Last Man in Tower Page 4

  ‘Rum-pum-pum,’ the naked, dripping boy said, while she scrubbed his pale, downy legs. (Good for the circulation, according to Reader’s Digest.) ‘Rum-pum-pum.’ There was a time, not so long ago, when he would bathe and dry himself off with a towel in minutes – and she had had dreams of his being able to dress himself one day.

  ‘We should learn a new word today, Ramu. Here, what’s this word in Masterji’s novel? Ex-press. Say it.’

  ‘Rum-pum-pum.’

  Treading on the old newspapers lying on the floor, Ramu, now fully dressed, headed into the dining room. The Puris’ 834 sq ft of living space was a maelstrom of newsprint. The sofas had been lost to India Today and Femina magazines, while the dining table was submerged under office papers, loan applications, electricity bills, savings bank statements, and Ramu’s cartoon drawing books. The face of the fridge in the dining room was a collage of philantrophic stickers (‘Fight Global Warming: Lights out for one hour this week’) and crumpling notes with long-expired messages. There were cupboards in each room; their doors gave way suddenly to let books and newspapers gush out with traumatic force, like eggs from the slit-open belly of a fish. Every few weeks, Mr Puri would scatter magazines while searching for a bank cheque or letter and shout: ‘Why don’t we clean this house up!’ But the mess grew. The enveloping junk only enhanced the domestic glow from the neat beds and the well-stocked fridge, for (as outsiders instinctively understood) this dingy, dirty flat was an Aladdin’s cave of private riches. The Puris owned no property and little gold. What they had to show for their life was in the form of paper, and how comforting that all of it was within arm’s reach, even Mr Puri’s old, old Shankar’s Weekly magazines, full of cartoons mocking Prime Minister Nehru, borrowed from a friend when he dreamed of becoming a professional caricaturist.

  As his mother put Ramu’s shiny black shoes on her knees, one after the other, to tie his laces, he sneezed. Down below in 2C, Mrs Ajwani, the broker’s wife, was spraying herself generously with synthetic deodorant. Done with the laces, Mrs Puri spat on the shoes and gave them a final polish with a thick index finger, before she took Ramu to the toilet, so he could admire his good looks. The moment the boy stood before the mirror, the toilet filled with gurgling noise, as if a jealous devil were cursing. Directly overhead in 4C, Ibrahim Kudwa was performing extraordinary exercises with salt water, designed to strengthen his weak stomach. Mrs Puri countered with some gargling of her own; Ramu pressed his head into her tummy and chuckled into his mother’s fatty folds.

  ‘Bye, watchman!’ Mrs Puri shouted, on Ramu’s behalf, as they left the Society. Ram Khare, reading his digest of the Bhagavad Gita, waved without looking up.

  Ramu disliked heat, so Mrs Puri made him walk along the edge of the alley, where king coconut palms shaded them. The palms were an oddity, a botanical experiment conducted by the late Mr Alvares, whose mansion, full of unusual trees and plants, had been sold by his heirs to make room for the three florally named concrete blocks, ‘Hibiscus’, ‘Marigold’, and ‘White Rose’.

  Mrs Puri tickled her son’s ear.

  ‘Say “Mar-i-gold”, Ramu. You could say lots of things in English, don’t you remember? Mar-i…?’

  ‘Rum-pum-pum.’

  ‘Where did you learn this thing, Ramu, this “Rum-pum-pum”?’

  She looked at her boy. Eighteen years old. Never growing, yet somehow picking up new things all the time – just like the city he lived in.

  As they neared the church, Ramu began to play with the gold bangles on his mother’s hand.

  The school bus was waiting for them in front of the church. Before helping Ramu board its steps, Mrs Puri loaded him with a home-made sign: it showed a big green horn with a red diagonal going through it and the legend ‘NO NOISE’. Once again, Mrs Puri made his classmates promise, as she did every morning, to be quiet; and then she waved, as the bus departed, at Ramu, who could not wave back (since he was pressing the NO NOISE sign to his chest), but said what he had to say to his mother with his eyes.

