Last Man in Tower

3 JULY

Ajwani took the slice of lemon and pressed it with dark fingers: seeds and juice oozed out.

‘That’s what she feels like. Pretends to be special, a social worker helping the poor, but every day the deadline comes nearer, this is what is happening to her brain.’

Mrs Puri glared at him; she bent and picked up the lemon seeds from the carpet of her living room. ‘Don’t do that. Ramu might slip on them.’

Ramu lay under his blue aeroplane quilt, the door to his bedroom ajar; as he sipped lemon tea on the living-room sofa, Ajwani waved to the boy.

‘I know Shah has seen Mrs Rego,’ he whispered. A teenager in the slum, one of his connections down there, had seen a Mercedes driving down to the Institute. The next morning wrappers from a very expensive seafood restaurant at Juhu had been discovered in her rubbish.

‘How do you know what is in her rubbish?’ Mrs Puri asked.

Ajwani grinned; the gill-like lines on his cheeks deepened.

‘Do you want to fight over small things, Mrs Puri? I know I am the black sheep of this Society. I do things you good people will not do. But now you must listen to the black sheep, or all of us will lose the money.’ He whispered, ‘Mrs Rego was offered a small sweetener. By Mr Shah. That is my guess.’

‘A small sweetener?’ Mrs Puri turned the words upside-down as if they were a pair of suspect jeans. ‘You mean extra money? Why only her? Are you getting one, Ajwani?’

The broker threw up his hands in frustration.

‘I won’t even ask for one. If everyone wants a small sweetener, no one will get the cake. On my own personal initiative, I am convincing the Opposition Party, one by one. Why? Because I take responsibility.’

Mrs Puri closed Ramu’s bedroom door. She whispered, indicating to Ajwani the appropriate decibel level for a home with a growing child. ‘You took responsibility for Mrs Rego? Then why hasn’t she agreed?’

Ajwani winced.

‘A man can’t put pressure on a woman beyond a certain point. A man can’t.’

‘So that’s why you came here,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘I am not going to speak to that Communist woman.’

‘Mrs Puri…’ The broker joined his hands in prayer. ‘… this old fighting, this old pettiness — they have to end. This is why we have never gone anywhere in this country.’

Telling Ajwani to watch over Ramu while he slept — the Friendly Duck nearby, in case he woke up — Mrs Puri limped down the stairs, breathing stertorously as she transferred her weight from foot to foot. No one answered the bell at 1B. She pressed a second time.

‘It’s open,’ a voice said from within.

She found the Battleship at the dining table, staring at the wall.

‘What is wrong, Mrs Rego?’

‘It’s on the wall. Do you see it?’

It was the first time Mrs Puri had been inside the Battleship’s home.

She saw framed posters in Hindi and English, and three large black-and-white photographs, one of which she recognized as that of President Nelson Mandela.

‘Ramaabai usually handles them when they come inside the house. I can’t do anything until someone kills them for me.’ Mrs Rego pointed a finger.

Now Mrs Puri saw it. Above President Mandela.

Thick and curvy as something squeezed out of a tube, pistachio in colour, the lizard was moving towards the fluorescent tube-light, where the flies had gathered.

A fellow like this one Mrs Puri had never seen: a monarch of his species. Seizing a dragonfly hovering near the tube-light he tossed back his head; the translucent wings glowed golden against the tube-light and then disappeared into crunching jaws. His engorged body went inside the tube-light, a grey form making precise black marks where the feet pressed on the illuminated cylinder.

‘This is the problem?’ she asked.

Mrs Rego nodded.

Mrs Puri went into the kitchen, removed the gold bangles from her forearms, and put them on a newspaper on the table. She looked for a chair that would help her reach the tube-light.

She saw, above the fridge, a poster of a human being formed entirely by hands and feet clasping each other, with the slogan:

NONE OF US IS AS STRONG AS ALL OF US VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION IT IS YOUR RIGHT AND DUTY

Mrs Puri shook her head. Even the kitchen was Communist.

Searching for a weapon, she settled on the Yellow Pages lying on the microwave oven. She climbed on to a chair by the dining table. Tapping a corner of the Yellow Pages against the tube-light, she drew the monster out, tap by tap.

Mrs Rego had withdrawn into the kitchen for safety.

‘Are you killing it?’ she shouted from there.

‘No, I’m throwing it out.’

‘Its tail will fall off! You must kill it!’

