Last Man in Tower

19 JUNE

Pizzicati of intercepted raindrops dripped from a coconut palm: a virtuoso of brightness in the concert of thunderclouds, dense sky, thickening rain.

From their bedroom window Ramu and the Friendly Duck watched.

The metal trellis meant to guard the window from burglars came to life; the wrought-iron foliage dripped and became real leaves and real flowers.

‘Oy, oy, oy, my prince. What deep thoughts are you thinking?’

Sitting next to her son, Mrs Puri pointed to the sky. The lines of diminishing rain were sparkling: the sun was coming out.

‘Remember what Masterji says? When there is rain and sun together, there is a… You know the word, Ramu. Say it. It’s a rai… a rain… a rainb…’

Shielding Ramu’s wet head with her arm, Mrs Puri looked up. A drop of rainwater was hanging from the ceiling. Vishram’s old walls glistened with bright seepage; moisture was snuggling into cracks in the paint, licking steel rods, and chewing on mortar.

Ramu, who could read his mother’s thoughts, reached for her gold bangles and began to play with them.

‘We don’t have to worry, Ramu. We’re moving into a brand-new home. Just three months from now. One that won’t ever fall down.’

Ramu whispered.

‘Yes, everyone, even Masterji and Secretary Uncle.’

The boy smiled; then plugged his ears and closed his eyes.

Mrs Puri turned and shouted, ‘Mary! Don’t make so much noise with the rubbish. I have a growing son here!’

*

Mary, as she did every day, was dragging a mildewed blue barrel from floor to floor of Vishram Society, emptying into it the contents of the rubbish bins placed outside each door, and cleaning up the mess made by the early-morning cat as it looked for food.

The people of Vishram Society did not praise servants lightly: but Mary they trusted. So honest that even a one-rupee coin dropped on the floor would be put back on the table. In seven years of service not one complaint of theft. True, there was always dirt on the banisters and on the stairs, but the building was an old one. It secreted decay. Why blame Mary?

Her life was a hard one. She had married a pair of muscled arms that drifted into and out of her life, leaving bruises and a child; her father sometimes turned up under the vegetable stalls in the market, dead-drunk.

Done with 5B, the last flat on the top floor, she rotated the blue bin down the steps, filling the stairwell with a noise like thunder. (‘Mary! Didn’t you hear me! Stop that noise at once! Mary!’) With the branching veins on her forearms in high relief, as if the bin were tied to them, she rolled it out of the Society and out of the gate and down the road to an open rubbish pit.

The rains had turned the pit into a marsh: cellophane, eggshell, politician’s face, stock quote, banana leaf, sliced-off chicken’s feet and green crowns cut from pineapples. Ribbons of unspooled cassette-tape draped over everything like molten caramel.

Throwing plastic bags from her blue bin into the marsh, Mary, through the corner of her eye, saw a man walking towards her. She smelled Johnson’s Baby Powder. She took a step closer to the rubbish pile, preferring its odours.

‘Mary.’

She grunted to acknowledge Ajwani’s presence. She disliked the way he looked at her; his eyes put a price on women.

‘What was in Mrs Puri’s rubbish bag this morning?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will you find it for me?’ he asked, with a smile.

She waded into the rubbish and picked out a plastic bag, which she threw at Ajwani’s feet. He turned it over with his shoe.

‘Do you remember, Mrs Puri said she was taking her Ramu to the temple yesterday? Sitla Devi in Mahim, she said, when I asked her. Now, when Hindus go to the temple they bring things back with them — flowers, coconut shells, kumkum powder — and you don’t see any of them in her rubbish. What does that tell you?’

Mary, having emptied the blue bin, scraped its insides with her palm. Three dark hogs began snivelling in the muck; a fourth, its eyes closed, stood stationary in the slush, like a holy meditating thing.

‘I don’t know.’

‘A man has no secrets from his rubbish bin, Mary. From now on, I want you to look through three rubbish bags every morning. Masterji’s, Mr Pinto’s, and Mrs Rego’s.’

‘That is not my work,’ she said. ‘It is the early-morning cat’s work.’

‘Then become the cat, Mary.’

With a smile Ajwani offered a ten-rupee note. She shook her head.

‘Take it, take it,’ he said.

‘This is for you too.’ Ajwani held out a red box with the image of Lord SiddhiVinayak on it. ‘For your son.’

Mary looked at the red box: large spots of grease stained its cardboard sides.

Two scavenger-women had been waiting for Mary to toss out the contents of the blue bin; one was holding a car’s windscreen-wiper. Now they went barefoot through the wet refuse, old jute bags on their shoulders, sifting through the rubbish with the wiper. They left Mrs Puri’s bag alone. They were not looking for information: merely plastic and tin.

Back in Vishram, Mary hid the sweet-box in the servant’s alcove, then swept the common areas, the stairwell, and the compound.

Half an hour later, with the sweet-box in one hand, she was buying vegetables at the market. Something fresh for her son. Beetroots. Good for children’s brains, Mrs Puri said, who was always cooking them for her boy. She should give me the beetroots, Mary thought. What was the point of wasting them on that imbecile?

Balancing a pav of beetroots on top of the red sweet-box, she came to Hibiscus Society.

‘Why are you looking for work here? Don’t you have a job at Vishram?’ the security guard asked.

‘The builder has made them an offer. Everyone leaves on October 3.’

‘Oh, a redevelopment.’ The guard sucked his teeth. He was an old man; he had seen Societies. ‘It will take years and years. Someone will go to court. You don’t have to worry now.’

‘Anyone living in the slum by the nullah — attention!’

A man came running through the market. He cupped his hands to his mouth: ‘Slum clearance! The men are here!’

The guard at Hibiscus Society, scratching his head and contemplating Mary’s proposal, said, ‘All right. But what’s my interest in this? Do I get a monthly cut? If I don’t, then…’

But where the maid-servant had stood, a red box of sweets now lay on the ground, beetroots rolling around it.

Bumping into people, she ran. Pushing cycles and carts, she ran.

Past Vishram Society, past the Tamil temple, past the construction site where the two towers were coming up, and into the slums; passing narrow lane after narrow lane, dodging stray dogs and roosters to run into the open wasteland beyond. A plane soared above her. Finally she reached the nullah, a long canal of black water, on whose banks a row of blue tarpaulin tents had risen.

Her neighbours were chopping wood; a rooster strutted round the huts; children played on rubber tyres tied to the trees.

‘No one is coming here, Mary,’ her neighbour told her in Tamil. ‘It was a false alarm.’

Slowing down, breathing deeply, Mary came to her tent, and looked inside its blue tarpaulin cover, held aloft by a wooden pole. Everything intact: cooking oil, cooking vessels, her son’s school books, photo albums.

‘They won’t come till after the monsoons,’ her neighbour shouted. ‘We’re safe till then.’

Mary sat down and wiped her face.

Among the patchwork of fully legal slums, semi-legal slums and pockets of huts in Vakola, this row of tents next to a polluted canal, the nullah that cut through the suburb, led the most precarious existence. Because they had come here after the last government amnesty for illegal slums, and because the canal could flood during a heavy monsoon, the squatters had not been granted the identification cards which ‘regularized’ a slum-dweller’s existence and gave him the right to be relocated to a pucca building if the government bulldozed his hut. Municipal officials had repeatedly threatened the dwellers by the nullah with eviction, yet someone had always intervened to save them, usually a politician who needed their votes at the next municipal election. Last month, Mrs Rego had come down to explain to them that things had changed. It was now a season of will power in Bombay: the coalition of corruption, philanthropy, and inertia that had protected them for so long was disintegrating. A new official had been put in charge of clearing the city’s illegal slums. He had smashed miles of huts in Thane and promised to do the same in Mumbai. Every day their slum survived should be considered a miracle.

