Last Man in Tower Read online

  Just one glance at Vishram in the evening, as its residents sit in white plastic chairs in the compound, chit-chatting, fanning themselves with the Times of India, and you know that this Society is – what else? –pucca.

  BOOK ONE

  How the Offer was Made

  11 MAY

  Three o’ clock: the heat at its annual worst.

  Ram Khare, the guard, cooled himself with his checked hand kerchief, while reading aloud from a digest of the Bhagavad Gita scarred in places by the long fingernails which he pressed down on it.

  … never over a man’s actions, said the Lord Krishna, but only over the fruit of a man’s actions, is…

  A fly rubbed its legs near the holy book; two sticks of jasmine incense burned under an image of Lord Shiva, only partly masking the odour of rum inside the guard’s booth.

  A tall man in a white shirt and black trousers – salesman, Ram Khare assumed – stood in front of the booth and entered his details into the ledger. The visitor put his pen back in his pocket. ‘Can I go in now?’

  Ram Khare moved a thumb from his holy digest to the visitors’ register.

  ‘You haven’t filled in this last column.’

  The visitor smiled; an upper tooth was chipped. Clicking the ballpoint pen back to life he wrote in the column headed Person(s) to see:

  Hon’ble Sec

  Turning to his right upon entering the building, as directed by Ram Khare, the visitor walked into a small room with an open door, where a bald man sat at a desk, one finger of his left hand poised over a typewriter.

  ‘… no-tice… to… the… res-ee-den-ts… of Vi-shraaam…’

  His other hand held a sandwich over a scalloped paper plate brightened by comets of mint chutney. He bit into the sandwich, then typed with one finger as he ate, breathing laboriously, and murmuring between breaths: ‘… sub-ject… Gen-ral… Wa-ter… May-n-tenanse…’

  The visitor knocked on the door with the back of his hand.

  ‘Is there a place to rent here?’

  The man with the sandwich, Mr Kothari, Secretary of Vishram Tower A, paused with a finger over the old Remington.

  ‘There is,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

  Ignoring the visitor, he continued typing, eating, and mumbling. There were three printed sheets on his desk, and he picked one up and read aloud: ‘… questionnaire from the Municipality. Have all the children in the Society received anti-polio drops? If so, kindly provide… if not, kindly…’

  A small hammer sat near the typewriter. With the polio notice in one hand, the Secretary stood up with the hammer in the other hand and went to the noticeboard, whose glass face he opened. The visitor saw him pinning the notice into place with a nail, then driving the nail into the wooden board with three quick blows – tuck, tuck, tuck – before closing the glass. The hammer returned to its spot near the typewriter.

  Back in his chair, the Secretary picked up the next piece of paper. ‘… complaint from Mrs Rego. Giant wasps are attacking… why am I paying monthly maintenance fees if the Society cannot hire the…’ He crushed it.

  And then the final sheet. ‘… complaint from Mrs Rego. Ram Khare has been drinking again. He should be replaced with a sober, professional… Why am I paying monthly maintenance…’ He crushed it.

  About to return to his typing, he remembered the visitor.

  ‘A place to buy, you said?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Rent.’

  ‘Good. What is your line of work?’

  ‘Chemicals.’

  ‘Good. Very good.’

  Dark-skinned, tall, upright, in well-ironed Oxford-style shirt and pleated cotton trousers, the visitor gave the Secretary no reason to doubt that he was in a solid field like Drug & Chem.

  ‘Nothing is strictly speaking available now,’ the Secretary confessed, as the two men climbed the stairs. (‘Ninety-nine per cent of the time the lift works.’) ‘But, I can tell you, confidentially, that the owner of 3B is not fully happy with the present situation.’

  An eczema of blue-skinned gods, bearded godmen, and haloed Christs covered the metal door of 3B – a testament to generations of ecumenical tenants who had each added a few icons of their own faith without removing those of any other – so that it was impossible to know if the present tenant was Hindu, Christian, or a member of a hybrid cult practised only in this building.

