Last Man in Tower

by Aravind Adiga

While there is no suspicion of foul play in the matter, the Santa Cruz police said they are not ruling out any possibility at this stage. An investigation is underway.

  It is believed, however, that the deceased had slipped into a state of extreme depression following the death of his wife almost exactly a year ago. Residents of the neighbourhood say that he had been progressively losing his mind under the pressure of diabetes and old age, withdrawing into his room, talking to himself, engaging in anti-social behaviour and fighting with his entire Society over a proposed offer of redevelopment, which he alone opposed. Dr C. K. Panickar, a clinical psychiatrist at Bandra’s Lilavati Hospital, says he had shown classic symptoms of mental deterioration. ‘Paranoia, passive-aggressive developments, and even schizophrenia cannot be ruled out given the subject’s behaviour in his final days,’ he suggests.

  The deceased is survived by a son, Gaurav, who lives in Marine Lines, and a grandson, Ronak.

  EPILOGUE

  Murder and Wonder

  15 DECEMBER

  The little dark man in the blue safari suit walked through the vegetable stalls, disappointed that no one looked at him this morning as if he were a murderer.

  For nearly two months the watermelon and pineapple sellers had discussed how that broker from Vishram, Ajwani, the one who sat across the road in that little real-estate office with the glass door, had arranged for one of his underworld contacts to kill Masterji; no – how he had done it himself, tiptoeing into Vishram under the cover of darkness and lifting the old teacher up on his thick arms to the terrace. They would turn around to find Ramesh Ajwani there, always with a smile, saying: ‘What is the price for brinjals today?’

  And they would start to haggle with him: for being a murderer does not necessarily get one a better rate with the brinjals.

  He had been the first suspect. Nagarkar, the senior inspector, had summoned him to the station the morning after the death; he knew that Ajwani had connections to shady characters throughout Vakola. (The kinds of clients he had bribed them to get clearance certificates for!) For half a day the inspector grilled him below the portrait of Lord SiddhiVinayak. But his story held. A dozen people remembered seeing the broker outside the Dadar train station at various hours of the night of Masterji’s death; he was said to have suffered an attack of indigestion, and to have lain there, writhing and incoherent.

  ‘If you didn’t do it, then who did?’ the inspector asked. ‘Do you really expect me to believe it was suicide?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ajwani said. ‘I came home after midnight. I was not well. The police were already there.’

  The Secretary was the next to be summoned to the station. But three witnesses put him in Ajwani’s real-estate office at the hour of Masterji’s death. One was Mani, the broker’s assistant, and the other two were Ibrahim Kudwa and Mr Puri, two of his neighbours, both respectable men. Every resident of Vishram Society, it turned out, could prove that he or she had been somewhere else at that time. The only ones who were in the building when Masterji fell off the roof were an ancient couple, the Pintos, who seemed barely capable of either sight or movement.

  The builder? Nagarkar knew that Shah was a smart man: too smart to become involved if he would be an immediate suspect. So Masterji became the prime suspect in his own murder. Many people, both in Vishram and in the neighbourhood at large, gave evidence that the teacher had been growing senile and unpredictable for a while. His wife’s death and his diabetes had made him depressed. In the end the Inspector decided, since he did not like unsolved mysteries, that it must have been suicide.

  Ajwani knew it was not. For one week he had not spoken to anyone else in Vishram. Then he moved his son and wife to a rental flat by the train station. He was not going to live with those people again.

  How they had done it he was not sure. Maybe Mr and Mrs Puri had done it on their own; the Secretary may have helped. Maybe it was just a push. But no, some part of him knew that Masterji would have struggled. A born fighter, that old man. They must have drugged him, or maybe hit him; whatever they did, either because the skull cracked in the fall, or because the doctor who examined the corpse was incompetent or bored, nothing had been detected.

  He came to the fruit and vegetable market twice a day, three times a day if he could. He bargained for carrots and guavas and abuse; this was part of his penance. He hoped that the vendors would surround him one day and thrust their fingers into his ribcage; then pelt him with tomatoes and potatoes and push chillies into his eyes. He wanted to go home stained and accused of murder.

