Last Man in Tower (29 page)

He turned and found a man in a crisp white shirt standing right outside the Loyola Trust Building.

He stared at Mr Shah’s left-hand man. The metal grilles of the building groaned as pigeons landed on them.

‘Mr Masterji…’ Shanmugham held out his hand. ‘Don’t do this to yourself. This is the last chance.’

Masterji shivered at the sight of that hand. Without a word he walked away from his ex-lawyer’s office.

‘Hire another lawyer,’ Gaurav said, when his father, calling him from the pay telephone, had explained everything. ‘There are thousands in the city.’

Masterji found his son’s voice changed, ready to listen.

‘No,’ he told Gaurav. ‘It won’t work. The law won’t work.’

He could hear the builder’s tongue vibrating within Parekh’s mucus. Just like the tuning fork he had used in class for an acoustics experiment. Corruption had become Physics; its precise frequency had been discovered by Mr Shah. If he engaged another lawyer, that thick tongue would fine tune him too.

‘My last hope is Noronha. At the
Times
. I’ve written letter after letter, and he won’t write back. If there’s some way to reach him, son…’

More silence. Then Gaurav said: ‘I have a connection at the
Times
. I’ll see if we can reach Noronha. In the meantime you go home and lock the door, Father. When my connection gets back to me, I’ll phone you.’

‘Gaurav,’ he said, his voice thickening with gratitude. ‘I’ll do that, Gaurav. I’ll go home and wait for your call.’

A cow had been tied up by the side of the fried-snacks store, a healthy animal with a black comet mark on its forehead. It had just been milked, and a bare-chested man in a dhoti was taking away a mildewed bucket inside which fresh milk looked like radioactive liquid. Squatting by the cow a woman in a saffron sari was squeezing gruel into balls. Next to her two children were being bathed by another woman. Half a village crammed into a crack in the pavement. The cow chewed on grass and jackfruit rinds. Round-bellied and big-eyed, aglow with health: it sucked in diesel and exhaust fumes, particulate matter and sulphur dioxide, and churned them in its four stomachs, creaming good milk out of bad air and bacterial water. Drawn by the magnetism of so much ruddy health, the old man put his finger to its shit-caked belly. The living organs of the animal vibrated into him, saying: all this power in me is power in you too.

I have done good to others. I was a teacher for thirty-four years.

The cow lifted her tail. Shit piled on the road. When they saw Masterji talking to the cow and telling her his woes, those who had been born in the city perhaps thought that he was a mad old man, but those who had come from the villages knew better: recognizing the piety in his act, the woman in the saffron sari got up. The two children followed her. Soon the cow’s forehead was covered with human palms.

Giri laid out dinner on the table. White rice, spinach curry, curried beans, and
pappad
, around a
hilsa
fish, grilled and chopped, mixed with salt and pepper, and served in a porcelain bowl. The fish’s head sat on top, its lips open, as if pleading for breath among its own body parts.

The
hilsa
made Shah’s mouth water. He walked around the dinner table in his Malabar Hill home with a piece of silk in his hand – a handkerchief that Rosie had bought him, one of those tiny portions of his own money that she returned to him, perfumed and gift-wrapped in damask. He rubbed it between his fingers.

He had been walking about the flat ever since Shanmugham had come back from the lawyer’s office, sweating with bad news.

Fresh breeze: he went up to the window. Down below, in the gutter outside his building, a man in rags scavenged for empty bottles.

Even down there, Shah saw wanting. That beggar with the gunny sack, if the story so far were told to him, would be appalled by this old teacher. A man who does not want: who has no secret spaces in his heart into which a little more cash can be stuffed, what kind of man is that?

‘I have seen every kind of negotiation tactic, Giri. I can classify them. Saying you’re ill. Blind. You miss your beloved dead dog Timmy or Tommy that lived in that flat. But I have never seen this tactic of simply saying “No”, permanently.’

‘Yes, Boss.’ Giri said. ‘Will you eat now?’

‘We are dealing with the most dangerous thing on earth, Giri. A weak man. A weak man who has found a place where he feels strong. He won’t leave Vishram. I understand now.’

Giri touched his master.

