Last Man in Tower (25 page)

Two municipal workers began sweeping the pavement behind the Puris. Their faces filled with dust; they were too tired to sneeze.

Mrs Puri closed her eyes. She thought of the Lord Ganesha at the temple in SiddhiVinayak and prayed:
We said we were going to temples but we went to see new homes. We were afraid of the Evil Eye but we forgot about you. And you punished us by placing a stone in everyone’s path. Now move the stone, which only you, God, with your elephant’s strength, can do.

‘Ramu, Ramu,’ she said, shaking her son awake. ‘It’s only an other hour from here. Get up.’

When the clock struck five, Shelley Pinto was in bed, her purblind eyes staring at the ceiling.

She heard her husband at the dinner table, scribbling away with paper and pencil, as he used to when he was an accountant.

‘Is something worrying you, Mr Pinto?’ she asked.

‘After I said goodbye to Masterji, I saw a fight in the market, Shelley. Mary’s father was drunk, and he had said something. One of the vendors hit him, Shelley. In the face. You could hear the sound of bone crushing into bone.’

‘Poor Mary.’

‘It’s a horrible thing to be hit, isn’t it, Shelley. A horrible thing.’ He spoke to himself in a low voice, until his wife said:

‘What are you whispering there, Mr Pinto?’

He said: ‘How many square feet is our place, Shelley? Have you ever calculated?’

‘Mr Pinto.
Why
do you ask?’

‘I have to calculate, Shelley. I was an accountant. It gets into the blood.’

‘I’ll be blind in another building, Mr Pinto. I have eyes all around Vishram Society.’

‘I know, Shelley. I know. I’m just calculating. Is that a sin? I just want to turn into US dollars. Just to see how much it would be.’

‘But Mr Shah is paying us in rupees. We can’t send it in dollars.’

When they had gone to America in 1989, Mr Pinto had acquired, on the black market, a small stash of US dollars from a man in Nariman Point. The government in those days did not allow Indians to convert rupees into dollars without its permission, so Mr Pinto had made her swear not to tell anyone. The dollars proved to be redundant, for the children took care of them in Michigan and Buffalo. On the return stopover in Dubai, they exchanged their original dollar stash, plus the gifts of American money Deepa and Tony had forced on them, for two 24-carat gold biscuits, one of which Mr Pinto smuggled into India in his coat pocket while a trembling Shelley Pinto carried the other in her purse past a customs officer.

That was her abiding memory of the word ‘dollar’. Something that turned into gold.

‘Oh, all that’s changed, Shelley. All that has changed.’

Mr Pinto sat by her bedside and explained. It was all there on the Reserve Bank of India’s website. He had been to Ibrahim Kudwa’s cyber-café a few days ago and had navigated the site with Ibrahim’s kind help.

‘If it is a gift, we can only send out 10,000 dollars per annum. But if it is investment, we can send 100,000 dollars. And soon they may increase the limit to 200,000 dollars each year. It’s
perfectly
legal.’

The darkness that enveloped Mrs Pinto grew larger. They, from India, would now have to send the children, in America, money?

‘Will Tony have to come back?’

‘He has a Green Card. Don’t be stupid, Shelley. Their children are citizens.’

‘But he has no money?’

‘Things are difficult over there. Deepa may lose her job. I didn’t want to frighten you.’

‘Everything is so expensive in the States. Don’t you remember how much the sandwiches cost? Why did they leave Bombay?’

‘Just tell me how many square feet this place is, woman. Let me worry about things.’

‘812 square feet,’ she said. ‘We had it measured once.’

Mr Pinto sat at the dinner table again and rubbed his pale hands together: ‘I feel young again, Shelley.’ She wondered if he was asking for a resumption in their relations, which had ceased some twenty-seven years ago, but no, of course not, all he meant was this: he was being an accountant again.

‘It would be so simple, Shelley. Two-thirds of the money we send in dollars to the children, and with the rest we buy a small flat right here in Vakola. Nina could come and cook there too.’

‘How can you talk like this, Mr Pinto?’ she said. ‘If Masterji says no, we must say no.’

‘I’m just cal-cu-la-
ting
, Shelley. He is my friend. Of thirty-two years. I will never betray him for US dollars.’