  Mrs Puri hobbled back to Vishram. Walking around the big construction hole in front of the gate, which the workers were now filling up with shovels, she noticed that the sign:

  WORK IN PROGRESS INCONVENIENCE IS REGRETTED BMC

  had been crossed out and rewritten:

  INCONVENIENCE IN PROGRESS WORK IS REGRETTED BMC

  Age had accumulated in fatty rings around Mrs Puri, but her laughter came from a slim girl within: a joyous, high-pitched, ascending ivory staircase of mirth. The shovels stopped moving; the men looked at her.

  ‘Who wrote this joke on the sign?’ she asked. They went back to filling the hole.

  ‘Ram Khare! Look up from your book. Who did that to the municipal sign?’

  ‘Mr Ibrahim Kudwa,’ the guard said, without looking up. ‘He asked me what I thought of the joke and I said, I can’t read English, sir. Is it a good joke?’

  ‘We are impotent people in an impotent city, Ram Khare, as Ibby often says. Jokes are the only weapon we have.’

  ‘Truly, madam.’ Khare turned the page of his book. ‘There will be no water supply this evening, by the way. These men hit a water pipe when working and they have to shut down the supply for a few hours. The Secretary will put up a sign on the board after he gets back from his business.’

  Mrs Puri wiped her face with a handkerchief. Breathe in. Breathe out. She turned around from the guard’s booth and retraced her steps out of the gate.

  The warning about the water cut had reminded her of Masterji’s blocked taps.

  Any good Society survives on a circulation of favours; it is like the children’s game where each passes the ‘touch’ on to his neighbour. If Mrs Puri needed a man’s helping hand when her husband was at work, the Secretary, who was good with a hammer and nail, helped out; just last week he had struck a nail into the wall for a new rope-line for her wet clothes. In return, she knew she had to take responsibility for Masterji’s needs.

  When her boy was diagnosed with Down’s syndrome, Sangeeta Puri, before telling her mother or sister, had told her immediate neighbours. Masterji, listening to the news with a hand on his wife’s shoulder, had begun to cry. She still remembered those tears falling down his cheeks: a man who had never wept on any other day, even when there was a death in his family. For years he had given her suggestions from medical journals and newspapers, to halt – or even reverse – Ramu’s ‘delay’. Everything she had done to stir Ramu’s inert neurons into life, she had discussed first with Masterji: consultations with foreign-trained specialists, oil massages, innovative mental and physical exercises, shock doses of shark liver oil and cod liver oil; Masterji, despite his well-known atheism, had even approved of her trips to holy shrines to seek divine favour on Ramu’s slow brain.

  And there was another matter. Six months before her death, Purnima had lent Mrs Puri five hundred rupees, which she had in turn lent to a relative. Masterji had not been told about this by Purnima, who often shielded her financial indiscretions (as he would judge them) from his temper.

  So, becoming Ms Responsibility once more, Mrs Puri headed for the slums.

  There were two ways in which the residents of Vishram Society had, historically, dealt with the existence of slums in Vakola. One was to leave the gate of Vishram every morning, process to the main road, and pretend there was no other world near by. The other was the pragmatic approach – taken by Mr Ajwani, the broker, and also by Mrs Puri. Down in the slums, she had discovered many men of talent, experts at small household tasks. Had she not once seen a plumber there?

  So now she walked down the mud road, past two other middle-class buildings – Silver Trophy and Gold Coin – and into the slums, which, branching out from here, encroached on to public land belonging to the Airport Authority of India, and expanded like pincers to the very edge of the runway, so that the first sight of a visitor arriving in Mumbai might well be of a boy from one of these shanties, flying a kite or hitting a cricket ball tossed by his friends.
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br />   Smelling woodsmoke and kerosene, Mrs Puri passed a row of single-room huts, each with its tin door open. Women sat outside, combing each other’s hair, talking, watching over the pots of steaming rice; a rooster strutted across the roofs. Where had Mrs Puri seen that plumber? Further down the road, two giant half-built towers covered in scaffolding – she had not seen them before – only multiplied her confusion.

  Suddenly, the roar of an engine: white and tubular and glistening, like a sea snake leaping up, a plane shot over a small Tamil temple. This was the landmark she had been trying to remember: this temple. Somewhere here she had seen that plumber.