The tail had indeed fallen off. Mrs Puri caught the body of the wriggling lizard, went outside, and dropped it down the wall of the Society. She came back for the tail.

‘Over,’ she said, walking into the kitchen to wash her hands.

She held out her arm with the fingers bunched together. Mrs Rego picked up the bangles from the newspaper and slid them one by one over her neighbour’s wrist, until the forearm was again sheathed in gold.

‘Why are you so scared of them? My husband draws them to amuse Ramu. Spiders, too.’

‘You know he stole all my gold coins,’ Mrs Rego said, as she slid the final bangle on to Mrs Puri’s forearm.

‘Who? The lizard?’

‘Sovereigns. George V sovereigns. Half-sovereigns. This fat. All gone.’ Mrs Rego smiled. ‘The man from whom I take my last name.’

‘I never met him, Mrs Rego.’

‘He is a thief. He made me a poor woman. Did I ever tell you that my father was one of the richest men in Bandra?’

‘Many times.’ Mrs Puri gave the bangles a shake to settle them down her arm.

‘It’s true. We had the best of everything. Catherine and me. Yet we fought over everything. For dinner our father would serve us biryani. Mutton. We fought so much, you’re getting more, I’m getting less, he decided to weigh each portion of biryani on a scale before he served us. That way neither would “trump” the other. Catherine was light-skinned; each time we stood in front of a mirror she trumped me. When she married that Jewish man, and I married a pucca Catholic, I thought I had trumped her for good. But now… she still lives in Bandra. Her husband is well known. And she has a Sony PlayStation in her flat. I have to take my children there so they can play with it.’

Mrs Puri gave her left hand another shake. ‘You have your work.’

‘Who am I, Arundhati Roy? Just a woman in Vakola sending letters to foreigners asking for money. Once in a blue moon I help someone in the slums. Mostly I just sit and watch as this city is ruined by developers.’

A new Heinz ketchup bottle stood on the Regos’ table, but the empty one, which it superseded, had not yet been thrown out. Mrs Puri placed the new bottle adjacent to the empty one. ‘This is what we want in life,’ she said, pointing to the new bottle. ‘And this is what we get.’ Mrs Rego laughed.

‘I’ve admired your way with words all these years, Mrs Puri. Even when we fought.’

‘In college you should have seen my short stories, my poems.’ Mrs Puri swiped her hand over her head, to indicate past glories. ‘I could’ve been a writer, anything I wanted. We have all had to accept other lives.’

‘The Confidence builder gave me a bribe, Mrs Puri. To accept the offer.’

Mrs Puri nodded. ‘I know. Ajwani told me.’

‘How does Ajwani know?’

‘He knows all kinds of things. He’s like one of these lizards, going up every wall.’ Mrs Puri came closer to Mrs Rego to say: ‘He is a dirty man.’

‘Dirty?’

‘He goes to unclean women. In the city. I know it for a fact. My husband once saw him near Falkland Road.’

Mrs Rego, about to ask what Mr Puri had been doing near Falkland Road, suppressed her question.

‘Money is nothing to me,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘When I’m hungry I butter a loaf of bread and eat. But Ramu I have to think of. And Sunil and Sarah you have to think of. Even the poor live better than we do. When you drive on a high road over the slums, you see satellite TV dishes like lotus leaves on a pond. You’ve thought about the poor for years. Now think about your children. I know what I want to do with my money. Take care of Ramu. Buy a home in Goregaon. Do you know what I want to do with the rest? A clinic for injured dogs. This city is full of disfigured animals.’

‘How Christian of you, Mrs Puri.’

‘I know you don’t like builders. Don’t do it for Mr Shah. Do it for your children. When small people like us compromise, it is the same as when big people refuse to compromise. The world becomes a better place.’

Mrs Puri needed another half an hour. Then the two women embraced; Mrs Puri saw, through a veil of sincere tears, a shining wooden cupboard full of Ramu’s fresh, fragrant clothes. She closed her eyes in happiness. The harder she cried, the bigger the cupboard grew.

If anyone’s getting a small sweetener, she thought, eyes closed, patting her friend’s back, it’s me and Ramu.

*

In 2A, Vishram Society, Mrs Pinto and her husband held hands across their dining table.

Masterji cracked his knuckles. He was on the sofa.

‘So what if Mrs Rego has changed her mind? There are three of us, and that is enough. In Rome they had this triumvirate. Caesar, Crassus, Pompey. We’ll be like that. The Vakola Triumvirate.’