Mr Pinto walked around the living room, and said: ‘Let us go for our evening walk, Shelley. Exercise is good for the lower organs.’

‘Masterji warned us not to leave the building while he was gone.’

‘I am here to protect you. Don’t you trust your own husband? Masterji is not God. We are going down.’

With her husband behind her, Mrs Pinto descended the steps. Just before she reached the ground floor, something bumped into her side – she knew, from the smell of Johnson’s Baby Powder, who it was.

‘Rajeev!’ Mr Pinto called after Ajwani’s son. ‘This is not a zoo, run slowly.’

‘Don’t fight with anyone today, Mr Pinto,’ she said. ‘Let’s be quiet and stay out of trouble.’

Holding on to each other, they walked out of the darkened entranceway into the sunlight. Mrs Kudwa, seated on the prime chair in parliament, talking to Mrs Saldanha at her kitchen window, was silent as they passed.

The guard was in his booth, keeping a watch on the compound.

Mr Pinto coughed. Smoke billowed in from over the compound wall; gathering the stray leaves from the Society, Mary had set fire to them in the gutter outside. Suspended in a dark cloud, the hibiscus flowers had turned a more passionate red.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine, Shelley. Just a cough.’

Mr Pinto heard singing in the distance: children rehearsing patriotic songs for Independence Day:

‘
Saarey jahan se accha

Yeh Hindustan hamara

Hum bulbule hain iski

Yeh gulistan hamara
.’

‘Better than all the world

Is this India of ours;

We are its nightingales,

It is our garden.’

A few steps down, he turned to his wife and said: ‘Wait.’

They were in the ‘blood stretch’, and he held his breath. Leaning over the wall, he saw a pack of stray black dogs, down in the gutter, running after a small white-and-brown puppy. It squealed as if this were no game. The four dogs chased it down the length of the gutter. Then all of them vanished.

‘What is happening there, Mr Pinto?’

‘They’re going to kill that little thing, Shelley.’ He paused. ‘It looks like Sylvester.’

The Pintos had once had a dog, Sylvester, for the sake of their son Tony. When Sylvester died, the Society had allowed them to bury him in the backyard so they could be near him as they walked around Vishram.

The squealing noise broke out again from inside the gutter.

The old accountant put his hand on his wife’s back. ‘You walk on along the wall, Shelley; you know the way, don’t you? I have to see what they are doing to that puppy.’

‘But Masterji said not to leave the building till he came back with a lawyer.’

‘I’m going right outside, Shelley. We have to save that little fellow.’

Shelley waited by the wall, holding her breath against the stench from the beef-shop. The squealing from the gutter grew louder, and then died out. She heard footsteps from the other side of the wall. She recognized them as Mr Pinto’s. She heard him lower himself into the gutter.

‘Don’t walk in the gutter, Mr Pinto. Do you hear me?’

Now she heard a second set of footsteps. Younger, faster footsteps.

‘Mr Pinto,’ she called. ‘Who is that coming close to you?’

She waited.

‘Mr Pinto… where are you? And who is that who has come in to the gutter? Say something.’

She put her hand on the wall; from a bruise in the brick, she knew that the guard’s booth was to her left, about thirty-four small steps away.

She walked with her hand on the wall.

The guard’s booth was still twenty-nine steps away when Shelley Pinto heard her husband cry out.

Masterji, on his way to the lawyer’s office, stopped and sniffed. Balls of batter-coated starch were sizzling inside a snack store.

Quick dark arms emerged from a white
banian
to grate potatoes into a vat of boiling oil. Another pair of arms waited with a scoop; now and then the scoop dipped into the vat to come up with sizzling wafers. Big bins full of snacks surrounded the two men: fried potatoes (red and spicy, or yellow and unspiced), fried plantains (cut into round slices, or sliced longitudinally into strips, or coated in spices, or dusted in brown sugar), and batter-fried greens. Next door, in a rival establishment, a rival vat of raucous oil hissed with potatoes. Between them, the two shops produced the continuous competitive buzzing of boiling oil that is as much a dialect of the Bombay street as Hindi, Marathi, or Bhojpuri.

The competition of painted signs came next.

