Last Man in Tower (19 page)

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.

BOOK FIVE

The End of an Opposition Party

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:

N
ONE OF
U
S IS AS
S
TRONG AS
A
LL OF
U
S
V
OTE IN EVERY ELECTION
I
T 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.’