‘Do you want the money, Masterji?’ Mr Pinto asked. ‘If you want it, Shelley and I will agree. We don’t want to hold you back.’

‘What a thing for you to ask, Mr Pinto. What a thing for you to…’

‘Like a lemon being squeezed. That is how they feel with every passing day,’ Mr Pinto said, thinking of what Ajwani had told him in parliament the previous evening. ‘Yesterday Mrs Saldanha smiled at me when I walked out of the gate. But she didn’t smile when I came back. In those five minutes she must have heard the ticking of the deadline clock.’

‘I haven’t noticed anything changing,’ Masterji said. ‘Our neighbours are solid people.’

‘We’ll give in to Mr Shah for your sake, Masterji. Won’t we, Shelley?’

Masterji felt things shifting beneath his feet, as if he were standing by the waves at Juhu beach. But I’m doing it for their sake, he thought.

He looked at Mr Pinto’s old face staring into Shelley’s old face; he saw their osteoarthritic fingers knitted together on the table. They don’t want to be thought of as the people who are holding everyone else up.

His gaze moved to the dining table with the red-and-white cloth, where he had eaten his meals since his wife’s death.

‘I do not want to take Mr Shah’s offer,’ he said. ‘I have lived in Vishram Society with my friends and I wish to die here with them. As there is nothing more to say, I will see you at dinner.’

In the crepuscular light of the stairwell he examined the old walls of his Society: the dim yellow paint, nicks, blotches, and rain-stains.

Now it seemed to him that Mr Pinto was right. They had been changing for some time. His neighbours. When Ajwani met him in the street, he would turn away and pretend to be on his mobile phone. Masterji touched a fresh white indentation in the wall. The Secretary. Here the change was more subtle: the laugh-lines around the snowy eyebrows spread wider with each smile.

Purnima’s function in life had been to restrain him; and now this dim stairwell forced him into self-reflection, as if her spirit had been reincarnated here. You’re doing it again, she said. Imagining the worst in humans. He stood in the stairwell, scooping out dirt from the wet octagonal stars of the grille.

Half an hour later, the pink orthopaedic bandage fastened around his knee to ease the tension in it, he was on his bed turning the Rubik’s Cube when two sets of knuckles knocked on his door: one rhythm insistent, the other unctuous.

‘I’m coming, Sangeeta. And don’t knock so loudly, Ajwani.’

When he opened the door, Mrs Puri smiled.

‘Masterji, I just went down to the Pintos’ house. And asked them again if they would sign.’

Ajwani stayed a few feet behind Mrs Puri, looking at his feet. Masterji felt that there had been some tension between the two of them, and that he was the source of this tension.

‘Don’t speak to the Pintos. Speak to me. My answer is still no.’

‘Masterji, I am not a brilliant human being as you are. I just have one question for you. Why do you want to stay in a building that is about to fall down?’

He knew, from the absolute nature of the silence, the ceasing of all ambient noise, that the Pintos were listening in.

‘I have memories here, Mrs Puri. My late daughter, my late wife. Shall I show you Sandhya’s sketchbook? It is full of drawings of the garden. Every tree and plant and spider’s web and stone and…’

She nodded.

‘I remember her. A beautiful girl. But you are not the only one with memories in this building. I have them, too. I have one of this very spot. Do you remember, Masterji, that day eighteen years ago, when I came here and told you what the doctors had told me about Ramu? Purnima was at the door and you put your book down on your teakwood table. And you remember what you did, what your eyes did, when you heard the news about Ramu?’

The old man blinked with emphasis. He remembered.

‘Masterji, I love the Pintos as much as you do. For years they have looked after my Ramu as he played in the compound. But will they pay for his hospital and his nurse when he grows old and needs medical attention? Ask them.’

He listened: not a cough, not a scratch on a table, from downstairs. The Pintos did not object to the logic.

‘Thirty years,’ Mrs Puri said, ‘I’ve come to you for advice. Now I ask you to listen to a foolish, fat woman just this once. Speak to Gaurav. Ask him what he thinks, as a father should ask his son. Will you do that for me, for your Mrs Puri?’

She glared at the small dark man next to her.

The markings on Ajwani’s cheeks rose ingratiatingly: he forced out a grin.

‘Masterji, my two sons are your biggest fans. R and R. I am your third-biggest fan in the world.’

When the rain had ended, Masterji walked down the stairs to the compound. Mrs Saldanha’s door opened.