F
ERROUS NONFERROUS METALS
. I
QBAL
R
OZA PROPRIETOR
. D’S
OUZA BRAND WEDDING CARDS
. B
ULK SALES

The old buildings began to ooze out fresh juice; ensconced in arched niches in the rotting façades, vendors sat before pyramids of oranges and lemons, operating electric mixers that rumbled apoplectically.

The sound of metallic snipping warned Masterji to slow down.

F
AMOUS HAIR CUTTING PALACE

– this was the landmark mentioned in the advertisement. The next doorway must lead into the Loyola Trust Building.

The pigeons landing on the metal grilles of the windows made a constant cooing as he walked in; a sapling had cracked the cornice above the doorway. No reception area, no signboard in the lobby. A metal cage went up the airshaft, as if protecting the lift, which seemed, in any case, to be broken. Masterji knew at once the story of this building. The landlord could not – because of tenant protection laws – force his tenants out; they were probably paying the same rent they were in 1950, and he was retaliating by refusing to provide even the basics – light, safety, hygiene. You could almost hear him praying every night to God: make my tenants fall down the stairs, break their bones, burn in fire.

It grew darker as Masterji climbed the steps. A plaque of dense black wires criss-crossed the wall like a living encrustation growing over old plaster and brick. He could even smell the acridity of cockroach on the wall. He heard talking from above him:

‘There are three great dangers in this city.’

‘Three?’

‘Three: children, goats, and a third thing I forget.’

‘Children – a danger?’

‘The greatest. Responsible for half the traffic accidents in this city.
Half
.’

He climbed more steps to see a pale pot-bellied idol of Ganesha in a dim niche, like a soft white rat living on the staircase. There appeared to be no electricity up here, and uniformed men sat beneath a paraffin light. He walked unchallenged past the men, just as one cried: ‘I remember the third danger now. I remember it. Shall I tell you?’

Along a dim corridor, a bright metal sign on an open door announced:

P
AREKH AND SONS
A
DVOCATE
‘L
EGAL
H
AWK WITH
S
OUL
& C
ONSCIENCE
’

A small man in a grey uniform sat on a wooden stool between the metal sign and a glass door. A red pencil behind his ear.

‘You are here to see…’ he asked, taking out the pencil.

‘I am a man in need of legal help. A connection of mine told me about Mr Parekh.’

The man wrote in the air with the pencil. ‘What is the
name
of your connection?’

‘Actually, it was a connection of a connection. He had used Mr Parekh’s services.’

‘So you want to see…’

‘Mr Parekh.’

‘
Which
Parekh?’

‘Legal hawk with a conscience. How many of them are here?’

The peon held up four fingers.

With the red pencil behind his ear, he went into the office; Masterji sat on his chair, raising his feet as an old servant woman mopped the floor with a wet rag.

Having apparently figured out which Parekh he was after, the peon opened the glass door and beckoned with the red pencil.

Masterji stepped into fluorescent light and air-conditioning breeze.

With its low dark wooden ceiling, the office had the look of a ship’s cabin; a man wearing thick glasses sat beneath a giant framed photograph of Angkor Wat with the legend: ‘World’s Biggest Hindu Temple’.

The air smelled of disinfectant.

Mr Parekh (so Masterji assumed) was drinking tea. He stopped to blow his nose into a handkerchief and turned to use a spittoon before returning to his tea; he was like some non-stop hydrostatic system able to function only while accepting and discharging liquids. As with liquids, so with information; he was simultaneously talking on a mobile phone propped on his shoulder, and signing documents that an assistant held out for him, while somehow finding himself able to whisper to Masterji: ‘Tea? Any tea for you, sir? Sit. Sit.’

Putting down his mobile phone, he sipped the last of his tea, turned to one side to spit, and said: ‘State the problem in your own words.’

The lawyer had a bald, baby-pink scalp, but three immortal silver strands went from his forehead to the base of his neck. An ailment, possibly related to the pinkness of scalp, had eaten away his eyebrows, so that his eyes looked at Masterji with startling directness. A neck-chain with a gold medallion dangled over his white shirt. The size of the gold medallion, contrasting with the palsied state of eyebrows and scalp, suggested that though Mr Parekh had endured much in life, he had survived and prospered.