‘Sit. Or the
hilsa
will get cold, and what did Giri go to all this trouble for?’

Shah looked at the fish: and he had a vision of the old teacher, sliced and chopped the same way, salted and peppered, sitting on the dinner table. He shivered, and rubbed the silk again.

All Shanmugham had done so far was to send a boy with a hockey stick to speak to that old man – Mr Pinto. Nothing criminal in that. He had just been sending Vishram Society a gift from reality. He had assumed that would be enough, for a building full of older people. Social animals.

Now Shanmugham was waiting in the basement for instructions. He could see him standing by a car’s rear-view mirror or in the lift, practising his threats: ‘Old man, we have given you every chance, and now we are left with no…’

The silk grew warm in Shah’s fingers.

A dirty business, construction, and he had come up through its dirtiest part. Redevelopment. If you enjoy fish, you have to swallow a few bones. He made no apology for what he had had to do to get here. But this was not how the Shanghai was meant to happen: not after he had offered 19,000 rupees a square foot for an old, old building.

The hot silk handkerchief fell to the floor.

Hanging above the writing desk in his study was Rosie’s gift, the framed three-part black-and-white poster of the Eiffel Tower being raised into place. Placing all his fingers on the polished mahogany table Shah saw, as if through a periscope, the rabbit-warren of cash networks that ran beneath it: he spied into the deepest, most secret paths through which the Confidence Group moved its money and followed the flipping serial numbers of accounts in the Channel Islands and in the Maldives. He was master of things seen and things unseen. Buildings rising above the earth and concourses of money running below it.

And why had he built these things above and below the earth?

Now everyone believed India was going to be a rich country. He had known it ten years ago. Had planned for the future. Skip out of slum redevelopment. Start building glossy skyscrapers, shopping malls, maybe one day an entire suburb, like the Hiranandanis in Powai. Leave something behind, a new name, the Confidence Group, founder Dharmen Vrijesh Shah, a first-wife’s son from Krishnapur.

And some stupid old teacher was going to get in the way? One of the neighbours had told Shanmugham that Masterji’s son had contacted her. He had told her that his father planned on going to the
Times of India
the next day. To say that the Confidence Group was threatening him.

The builder slapped both palms against his skull. Of all the good housing societies in Vakola, of all the societies
dying
to receive such an offer, why had he picked this one?

Fate, chance, destiny, luck, horoscopes. A man had his will power, but there were dark powers operating all around him. So he sought protection in astrology. His mother had died when he was a boy. Wasn’t he marked out for bad luck from the start? The first wife’s son. Krishnapur, he smelled its cow shit in his nostrils. He had rebelled against it, but it was still there, the village mud, village fatalism.

He could not leave Vishram now. He would lose face in Vakola. J. J. Chacko would take out advertisements up and down the highway mocking him.

And that meant there was only one thing to do with this old man. Only one thing could make the Shanghai happen.

Shah thought of the chopped
hilsa
.

In the old days, if a builder had a problem, that problem would end up in pieces in the wet concrete: it became part of the building it had tried to obstruct. A bit of calcium was good for the foundations. But those days were gone: the lawless days of the 1980s and ’90s. Vishram was a middle-class building. The man was a teacher. If he died suddenly, there would be an immediate suspect. The police would come to Malabar Hill and press his doorbell the next morning.

On the other hand, the palms of the policemen had been well greased. He might get away with it if the job were done well: scientifically, no fingerprints left behind. His reputation in Vakola would certainly improve: deep down, everyone admires violence. It was a risk, a big risk, but he might get away with it. He bent down and picked up the silk cloth.

As it became warm again between his fingers, he heard snoring.

The door to his son’s room was ajar. Satish’s thick legs were curled together on the bed. Shah closed the door behind him and sat down by his son’s side.

Seeing his son like this, a breathing thing amidst warm dishevelled sheets, Shah thought of the woman with whom he had made this new life.