The huts along the nullah were now glowing from inside. Mary had been given an old three-battery white fluoroscent lamp by Mrs Rego, which she had hung by a hook from the roof of her tent.

In a little while, someone had come by to check on her. It was the Battleship herself.

Wiping her hands on her sari, Mary came out to talk.

‘Today was a false alarm, Mary, but sooner or later they will come to demolish this place. You should move while you can.’

‘This is my home, madam. Would you leave yours?’

She asked the Battleship about Timothy, her son. ‘Is he playing cricket by the temple?’

‘Let him play, Mary. He’s a child. There won’t be time to play later on.’

‘Those other boys don’t go to school, madam. Some of them are nearly twenty years old. Do you let your son play with them?’

Mrs Rego, about to put Mary in her place, restrained herself.

‘I’m the one who gives lectures here, Mary. I’m not used to hearing them from people who live by the nullah. But let’s not fight. Both of us had good news today.’

She was on her way home from the office of a lawyer in Shivaji Park who specialized in Housing Societies and their disputes. Not true, he had told her, that every member of a Society has to say ‘Yes’ before it can be demolished. A three-quarters majority vote in favour may be enough, legally speaking. But the law spoke ambiguously on this matter. As on most matters, the lawyer added. The law in Mumbai was not blind: far from it, it had two faces and four working eyes and saw every case from both sides and could never make up its mind. But an ambiguous, ambivalent, and ambidextrous law was not without its advantages. The issue here — individual right vis-à-vis collective well-being — was so complicated that if a single resident of Vishram went to court, the demolition would be postponed for years while the judge scratched his head over the case and tried to find a pattern in half a century of conflicting legal precedents. Mr Shah would give up and go somewhere else.

Mary came out of her hut with an axe and started cutting firewood for her evening cooking.

Mrs Rego had wandered a few huts down the nullah.

‘How many times have I told you,’ she was shouting at a man who had a well-known drinking problem, ‘not to even think of raising a hand at your wife?’

Mary was thinking of her Timothy. He should be in here, studying, not out there by the Tamil temple, playing cricket with those older, rougher creatures. He would soon start to look up to them.

She might hit him too hard for breaking her orders: better to take it out on the firewood. She swung and chopped.

‘I used to take you and your mother to a street fair in Bandra when you were this high. I’m sure you remember.’

At the other end of town, Dharmen Shah walked with his son past coloured balloons and fluorescent plastic loops. They had had an awkward tea in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, and emerged to find Nariman Point closed to traffic for a street fair. Blobs of vanilla ice cream, in cones or in cups, materialized around them like snowballs; horses, drawing chariots plated with silver-foil and shaped like swans, clattered up and down the avenue.

‘When am I getting my credit card back?’

‘When I feel like giving it back. Have you been seeing those gang boys again?’

Satish stopped. ‘Horse shit. Everywhere,’ he said. The bottoms of his jeans dragged on the dirty road, but Shah assumed it was the reigning style and checked himself.

‘I asked you a question about the gang, Satish. Do you still…’

The boy had put his fingers on his nose. ‘I want to go home,’ he said. His father asked only if he had money for a taxi.

Shah dialled for Shanmugham, who was at Malabar Hill, waiting to deliver the evening report to him.

‘Come over to Nariman Point.’

He stood behind a row of children who had lined up to buy red crystalline ice candy in a cup. The children looked at him and giggled; he smiled. All around him he saw men with their wives and sons.

I’m losing my boy, he thought. He knew that Satish had probably not told his taxi to go to Malabar Hill — he was headed straight to the home of one of his friends.

A cluster of yellow balloons rose above the fair and floated into the darkness; Shah followed them.

Leaving light and noise behind him, he came to a car park. A metal fence stood behind the car park, and dark water beyond it. At the end of the water, he saw the lights of Navy Nagar: the southern tip of Mumbai.

Shah pressed his face on the cold metal ringlets of the fence. He gazed at the distant lights, and then rotated his face until he was looking at the earth.

This fence was supposed to mark the land’s end, but a promontory of debris, broken chunks of old buildings, granite, plastic, and Pepsi Cola had sneaked past it — the enterprising garbage pushed several feet into water. Shah’s fingers pulsed as he gazed at the amphibian earth of Nariman Point. Look: how this city never stops growing: rubble, shit, plants, mulch, left to themselves, start slurping up sea, edging towards the other end of the bay like a snake’s tongue, hissing through salt water, there is more land here, more land.

A churning began in the promontory — plastic bags and pebbles started to ripple, as if mice were scurrying beneath them; then a sparrow shot out of the detritus. It’s coming to life, Shah thought. If only Satish were here to see it. All of Bombay was created like this: through the desire of junk and landfill, on which the reclaimed city sits, to be come something better. In this way, they all emerged: fish, birds, the leopards of Borivali, even the starlets and super-models of Bandra.

Now a homeless man began moving over the debris; he must have found a hole in the fence. He squatted and spat. His spit contributed to the reclaiming thunderhead, as would his shit, soon to follow. Shah closed his eyes and prayed to the debris, and to the man defecating in it: Let me build, one more time.

‘Sir…’ He felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s not clean here.’

Shanmugham, in his white shirt and black trousers, was standing behind him.

They returned to light and noise.

‘What is that Secretary doing?’ Shah asked, as they walked back to the street fair.

He had just heard the bad news: the four Nos at Vishram had become three, but those three Nos were simply not budging. And the Secretary protested on the phone that there was nothing he could do to make them sign the agreement.

‘I don’t know why they made him Secretary, sir,’ Shanmugham said. ‘He’s useless. But there is someone else… a broker… who might help us. He has asked for money.’

‘That’s fine. Spend another lakh, or two lakhs, if you have to. Spend even more than that, if absolutely necessary. October the 3rd is near by.’ Shah cupped his hand around his ear. ‘Every day I can hear it coming closer. Can you hear it too?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Shanmugham said. ‘I can hear it. I can hear October 3 coming closer.’

The builder stopped and turned his head. A sugarcane juice stand had been brought to the side of the road as part of the fair. His eyes rose to the top of the stand, where the canes had been piled, six foot high, the tallest of them curling down at the ends, like the claws of a crab.

The cane-crushing machine was lit up by naked electric bulbs. In a square of raw light, a boy turned a red wheel, which turned smaller green wheels, which tinkled and crushed the cane, whose juice, dribbling down a gutter full of irregular chunks of ice, passed through a dirty strainer into a stainless-steel vessel that fogged up from the cold liquid. Poured into small conical glasses, and sold to customers for five rupees each, seven for a larger glass.

‘I used to live on this juice when I came to Bombay, Shanmugham. Live on it.’

‘Sir: they use dirty water to make the ice. Jaundice, diarrhoea, worms, God knows what else.’

‘I know. I know.’

The bright, fast, musical wheels turned once again, crushing the cane — Shah imagined bricks rising, scaffolding erected, men hoisted miles into the air on such tinkling energy. If only he were new to Bombay again: if only he could drink that stuff again.

On the drive back, in his mind’s eye he continued to see them, the sugarcane-crusher’s wheels turning under the naked light bulbs, discs of speeding light punching holes into the night like spinning machines of fate, having completed their day shift, and now working overtime.

Late in the night, the first storm crashed into the city.

20 JUNE

Low rentals, five minutes to Santa Cruz train station, ten minutes to Bandra by auto. There are many advantages to life in Vakola, yes, but Ajwani, an honest broker, advises first-timers that there is also one big negative.