‘Masterji, I have avoided meetings all my life, as you may have noticed. But I have something to tell you.’

‘Yes, Mrs Saldanha.’

She stood in a shapeless green gown; worry-lines cut into her brow and strands of untidy silver coiled out of her hair. He remembered her twenty years ago: the most beautiful woman in the building.

‘Masterji, my Radhika wants to study Journalism. At Syracuse University.’

He avoided her eyes.

‘There was a Syracuse in the Roman empire. A place of learning.’

‘This one is in America. New York State. And they won’t give scholarships to Indians, so we have to pay for everything… ’

He passed through his neighbours sitting out in the parliament and walked around the compound. Mrs Kudwa, bringing along little Mohammad, in his white tae kwon-do outfit, came to see him next. The boy hid his face behind his mother; he had skipped Friday’s science tutorial.

When she was gone, others followed: Mrs Ganguly from the fifth floor, Mrs Vij from the second floor. In addition, Masterji received petitions from an invisible party. He was sure he heard his wife whispering to him as he crunched the gravel of the compound. These people were her neighbours too. She urged the cause of the living.

Before going into the building, he stopped by Mrs Puri’s chair in parliament, and told her that he would go see his son tomorrow. Not in the morning, though. The rush on the trains would be too great then.

‘It’s over. Even Masterji has agreed,’ Mary said.

Standing outside Silver Trophy Society, she explained her situation to the security guard: ‘When this Shanghai comes up, they’ll have maids who wear uniforms and speak English. They won’t want me. I have a son in school; I can’t miss a month’s pay.’

The guard was a lean light-skinned man; he assured Mary he would keep an eye out, but then asked about her ‘family’ with a gleam in his eye that could only signify lechery.

The guard at a building near the Dhobi-ghat had told her to check with him after noon; a doctor’s family had just moved in from Delhi.

Rain clouds were regrouping in the evening sky. Mary crossed the road, and walked past the rows of fish-sellers with their glistening fresh catch, to be told:

‘Those people from Delhi found a servant girl just ten minutes ago. Not even ten.’

Thanking the guard, she sat on a stone wall near the fish-sellers, and breathed into a fold of her sari. She had been out since seven in the morning. On either side of her, in baskets, or spread on blue tarpaulin sheets on the ground, she saw dried anchovies, fresh crabs, prawns in plastic buckets, and small slimy things that were still wriggling. An old fisherwoman scraped the scales off a two-foot yellow-finned tuna with a curved knife.

As if the departed souls of the fish were rising in a great host, a boom filled the air.

Mary looked up. A Boeing, climbing up from the Santa Cruz airport, cut through the darkening sky.

A blind man sat selling jasmine in the compound of the Tamil temple. The gate of the altar was open, and a small oil lamp glowed in front of a black Ganesha, resinous from decades of holy oil.

The side wall of the temple with the painted demon’s mouth was once again doing duty as a wicket.

Kumar, who worked as a cleaner in the kitchen of a nearby hotel, stood near the side wall, slapping his thighs in anticipation.

Dharmendar, the cycle mechanic’s boy, was running up to bowl with the red rubber ball in his hand.

Timothy, who had ‘bunked’ school to be here, had been given the honour of batting first, and took guard in front of the demon’s mouth.

Instead of releasing the red ball, Dharmendar dropped it and grinned.

‘It’s your lucky day, Timothy. Your mother is coming.’

‘Shit.’

The boy dropped his bat, grabbed his school satchel, and ran. Screaming his name — as the cricketers whistled with glee — Mary chased after him with her right hand raised and her fingers flexed.

Lightning forked over their heads, and large drops of rain fell on mother and son as they ran towards the nullah.

6 JULY

An old man leaned out of the open door, relishing the wind in his hair like a fourteen-year-old on his first unaccompanied ride. He stared at a train going in the opposite direction.

What power. The passing locomotive was a vector of raw momentum, rushing from another dimension at an angle through this one. A fragment of a dream slicing into the waking world.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

The first-class compartment was almost empty. But on an impulse Masterji had got up from his seat and done something he had not for decades — come to the open door of the compartment.

Insanity.

He, above all other men, should know the danger of standing here: he who had warned his students so many times against doing so: he, who had suffered so much from the tracks.

Another express sped past, and this time, the warm wind rushing between the trains felt like a spell. The faces of the commuters opposite him looked potent, magical, even demonic — as if they were creatures from another world: or perhaps always present in his world, well-hidden, exposed now by the jarring energy released by the passing of the engines.