  About to knock on the door, the Secretary checked himself – his fist was going to hit a sticker with the face of Jesus on it. Shifting his hand to find one of the few blank spots on the door, he knocked with care; after knocking again, he used his master key.

  The cupboard doors had been left wide open; the floor an archipelago of newspapers and undergarments – the Secretary had to explain that 3B was currently rented to a most unsatisfactory single woman, a working journalist. The stranger looked at the peeling grey paint and the water-damage blotches on the wall; the Secretary got ready with the official line given to potential tenants – ‘in the monsoons the rainwater stains the walls, but does not reach the floor’. He got ready with official answers to all the usual tough questions – how many hours of water supply, how much noise from the planes at night, whether the electricity ‘tripped’.

  Stepping over a variety of underwear, the stranger touched the wall, scratched on the flaking paint and sniffed. Turning to the Secretary, he took out a striped red notebook and wet a finger on his tongue.

  ‘I want a legal history of Towers A and B.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A summary of lawsuits filed, pending, or likely to arise in the future?’

  ‘There was a disagreement between the Abichandani brothers, true, over 1C. Solved out of court. We are not court-loving people here.’

  ‘Very good. Are there any “peculiar situations”?’

  ‘Peculiar…?’

  ‘I mean: family disputes ongoing or pending, pagdi system dealings, illegal sub-rentings, transfers of property under the informal method?’

  ‘None of that happens here.’

  ‘Murders and suicides? Assaults? Any and all other things that may make for bad luck, karma, or negative energy in the Vastu sense?’

  ‘Look here.’ Secretary Kothari folded his arms on his chest. The stranger seemed to want to know the moral history of every doorknob, rivet and nail in the Society. ‘Are you from the police?’

  The visitor looked up from his notepad, as if he were surprised.

  ‘We live in a dangerous time, do we not?’

  ‘Dangerous,’ the Secretary conceded. ‘Very.’

  ‘Terrorists. Bombs in trains. Explosions.’

  The Secretary couldn’t argue.

  ‘Families are coming apart. Criminals taking over politics.’

  ‘I understand now. Can you repeat your questions?’

  When he was gone, the Secretary, though eager to resume his typing, found himself too nervous. He refreshed each day’s labours with two ready-made sandwiches, purchased in the morning and stored in the drawers of his desk. Unwrapping the second sandwich, he nibbled on it ahead of schedule.

  He thought of the visitor’s jagged upper tooth.

  ‘Fellow might not even be in chemicals. Might not even have a job.’

  But the anxiety must have been merely digestive in nature, for he felt better with each bite he took.

  The residents of Vishram Tower A, thanks to the ledger in the guard’s booth, knew the basic facts about the strangers who visited them, something that could not necessarily be said about the people they had lived with for twenty or thirty years.

  Late in the morning Mr Kothari (4A), their Secretary, got on his Bajaj scooter and left on ‘business’. Early in the afternoon, while all the others were still working, he drove back, the rear-view mirror of his scooter reflecting a quadrilateral of sunlight on to his upper breast like a certificate of clear conscience. From his movements his neighbours had deduced the existence of a ‘business’ that did not require a man’s presence for more than two or th
ree hours a day and yet somehow funded a respectable existence. That was all they knew about Mr Kothari’s life outside their gates. If they asked, even in a round-about way, how he had saved up enough to buy the Bajaj, he would reply, as if it were explanation: ‘Not a Mercedes-Benz, is it? Just a scooter.’

  He was the laziest Secretary they had ever had, which made him the best Secretary they had ever had. Asked to resolve disputes, Kothari listened to both parties, nodding his head and scratching sympathetic notes on scrap paper. Your son plays music late at night disturbing the entire floor, true. Yet he’s a musician, true. When the disputants left his office, he threw the paper into the waste bin. Jesus be praised! Allah be praised! SiddhiVinayak be –! Etc. People were forced to adjust; temporary compromises congealed. And life went on.