  For two months after his death, Masterji was a residue of dark glamour on the Vakola market, a layer of ash over the produce. Then other scandals and other mysteries came. The vendors forgot him; Ajwani had become just another customer.

  He walked away from the market, hands behind his back, until he heard hammers chipping away at stone and brick.

  Vishram Society was overrun by workmen like a block of sugar by black ants. The roof had fallen in; men sat on the exposed beams and stood all along the stairs, hacking at wood with saws, and hammering at walls and beams. TNT could not be used in a neighbourhood this densely populated; the destruction had to be done by human hands. The men who had been working on the Confidence Excelsior and the Fountainhead were now chipping, peeling, and smashing Vishram; the women carried the debris on troughs on their heads and dumped it into the back of a truck.

  Every few hours, the truck drove down the road, and poured its contents as filling into the foundations of the Ultimex Milano. The metal skeleton beneath the paint and plaster would be sent to workshops around Falkland Road to be broken up and recycled. Even in death, Vishram Society was being of service to Vakola and Mumbai.

  As each hammer struck Vishram, the building fumed, emitting white puffs from its sides, like an angry man in the Tom and Jerry cartoons that Ajwani’s sons watched in the mornings. It looked like some slow torture for all the trouble that the building had given Mr Shah. Some of the Christian workers had wanted to save the black Cross, but it was gone, probably crushed into the foundations of the Milano. Soon all that would remain of Vishram Society would be the old banyan; and each time there was a wind, its leaves brushed against the abandoned guard’s booth like a child trying to stir a dead thing to life.

  Ajwani leaned against the tree and touched its trunk.

  ‘Rich man! Where have you been?’

  A tall and lean man, brushing white dust from his white shirt and black trousers, had come up to him.

  ‘You haven’t signed the Confidence Group papers,’ Shanmugham said, ‘and without it we can’t give you the money.’

  Ajwani stepped back from the tree.

  Shanmugham raised a leg and patted white dust off his trousers.

  ‘One and a half crores of rupees. All of you are now rich men, and what do I get, Mr Ajwani? Nothing.’

  Mr Shah had not given him a bonus or an extra. Not even a pat on the head, not even what a dog would get for chasing a stick. All the boss had said was: ‘Now I want you to make sure that the demolition does not fall one day behind, Shanmugham. Time is money.’

  For months he had been the man handing out red boxes of sweets to the residents of Vishram: where was his red box?

  Moving close to the broker, he lowered his voice.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said. That day in your inner room, when we sat with the coconuts. About how some clever left-hand men actually manage to…’

  Shanmugham started. The broker was walking away briskly, arms swinging, as if he were about to break into a run.

  ‘Come back, Mr Ajwani! If you don’t sign your papers, you won’t get the money!’

  What was wrong with the man?

  With one eye closed, Shanmugham looked at the old banyan’s leaves: sunlight oozed through the dark canopy like raw white honey. He picked up a stone and threw it at the light.

  16 DECEMBER

  The lift opened: the chai boy stepped out into the car park with a tra
y full of teacups.

  He stopped and stared.

  The tall man in the white shirt was doing it again. Standing before his Hero Honda motorbike, he was talking into the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Mr Shah, I know you told me you didn’t want to talk about a certain event ever again, but yesterday I met that broker, and I…’

  The tall man closed his eyes, and tried again.

  ‘Mr Shah, the real story behind… I know you told me never to mention it again, but I…’

  The chai boy tiptoed around him; he took his tray of morning tea to the drivers waiting at the other end of the basement car park.

  A quarter of an hour later, Shanmugham stood before his employer. Giri was in the kitchen, cutting something to pieces.

  At his work desk, with the poster of the Eiffel Tower behind him, the boss was signing each page of a bundle of documents.

  ‘Did I ask you to come up, Shanmugham?’ he said without looking up. ‘Go down and wait for me. We have to go to Juhu immediately.’

  The left-hand man did not move.

  Shah looked up; he held a silver pen in his fingers.

