight-fisted, even unscrupulous man — there was always some unpleasantness over the bill for his ceremonies — and he succumbed to the sheer novelty of the offer; with Trivedi walking his scooter, they went to the coconut-man who sat near the entrance to St Catherine’s with a black knife and a large wicker basket that groaned with coconuts.

As the coconut-man began tapping on the green nuts to sound out the water in each, Masterji watched Trivedi’s face. The priest, in between births, marriages, and deaths, gave lessons in the proper recitation of Sanskrit verse to paying pupils. The well-oiled moustache that sat on his lips was itself a fine line of poetry: supple and balanced, robustly black with a tinge of grey at the edges, punctuated in the middle by a perfect caesura. Trivedi was curling its ends and smiling, but the truth was leaking out of his eyes and nose.

He was almost on the verge of tears.

Burning with jealousy, Masterji thought. Indeed, it now seemed to him that a good portion of everyone’s professed admiration for Vishram all these years had been a kind of condescension for an old, crumbling building. And now they had been startled into real respect for its inhabitants.

‘I’ll give you good news, Trivedi,’ he said, taking pity on the man.

With a curved knife the coconut-man slashed open the mouth of one of the nuts.

The priest’s eyes grew large.

‘This Shah is going to make an offer for our place too?’

‘No. The good news for you is that there is no good news for us. The Pintos have said no. Shelley won’t be able to find her way around any other building.’

‘Twenty thousand rupees per square foot! You could buy her new eyes with so much money.’ Trivedi grinned. ‘You’re teasing me, aren’t you, Masterji?’

The market filled with noise: a funeral procession began to move, clamorously, towards the highway.

The coconut man handed each of them a sliced-open nut, brimming with fresh water and pierced by a pink straw.

Masterji knew he ought to refuse: the nut was meant for a man who would take Mr Shah’s money.

‘… of course you must be joking, Masterji… will you really say no? Once the deadline comes near, will you really really…’

He took the brimming coconut in his hands and felt its weight. When you’re rich, you don’t have to give people things, he thought. They give you things.

How wonderful.

Sucked through a straw, the cool sweet water was a bitter thrill: he understood, for four or five seconds, what it was to be a millionaire.

Bald, moist, chocolate-dark, the drummer’s head glistened in the mid-morning light; behind him, a swaying man blew on a nadaswaram. Four teenagers carried the wooden bier; two followed them striking bronze cymbals. On the bier lay the body of an old woman draped in a bright green sari, her nostrils stopped with cotton balls. A boy at the head of the procession broke out, every few steps, into jubilant dance.

Standing in the Vakola market with folded arms, Ajwani, the broker in Vishram Society, watched Shanmugham, a few steps away, watching the funeral procession with folded arms.

The Confidence Group man wore his standard white-over-black uniform; under his arm he held what looked like a financial prospectus.

Shanmugham turned and noticed Ajwani noticing.

The broker approached him with a smile.

‘I’m from Vishram Society. Name is Ajwani.’

Shanmugham returned the smile. ‘I know. Ramesh. Tower A. You own the Toyota Qualis.’

Soon the two men were sitting together at a nearby restaurant. Ajwani dispatched a mouse from under their table with a kick; he made a sign to the waiter.

He picked up the green prospectus that Shanmugham had laid on the table and flicked through its pages.

‘Mutual Funds… I used to play the market in the nineties. Technology companies. I bought Infosys shares. Made no money. You won’t, either.’

‘I have,’ Shanmugham said.

‘Then you’ll lose it all. Men like us don’t become rich from shares.’

Ajwani slid the prospectus across the table; he looked his interlocutor in the eye.

‘I want to ask you, Mr Shanmugham: what is your title in the Confidence Group?’

‘Don’t have one. I am helping out as a personal favour to Mr Shah.’

‘No, you’re not.’ The broker clamped his hand down on the prospectus. ‘Every builder has one special man in his company. This man has no business card to hand out, no title, he is not even on the company payroll. But he is the builder’s left hand. He does what the builder’s right hand does not want to know about. If there is trouble, he contacts the police or the mafia. If there is money to be paid to a politician, he carries the bag. If someone’s knuckles have to be broken, he breaks them. You are Mr Shah’s left hand.’