  Kothari brushed his hair from ear to ear to hide his baldness, an act that hinted at vanity or stupidity; yet his eyes were slit-like beneath snowy eyebrows, and each time he grinned, whiskery laugh-lines gave him the look of a predatory lynx. His position carried no salary, yet he was ingratiating at each annual general meeting, virtually pleading for re-election with his palms folded in a namaste; no one could tell why this bland bald businessman wanted to sit in a dingy Secretary’s office and sink his face into files and folders for hours. He was so secretive, indeed, that you feared one day he would dissolve among his papers like a bar of Pears’ Soap. He had no known ‘nature’.

  Mrs Puri (3C), who was the closest thing to a friend the Secretary had, insisted there was a ‘nature’. If you talked to him long enough, you would discover he feared China, worried about Jihadis on the suburban trains, and favoured a national identification card to flush out illegal Bangladeshi immigrants; but most had never known him to express any opinion, unless it was related to the game of cricket. Some believed that he was always on his guard because as a young man he had committed an indiscretion; his wife was rumoured to be his cousin, or from another community, or older than him by two years; or even, by the malicious, his ‘sister’. They had one son, Tinku, a noted player of carom and other indoor sports, fat and white-skinned, with an imbecilic smile pasted on his face at all times – although whether he was truly stupid, or whether, like his father, merely hiding his ‘nature’, was unclear.

  The Secretary threw his sandwich wrapper into the waste bin. His breath was now a passion of raw onion and curried potato; he returned to work.

  He was calculating the annual maintenance fees, which paid for the guard, Mary the cleaning lady, the seven-kinds-of-vermin man who came to fight invasions of wasps and honeybees, and the annual heavy repairs to the building’s roofing and general structure. For two years now Kothari had kept the maintenance bill constant at 1.55 rupees a square foot per tenant per month, which translated into an annual bill of (on average) 14,694 rupees per year per tenant, payable to the Society in one sum or two (in which case the second instalment was recalculated at 1.65 rupees a square foot). His ability to keep the maintenance bill steady, despite the pressure of inflation in a city like Mumbai, was considered his principal achievement as Secretary, even if some whispered that he pulled this off only by doing nothing at all to maintain the Society.

  He burped, and looked up to see Mary, the Khachada-wali, who had been sweeping the corridor with her broom, standing outside his office.

  A lean silent woman, barely five feet tall, Mary had big front teeth erupting out of her concave cheeks. Residents kept conversation with her to a minimum.

  ‘That man who asked all the questions is taking a long time to make up his mind,’ she said.

  The Secretary went back to his figures. But Mary still stood at the doorway.

  ‘I mean, to ask the same set of questions for two days in a row. That’s curiosity.’

  Now the Secretary looked up.

  ‘Two days? He wasn’t here yesterday.’

  ‘You weren’t here yesterday morning,’ the servant said. ‘He was here.’ She went back to her sweeping.

  ‘What did he want yesterday?’

  ‘The same thing he wanted today. Answers to lots and lots of questions.’

  Mr Kothari’s bulbous nose contracted into a dark berry: he was frowning. He got up from his desk and came to the threshold of the office.

  ‘Who saw him here yesterday other than you?’

  With a handkerchief over his nose he waited for Mary to stop sweeping, so he could repeat the question.

  Mrs Puri was walking back to Vishram Society with her eighteen-year-old son Ramu, who kept turning to a stray dog that had followed them from the fruit and vegetable market.

  Mrs Puri, who moved with a slight limp due to her weight, stopped, and took her son by the hand.

  ‘Oy, oy, oy, my Ramu. Slowly, slowly. We don’t want you falling into that.’

  A pit had materialized in front of Vishram Society. It swallowed everything but the heads and necks of the men digging inside it, and an occasional raised muddy arm. Pushing her son back, Mrs Puri looked in. The soil changed colour every two feet as it went down, from black to dark red to bone-grey at the very bottom, where she saw ancient cement piping, mottled and barnacled. Wormy red-and-yellow snippets of wire showed through the strata of mud. There was a sign sticking out of the pit, but it faced the wrong direction, and only when Mrs Puri went all the way around the hole did she see that it said:

  WORK IN PROGRESS INCONVENIENCE IS REGRETTED BMC

  Ramu followed her; the dog followed Ramu.