Not the proximity of slums (they stay in their huts, you stay in your building, who bothers whom?). Not the Boeing 747s flying overhead (cotton in your ears, arm on your wife, off to sleep).

But-one-thing-you-must-know-before-you-move-here: Ajwani taps his mobile phone on his laminated table. This is a low-lying area. One day each monsoon, there is a storm, and on that day life in Vakola becomes impossible.

By morning floodwater had risen to waist height near the highway signal and in parts of Kalina. Vishram Society, on higher ground, was more secure, but the alley leading up to it was a foot below water; every now and then an autorickshaw arrived, scything storm water, discharging a client near the gate, and returning gondola-like. Abandoning the guard’s booth, Ram Khare sought the protection of the Society. Not that this protection was absolute; a continuous spray came through the stars in the grille. Buckets kept under the leaky spots in the roof overflowed every fifteen minutes; tongues of fresh algae and moss grew under the stairwell. Shifting diagonals of rain lashed the rusty gate and the blue roof of the guard’s booth; the water fell thick and glowing, and though the sun was hidden the rain-light was strong enough to read a newspaper in.

In the Renaissance Real-Estate Agency, Ajwani saw that it was futile to expect clients, told Mani ‘This is the day that comes once a year’, and staggered back to his Society under an umbrella.

At four o’clock, the sky was bright again. The thunderclouds, like a single dark bandage, had been stripped away, exposing a raw sun. People ventured out of their buildings into the water, the colour of Assam tea, on which floated rubbish and blazing light.

21 JUNE

The morning after the storm, Masterji paced about his living room. The compound was full of storm water and slush. He had just washed his brown trousers in the semi-automatic washing machine, and they would be flecked with red and black if he took even a few steps outside.

He knocked on Mrs Puri’s door, hoping for a cup of tea and some conversation.

‘You’ve become a stranger to us, Masterji,’ Mrs Puri said, when she opened the door. ‘But we have to go to SiddhiVinayak temple soon, Ramu and I. Let us talk tomorrow.’

It was true that his neighbours had not seen much of Masterji lately.

Parliament no longer met because of the rains; and, in any case, all the talking now took place behind closed doors. A hush of covert business had fallen over a garrulous Society. Amidst the silent germination of schemes and ambitions all around him, Masterji sat like a cyst, looking at the rain and his daughter’s drawings of Vakola, or playing with his Rubik’s Cube, until there was a knock on the door and Mr Pinto shouted, ‘Masterji, we are waiting, it’s time for dinner.’

A man’s past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.

Though the men and women around him dreamed of bigger homes and cars, his joys were those of the expanding square footage of his inner life. The more he looked at his daughter’s sketches, the more certain places within Vishram — the stairwell where she ran up, the garden that she walked around, the gate that she liked to swing on — became more beautiful and intimate. Sounds were richer. A scraping of feet somewhere in the building reminded him of his daughter wiping her tennis shoes on the coir mat before coming in. Sometimes he felt as if Sandhya and Purnima were watching the rain with him, and there was a sense of feminine fullness inside the dim flat.

When the sky cleared, he would notice it was evening, and walk along the garden wall. When the breeze scattered the dew from the begonia leaves on to his hand, she was at his side again, his little Sandhya, tickling his palm as in the old days. He superimposed her features on the women walking about the garden. Nearly thirty she would have been. Her mother was slim, she would have stayed slim.

At dinner the Pintos would say, ‘Masterji, you’ve become so quiet these days’, and he would only shrug.

They asked him once or twice if he had had his diabetes test done yet.

Though he was spending more time by himself, he would not say he had been bored; he was conscious, indeed, of a strange contentment. But now, when he wanted to talk to someone, he found himself all alone.

He opened the door and went into the stairwell. Instead of going down the steps, he walked up. He walked up to the fifth floor, and paused in front of a steep single-file staircase, which led to the rooftop terrace.

After the suicide of the Costello boy in 1999, the Society had discouraged the use of the terrace, and children were forbidden from going up there.

Masterji went up the staircase to the terrace. The small wooden door at the end of the stairs had not been opened in a long time, and he had to push with his shoulder.

And then, for the first time in over a decade, he was on the roof of Vishram Society.

Fifteen years ago, Sandhya had come up here in the evenings to play on a rocking-horse, which was still rotting in a corner. Planting a foot on it, he gave it a little kick. It creaked and rocked.

Years of uncleaned guano had calcified on the floor of the terrace, and rainwater had collected over it.

Masterji walked slowly through water to the wall of the terrace. From here, he could see Mary picking up leaves and twigs that littered the compound, and Ram Khare walking back into his booth.

Mrs Puri came out into the compound with Ramu; they went towards the black Cross with a bowl full of channa. As if she had a sixth sense, Mrs Puri looked up and saw her neighbour up on the terrace.

‘Masterji, what are you doing up there?’ she shouted. ‘It’s dangerous on the roof.’

Blushing with embarrassment, like a schoolboy who had been caught, Masterji came down the stairs at once.

To make up for his indiscreet walk around the terrace, he read from The Soul’s Passageway after Death for a while; then tried playing with his Rubik’s Cube. Eventually he yawned, shook himself awake, and walked down to the Secretary’s office.

Ajwani was in a corner of the office, reading the front page of the Times of India through his half-moon glasses. Secretary Kothari had another section of the paper; he was examining the real-estate advertisements. The two men were about to sip tea from little plastic cups; Kothari found a third cup into which he poured Masterji some of his tea. Ajwani came to the table to do the same.

‘Wonderful isn’t it, the rain,’ Kothari said, moving the little cup towards Masterji. ‘The whole world has become green. Everything grows.’

‘And buildings fall,’ Masterji said. Taking the Times of India from Ajwani, he read aloud the big story on the front page: ‘A three-storey building in Crawford Market fell during yesterday’s storm, killing the watchman and two others. Since the building was home to over twenty people, the people say it is a miracle only three died.’

Masterji kept reading. The desire for self-improvement had been the cause of destruction. Against the advice of the municipal engineer, the residents had installed overhead water tanks, and these, too heavy for the old building, had bent the ancient roof, which broke in the storm. Death, because they had wanted a better life.

‘There was also a collapse in Wadala. That’s in the inside pages.’

Ajwani crumpled his teacup and aimed it at the wastebasket.

‘Still, that makes it only six deaths this year. What was it last year? Twenty? Thirty? A light year, Masterji. A light year.’

A macabre competition that the men in Vishram had played for at least a decade. If it was a ‘heavy’ year for monsoon-related deaths, it accrued somehow to the advantage of one side (Masterji and Kudwa); a ‘light’ year was a point scored by the other (Mr Puri and the Secretary).

‘A light year,’ Masterji conceded. ‘But I’m hopeful. There’s a long way to go yet before this monsoon is over.’

‘I don’t like this competition,’ Ajwani said. ‘The roof that’s collapsing could one day be our own.’

‘Vishram? Never. This building would have lasted a thousand years.’

‘Will last,’ Masterji corrected the Secretary, with a smile.

‘Would have lasted.’

Masterji looked at the ceiling with a stylish wave of his hand: sardonic forbearance, as a character in a play might express it.

‘One point to your party,’ he said.

‘How is the girl in 3B? The journalist. Still troubling you?’

‘Oh, not at all. We’re friends now. She had tea with me the other day.’

‘Import-Export gave her notice. She has to leave by 3 October.’

Masterji turned to his left to face the broker. ‘Is Hiranandani finding a new tenant?’

