‘His friends? Those other boys, who were doing this—’ Shah made the same circular motion. ‘What happens to them?’
‘They’ll all have to go to the police station. Their parents will have to come and release them. We’ll keep the names out of the papers. This time.’
Shah put his hand on his heart. ‘So grateful.’
Giri went at once into his master’s study. A wooden drawer opened, then closed. Giri had done this before, and knew exactly how much to put in the envelope.
He handed it to Shah, who felt its weight, approved, and handed it to the policeman who had done the talking: ‘For some chai and cold drinks at your police station, my friend. I know it’s very hot these days.’
Though the envelope had been accepted, neither of the policemen had left. The talkative one said: ‘My daughter’s birthday is coming up, sir. It’ll be a nice weekend for me.’
‘I’ll send her a birthday cake from the Taj. They have a nice pastry shop. It’ll arrive soon.’
‘Sir…’ The quiet policeman spoke.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, my daughter’s birthday is coming up too.’
Giri saw the policemen out with a smile; Shah stood chafing the thick gold rings on his index finger. The moment Giri closed the door, Shah jabbed the ring into his son’s nose.
‘Soda Pop’ flinched, squeezed his eyes closed, and held his face averted, as if preserving the force of the jab.
Soda Pop trembled; if he could, every part of his body said, he would have launched himself at his father and killed him right then.
Giri took him away to his room. ‘Let’s wash up, Baba. We’ll go to your room and drink some warm milk. That’s what we’ll do.’
Returning to the living room, Giri found his employer and Shanmugham on either side of the Dancing Nataraja, examining the white thing that shared the wooden table on which the bronze statue stood: a plaster-of-Paris model of a building, which a peon from Mr Shah’s office had brought to the flat two days ago.
‘Will you go and speak to the boy now?’ Giri asked. ‘Say something nice.’
Shah ran his palm down the side of the plaster-of-Paris model.
‘Bring me a plate with some toast, Giri,’ he said. ‘At once. And some for Shanmugham, too.’
Giri glared at Shanmugham as he went to the kitchen; he did not approve of the presence of employees during meals.
Shah kept looking at the plaster-of-Paris model. His eyes went down to the inscription on its base:
CONFIDENCE SHANGHAI VAKOLA, SANTA CRUZ (E) SUPER LUXURY APARTMENTS ‘FROM MY FAMILY TO YOURS’
‘Look at it, Shanmugham,’ he said. ‘Just look at it. Won’t it be beautiful when it comes up?’
From the moment the car turned on to the bridge at Bandra, Shah had kept his eyes closed.
He felt his pulse quickening. His lungs became lighter. It was as if he had not coughed in years.
The Mercedes came to a halt; he heard someone opening the door for him.
‘Sir.’
He stepped out, holding Shanmugham’s hands. He had still not opened his eyes; he wanted to defer the pleasure for as long as possible.
He could already hear the two of them: the Confidence Excelsior and the Confidence Fountainhead. Rumbling, the way the boy had been inside his mother’s womb, in the last months before delivery.
He walked over truck tyre ruts, hardened and ridged like fossilized vertebrae. He felt crushed granite stones under his feet, which gave away to smooth sand, studded with fragments of brick. The noise grew around him.
Now he opened his eyes.
Cement mixers were churning like cannons aimed at the two buildings; women in colourful saris took troughs full of wet mortar up the floors of the Fountainhead. Further down the road, he saw the Excelsior, more skeletal, covered with nets and scaffoldings, ribs of dark wooden beams propping up each unbuilt floor.
A small village had sprung up around the construction work: migrants from north India, the workers had re-created the old home. Cows swatting away flies, broth in an aluminium vessel boiling over, a small shrine of a red god. Hitching up his trousers, Shah walked up to the cow; he touched its forehead three times for good luck and touched his own.
A group of day-labourers were waiting for him.
‘How is the cement pouring today?’ he asked.
‘Very well, sir.’
‘Then why are you people standing here, wasting time?’
He counted the men. Six. They wore banians and white dhotis, and their bodies were filmed over with construction dust. The contractor in charge of work at the Fountainhead came running.