  A group of boys were playing cricket at the temple: a guardian demon’s face painted on the outer wall (its black mouth opened wide enough to swallow all the world’s malefactors) served as the wicket.

  All this animal power, all this screaming from the cricketers: oh, how a mother’s heart ached. These boys with their rippling limbs and sinewy elbows were growing into men. And not one of them half as good-looking as her Ramu.

  ‘Mummy,’ one of the cricketers shouted. ‘Mummy, it’s Mrs Puri Aunty.’

  Mary, the cleaning lady of Vishram Society, stood up from the roots of a tree in the temple courtyard, wiping her hands on her skirt.

  ‘This is my son,’ she pointed to the cricketer. ‘Timothy. Spends too much time here, playing.’

  Inside the Society, relations between Mary and Mrs Puri were frosty (‘yes, it is part of your job to catch that early-morning cat’), but the distance from Vishram and the presence of Mary’s boy permitted a relaxation in mistress–servant tensions.

  ‘Nice-looking boy. Growing tall and strong.’ Mrs Puri smiled. ‘Mary, that plumber who lives here, I need to find him for some work in Masterji’s flat.’

  ‘Madam—’

  ‘There are problems with his pipe. Also his ceiling needs to be scrubbed. I’ll go from flat to flat and make a collection for the plumber’s fee.’

  ‘Madam, you won’t find anyone today. Because of the big news. They’ve all gone to see the Muslim man’s hut.’

  ‘What big news is this, Mary?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard, madam?’ She smiled. ‘God has visited the slums today.’

  In the evening, the ‘big news’ was confirmed by Ritika, an old college mate of Mrs Puri and a resident of Tower B, who came over to parliament.

  Their higher average income, lower average age, and a sense of being ‘somehow more modern’ meant that Tower B residents kept to themselves, used their own gate, and celebrated their religious festivals separately.

  Only Ritika, a show-off even in college, ever came over to Tower A, usually to brag about something. Her husband, a doctor who had a clinic near the highway, had just spoken to the Muslim man in the slums, who was a patient of his.

  Mrs Puri did not like Ritika getting such attention – who had beaten whom in the debating competition in college? – but she sat on a plastic chair in between Ajwani the broker and Kothari the Secretary and listened.

  Mr J. J. Chacko, the boss of the Ultimex Group, had made an offer of 81 lakh rupees (81,00,000) to that Muslim man for his one-room hut. It was just down the road from Vishram. Had they seen where the two new buildings were coming up? That was the Confidence Group. J. J. Chacko was their big rival. So he was buying all the land right opposite the two new buildings. He already owned everything around the one-room hut; this one stubborn old Muslim kept saying No, No, No, so Mr Chacko bludgeoned him with this astronomical offer, calculated on God alone knows what basis.

  ‘Everyone, please wait a minute. I’ll find out if this is true.’

  Amiable and dark, Ramesh Ajwani was known within Vishram to be a typical member of his tribe of real-estate brokers. Ethics not to be trusted, information not to be doubted. He was a small man in a blue safari suit. He punched at his mobile phone; they waited; after a minute, it beeped.

  Ajwani looked at the text message and said: ‘True.’

  They sighed.

  The residents of Vishram Society, even if they kept away from the slums, were aware of changes happening there ever since the Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC), the new financial hub of the city, had opened right next to it. Bombay, like a practitioner of yoga, was folding in on itself, as its centre moved from the south, where there was no room to grow, to this swamp land near the airport. New financial buildings were opening every month in the BKC – American Express, ICICI Bank, HSBC, Citibank, you name it – and the lucre in their vaults, like butter on a hotplate, was melting and trickling into the slums, enriching some and scorching others among the slum-dwellers. A few lucky hut-owners were becoming millionaires, as a bank or a developer made an extraordinary offer for their little plot of land; others were being crushed – bulldozers were on the move, shanties were being levelled, slum clearance projects were going ahead. As wealth came to some, and misery to others, stories of gold and tears reached Vishram Society like echoes from a distant battlefield. Here, among the plastic chairs of their parliament, the lives of the residents were slow and regular. They had the security of titles and legal deeds that could not be revoked, and their aspirations were limited to a patient rise in life earned through universities and interviews in grey suit and tie. It was not in their karma to know either gold or tears; they were respectable.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if someone gave us 81 lakh rupees?’ Mrs Puri said, after Ritika was out of earshot.