‘Yes,’ Ajwani smiled. ‘Mr Shah, of the Confidence Group.’

Masterji looked at the ceiling and raised his voice. ‘Another point for that party. We’re losing here, my fellow Opposition members.’

Removing his glasses, Ajwani smiled. ‘I’ll give you the point, Masterji. I’ll give you one hundred debating points. But in return, will you do something for me? Both my boys are in your science top-up. Your two biggest fans in the world. Tell me everything you say. We must always make experiments before we believe things. Correct? Just for today, Masterji, let this Ajwani be a teacher to you. Make an experiment for him? Will you walk down the road, and take a look at what Mr Shah is building beyond the slums? And then will you honestly say that you are not impressed by this Mr Shah?’

Ramu, in T-shirt and jeans, had come down the stairs with his mother’s NO NOISE sign in his hands.

‘We’re going to SiddhiVinayak temple — we’ll pray for everyone,’ Mrs Puri said, telling the boy to wave at his three uncles, who waved back.

Ajwani, drawing his chair up to the Secretary’s table, summoned the other two with his fingers.

‘She comes back every day with brochures for new buildings, which turn up in her rubbish next day. Yet she says she goes to the temple.’

Masterji whispered back: ‘Your competition has just increased, Ajwani. God must have joined the real-estate business.’

Three men burst out laughing, and one of them thought: Exactly like old times. Nothing has changed.

When Masterji went outside, he found Ram Khare by the compound wall, examining a gleaming red object, a brand-new Bajaj Pulsar motorbike.

‘It’s Ibrahim Kudwa’s,’ Ram Khare said. ‘Bought it yesterday.’

‘He shouldn’t be spending money he doesn’t have.’

The guard smiled. ‘The mouth waters before it has food. It’s the human way, Masterji.’

The Pulsar’s metal skin gleamed like red chocolate. The segments of its body were taut, swollen, crab-like; the owner’s black helmet was impaled on the rear-view mirror. Masterji remembered the scooter he had once owned, and his hand reached out.

A rooster, one of those that wandered about Vakola and sometimes slipped into the compound of a Housing Society, flew on to the driver’s seat and clucked like a warning spirit.

This is what a woman wants. Not gold, not big cars, not easy cash.

This.

Rich dark fine-grained wood, with a fresh coat of varnish and golden handles.

Mrs Puri moved her hands over the face of the built-in cupboard, pulled the doors open, and inhaled the fresh-wood smell.

‘Madam can open the drawers too, if she wants.’

But Madam was already doing that.

The family Puri were in a sample flat on the sixth floor of the Rathore Towers — beige, brand-new, double-bedroomed, approximately 1,200-square-foot built-up area. Mr Puri stood by the window with Ramu, showing his son the common swimming pool, the gym with weight-loss guarantee, and the common table-tennis room down below.

The guide, who was holding a brochure in her hands, turned on a light.

‘And here is the second bedroom. If Madam would come this way?’

Madam was too busy opening the drawers. She was imagining the sunlight glowing on this beautiful piece of dark wood every morning for the rest of her life. Stocked chock-a-block with Ramu’s fragrant clothes. His towels in this drawer. His T-shirts here. T-shirts and shorts here. Polo shirts here. Fluffy trousers here.

‘Come this way, sir. And the child. And you too, madam. I’m sorry, I have another appointment after this.’

‘He’s not a child. He’s eighteen years old.’

‘Yes, of course,’ their guide said. ‘Observe the fittings and finishings. The Rathore Group is all about fittings and finishings…’

‘Why are there no curtain rods in the rooms?’

‘Madam is correct. But the Rathore Group would be happy to add curtain rods for someone like Madam.’

Red curtains would be perfect here. The place would look like a lighthouse at night. Neighbours would notice; people on the road would look up and say, ‘Who lives there?’

Mrs Puri pressed the soft hand that was in hers. Who else?

What an enormous, high-ceilinged, light-welcoming apartment. And look at the floor: a mosaic of black and white squares. A precise, geometrical delineation of space, not the colourless borderless floors on which she had fought and eaten and slept all her married life.

In the lift, she asked her husband: ‘You didn’t tell anyone you were coming here, did you?’

He shook his head.

The Evil Eye had blighted Mrs Puri’s life once. Back when she was pregnant, she had bragged to her friends that it was going to be a boy for sure. The Evil Eye heard her and punished her son. She was not going to make that mistake again.

She had kept up the same charade for weeks now, announcing to Ram Khare that she and the boy were off ‘to the temple’ — before catching an autorickshaw to the latest building she was inspecting. Her husband arrived directly. Everything was hush-hush. The Evil Eye would not hear of her good fortune this time.

Mr Puri placed his hand on his son’s head, tapping along the close-cropped hair to the whorl at the centre.

‘How many times have I told you not to do that?’ Mrs Puri pulled Ramu away from his father. ‘His skull is sensitive. It’s still growing.’

When the door opened, Ritika, her friend from Tower B, and her husband, the doctor, were waiting outside.

They stared at each other, and then burst out laughing.

‘What a surprise, if we ended up neighbours again,’ Mrs Puri said, half an hour later. ‘A lovely surprise, of course.’

The two families were at a South Indian restaurant just below the Rathore Towers, in an air-conditioned room with framed photographs of furry foreign dogs and milkmaids.

‘Yes,’ Ritika smiled. ‘Wouldn’t it be?’

Mrs Puri and Ritika had been at the same school in Matunga, then together at KC College in Churchgate. Mrs Puri had had her nose ahead. Debating. Studies. Prize competitions. Even when they were looking at boys to marry. Her groom had been taller. Two inches.

Now Ritika’s two children by her short husband were short, ugly, and normal.

‘How much are you getting for your place?’ Ritika asked. ‘We have 820 square feet.’

‘Ours is 834 square feet. They were going to put common toilets in Tower A, then added that little bit of floor space to the C flat. There are advantages to being in an old building.’

‘So that means you’re getting…’ Ritika looked around for pen and paper, before sketching into the air.

‘1.67 crores,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘And you?’

Ritika withdrew her finger from the air, smiled with dignity, and asked: ‘Did you see one of those three-bedroom places on the top floor? That’s what we were thinking of buying.’

‘We can’t spend more than sixty-five lakhs.’ Mrs Puri mouthed the next sentence: ‘The rest is for Ramu’s future. Only problem is, this gentleman…’ She leaned her head towards her husband. ‘… wants to leave the city.’

Fighting, like love-making, should be hidden from the child: the eighteen-year rule in the Puri household. But this was open provocation.

‘Why would anyone want to live in Mumbai today?’ Mr Puri snapped at his wife. ‘Let’s go to a civilized place like Pune. Some place where ten thousand beggars don’t come every morning by train. I’m sick of this city, I’m sick of its rat race.’

‘The thing to do in a rat race is to win it. Not run away.’

‘A civilized place. Pune is civilized. So is Nagpur.’

Mrs Puri tied a knot into her sari to remind herself. This would be settled after Ramu went to sleep with his Friendly Duck.

‘We have checked this Confidence man,’ Ritika’s short husband said in a low voice. ‘I know someone who knows someone in the construction business. He delays with the money: always delays. But he does pay. We may have to fight him in court to get the money, but we will get it. I don’t worry about him. Not about him.’

‘Then who?’

‘Sangeeta…’ Ritika smiled. ‘… we have heard that some people in Tower A are opposing the deal?’

‘Absolutely no one in our Society opposes it. One person is saying “Maybe”. She’s a Communist. We’ll make her change her mind.’

‘But she’s not the only one, Sangeeta. That old teacher in your Society too.’