‘They say, sir, the heat… they want to go and tend their fields…’
Shah clicked his tongue.
‘I want them to speak for themselves.’
One of the group of mutineers, a small man with neatly parted hair, explained.
‘We can’t work in these conditions, sahib, please forgive us. We will finish the day’s work honestly, and leave in the evening. Ask the contractor. We have been your best workers until now.’
Shah looked up at the Fountainhead, and then at the Excelsior, and raised his eyes to the sun.
‘I know it is hot. The coconut palms are turning brown. The cows don’t want to stand even if you put food in front of them. I know it is hot. But we have only a month before it starts raining, and we must finish pouring concrete now. If we don’t, I will lose a month and a half – two months, if the rains are heavy. And time is one thing I cannot lose.’
He spat something thick, pink, and gutka-stained. He stroked the cow again, and spoke.
‘You may think, looking at me, he is a rich man, what does he know about the heat? Let me tell you.’
Using the hand which had been rubbing the cow, he pointed a finger at the men: ‘This Dharmen Shah of yours knows what it is to work and walk and sweat in the heat. He did not grow up in luxury like other rich men. He grew up in a village called Krishnapur in Gujarat. When he came to Bombay he had just twelve rupees and eighty paise on him and he came in summer. He took the train, he took the bus, and when he had no more money for the bus, he walked. His chappals wore away and he tied leaves around his feet and he kept walking. And you know what he found when he came to Bombay?’
Two fifty, Shanmugham thought. Don’t offer them more than 250.
‘Gold.’ Mr Shah now showed the mutineers all his fingers and all his rings. ‘And the hotter it becomes, the more gold there is in the air. I will increase your pay…’ He squeezed his fingers back in and tingled them as he frowned. ‘… to… 300 rupees per day per man. That’s a hundred rupees more than you are getting now, and more than you’ll get anywhere else in Santa Cruz. You say you want to go home. Don’t I know what you’ll do? Work your farms? No. You’ll lie on a charpoy in the shade, smoke, play with a child. When the sun sets, you’ll drink. You’ll run out of money, come back on 15 June, when it’s raining, and beg me for work. Open your ears: the contractor will remember each worker who leaves now when the boss needed him most. No man who does not work for Shah when it is hot will work for him when it is cool. I will send buses around Maharashtra to pick up villagers and bring them here. It may double my expenses but I will do it. But if you stay and work, I’ll pay you 300 rupees, day after day. I’m tossing gold in the air. Who will grab it?’
The workers looked at one another: indecision rippled over them, and then the one with the neatly parted hair said: ‘Sahib, do you mean what you said, 300 a day? Even the women?’
‘Even the women. Even the children.’ Shah spat again and licked his lips. ‘Even your dogs and cats if they put bricks on their heads and carry them for me.’
‘We will stay for you, sahib,’ the worker said.
And though none of the other men in banians and dhotis looked happy, they seemed powerless to resist.
‘Good. Get to work at once. The rains are coming closer to Bombay every second we waste.’
When they were out of
earshot, the contractor whispered: ‘Are you really going to pay the women the same, sir? Three hundred?’
‘How much are you giving them now?’
‘One twenty-five. If they’re hefty, 150.’
‘Give the women 200,’ Shah said. ‘The fat ones 220. But the men get 300 as I said.’
‘And you—’ he jabbed a gold-ringed finger at the contractor’s chest. ‘Next time something is wrong at the site, don’t tell me: “All is well, sir.” Does it hurt your mouth if the truth comes out of it once a year?’
‘Forgive me, sir,’ the contractor said.
‘They’re social animals, you understand. If one complains, all will complain. I need to know as soon as there is trouble.’
‘Forgive me, sir.’
Shah walked with Shanmugham from the Fountainhead to his other building.
Shanmugham felt his shirt sticking to his back. His employer’s shirt was wet too, but it seemed to him that these were spots not of moisture, but of molten butter. The man who had been sick in the morning now glowed with health. Shanmugham could barely keep up with him.