  Mrs Puri saw the Secretary was at the guard’s booth, reading the register and holding a hand up against the early-evening sun.

  ‘Ram Khare, Ram Khare,’ he said, and turned the register around so it confronted the guard. ‘There is a record of the man today, Ram Khare. Here.’ He tapped the entry the inquisitive visitor had made. ‘But…’ He flipped the page. ‘… there is no record of him in here yesterday.’

  ‘What are we talking about?’ she asked.

  Ramu took the stray dog with him to the black Cross, where he would play until his mother called him in.

  When the Secretary described the man, she said: ‘Oh, yes. He came yesterday. In the morning. There was another one with him, too. A fat one. They asked all these questions. I answered some, and I told them to speak to Mr Pinto.’

  The Secretary stared at the guard. Ram Khare scraped the ledger with his long fingernails.

  ‘If there is no record in here,’ he said, ‘then no such men came.’

  ‘What did they want to know?’ the Secretary asked Mrs Puri.

  ‘Whether it is a good place or a bad place. Whether the people are good. They wanted to rent a flat, I think.’

  The fat man with the gold rings had impressed Mrs Puri. He had red lips and teeth blackened by gutka, which made you think he was lower class, yet his manners were polished, as if he were of breeding, or had acquired some in the course of life. The other man, the tall dark one, wore a nice white shirt and black trousers, exactly as the Secretary had described him. No, he said nothing about being in chemicals.

  ‘Maybe we should tell the police about this,’ the Secretary said. ‘I don’t understand why he came again today. There have been burglaries near the train station.’

  Mrs Puri dismissed the possibility of danger.

  ‘Both of them were good men, polite, well dressed. The fat one had so many gold rings on his fingers.’

  The Secretary turned, fired – ‘Men with gold rings are the biggest thieves in the world. Where have you been living all these years?’ – and walked away.

  She folded her fat forearms over her chest.

  ‘Mrs Pinto,’ she shouted. ‘Please don’t let the Secretary escape.’

  What the residents called their sansad – parliament – was now in session. White plastic chairs had been arranged around the entrance of Tower A, right in front of Mrs Saldanha’s kitchen, an arrangement that allowed those seated a glimpse, through an almond-shaped tear in the green kitchen curtain, of a small TV. The first ‘parliamentarians’ were about to
sit on the plastic chairs, which would remain occupied until water returned to the building.

  A small, slow, white-haired man, refined by age into a humanoid sparrow, lowered himself into a chair with a direct view of the TV through Mrs Saldanha’s torn curtain (the ‘prime’ chair). A retired accountant for the Britannia Biscuit Company, Mr Pinto (2A) had a weak vascular system and kept his mouth open when walking. His wife, almost blind in her old age, walked with her hand on his shoulder, although she knew the compound well enough to navigate it without her husband’s help; most evenings they walked as a pair, she with her blind eyes, and he with his open mouth, as if sucking sight and breath from the other. She sat next to her husband, with his help.

  ‘You have been asked to wait,’ said Mrs Pinto, as the Secretary tried to make his way around the plastic chairs into his office. She was the oldest woman in the Society; Mr Kothari had no choice but to stop.

  Mrs Puri caught up with him.

  ‘Is it true, Kothari, what they say the early-morning cat found in 3B’s rubbish?’

  The Secretary, not for the first time during his tenure, cursed the early-morning cat. This cat prowled the waste bins that the residents left out in the morning for Mary to collect, in the process spilling beans, bones, and whisky bottles alike. So the residents of the building knew from the rubbish who was a vegetarian and who merely claimed to be one; who was a rum-man and who a gin-man; and who had bought a pornographic magazine when on holiday in Singapore. The main aim of this cat – ginger and scrawny, according to some, black and glossy according to others – indeed, was to make sure there was no privacy in the building. Of late the ginger (or black) fellow had led Mrs Puri to a vile discovery when it knocked over the waste bin of 3B (the flat Kothari had shown to the inquisitive stranger).