‘Masterji?’ Mrs Puri laughed. ‘He’s just a big jackfruit. Prickly outside, soft and sweet inside. He’s a born quarreller, not a born fighter. Always complaining about this, about that. But the moment the Pintos say yes, he’ll say yes. I know my Masterji.’

The waiter approached with plates of crispy dosas.

‘Just you wait and see, Ritika, we’ll beat you to it. Tower A will have our special general meeting and hand in our forms first.’

When the waiter put down their dosas, everyone noticed that the biggest one had been placed in front of Mrs Puri.

They sat on a bench in the small open square outside the restaurant, in the shade of a small Ashoka tree. Mrs Puri had not forgotten the knot in her sari, but it had to be established that there was no fighting between Mummy and Daddy, so they sat close to each other. Ramu, swinging his legs in between them, played alternately with her fingers and his.

A couple came up to them. The woman asked: ‘We’re looking for Rathore Towers.’

‘Right behind us.’ Mrs Puri pointed.

The woman wore a svelte black salwar kameez. Her man was in a nice business shirt. Smart young couple.

Mrs Puri put her arm around Ramu and told the young woman: ‘This is my son. His name is Ramesh. We may be your neighbours.’

Mr Puri raised his eyebrows: a thing like this had never been done before. Introducing Ramu to a stranger.

All these years his wife had lived a leper’s length away from people. Her normal response when strangers came by was to tuck Ramu behind her body; that may have been why she let it grow so fat after his birth. He was still thinking about her extraordinary behaviour, when:

‘This Sunday we are all going to the Taj. Did you hear me?’

‘The Taj?’ Mr Puri asked. ‘Have you gone mad now, Sangeeta?’

Of course not. Since she was a child, she had seen its pale conical lampshades behind the dark windows: the Sea Lounge at the Taj Hotel. This Sunday they would walk in, hand in hand, and ask the waiter: ‘A table in Sea Lounge, please.’ (‘The Sea Lounge,’ Mr Puri corrected her.) Then they would sit down and say: ‘We want coffee, please.’ Good behaviour would be observed by all, especially by Ramu, who would not rub his gums, drool, or kick legs about. Maybe a film star would come in. After settling the bill (hundreds and hundreds of rupees), they would keep it as a memento.

Mr Puri, who was going to protest, kept quiet. Why not? he thought. Other human beings did it.

Two sharp fingers scraped his leg: a beggar child. Feeling guilty for his Taj fantasy, he gave the child a two-rupee coin.

‘Don’t criticize me for doing that,’ he said, expecting the worst from his wife.

‘Why would I?’

‘For twenty-five years I’ve always wanted to give to beggars. Even one rupee, and you became angry.’

This was a slander on her; but she let it stand — if it made Mr Puri happy, let him say it. He too had suffered enough in life.

It began to rain. They scampered for a rickshaw; Mr Puri got in first with the boy, and his wife, after undoing the knot in her sari, joined them.

25 JUNE

The end of the earth. As the sun dies out, it cools and turns into a red giant, and then expands and expands, until it has consumed all the inner planets, including the earth.

At this point, the ceiling lights go off — to add drama. Shadows are cast on the wall in the glow of the lamp light.

The preparations for the day’s ‘top-up’ were all in place. With two hours to kill, Masterji picked up The Soul’s Passageway after Death and made another attempt to finish it.

He followed the atma’s flight of enlightenment over the seventh and final ocean of the afterlife, beyond which glittered the peaks of snowy mountains. Another 10,000 years of purgation awaited it here.

He closed his eyes. At the age of sixteen, when other boys his age in Suratkal were playing cricket in the maidan or chasing college girls, Masterji had gone through a ‘spiritual’ phase, spending his afternoons reading Dr Radhakrishnan on Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, performing exercises from a second-hand copy of B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, and teaching himself Sanskrit. This ‘spiritual’ phase ended the night he watched his father’s corpse burning in the cemetery and thought: That’s all there is to life. Nothing more. After his father’s death, when he went to Mumbai to live with an uncle, he left Dr Radhakrishnan and B. K. S. Iyengar behind him. Bombay was a new world, and he had come here to become a new man. Now it seemed to him that, oddly enough, he had spent his forty-four years in Bombay exactly in the manner prescribed by the Hindu philosophers: like a lotus in a dirty pond, be in the world but not of it. Nothing had made him cry for years. Not even his wife’s death. Was he really sorry that she had died? He did not know. The hypodermic needle of the outside world had bent at his epidermis and never penetrated.

He heard something strike the floor, and realized it was his book. ‘I’m falling asleep. During the day.’

Not once in his adult life, not even when sick, had he allowed himself this luxury; he had scolded his wife and daughter if he caught them napping in the afternoon, and punished, by a stroke of a steel foot-ruler applied to the knuckles, his son. With a concentrated exertion of will he broke through the settling surface of sleep and got up.

He turned the tap in the living-room sink to wash his face in cold water, but the customary trickle had dried up completely.

How, in the midst of the monsoons, could he have no water in his living room? He struck the tap with his fist.

From the stairwell, as if to taunt him, came the words:

‘By the rivers of Bab-y-lon

Where we sat dowwwwwn.’

The song was in English and the voice was deep: Ibrahim Kudwa, going up to his flat.

An hour later, the children were in the room, and Masterji was casting shadows on the wall to show how a healthy star changes into a red giant.

He was still talking and casting shadows, when the red giant flickered on the wall and vanished. Flashes of light and great explosions from near at hand overwhelmed the stars and black holes of Masterji’s distant galaxies.

The residents of Tower B were setting off firecrackers.

The physics students watched from Masterji’s window, craning their necks to get the best view.

‘What is going on?’ Masterji asked. ‘Is it a festival today?’

‘No,’ Mohammad Kudwa said.

‘Is someone getting married, then?’

The lights came on in the room: Mrs Puri had walked in through the open door.

‘Have you read the notice, Masterji?’ she asked, her fat fingers still at the light switch. ‘They beat us to it. Tower B. They have accepted the offer.’

‘You are interrupting the physics top-up, Mrs Puri.’

‘Oy, oy, oy…’ She flicked the light switch on and off. ‘Masterji. This cannot go on any longer. Speak to the Pintos. Must we all lose the light because of Shelley’s blindness? Here…’ She held out a paper. ‘… read this. And let the boys go. What kind of class can you have with all that noise outside?’

‘All right,’ Masterji shouted to the boys at the window. ‘Go down and play with those fellows. That’s what you want, isn’t it? No one cares about physics. Go. And you too, Mrs Puri.’

She stood at the door with the notice in her hands.

‘I’ll go, Masterji. But will you do what Ajwani asked? Will you go down and see Mr Shah’s new buildings?’

He closed the door behind all of them.

How did she know what Ajwani asked me to do? he wondered. Are they talking about me behind my back?

He read what Mrs Puri had left for him:

NOTICE

Vishram Co-operative Hsg Society Ltd, Tower B, Vakola, Santa Cruz (E), Mumbai — 40055

Minutes of the extraordinary general meeting held on 24 june

Theme: Dissolution of Society (Approved)

As the quorum was sufficient, the meeting commenced on time, at 12.30 p.m.

Mr V. A. Ravi, Secretary, suggested that the members should dispense with formalities and deal with the main issue, which was to consider the generous offer of redevelopment presented by…

He opened the window and tried to get a good view of Tower B. Standing in front of their building, men and women were lighting sparklers, rockets, dizzying sudarshan-chakras, and things in bottles with no purpose but to emit raw noise and light.

The doorbell rang.