A touch on his shoulder.

‘Radium, sir? It works. Real radium.’

Masterji turned round. It took him a second to recover from the illusion of the passing demon-faces.

A man in a dirty shirt was offering him a packet of glow-in-the-dark stars: ‘Radium for Children.’ Ten rupees. Suitable for bedroom walls. Sparks the intellect, sends them to university.

Masterji looked at the packet; he had forgotten to bring a gift for Ronak.

Paunchy, with his breasts pressing against a patterned silk shirt, Gaurav Murthy walked down the aisle of the grocery store. He pointed at peanut chikkis and golden ladoos, at fried banana chips and spicy farsan packets; the storekeeper swept them all into a plastic bag.

Ten rupee packets of peanuts, natural and masala batter-coated, one packet of Frito-Lay’s masala kurkure. One more packet of peanuts? Why not.

‘My father is coming home again, you see.’

‘A happy occasion,’ the store owner said. ‘Buying sweets for him. You’re a good son.’

‘Why not give me some banana chips, just in case? A small packet will do.’

With a half-kilo of snacks in a bag, Gaurav Murthy walked home. A quarter to five. His father had said he would come at five. Which meant he was already there.

He shouldn’t have strayed this far from his Society, but the snacks in Dhobi Talao, just around the corner, were cheaper. Stopping outside his building to catch his breath, he noticed a star from last Deepavali on the terrace; he was sure his father had noticed it too. (‘Why is it still up there? Don’t you pay the maid to…’) Reaching into his shopping bag, he ripped open a packet of chikki. He chewed the peanuts. His father would mock him for having put on weight; he chewed faster.

‘His father’s tail.’ That was what his mother had called him in the earliest days, when with a dumb, animal joy he had jumped up when the doorbell rang in the evening and had followed his father around the house, even into the bathroom, which he had to be pushed out of. The disenchantment began when he was fourteen, and his mother came back from Suratkal robbed by his uncles: he discovered that his father, who struck him on the knuckles with a steel foot-ruler for minor infractions, could not stand up to two provincial thieves. Contempt was born in Gaurav, the contempt of a son who has been hit by a weak father. As his shoulders grew, the contempt grew with them. His father wanted him to become a scientist or a lawyer, a man who worked with his mind; he decided to study commerce. In the university library he looked up from his textbooks of finance and thought of something his father had done or said the previous day: like a common stock on the Bombay Sensex, the value of Yogesh Murthy’s reputation was recalculated daily in his son’s mind, and daily it fell.

A man has no choice in his father; but if he keeps his distance from an unlikeable one, Society always blames him. It seemed wildly unfair to Gaurav.

As he pressed the doorbell, he could hear screams from the compound of his Society; he identified the particular shrillness that was his son’s. Why hasn’t the boy come up right away?

The maid opened the door. His father stood in the living room, admiring Sonal’s latest acquisition: a large bronze ornamental plate, filled to the brim with water, on which floated red gulmohar petals.

‘Look, Gaurav: Father-in-law has brought a nice gift for Ronak,’ his wife said, showing him the packet of Radium stars. ‘How sweet of him to spend the money.’

Saying it was time to feed her father, she retreated into an inner room, leaving the two men to the business of the day.

‘Life is difficult, Father. Sonal’s life is very difficult.’

‘I thought you had a good job, son.’

When Gaurav spoke, Masterji had the impression he was addressing someone on his right shoulder. He moved his head to intercept his son’s gaze; the boy shifted his eyes further to the right.

‘Job is good, Father. Other things in life are not good. Stress. All the time. I see a Guru now for my stress. Sangeeta Aunty told me about him. He gives me mantras to chant.’

His father was a rationalist, of course. Something stinging would be on its way soon. Gaurav bit into the chikki.

‘When are you signing the acceptance form, Father, and taking the money?’

Sonal, from the other room, supplied the lines he had forgotten:

‘Father-in-law, there are questions of… income tax, estate tax. Life insurance. We have to plan. Sooner you say “yes”, the better for all of us.’

Masterji glared at the chikki as he spoke.

‘Son, there are the things we know about Vishram. Physically it has fallen behind but the memories of my late wife…’

‘You mean my mother.’

‘Yes, your mother, and your sister. It is not such an easy thing, to pack up and leave.’

As his father watched, Gaurav ripped open another packet of chikki; his wife spoke for him.

‘Have you seen the new buildings in Parel, Father-in-law?’