Shanmugham retrieved his prospectus from beneath the broker’s hand.

‘I’ve never heard of that term before. Left-hand man.’

The waiter put two cups of tea on their table.

‘Bring me a bowl of sugar,’ Ajwani said.

He courteously moved Shanmugham’s tea a bit closer to him.

‘Have you heard the saying, a broker is first cousin to a builder? I’ve seen redevelopments all my life. The builder always has a man on the inside. He gives you information about the other members of the Society. You give him a bribe. Unfortunately, you picked the wrong man this time.’

Shanmugham, who had begun blowing on his tea to cool it, stopped.

The broker continued: ‘It’s usually the Secretary who is picked. The Secretary of Tower B, Mr Ravi, is a good man. But our Secretary is a nothing man.’

‘Nothing man?’ Shanmugham asked his tea.

‘Didn’t have a son till he was nearly fifty years old. He can’t do this.’ Ajwani raised a finger. ‘All he has done for days is say, Africa, Africa, Africa.’

‘Then who can help us?’

Ajwani shrugged.

‘Let me ask you this. How many people in Vishram Tower A are saying no to the offer?’

‘Four.’

Ajwani tapped the table with his mobile phone.

‘Wrong. Only one person really opposes it. The other three don’t know what they want.’

‘Which one?’

The waiter placed the sugar on the table; Ajwani tucked his mobile phone into his pocket. He smiled.

‘The deadline is too tight, Mr Shanmugham. A project like this will take two years, minimum. Why is your boss pushing so hard?’

Shanmugham’s eyes glistened. He drank his tea and moved the empty glass back to the centre of the table.

‘Which one?’

Reaching for the sugar, Ajwani took a spoonful, and held it poised over his cup. ‘You want information from me…’ He vibrated the spoon. ‘… for nothing. That’s greed. Give me a sweetener. Another thousand rupees a square foot.’

Shanmugham rose to his feet.

‘I came to Vakola to deliver boxes of sweets to your Society. You will find one for you at the gate, Mr Ajwani. Other than that, I have nothing to give you.’

The broker stirred the sugar into his tea.

‘You will never get Vishram Society to accept your offer without my help.’

*

Stopping at the gate of the building, Ajwani discovered that Shanmugham had been telling the truth about the sweets.

Red boxes, each with an image of Lord SiddhiVinayak. Inside each one was 300 grams of dough-and-cashew sweets, cut into diamond-shaped slices. A handwritten letter strapped to every box. Signed. ‘From my family to yours. Dharmen Shah. MD, Confidence Group.’

‘I gave your box to your wife,’ Ram Khare said.

Ajwani pointed to the stack by the guard’s side. ‘Why are there four boxes there?’

‘Four people said they didn’t want the sweets,’ the guard said. ‘Can you believe that?’

Ajwani peered at the boxes. ‘Which four?’

A sunny smile from Ibrahim Kudwa’s bearded face was a sure thing as one of his neighbours passed the jumble of wire, vegetation, brick, cheap roofing, and peeling paint that went by the title SPEED-TEK CYBER ZONE CYBER CAFÉ. The trunk of the banyan by the cybercafé had been painted white, in simulation of snow. Kudwa’s long-time assistant, Arjun, had apparently converted to Christianity some years ago; last Christmas, he won the banyan tree over to his religion and placed a private crib with toy figures, arranged in a splendour of cotton-snow, at its foot. Other evidence of Christmas could be found in the large five-pronged star, surrounded by bunting, that Arjun had hung over the roof of the café; months later, it was still there, un expected, colossal, the bunting fraying, and, with the light behind it in the morning, looking like a symbol of the Apocalypse. As if drawn to the mystic star, a Hindu holy man sometimes sat outside the café. Mr Kudwa saw no objection to his doing so; indeed he had even encouraged the man with the occasional two-rupee coin.