‘Masterji… Please… just go down and look at Mr Shah’s…’

Mrs Puri had brought Ramu with her this time. The boy smiled; he too was pleading with his Masterji.

A tower of Babel of the languages of construction.

Bricks, concrete, twisted steel wires, planks, and bamboo poles held up the interiors. Long metal spokes stuck out from the floors with green netting, which sagged between the spokes like webbing, as if a fly had been squashed into the blueprint of the building. Holes in the concrete as big as a giant’s eyes, and massive slabs that appeared to be aligned incorrectly, overlapping and jutting over each other. Everything was an affront to a man’s sense of scale and order, even the sign that identified the thing, large as a political advertisement, and lit from beneath:

THE CONFIDENCE EXCELSIOR

Masterji stood before the two half-built concrete towers.

One day they would be glassed and sheathed, but now their true nature was exposed. This was the truth of 20,000 rupees a square foot. The area already had a water shortage, how would it support so many new homes… and what would happen to the roads?

Lights came on at the top of the second tower: somehow a crane had been lifted up there, and it began to move. In the glare of the lights Masterji saw men sitting on the dark floors like an advance army concealed in the entrails of the building.

He lifted his foot just in time: a dead rat lay before him imprinted with a tyre-track.

He walked past the huts and the Tamil temple, to return to the gate of his Society. The celebrations continued outside Tower B.

He was halfway up the stairs, when a red missile hurtled down in the opposite direction.

‘Sorry, Masterji.’

It was Ms Meenakshi, his next-door neighbour: wearing a red blouse that did not quite reach her jeans.

‘Don’t worry, Ms Meenakshi. How are things?’

She smiled and kept going down the stairs.

‘How is your boyfriend?’ he shouted.

From somewhere near the ground floor, she laughed. ‘My boy friend is scared of you, Masterji. He won’t come here any more.’

He listened to her charge out of the building. Exactly the way Sandhya, when her friends called her for a game of volleyball, dropped her sketchbook and rocketed downstairs.

He placed his hand on the warm building. Just as when a drop of formaldehyde falls on a dead leaf in a science class, revealing a secret life of veins, Vishram throbbed with occult networks. It was pregnant with his past.

Back in his flat, he turned the tap at the washbasin sink. He slapped it. Water spurted out brown and then red and then stopped. He slapped it again, and now the tap spat out a stone. A final red spurt, and finally the water flowed clear and strong.

Who says it is falling down? he thought, washing his face in the cold water. It will last for ever, if we take care of it.

From the kitchen, the old calendar tapped against the wall in a frenzy of approval.

Turning its page to October, where some dates had been circled by his wife (7 October — Dentist), he added a circle of his own in red. 3 October. He flipped the calendar’s pages back to June. Last year’s calendar, but it would do. He crossed out ‘25 June’. The red tip of the pen hopped over days and months… just ninety-eight days left.

No.

Ninety-nine days left.

Down in the compound, a last firecracker exploded.

29 JUNE

Friday mornings in 1B, Vishram Society Tower A. Kellogg’s, warm milk, lots of sugar. Marmalade on toast. Wedges of Amul cheese.

The dishes had been cleared from the dining table and immersed in a kitchen sink brimming with frothy soap-water.

Sitting on their mother’s bed, Sunil and Sarah watched as Mrs Rego, at her reading table, slit open the latest letter from her younger sister, Catherine, who lived in Bandra.

Hair brushed, double-windsor-knotted, wearing his navy-blue-and-white school uniform, fourteen-year-old Sunil, Mummy’s ‘senior adviser’, closed his eyes to concentrate. Next to him in her pretty uniform (pink and white), Sarah, eleven, the ‘junior adviser’, kicked her legs and watched a dragonfly.

A black-and-white photograph of Arundhati Roy hung from the bedroom wall next to a framed poster for a Vijay Tendulkar play performed at the Prithvi Theatre.

Putting on her glasses, Mummy read Aunty Catherine’s letter out loud, until she reached the sentence that began: ‘Even though you have not written for a week, as it is your wont to do…’

Reading it aloud a second time, Mrs Rego put a hand to her heart. Gasp. ‘Wont’ was a most stylish word, she explained to her children. Which meant that the three of them had been well and truly ‘trumped’.

The aim of this Friday-morning epistolary jousting was for each sister, in an apparently banal letter to the other, to slip in a ‘stylish’ word or phrase, which would catch the other off guard, and force her to concede that she had been ‘trumped’. Even though they were just minutes apart from each other (depending on the traffic in the east — west passage), Mrs Rego each Friday sealed a blue prepaid letter, addressed it with formal pomp (‘Mrs Catherine D’Mello-Myer of Bandra West’) and walked over to the postal workers’ colony near the Vakola mosque to drop it into the red box there.

A week later, the postman would deliver the riposte from Bandra.

Now Mrs Rego had to ‘trump’ Aunty Catherine back.

Taking out her best Parker fountain-pen, using her most florid hand, she wrote on the blue prepaid letter:

Dearest Darling Catherine…

… while preparing for an important executive meeting at the Institute, I found, quite serendipitously, your lovely little letter…’

‘“Serendipitously” is a very stylish way of saying “by chance”,’ Mrs Rego explained to the children. The three shared wicked giggles. The moment she got to the line, Catherine would have to swivel about in her chair, saying, ‘Oh, but I’ve been trumped.’

Sunil took Mummy’s Parker and underlined the phrase three times, just to stick it in to his Aunty Catherine.

‘Time for school, children.’ She rose from the bed. ‘I’ll get a plastic bag.’

Mrs Rego went into the kitchen to check on Ramaabai, the maid. Standing at the sink, the old woman removed one wet utensil after the other from the foamy water, like a psychoanalyst extracting submerged memories, and wiped each one clean with a pink Brillo pad.

‘Ramaabai, if you break any of the glasses today I’ll deduct the cost from your month’s salary,’ Mrs Rego said. ‘And be on time in the evening.’

The maid kept cleaning the dishes.

Mrs Rego and her children went from floor to floor in Vishram Society, inspecting the doors. Another shipment of sweets had arrived from the builder last night, to celebrate Tower B’s (unanimous) acceptance of his plan, and Mrs Rego knew from the last time what would happen. The golden Ganeshas from the red sweet-boxes, cut out by those who did not wish to discard a god’s image, had turned up alongside the overlapping Shivas and Jesuses on the doors.

Mrs Puri, naturally, had put up a Confidence Group Ganesha on her door. Two of them, in fact. Mrs Rego’s nails scraped at the god’s pot belly until it bulged out. She did the same to the second Ganesha. Sunil held up the black bag; his mother flicked the gods into it.

Saying goodbye to her two advisers at the gate — they would catch their school bus from the market — Mrs Rego went the other way. Her fingers touched her black handbag, her elbow thrust out at a sharp angle; her lips were sucked in and her eyes were narrowed. Not a square inch of vulnerable surface.

She pitched the black bag into the open rubbish pit, where, to her delight, a stray hog took an interest in it. She wished she had rubbed some honey over the Confidence Group Ganeshas she had removed from the doors.

‘Liar,’ Mrs Rego said, as if goading the animal to attack. ‘Liar, liar, liar’: she clapped three times.

Leaving the hog to enjoy Mr Shah’s gifts to Vishram, she walked towards her institute.

A life like Mrs Rego’s provided an excellent schooling in the ways of liars.