  ‘We just had a call, Shanmugham. Satish has been arrested. Doing the same thing with the gang. This time in Juhu.’ He made a circular motion with his pen in his hand. ‘They sprayed some politician’s van. Giri is putting the money in the envelope. We won’t be able to keep it out of the newspapers this time.’

  Shanmugham said what he had rehearsed for nearly twenty minutes in the basement: ‘Sir: in the matter of the murder at Vishram Society. I have been thinking about it for some time. It is not a suicide. In Vakola they say either Shah did it, or the neighbours did it. And you didn’t do it, since I didn’t do it. So the neighbours did it.’

  Shah did not look up.

  ‘The newspapers said it was suicide. Go down and wait. We must go to Juhu.’

  Shanmugham spoke to the poster of the Eiffel Tower over his boss’s head.

  ‘The police might be interested, sir, if someone told them that the people in Vishram did it. They might reopen the case. Look at the photographs of the corpse more carefully. The construction might be delayed.’

  The silver pen dropped on to the table.

  Shanmugham shivered; in another room, Shah’s mobile phone had begun to ring. Giri came in with the mobile phone, wiped it on his lungi, and placed it on his employer’s desk.

  Shah, his eyes closed, listened to the voice on the phone.

  ‘I am on my way. I understand. I am on my way.’

  He rubbed the phone on his forearm and held it out for Giri.

  Giri stood in the threshold for a minute, looking at the two men. Then he went back to the kitchen to continue cutting his bread.

  Shah’s jaw began working. He started to laugh.

  ‘Oh, you are a son of mine, Shanmugham. A real son.’

  He tapped twice on his desk.

  ‘You listen to me: there is already one body in the foundations of the Shanghai, and there’s plenty of space there for another. Do you understand?’

  Shah grinned. Shanmugham understood that he had one sharp tooth, but this man had a mouth full of them.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  Shanmugham could not move. He felt his smallness in the den he had walked into: the den of real estate.

  ‘Shanmugham. Why are you wasting my time?’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Go down to the basement and wait in the car. We have to get the boy out of the police station.’

  And Shanmugham went down to the basement.

  At least, Shah thought, I got six good years out of this one. On the pad on his table, where he had written:

  Beige marble.

  Grilles on windows. (Fabergé egg pattern: pay up to one rupee extra per kg wrought iron. No more.)

  he added:

  Left-hand man

  He straightened his clothes in the mirror, spat on to a finger, checked the colour of his insides, and went downstairs.

  Juhu. Two half-built towers like twin phantoms behind a screen of trees, neither vanishing nor growing into clarity.

  Dharmen Shah was sick of buildings.

  He turned to his son and asked: ‘How many more times will you do this?’

  ‘Do what?’ Satish was looking out of the window of the moving car. He wore a light green shirt; his school uniform shirt, which he had changed out of, was in a plastic bundle by his feet.

  ‘Disgrace your family name.’

  The boy laughed.

  ‘I disgrace your name?’ He stared at his father. ‘I read the papers, Father. I saw what happened in Vakola.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve read. That old teacher killed himself. He was mad.’

  The boy spoke slowly. ‘All of us in the gang are builders’ sons. If you don’t let us do these things now,’ he said, ‘how will we become good builders when we grow up?’

  Shah saw a platinum necklace around his son’s neck; the younger generation preferred it to gold.

  Satish asked to be let down at Bandra; he wanted to eat lunch at Lucky’s. His father had taken his credit card from him at the Juhu station; now he gave it back here to the boy, along with a 500-rupee note.

  Satish touched the note to his forehead in a salaam. ‘One day, Father, we’ll be proud of each other.’

  On a pavement near the Mahim Dargah, Shah saw a dozen beggars, waiting for free bread and curry, sitting outside a cheap restaurant. Tired, lively, cunning, each dirty face seemed to glow. One blind man had his face turned skywards in a look of dumb ecstasy. Just a few feet away, a man with red bleary eyes, his head in his hands, appeared to be the most frightened thing in the world.

  Shah watched their faces go past.