  Ajwani the broker, who was punching away at his mobile phone, looked up and smiled sardonically. Then he returned to punching at his mobile.

  The value of their own homes was uncertain. The last attempted sale had been seven years ago, when Mr Costello (5C) put his fifth-floor place on sale after his son had jumped from the terrace; no one had purchased the flat, and it was still under lock and key while the owner had himself moved to the Gulf.

  ‘The poor in this city were never poor, and now they…’ Mrs Puri moved her head to the right – Mrs Saldanha’s daughter, Radhika, had entered her mother’s kitchen in a most thoughtless manner, obstructing the parliamentarians’ view of the TV. ‘… are becoming rich. Free electricity in the slums and 24-hour cable. Only we are stuck.’

  ‘Careful,’ Mr Pinto whispered. ‘Battleship is here. Careful.’

  Mrs Rego – the ‘Battleship’ for her wide grey skirts, formidable girth, and stentorian voice – was returning home with her children.

  With a ‘Hello, Uncle, Hello, Aunty’, Sunil and Sarah Rego went up the stairs. Their mother, without a word to the others, sat down and watched the TV.

  ‘Have you heard, Mrs Rego, about the 81 lakh offer? For a one-room in the slums?’

  The Battleship said nothing.

  ‘Even a Communist like you must be interested in this,’ Mrs Puri said with a smile.

  The Battleship spoke without turning her face.

  ‘What is the definition of a dying city, Mrs Puri? I will tell you, as you do not know: a city that ceases to surprise you. And that is what this Bombay has become. Show people a little cash, and they’ll jump, dance, run naked in the streets. That Muslim man is never going to see his money. These developers and builders are mafia. The other day they shot a member of the city corporation dead. It was in the papers.’

  Mr Pinto and his wife slipped away like doves before a thunderstorm.

  But it did not start at once.

  The TV presenter, as if to add to the atmosphere of gloom, mentioned that the water shortage was likely to get worse unless the monsoons arrived – for once – on time.

  ‘Too many people come into the city, it’s a fact,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Everyone wants to suck on our…’ She touched her breasts.

  The Battleship turned to her.

  ‘And did you drop to Bombay from heaven, Mrs Puri? Isn’t your family from Delhi?’

  ‘My parents were born in Delhi, Mrs Rego, but I was born right here. There was enough space in those days. Now it’s full. The Shiv Sena is right, outsiders should stop coming here.’
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br />   ‘Without migrants, this city would be dust. We are ruled by fascists, Mrs Puri, but everything is second-rate here, even our fascists. They don’t give us trains, don’t give us roads. All they do is beat up hardworking migrants.’

  ‘I don’t know what a fascist does, but I know what a Communist does. You don’t like developers who make people rich, but you like the beggars who get off at Victoria Terminus every day.’

  ‘I am a Christian, Mrs Puri. We are meant to care for the poor.’

  Mrs Puri – debating champion at KC College – was about to finish her opponent off with a riposte, but Ramu came to his mother’s ear and whispered.

  ‘There’s no water coming up the pipes, Ramu,’ she said. ‘No water tonight, dear. I told you, didn’t I?’

  Ramu’s lower lip covered his upper, and bulged up towards his nose: his mother knew this as a sign that he was thinking. He pointed to the pipes that went up the sides of Vishram Society’s walls.

  ‘Quiet, Ramu. Mummy is speaking to Communist aunty.’

  ‘I am not a Communist, and I am not anyone’s aunty, Mrs Puri.’

  Mrs Kothari, the Secretary’s wife, put her head out of the window and shouted: ‘Water!’

  It was an unscheduled blessing from the Municipality, a rare kindness. The fighting adjourned; both women had to obey a higher imperative – fresh water.

  Where is Masterji? Mrs Puri wondered, as she went up the stairs. He should have returned from seeing his grandson by now. After giving Ramu his evening bath, she made sure to collect an extra bucket of water for the old man, in case the Municipality, for giving them water they were not meant to have, punished them by annulling their morning water supply. That was, after all, how the people who ran Mumbai thought.