They were at a group of workers’ huts in between the two building projects. A stunted gulmohar tree stood here with criss-crossing branches, like a man who has got his arms in a tangle by pointing in every direction at once. A water pump dripped in its shade. A heap of sand was piled up on one side of the tree, with crushed stones on the other side. Two of the workers’ children had pitched a tyre on a low branch, on which they swung until their feet dug into the sand. Another had picked up an axe, with which he attacked the sand, sneezing each time his wobbling blows connected.
The builder stopped by the water pump to read a message on his mobile phone.
‘That was from Giri.’ He put his phone into his pocket. ‘I would have cancelled the birthday party for Satish but the invitations have gone out. The boy has agreed to be there, and behave himself.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You have children don’t you, Shanmugham?’
‘Yes, sir. Two sons.’
‘I hope they never become to you, Shanmugham, the curse mine is to me.’
‘Shall I go now, sir? To Vishram Society – to make the offer?’
‘You wait until I tell you to go. The astrologer is going to call me and give me the exact time. This won’t be an easy project, Shanmugham. We need every chance we can get. The stars might help us.’
Shah pointed with his mobile phone across the road. A plane went overhead; waiting until its boom passed, he said: ‘Look at his guts, Shanmugham. Right under my nose he buys that place.’
Across the road, a giant billboard had come up next to the ramshackle brick houses with corrugated tin roofs held down by rocks.
ULTIMEX GROUP IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE FUTURE SITE OF ‘ULTIMEX MILANO’ A NEW CONCEPT IN HOUSING SUPER LUXURY APARTMENTS
‘Do you know when he’s going to start work?’
‘No word yet, sir.’
‘People will laugh at me if he finishes his building first, Shanmugham.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Mr Shah went alone to the Excelsior. The work had fallen behind schedule here, so Shanmugham knew that his boss would have plenty to do for the next few hours.
He sat in the shade of the stunted tree, his mobile phone in his right hand.
The three workers’ children sat on the sand pile, watching him with open mouths.
Showing them a closed fist, Shanmugham said: ‘Mr Secretary, members of Vishram Society, all your dreams are…’
A water buffalo drew near the children.
Shanmugham left the site, had lunch on the main road, returned, and waited near the sand. The children came back to watch. He practised again on them. Taking out his blue-checked handkerchief, which his wife laid folded for him every morning on the breakfast table, he wiped his face: temples, nose, and then the back of his neck, down to the first sharp knob of his spine. He folded the handkerchief back into the square his wife had made. Then, lunging forward, he showed the children his jagged tooth: Aaaargh!
They ran.
He left the site, had tea near the main road, and returned to the pile of sand. The children came back to watch. The water buffalo moved near the sand, turning its long curved horns from side to side; a crow glided to the earth in between the buffalo’s horns, and sucked a worm raw out of a hole.
Some time after five o’clock, Shanmugham reached his hand into his pocket and fumbled: his mobile phone had beeped. Mr Shah, standing on the third floor of the Excelsior, was waving at him.
The message had arrived from the astrologer in Matunga.
Leaving his group of spectators seated on their sand pile, Shanmugham sprinted from the construction site, down the mud path, past the Gold Coin and Silver Trophy Societies, past the Tamil temple in front of which boys were playing cricket (hopping to avoid the red cricket ball), and arrived, panting, at Vishram Society, where he placed his hands on the guard’s booth and said: ‘I want to see your Secretary again.’
Ram Khare, who had been fanning himself with his checked handkerchief as he recited from his holy digest, looked up at his visitor and dropped the handkerchief.