  If only the traffic hadn’t been so light that evening the old teacher came to the Malabar Hill house. If only he had met face to face with that teacher, the matter would have ended right then. Blood need not have been spilled.

  So why had they not met?

  He had a vision of a blazing red curtain and a silhouette moving behind it: when the red curtain was torn away, he saw the faces of the beggars outside his car. All his life he had seen faces like these and thought: Clay. My clay. He had squeezed them into shape in his redevelopment projects, he had become rich off them. Now it seemed to him that these shining mysterious faces were the dark powers of his life. They made this thing happen. Not to get my Shanghai built. To get their city built. They have used me for their ends.

  One of the beggars laughed. A choir of particulate matter shrilled inside Dharmen Shah’s lungs; he coughed again and again, and spat into a corner of the Mercedes.

  Half an hour later, he lay shirtless on a cold bed. In the only place on earth where personalized service depresses you.

  ‘We changed the size of the bed to suit your body’ – the voice of the radiologist.

  Doctors display such familiarity only with the chronically ill.

  Face down he lay, the fat folds of his chest and belly pressed against cold hard cushion. An X-ray machine moved above him, taking pictures of the back of his skull.

  The X-ray machine stopped moving, and the radiologist went into another room, grumbling: ‘I don’t know if I’ve got the pictures, since you moved…’

  Shah, shirtless on a three-legged stool, waited like a schoolboy.

  ‘I’m sorry. We didn’t get the X-rays. You have five minutes.’

  He came out into the outpatient waiting room of Breach Candy Hospital. Rosie was waiting for him, in her shortest shortest skirt.

  ‘Uncle.’ She clapped. ‘My uncle.’

  Her nose was still bruised, a pale strip of skin revealed where the bandage must have sat for days.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming, Rosie,’ he said as he sat down by her side. ‘I really did.’

  ‘Of course I wouldn’t leave you alone in the hospital, Uncle.’ Dropping her voice, she asked: ‘Is the skirt short enough?’

  The other patients waiting outside the r
adiologist’s office stared at this fat man with the well-rounded girl in skimpy clothes with her arms around him. Shah knew they were staring and he didn’t give a shit. Shameless in health, shameless he was going to stay in illness.

  ‘It’ll warm the whole hospital.’

  ‘That’s the plan, Uncle.’ She winked. ‘They keep the AC on so high.’

  He whispered into her ear.

  ‘You can go home, Rosie. A hospital is no place for a girl like you.’

  Rosie didn’t bother to whisper.

  ‘My father was the son of a first wife. I never told you this, did I, Uncle? His mother died of blood cancer when he was eight. This country is full of first wife’s sons who ended up as losers. I like being around a winner.’

  She kissed him on the cheek.

  The wetness remained on Shah’s cheek and he recognized it for what it was: ambition. The girl didn’t just want a hair salon, she wanted everything: all his money, all his buildings. All his money above and below the earth. Marriage.

  He wanted to laugh – a girl he had pulled out of jail! – and then he remembered the story Rosie had told him. The actress and the Punjabi producer. ‘Her blowjobs sing across the decades.’

  How there is nothing small, nothing ignoble in life. A man may not find love in the sacrament of marriage but he has found it with a woman he coupled with on his office sofa: just as a seed spat out by the gutter pipe, sucking on sewage, can grow into a great banyan.

  ‘Mr Shah?’ A crooked finger summoned him back into the X-ray room.

  You don’t fool me, Shah thought, as the X-ray machine did its work again. You’re not going to save anyone. This was just the bureau cracy of extinction: its first round of paperwork. The cold of the metal bed penetrated multiple layers of butter-fed fat; he shivered.

  ‘Should I keep my eyes closed or open?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Just relax.’

  ‘I’ll close them, then.’

  ‘As you wish. Relax.’

  He could feel Rosie’s fingers still warm on his own. He could smell her legs on his trousers. He thought again of the abandoned old mansion that he passed every day on his way down Malabar Hill, the green saplings breaking through the stone foliage. It was as if each green sapling were a message: Leave Mumbai with Rosie, find a city with clean air, have another son, a better one – you still have time, you still have…