Leaning back, so that he could see her with her feeding spoon, dripping with yoghurt, Sonal smiled.

‘They’re duplexes. Not yet built and each is sold already. NRIs from England. You know how much they cost?’ She fed her father yogurt. ‘Twenty-seven crores each. All sold.’

Twenty-seven crores each. Trying to make sense of how much money that was, Masterji thought of the ocean.

‘Twenty-seven crores,’ Gaurav said. ‘Twenty-seven.’

Look at the boy, bleating his wife’s words. Masterji glared once again at the chikki in his son’s hand.

The maid brought in a piece of barfi and six or seven fried banana chips and put them on the table in front of him. The portions were small. This was always the case when he came here; food merely tiptoed across his plate.

‘We have your mother’s one-year anniversary coming up in October, son. I spoke to Trivedi, he’s eager to perform the ceremony. The three of us will go to Bandra like last time. I hope you’ll join us this year, Sonal. And bring Ronak too.’

He ate the banana chips one by one.

Gaurav picked up the Radium packet and sniffed. ‘Father, this is a cheap thing, not good for the boy.’ He let it fall.

Masterji got up and went to the balcony. Spotting Ronak playing down in the compound, he clapped. Without turning to his son, he said: ‘Not one of my gifts for Ronak is liked in this household. I give him a book, a wonderful blue book. The Illustrated History of Science. It was returned to me by his mother.’

He clapped again.

Sonal leaned back from the inner room to look at her husband. Answer, answer, his eyes urged her.

Moving towards her father with another spoonful of yoghurt, she disappeared from sight.

‘Father, you always expected me to read books, even when I was a boy. You made me learn French. I am no good at these things. Mother told you this: I am not intellectual like you.’ Gaurav opened a new bar of peanut-chikki. ‘And, Father, the practice among Sindhis is to give gold when a child is born. Sonal once told you this, thinking that a south Indian like you might not know it. But you never gave Ronak any gold. One of Mother’s necklaces is still in the old place. A Vummidi necklace. In her almirah. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.’

After clapping once more — ‘Ronak, it’s me, come up!’ — Masterji returned to the room. He sat down in front of his son.

‘You’re too lazy to read, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t encourage Ronak. It is life’s greatest joy and power: the ability to learn. Remember what I used to tell you. Lord Elphinstone refused the governor-generalship so he could write his history of India.’

Gaurav ate more chikki.

Sonal, Sonal, please come out — he licked his thumbnail, thumb, index finger nail, index finger, and the webbing in between thumb and index finger. Come out before I get up and shout at the old man.

But then the smell of sweat and sun entered the room; a wooden cricket bat dropped to the ground; and a boy was hoisted up into the air in his grandfather’s arms.

In the kitchen Sonal did mathematics. ‘It’s 810 square feet, you say, Father-in-law? That would be… 1.62 crores. Let me double-check. 810 times 20,000. Yes, I think that’s right… 1,62,00,000.’

She came out with a glass of pineapple juice on a tray.

‘Not for me, Sonal, too much sugar.’

He offered the glass to Ronak, who sat next to him on the sofa, but the well-mannered child refused.

‘This Mr Shah had better pay on time, Father-in-law. If not, Gaurav has a connection at work who knows a good property lawyer. Once you sign the agreement, you can move in here,’ Sonal said. ‘Both our fathers will be with us.’

‘It might be a good idea,’ Masterji said. ‘To be close to Ronak.’

His son reached for the bar of chikki, broke off a chunk, and began chewing again.

Sonal smiled at her husband. ‘Of course, if Father-in-law doesn’t want to stay with us, he can always buy a one-bedroom flat in Vakola.’ She said it out loud: ‘One-six-two-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero!’

Masterji, stroking his grandson’s wet hair, heard a gurgling noise from the inside room — as if even that brain-dead old man was excited. Senility for a banker, Masterji thought, must consist of lots of zeroes going round and round in his head.

‘Are you sure you won’t drink that pineapple juice before you leave?’ Sonal said. ‘Just a sip? Share it with your grandson?’

The lift was broken, so he walked down the stairs.

When he raised his leg, the stair dissolved, and he put it down into soft, wet black air. He held on to the solid banister to stop himself sliding. His arthritic left knee throbbed. O, Purnima, he prayed, Purnima. His blood sugar was sputtering like the engine of an old autorickshaw. O, Purnima.