He followed the visitor all the way to the Secretary’s office, standing outside and watching as the man put his hands on either side of the Remington typewriter and said: ‘Mr Secretary: I have to make a confession to you. I am not the man I said I was, when I came to see you the other day. My name is, indeed, Shanmugham: that much is true. But I come as a representative of one of Mumbai’s leading realestate development companies, namely, the Confidence Group, and of its managing director, the esteemed Mr Dharmen Shah. Let me tell you now why I had to deceive you the other day. First read this letter that I am placing, with all due respect and reverence, on your desk; while you read it, I will wait here with my…’
The foundation of the 32-year-old friendship between Masterji and Mr Pinto was the ‘No-Argument book’ – a notebook in which every financial transaction between them had been faithfully recorded. In July 1975, the first time they had had lunch together, Mr Pinto, an accountant for the Britannia Biscuit company, had proposed an actuarial conscience to watch over their snacks and coffees. Realizing that petty fights, mainly over money, had disrupted his other friendships, and determined that this one should be saved, Masterji had accepted.
Mr Pinto was making his latest entry into the ‘No-Argument’ – the sixteenth of its kind since the original notebook of ’75.
‘Fill it out later. I can see the waiter.’
‘Okay,’ Mr Pinto said. ‘But you owe me two and a half rupees.’
‘Two and a half?’
‘For the newspaper.’
‘Which one?’
‘Hindustan Times. You made me buy it last Saturday because you wanted to read a column by some former student of yours.’
‘Nonsense,’ Masterji said. ‘I have no students writing for that paper.’
Mr Pinto knew that Masterji had not bought the Hindustan Times; a life-long accountant, he deflected a variety of worries into money talk. What he had really meant to bring up was something else: the previous night’s incident. Masterji’s behaviour in pushing the modern girl’s boyfriend, for no good reason – the girl’s screaming had brought people from around the building to the third floor – was so contrary to his usual ‘nature’ that people in Vishram had talked all day long about the incident, retelling and embellishing it. A man deprived in quick order of both occupation and wife was in a dangerous place, some felt. Ajwani, the broker, had even asked how safe was it to leave their children in a darkened room with him any more? Mrs Puri’s stout rebuttal (‘—ashamed of yourself!’) had put an end to such talk.
Mr Pinto knew that it was his duty to let his friend know what they were saying about him in the Society. ‘But it is best to raise such matters after dinner,’ he decided.
Putting away the No-Argument book, he prepared himself for what the Biryani Emperor of Bombay had to offer.
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A good biryani needs excitement. A touch of mystery. At Café Noorani near Haji Ali, the waiter comes out with a plate with an oval heap of steaming rice, speckled with yellow and red grains; the chicken was somewhere inside, true, but you had to dig into it with the fork – what aroma! – to find those marinated red chunks.
In contrast – Mr Pinto stuck his fork into his plate – look at this. Two paltry brown chicken pieces, by the side of lukewarm rice. Not a vegetable in sight.
The ‘Biryani Emperor’ was set in between shops selling bright silk saris, which added to the diners’ awareness of the excitement missing from the food. This was a Sunday night; and for the two friends Sunday night was always biryani night. Conservative in most other things, they were reckless on biryani night, trying out a new place each week. Mr Pinto had found the ‘Biryani Emperor of Bombay’ much written about in the papers, even numbered among the ‘the ten best-kept secrets of Mumbai’ in one newspaper.
‘Biryani Emperor of Bombay. What a fraud, Masterji.’
Not hearing a response from his friend, he looked up. He saw Masterji staring at the ceiling of the restaurant.
‘Is it a rat?’
Masterji nodded.
‘Where?’
The roof of the Biryani Emperor was held up by rafters of wood, and a rodent had materialized on one of them.
‘Boy!’ Masterji shouted. ‘Look at that thing up there on the wood.’
The ‘boy’ – the middle-aged waiter – looked up. Undeterred by all the attention, the sly rat kept moving along the rafter, like a leopard on a branch. The ‘boy’ yawned.
Masterji pushed his biryani, not even half eaten, in the direction of the boy.
‘I have a rule. I can’t eat this.’
It was true: he had a ‘one-rat rule’ – never revisit a place where a single rat has been observed.
‘You and your rule.’ Mr Pinto helped himself to some of his friend’s biryani.
‘I don’t like competing for my food with animals. Look at him up there: like a Caesar.’
‘A man has to bend his rules a little to enjoy life in Mumbai,’ Mr Pinto said, chewing. ‘Just a little. Now and then.’
Last Man in Tower Page 7