Man of enterprise, Ibrahim Kudwa; lead singer in a rock-and-roll band at university, he had chosen, after graduation, not to remain in the Muslim-only building in Bandra East where his brothers and sisters still lived. Vishram was old, but he wanted his children to mix with Hindus and Christians. On the advice of a magazine article, he had decided that the future was in technology. Rejecting an offer from his brother to join the family hardware store in Kalanagar, he opened a cyber-café in the neighbourhood in 1998. Easy money. His rates rose from ten rupees per hour, to fifteen, to twenty, and then declined again to fifteen, and then to ten. A treacherous thing, technology. Within six months, an internet connection had become so cheap that only the rough, the rowdy and the tourists needed a cyber-café. Hardware held its price; his brother had recently bought a second two-bedroom flat as an investment property. Then the government decided that anyone using a cyber-café was a potential terrorist. User name, phone number, address, driving licence or passport number — the café owner was legally obliged to keep detailed records of every customer, and the police swooped on Kudwa’s books for any excuse to extort a bribe.

Yet none of his neighbours would say that he was an unhappy man. He was a bear that could find honey at any level of a tree. He lavished his considerable free time on his two jolly children, ten-year-old Mohammad, who lost stout-heartedly to the little Ajwanis in tae kwon-do competitions, and two-year-old Mariam, who staggered elliptically about her father’s cyber-café in a nightie, inviting herself on to the laps of customers to strike at the old keyboards with glee. Mumtaz, his wife, saved up discount coupons and credit card points, so they could take holidays to Mahabaleshwar each summer. In August the previous year they had even accomplished the miracle, subsidized by the credit card points, of a family holiday to Ladakh, where they had visited Tibetan monasteries and returned with holy beads and T-shirts for their Hindu neighbours.

‘Why are you in the Opposition Party, Ibrahim?’

Ajwani had just lowered himself into the visitor’s chair in the café.

‘Opposition Party?’ Kudwa asked. Little Mariam was on his lap, and he was stroking her hair.

‘You are saying no to the offer. Why?’

Kudwa stared. ‘Who told you I had said no?’

He let Mariam crawl about the floor. ‘Do you think I want to stay in this internet café business all my life? Do I want my children to grow up poor?’

‘So you are going to support us, Ibrahim.’ Ajwani grinned. ‘Why didn’t you take your sweet-box, then?’

‘No, it’s not that simple.’ Kudwa gestured for patience by patting the air.

On the other hand, there was the thing Mrs Puri had called Masterji: ‘An English gentleman’. Even though she wanted to accept the offer, she admired his gesture. How would his neighbours interpret his character if he rushed to take Mr Shah’s money?

‘I want to be well thought of. People in the Society think of me as a fair-minded man.’

Kudwa scratched his beard with both hands.

‘Of course we do,’ Ajwani said. ‘By the way, that was a lovely joke the other day. What you wrote on that sign outside the Society. What was it, “Inconvenience is regretted, but work…”’

‘Inconvenience in progress, work regretted.’ Kudwa beamed. Mariam was venturing under one of the computers; he picked her up and brought her back to the chair.

‘You are liked by everyone, Ibrahim. But will people still like you if you don’t say yes — that I don’t know.’

Kudwa winced.

‘It upsets my stomach, Ramesh. Just thinking about this decision. My wife says I have a high ratio of nerves to flesh. A man with a bad stomach should never be asked to make decisions.’

Ajwani saw a strip of heart-shaped antacid tablets in Kudwa’s shirt pocket, like multiple testimonials to his claim. He reached over and snapped his fingers against the strip of antacids.

‘Come with me, Ibrahim. I’ll solve your problem in a second.’

Picking little Mariam up from the floor — and shouting to Arjun, who was sweeping the courtyard behind the café, to mind things and make sure the customers did not surf on to ‘dirty’ sites while he was away — Kudwa followed his neighbour into Vishram Society.

As they passed their building, Kudwa glanced at the Secretary’s office.