Explosions of glucose — comets and supernovae — lit up his private darkness; a bacchanalia had begun in his hyper-metabolizing cells.

Holding on to the banister he lowered himself down on to the steps. He could hear Purnima yelling at him from the oceans of the other world. Why hadn’t he taken that diabetes test yet?

Is it possible, he wondered, that Sonal gave me that pineapple juice precisely to make this happen? She kept insisting.

Down below on the landing, a man in rags, one of the servants of Gaurav’s Society, slept with his arm over his face.

Masterji touched the wall of his son’s Society. It did not remember Purnima or Sandhya. Soon he would be living within four walls like this.

Striding over the sleeping servant, he walked on down, still wondering about Sonal and the pineapple juice.

‘Why is it taking him so long to come back?’ Mrs Puri asked.

Half a dozen residents had gathered in the Secretary’s room to celebrate Masterji’s return. The moment he would walk in with a smile and say, ‘Yes.’ A microphone had been placed near the black Cross; the plan was to hold an impromptu general meeting and have the whole thing done with in ten minutes.

The Secretary patted his comb-over into place. ‘He is stuck in the train, maybe.’

Ajwani had been standing in a corner of the office punching away on his mobile phone: now he turned the phone around and tapped it against a filing cabinet.

‘I’m getting worried. Look here…’ He smiled at the Secretary. ‘… why don’t you type out our Acceptance form now? Just type a form saying, All Members of Tower A have agreed and signed. As soon as he comes, get him to sign it. He may change his mind any minute. A man like that, he’s unpredictable. Remember what he did to the modern girl’s boyfriend?’

Ajwani gave the air a push.

Kothari put two fingers over the keys of the Remington, and then retracted them one by one.

‘I think it’s against the rules to type a form like that until everyone has actually said yes.’

The broker shook his head, punched on his mobile phone and murmured something.

‘What did you call me?’ The Secretary got up. ‘I know that you’ve been calling me that behind my back, Ajwani. Nothing man.’

The broker looked up from his mobile phone. ‘I speak my mind, Kothari. Don’t hide things.’

‘What does that mean? What have I been hiding all these years?’

Ibrahim Kudwa was waiting in the office; Mumtaz was by his side, with baby Mariam on her lap. He was going to intervene in the quarrel when Mrs Puri walked in and said: ‘Ibby.’

He smiled. ‘Sangeeta-ji,’ he said.

‘Ibby, the internet connection at home is a bit slow today. I don’t know if it’s a loose cable or…’ She smiled at Mumtaz. ‘Your husband is so good with computers and wires.’

Mumtaz watched her husband follow Mrs Puri up the stairs. He would come down speaking like her. Saying ‘Oy oy oy’ in every other sentence. In the way that the body of an unfaithful husband took on other fragrances, Ibrahim’s voice took on the accents of the women he was trying to impress.

If asked to decide who made the most incompatible couple in their building, the residents of Vishram would have had a hard time choosing between the Puris and the Kudwas. Before Mohammad’s birth Mumtaz Kudwa had worked at a dental clinic in Khar (West); now she left home once a day, to bring Mohammad back from school, and the other residents rarely spoke to her except on festivals like Republic Day. Ibrahim made his nest in other people’s homes. Always pressing the bell to chat, to offer a ride on his scooter, the free use of his internet café, and you felt he would have been happier watching TV on your sofa than on his own.

It had been an arranged marriage; even in the earliest, happiest days, Mumtaz had noticed odd things about her husband. If Ibrahim was treated like an adult, he acted like a child. Grateful to be included in a group, he would do anything others wanted of him, even if it demeaned or endangered him. In his own home, with his own father and mother, he was so thrilled when he got attention at the dinner table. One day she felt bold enough to ask: ‘Why do you worry so much about what they think about you?’ He was angry for days; and then, without consulting her, he announced that they would now live away from his family. They moved to an old building full of Hindus and Christians, and Ibrahim’s behaviour became worse. Mrs Puri pestered him for little favours — a free tube of potassium nitrate toothpaste for Ramu’s sensitive teeth, for instance — and Ibrahim, incapable of saying no, had forced her to smuggle six tubes out of the dentist’s clinic (‘it’s not stealing, it’s for a neighbour’).

She thought it would be worth leaving Vishram just to take her husband away from that woman.

With her child on her lap she looked at the door, only dimly aware that voices were rising around her as Ajwani and the Secretary argued.