Georgina Rego, the ‘Battleship’, was one of two daughters of a famous Bandra doctor who would have been rich if he had not trusted every man he met on the street. Catherine, the younger sister with whom she played her game of ‘trump’, still lived in Bandra, in a flat in the Reclamation. Disobeying their father, Catherine had married an American exchange student, a half-Jew — a scandal in the community in those days; now the foreign husband, a quiet, goateed man, wrote articles on village life in India that were published in foreign magazines and in the copies of the Economic and Political Weekly that came to Mrs Rego’s desk at the Institute.

Her own husband, Salvador, had been picked by her father. A Bombay Bandra Catholic who liked worsted wool suits and dark shirts embroidered with his initials: ‘S.R.’ After two years in Manila working for a British merchant bank he confessed one evening by long-distance that he had found another, a local, younger. Naturally, a Catholic. They were all good Catholics in the Philippines. ‘You were never going to be enough for a man like me, Georgina.’

He cleaned her out.

Her entire dowry. Sixteen George V half-sovereigns, her father’s share certificates in the Colgate-Palmolive company, two heavy silverware sets — all smuggled in her husband’s luggage to Manila. Her father was dead and she could not live off Catherine’s handouts, so she had left Bandra, a single mother with two children, and moved to the eastern side of the city, to a neighbourhood without roads and reputation, but with Christians. Va-kho-la. (Or was it Vaa-k’-la? She still wasn’t entirely sure.)

From Catherine she heard about big changes in Bandra. One by one, the old mansions on Waterfield Road were melted down like ingots — even her own Uncle Coelho’s. It was always the same builder, Karim Ali, who broke down the houses. When he wanted to snatch Uncle Coelho’s house on Waterfield Road to put up his apartment block for Bollywood stars, he too had come with sweets and smiles — it was all ‘Uncle and Aunty’ at first. Later on, the threatening graffiti on the walls and the late-night phone calls, and finally the day when four teenagers burst in when Uncle Coelho was having dinner, put a cheque on one side of the table, a knife on the other, and said: ‘Either the knife or the cheque. Decide before dinner is over.’ This Confidence Shah was the same kind of man as that Karim Ali — how could anyone believe those oily smiles, those greasy sweets? Behind the smiles were lies and knives.

‘Hey!’ Mrs Rego shouted. ‘Turn your phone off while driving!’

A motorcyclist was wobbling down the road, his head propped to one side as he talked on his phone. He grinned as he passed her, and kept talking.

Breaking the law in broad daylight. Did the police care? Did anyone care? You would never get away with talking on your phone while driving in Bandra — that much had to be said for the western side of the railway lines. Raise property prices in Vakola by 20 per cent, and fellows like this — she snapped her fingers — evaporate.

The Institute for Social Action lay halfway between Vishram Society and the slums that lay further down the road. An old tiled building, the door left open at all times.

Saritha was standing outside the door, waiting for Mrs Rego.

Along with Julia and Kamini, Saritha was one of the three socially committed girls from good families (employment at the Institute was strictly restricted to good families) who answered to Mrs Rego. Saritha’s role was to conduct research into public interest litigation on slum redevelopment, and kill the lizards that overran the walls. For if there was much compassion at the Institute for the poor, there was none for reptiles or arachnids; Mrs Rego hated and feared anything that crawled on walls.

‘What is it?’ she shouted at Saritha. ‘Is there a lizard in the office?’

Saritha tilted her head.

Now Mrs Rego saw it: there was a black Mercedes parked right by the Institute. Shanmugham stood by the car. He smiled, and made a sort of salute, as if he worked for her.

‘Mrs Rego, my boss wants to have a word with you. He sent the car for you.’

‘How dare you,’ she said. ‘How dare you! Get out of here, or I’ll call the police.’

‘He just wants to have lunch with you, Mrs Rego. Please… just for ten minutes.’

She went into her office and closed the door. She took up the papers on her desk and read. A reply from a German government-run social welfare body; yes, there was funding available for those doing work for the poor in Mumbai. The deadline, unfortunately, had… A request from a social worker studying for her Ph.D. at the University of Calicut. She was collecting data on child sponsorship; did the Institute have any information on children…

Mrs Rego looked at the clock.

‘Is that man still outside?’ she shouted.

Saritha came into the office and nodded.

From her office window, she saw Mr Shah’s half-built towers in the distance: blue tarpaulin covered them against the rains, and work went on inside the covers.

A gust of wet wind blew through the window; Mrs Rego rubbed her goosebumpy forearms.

‘That’s a shark, sir. Freshwater. A small one. But authentic.’

The smell of beer, prawn, curry, butter, oil thickened the recycled air-conditioned air inside the restaurant. An aquarium had been set into the near wall. The thing that had been called a shark gaped with a stupid open mouth in one corner, while smaller fish glided around, scoffing at its sharkish pretensions.

Mr Shetty, the manager, stood with his hands folded in front of his crotch.

‘A recent addition to the aquarium,’ he said. ‘I hope you approve of it.’

In the restaurant in Juhu — Mangalorean seafood, his favourite cuisine — Dharmen Shah sat in silence at a table with a view of the door. The ceiling of the restaurant was vaulted, an allusion to the caves of Ajanta; the wall opposite the aquarium was covered with a bas-relief, in plaster of Paris, of the great civic monuments of the city — VT, the Rajabai Tower, the columned façade of the Asiatic Society library. Beer, prawn, curry, butter, oil mingled in the chilled air.

The manager waited for Mr Shah to say something.

A waiter brought a whole lobster on a plate and placed a bowl of butter by the side. More food came: crab, fish curry, a prawn biryani. Wrapped in aluminium foil, a stack of glistening naans arrived in a wicker basket. Four flavoured cream spreads were placed next to it: pudina, garlic, lemon, and tomato.

Maybe she isn’t going to come, Shah thought, as he tore apart the bread with his fingers.

She had quoted God’s name, after all. ‘By the Lord Jesus Christ I will…’

He wondered which of the four cream spreads to dip his bread in.

Remember, Dharmen: he told himself. A person who quotes Jesus is not, in real-estate terms, a Christian. No. A person who quotes Jesus is looking for a higher price to sell.

Humming a Kishore Kumar tune, he dipped the bread into the pudina cream.

Next he went for the buttered crab. With a long thin spoon, Shah scooped the baked flesh from the salted and peppered exoskeleton of the crab; when all the easy meat had been carved from the chest and eaten, he tore the limbs apart, and chewed on them, one at a time, biting into the shell and chewing till it cracked open, before sucking at the warm white flesh. The waiters were prepared to carve out the flesh and bring it on a small plate, but Dharmen Shah did not want it that way. He wanted to feel he was eating a thing that had been breathing just an hour ago: wanted to feel, once again, the extraordinary good fortune of being one of those still alive.

He began to think of the woman again. Mrs Rego. Maybe she was not going to come? No. No. A social worker needs a builder. We make each other: she can be so pure only if I am so evil. She will come to me.

He spat out shell and cartilage on to the porcelain plate. With a finger he checked the colour of the mucus that covered the shell.

The restaurant door opened: Shanmugham stepped in from blinding light, like a figure in a revelation.

He’s come alone, Mr Shah thought. So she said no. He could not breathe.

The restaurant door opened again: silhouetted against the painful white light, Shah saw a middle-aged woman.

He wiped his lips and stood up.

‘Ah, Mrs Rego, Mrs Rego. How nice of you to come. I assume the traffic kept you so long?’ he asked, looking at Shanmugham.

Who made a quick negative movement of his head.

Mrs Rego did not sit down.

‘Why have you brought me here, Mr Builder? What is the business?’

Shah spread his arms over the dishes on the table.

‘This is the business. We Gujaratis don’t like to eat alone. Would you like some fresh-lime soda, Mrs Rego? — and you must sit down, please.’