Kothari had told him his Africa story that morning, as he had told it to every other member of Vishram Society. It made sense to Kudwa at last — the Secretary’s strange, secretive, and yet somehow sociable personality. All these years his African-returned father’s shame — the shame of the expatriate who had returned empty-handed — had crushed his natural gregariousness. If not for his shame, Kothari would have been a different kind of man. All of them could have been different men.

‘How strange that the Secretary should have a passion for flamingoes,’ he said.

Ajwani turned. ‘How strange that the Secretary should have a passion for anything.’

‘Perhaps we will stay here, in the building, and know each other better. Maybe that is what this Shah’s proposal is really meant to do.’

‘No.’ Ajwani minted invisible currency with his fingers. ‘It’s meant to make us rich.’

He cut across the compound in the direction of Tower B. In the parking area in front of the building, he pointed to a vehicle with a gold ‘V’ ribbon on its bonnet.

Fresh from the showroom, a Toyota Innova. It had been bought two days ago; the order, however, must have been placed weeks before Mr Shah’s offer.

Ajwani, who hoarded information on all the middle-class residents of Vakola, had quickly discovered the name of the owner: Mr Ashish, a software engineer, one of the residents of Tower B.

‘What do you see?’ Ajwani asked.

‘A car. A new car.’

‘No. You see ten years of slogging, skimping, and sacrificing, before you can buy something like this. There is a new way to look at new things, Ibrahim. Touch it.’

‘Touch it?’

Ajwani brushed a few spots of dandruff from Kudwa’s shoulder, and gestured for Mariam.

‘Don’t worry about the owner. He wants you to touch it. You know what people in Tower B are like, don’t you?’

Ibrahim Kudwa handed his daughter over to his neighbour. He ran his hands through his beard, then took a step towards the gold-ribboned car. His index finger reached for its shining metal skin: and at once the shell surrounding the Innova that said ‘Ten years from now’ broke and fell to pieces. He spread all his fingers on its skin, and could not repress a grin.

On the way back, Kudwa asked for his red sweet-box at the guard’s booth.

Tapping his fingers behind his back, Ajwani went down to the fruit and vegetable market.

He did all his best thinking in the market. At least once a week he came here with his two boys to teach them how to bargain. An essential part of their education. If a man could not be cheated on his food, he could not be cheated on anything else.

Africa, Ajwani said to himself, as he went among carts full of ripe watermelons. He had never been to Africa. Nor America, Europe, Canada, Australia. Had never crossed the ocean.

Women had been his Africa. They come into a real-estate broker’s office all the time — air hostesses, models, sales girls, single girls, divorced women — looking for rooms in a hurry, sometimes in a desperate hurry. A broker can seem a fatherly figure to them — benevolent, decisive. In his younger days, Ajwani, while never resorting to coercion or blackmail, had slept with plenty of his clients. Plenty. At first there was a hotel by the train station, the Wood-Lands, that rented rooms by the hour. Later he built an inner room in his office. A coconut to sip on, as they lay side by side in bed. The women were happy; he was happier than they were. That was how he liked his deals to be.

Money — money had been his India. He had not made a rupee on the stock market; even in real estate, his own field, his investments had flopped. Someone or other had always tricked him. He had bought the Toyota Qualis from a cousin so he could feel rich, but it was killing him. Drank too much diesel. Needed repairs month after month. Once again he had been cheated. In the movie of his own life, he had to admit, he was just a comedian.

But not this time.

Small dark apples sat in a pyramid on a blue cart like medieval munitions; pointy-tipped papayas, modern artillery shells, surrounded them on all sides. Ajwani picked up a papaya and smelled its base for ripeness. He would do the same with Masterji, the Pintos, and Mrs Rego; sniff and tap, sniff and tap, find their weak spots, break them open. Kudwa he had done for free, but Mr Shah would have to pay for the next three.

The talk in the market, as it was every year at this time, was that the rains would be late, and that the water shortage would soon become terrible.

Stale gossip to the left, mediocre produce to the right: Ramesh Ajwani knew that his eyes were the brightest things for sale in Vakola market.