Feeling too weak for the evening train, Masterji had hailed a taxi outside Gaurav’s building. Why not? A rich man could travel like a rich man. He put his hand out of the window and tapped at the side of the black Fiat. The trip by road took at least half an hour longer than the train would have; by the time he passed the Mayor’s mansion near Shivaji Park, Masterji felt stronger. Alighting near the Bandra mosque, he crossed the busy road and waited for an autorickshaw to economize on the last leg of his trip home.

He had barely unlatched the gate of Vishram Society when a dark body ran out of the bright building and put its arms around his neck.

‘Thank you, Uncle! Thank you so much.’

Radhika Saldanha — he realized, after some confusion, as she turned and bolted back into her home.

Mrs Saldanha, watching through the tear in her window, smiled at him as he entered the building.

He stopped, from habit, at the noticeboard: a new typewritten sign had been hammered with a nail into the central panel.

NOTICE

Vishram Co-operative Hsg Society Ltd, Vakola, Santa Cruz (E), Mumbai — 400055

Minutes of the extraordinary general meeting of ‘A’ Building, held on 6 July

Theme: dissolution of Society

All members were present by the time, 5.30 P.M.

Ramesh Ajwani (2C) took the chair and presided over the meeting.

ITEM NO. 1 OF THE AGENDA:

All members have agreed, unanimously, to accept the offer made by the Confidence Group. The residents of the Society have agreed unanimously to the dissolution of the Society, and to the demolition of its physical structure.

No other items were discussed in the meeting.

For the Vishram ‘A’ Tower Executive Committee,

Signed,

Ashvin Kothari,

Secretary, Vishram Tower (A)

Copy (1) To Members of ‘A’ Building, Vishram

Co-op Hsg Society Ltd

Copy (2) To the Secretary, Vishram Co-op Hsg

Society Ltd

Note: Signatures of all members of the Society are listed below, next to their respective unit numbers (with square footage in brackets)

The Secretary emerged from his office with a smile.

‘What is this?’ Masterji asked, his index finger on the noticeboard. ‘I just got back to Vishram. I haven’t signed anything yet.’

Kothari came to the noticeboard and squinted; the lynx-like laugh-lines spread from his eyes. ‘Well, I was just saving time, Masterji. Since you’ve agreed, I thought I’d type up the notice.’

Masterji’s index finger had not moved.

‘Did I agree? When did I agree? I said I was going to speak to my son. That was all.’

The Secretary stopped smiling. ‘It was not my idea, actually. Ajwani’s idea. He forced me to put it up before you came back… he…’

Dislodging Masterji’s hand from the glass, the Secretary lifted it open. He tore off the notice, one half of which fell to the floor.

‘There, Masterji, are you happy?’

He was not.

‘Who gave you the right to say I have agreed? Why do you say I’ve signed something?’

‘Thank you, Masterji.’ Mrs Puri was coming down the stairs. ‘Thank you for thinking of all of us.’

Masterji’s index finger was again on the empty noticeboard.

‘Sangeeta, did you know the Secretary thinks he can forge my signature?’

‘Masterji!’ The Secretary raised his voice. ‘This is too much drama. It is just a simple thing — a simple mistake that we made! And I keep telling you, it was not my idea. It was Ajwani!’

Masterji took the crumpled form from the floor and straightened it out. He read it again.

‘It is a signature,’ he whispered. ‘My signature.’

‘Mrs Puri…’ The Secretary looked up. ‘You are his champion in the building. Talk to him, won’t you?’

‘Masterji. We waited for hours for you. I didn’t collect water for Ramu’s evening bath. You did tell us you would sign it.’

A voice boomed: ‘Don’t blame us, Masterji. We just put that notice up half an hour ago. Why did you take so long to come back?’

Ajwani’s small black face looked down from the second-floor banister.

‘It’s true, Masterji,’ the Secretary said. ‘If you had come back just half an hour ago…’

‘I couldn’t come sooner, because… I wasn’t feeling well…’

People looked down from various places along the stairwell: Mr Ganguly, Ajwani, Mr Puri, Ibrahim Kudwa, Mr Vij.

He wanted to breathe in the camphor-scented air from his wife’s cupboard. Mrs Puri stepped aside to let him go. The sick dog lay on the first landing, trembling from its joints. Masterji stopped in front of it and looked up at his neighbours. It was like being at the train compartment’s edge again, with the warm wind blowing into his eyes and the other train rushing past: he saw the demonic faces crowding around him.

He spoke so all would hear:

‘… have not said yes, have not said no.’