‘I’m not hungry. I may go back now.’

‘No one is stopping you at any time, Mrs Rego. There are autorickshaws right outside. You will be back in Vakola in ten minutes.’

Mrs Rego looked around the restaurant; she looked at the vaulted ceiling, at the bas-relief, and stared at the fish. ‘But why have you brought me here?’

Shah shared the joke with his food.

‘She is frightened I will do something to her. With that shark near by: I must look like some James Bond villain. Shanmugham, please call the manager of the restaurant here.’

Who came, with folded hands, leaning forward, eager to please.

‘Mr Shetty: this is Mrs Rego. You have seen her with me at… what time is it? 1.20 p.m. I want you to write it down in your register. Mrs Rego, resident of 1B, Vishram Society Tower A, Vakola, seen in the presence of Mr Shah. I want that down, word for word — do you have that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And please send a waiter for our order.’

The builder looked at his nervous guest.

‘Now: if anything happens to you, I will go to jail. You are a social worker: the press and the television people will show me no mercy. I took the liberty of ordering some dishes of seafood and crab before you got here. Shanmugham, you too sit down, and eat.’

Mrs Rego did not move. She stood staring at Mr Shah’s plate, on which gristle, bone, flesh, had piled up around bread, rice, and red curry.

‘You’re my guest, Mrs Rego. You may not like my offer, but you must eat the food at my table. A lady like you, who grew up in Bandra, must know not to snub her host. If it’s too much you can take it back for your boy. You have two boys, don’t you? A son and daughter, sorry. Well, you’ll take it back for both of them.’

Pulling out a chair, Mrs Rego sat.

A waiter cleared the napkin from her plate. Mr Shah himself served a portion of curried lobster, and offered Mrs Rego a naan, which she declined.

She never had carbohydrates in the afternoon.

*

Sunil Rego, coming home dirty from his cricket, found his mother sitting on the bed, with Sarah on her lap. The bedside lamp had been turned on.

‘There’s food for you in the fridge, Sunil. It’s wrapped in silver foil.’

Mrs Rego looked at her daughter. ‘Very good, isn’t it?’

Sarah nodded.

‘Why did you buy it, Mother?’ Sunil sat next to them.

‘I didn’t buy it. You know we don’t have money to spend on restaurant food.’

Mrs Rego whispered: ‘The builder sent it. Mr Shah. He has made us an offer.’

‘Yes, Mummy. I know.’

‘No, Sunil. He has made us a separate offer. This afternoon.’

Sunil listened to everything — how Shah had ordered food, listened to her life story, sympathized with her life story, then pushed a folder and a blank envelope over to her.

Not a bribe; a first instalment of the money to come — that was all. Don’t want it, she had said — thinking it was a trap. It will be deducted, will be deducted from the final payment. Take it, Mrs Rego. Think of your two sons. Your son and daughter, sorry.

‘What did you do, Mummy?’

‘I said no, of course. He said we could think about it and let him know.’

Sunil covered his mouth with his palm. Sarah did the same as her brother did.

‘What do we do now? Should we call your father in the Philippines and ask him?’

‘No, Mother,’ Sunil said sternly. ‘How could you even think of that? After all that he’s done to us?’

‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right.’

‘Are you calling Daddy?’ Sarah kicked her legs about. ‘Daddy in the Philippines?’

Sunil put his finger on his lips and glared at his sister.

‘Let’s take a walk, Mummy.’

Mrs Rego understood. The walls of Vishram were thin.

Mother and children, hand in hand, went to the main road, where she told them again, in slightly different words, all that had happened; and soon they were at the Dhobi-ghat, the part of Vakola where clothes were washed in the open air, in small cubicles seething with soap-suds and foam. Mother and children stood outside a laundry cubicle and talked. Behind them a long white petticoat rose and fell like a sail in a storm, as it was slapped on a granite slab. On the other side of the road, a bhelpuri-vendor sliced a boiled potato into cubes while his lentil broth simmered.

Mrs Rego turned around: the washerman had stopped his work to watch them.

Hailing an autorickshaw, Mrs Rego and Sunil said, almost in one voice: ‘Bandra.’

The dividing wall between the west and the east of Mumbai is punctured at Santa Cruz at just three places — indeed, the difficulty of passage is the harshest kind of tax imposed on the residents of the poorer east (for it is usually they who have to make this passage). Two of these passages are called ‘subways’, tunnels under the railway tracks, and both of these, Milan and Khar, are equally congested at rush hour. The third option, the Highway, is the most humane — but, being the longest, is also the most expensive by autorickshaw.

For reasons of economy, Mrs Rego asked that their driver take the Khar subway; turning left just before the station, their rickshaw joined the queue of vehicles hoping to make it through the tunnel to the west.

South Mumbai has the Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Building, but the suburbs, built later, have their own Gothic style: for every evening, by six, pillars of hydro-benzene and sulphur dioxide rise high up from the roads, flying buttresses of nitrous dioxide join each other, swirls of unburnt kerosene, mixed illegally into the diesel, cackle like gargoyles, and a great roof of carbon monoxide closes over the structure. And this Cathedral of particulate matter rises over every red light, every bridge and every tunnel during rush hour.

In a narrow passageway like the Khar subway, the pollution chokes, burns, ravages human tissue. When their rickshaw finally came, after twenty minutes of honking and crawling, to the mouth of the tunnel, Mrs Rego covered Sarah’s nose with her kerchief, and instructed the boy to cover his face too. The line of autos moved into the choked tunnel, passing under a giant advertisement offering cures for kidney stones by the latest ultrasonic methods to make, in this primitive fashion, the passage to the west.

Ahead in the distance, where the tunnel ended, the three Regos could see light, clean air, freedom.

In the shade of a group of king palms, a woman in a burqa lifted up her face-mask and whispered to a young man. Watching them, Mrs Rego thought: I am almost old. I am forty-eight years old.

Hand in hand, she and her children walked down the Bandra bandstand.

They spilled over, as if from the ocean: girls with golden straplets on their handbags, boys with buff shaved chests showing through their white shirts, on every brow and lip the moisture placed there by the warm night, and sucked away by the ocean breezes.

Mrs Rego waited for darkness to fall.

An old woman’s night is so small: a young woman’s night is the whole sky.

When the street lamps came to life, they took another rickshaw so she could see her Bandra again — the Bandra of her college days, where even the façade of a Catholic church had the quality and excitement of sin.

Getting off at National College, the three walked towards the old neighbourhood.

Girls were shopping for handbags and sandals in the lit stalls of the Linking Road. Just as she had done, all those years ago. If her younger self, searching for a handbag, were to bump into her, would she believe that this was her destiny in life — to end up as a left-wing radical in Santa Cruz (East)?

On Waterfield Road, she stopped by a café and looked into the glass window: what were all these young people, in their black T-shirts and turtleshell-rimmed glasses, talking about? How fat and glossy they looked, like glazed chicken breasts turning on a rotisserie spit.

The touch of cold glass on the tip of Mrs Rego’s nose was like a guard’s rebuke.

Not yet. Not till you sign that document.

‘Are we moving to Bandra, Mummy?’

‘Quiet. Mummy’s watching the people on the other side of the glass.’

‘Mummy—’

‘Anyway, we can’t move to Bandra, so don’t disturb her.’

‘Why not, Sunil?’

‘Because the builder is an evil man. Just like Karim Ali who robbed Grand-Uncle Coelho.’

‘Mummy, let’s move to Bandra. I like it here.’

Mrs Rego looked at her son, and then at her daughter, and nodded at both of them.