Rukmini. He had never seen her before the wedding day; she had been sent by bus from Krishnapur after he refused to return for the marriage. They had been wed right here in the city. He admired her courage: she had adapted to the big city in a matter of hours. The evening of the wedding, she was fighting with the grocery store man over the price of white sugar. After all these years, Shah smiled at the memory. For thirteen years she had kept his house, raised his son, and supervised his kitchen while he shouted at his colleagues and left-hand men in the living room or on the phone. She seemed to have no more of an opinion about construction than he did about cooking. Then one evening – he could not remember what she had overheard – she came to the bedroom, turned off his Kishore Kumar music, and said: ‘If you keep threatening other people and their children, one day something might happen to your own child.’ Then she turned the music on and left the room. The only time she had ever commented on his work.

Shah touched the dark body on the dishevelled bed. He felt the boy’s future like a fever. Drugs, alcohol. Jail time. A spiral of trouble. All because of
his
karma.

He felt he had tripped over something ancestral and half buried, like a pot of gold in the backyard: a sense of shame.

‘Master’ – it was Giri, silhouetted in the blinding light through the open door. ‘The
hilsa
.’

‘Throw it out. And close the door, Giri, Satish is sleeping.’

‘Master. Shanmugham… has come upstairs. He asks if you have anything to say to him.’

His wife’s
almirah
was open, the fragrance of her wedding sari and the old balls of camphor filled the bedroom air.

Masterji sat like a yogi on the floor.

Mrs Puri was shouting at her husband next door; the Secretary was pounding his heavy feet above his head. Then he heard feet from all around the building heading for the door below him. They were speaking to the Pintos. He heard voices rising, and then Mr Pinto saying, ‘All right. All right. But leave us alone then.’

A few minutes later, the doorbell rang.

When he opened the door, a small thin woman stood outside with a red notebook. A blue rubber band had been tied twice around it.

‘Mr Pinto gave this to his maid to give you, Masterji.’

‘So why are you giving it to me, Mary?’

Mary looked at her feet. ‘Because she didn’t want to give it to you herself.’

Masterji took the red book and removed the rubber band. The No-Argument book had been returned to him, with a yellow Post-it note on its cover,
All debts settled and accounts closed
.

‘Don’t be angry with Mr Pinto,’ Mary whispered. ‘They forced him to do it. Mrs Puri and the others.’

Masterji nodded. ‘I don’t blame him. He is frightened.’

He did not know whether to look at Mary. In all these years, he had not exchanged, except on matters directly related to her work, even a dozen words with the cleaning woman of his Society.

She smiled. ‘But you don’t worry, Masterji. God will protect us. They’re trying to throw me out of my home too. I live by the
nullah
.’

Masterji looked at Mary’s hands, which were covered in welts. He remembered a boy in school whose mother was a scavenger. Her hands were scored with rat-bites and long scratches.

How could they throw a poor woman like this out of her hut? How many were being forced out of their homes – what was being done to this city in the name of progress?

Closing the door behind Mary, he leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the cool wood: ‘Must not get angry. Purnima would not want it.’

The phone began ringing. Though he was waiting for Gaurav’s call, he approached the phone as he had recently learned to, with trepidation.

He picked up the receiver and brought it to his ear. He breathed out in relief.

Gaurav.

‘Good news, Father. I got through to Noronha. My connection put me through. I explained the situation: the threats, the phone calls, the attack on Mr Pinto—’

Masterji was so excited he passed the receiver from one ear to the other.

‘And today’s deceit by the lawyer? You didn’t leave that out?’

‘—that too, Father. Noronha is going to meet us.’

‘Wonderful, wonderful.’

‘Father, Noronha is just going to hear us. He can’t promise anything.’

‘I understand,’ Masterji said. ‘I understand fully. I just want a chance to hit back at this Mr Shah. Right now the score is one hundred to zero in his favour. I just want one good hit at his fat stomach. That’s all I ask from Noronha.’

‘He’ll meet us tomorrow in the
Times of India
office at five o’clock. Can you meet him in the lobby? Yes, I’ll come from work straight to VT.’

‘Thank you, son. In the end there is family, or what else is there? I knew I could count on you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Masterji lay in bed and thrashed his feet like a boy.

At Mr Shah’s Malabar Hill home, Giri had wiped the kitchen clean, turned off the gas, opened the day’s mail, and sorted the letters. The last thing he had to do before leaving was to forge his employer’s signature.