And then, looking at Mrs Pinto through the corner of his eye, he waited in the hope that she too would call him an ‘English gentleman’.
Mr Pinto completed the circuit of the compound wall, and scraped his chappals on the gravel around the guard’s booth. He waited for his wife and Masterji with his thin hands on his hips, panting like the winner in a geriatric sprint.
‘Let’s do breathing exercises together,’ he said, and gave Shelley his arm. ‘It makes you feel young again.’
As the three of them practised inhaling-exhaling-inhaling, the Secretary walked past with a large microphone, which he planted near the black Cross.
At five o’clock, ‘Soda Pop’ Satish Shah, recently the terrorizer of parked cars on Malabar Hill, stood by the entrance of the most famous Hindu shrine in the city, the SiddhiVinayak temple at Prabhadevi, waiting for his father.
With the latest issue of Muscle-Builder magazine in his right hand, he was practising behind-the-head tricep curls with his left.
He paused, turned the page of the magazine, and practised more repetitions with his left hand.
With his right hand he touched his nose. It still hurt.
It had not been his idea to spray-paint the cars. He had told the other fellows: the police would never allow it in the city. Let’s go to the suburbs, Juhu, Bandra. A man could live like a king out there. But did they listen?
In any case, what had they done? Just spray a few cars and a van. It was nothing compared to what his father did in his line of work.
The bastard works in construction, Satish thought, and he has the guts to tell me I am the bad one in the family.
Thinking about his father, he goaded himself into practising his tricep curls faster. He thought about the way that man chewed gutka like a villager. The way he wore so many gold rings. The way he pronounced English, no better than Giri did. ‘Cho-chyal Enimalz. Cho-chyal.’
Satish felt someone seize him by the arm.
‘This is not a thing to be doing here. You should be praying to God and remembering your mother.’
Shah straightened out his son’s arm, and pushed him into the temple. Shanmugham followed.
The temple was crowded, as it is at any hour of the day, yet the Lord Ganesha was receptive to free-market logic, and an ‘express’ line, for anyone who could pay fifty rupees a head, sped the three of them into the sanctum.
‘You’ll be seventeen in a few days. Do you know what I was doing when I was your age? Have you thought about those people whose cars you damaged? You will never again hang out with that gang. Understand?’
‘Yes, Father.’
In his fat fingers his father held a cheque. Satish, by craning his neck as he moved in the queue behind his father, could see that it was a donation of one lakh and one rupees, drawn on the Industrial Development Bank of India. A petition to God to improve his moral character? No, probably for a new building his father was starting today. A Confidence Group project could only begin after two divine interventions: a call from a Tamil astrologer in Matunga with a precise time to lay the foundation stone, and a visit here, to the shrine of Ganesha, whose image was the official emblem of the Confidence Group, embossed on to every formal communication and every building.
They were in sight of the sanctum. Within gilded columns, the red image of the deity was surrounded by four Brahmins, bare-chested, with enormous light-skinned pot bellies filmed over with downy hair: a purdah of human fat around His image. This was the final challenge to the devotees – only a faith that was 100 per cent pure would penetrate through this to reach the Lord.
Satish saw his father joining his palms over his head. Behind Mr Shah, Shanmugham did the same. ‘How cute: he thinks my father is God.’ The chanting of the devotees grew louder – they were right in front of the sanctum now – and Shah turned and glared at his son: ‘Pray.’
Satish closed his eyes, bowed his head, and tried to think of something he really wanted.
‘Please Lord Ganesha,’ he prayed, ‘make my father’s new project fail and I’ll write you a much bigger cheque when I have money.’
At six twenty, with the builder expected at any moment, the compound of Vishram Society glowed with rows of white chairs facing the black Cross.
The event had raised the metabolism of the old Society. The lamps over the entranceway had been turned so they would shine on the plastic chairs. The microphone near the black Cross, borrowed from Gold Coin Society, had been attached to a speaker, borrowed from Hibiscus Society. The members of both Vishram Societies were filling the seats. Secretary Kothari stood by the Cross along with Mr Ravi, the Secretary of Tower B.
Looking down from his window, Masterji saw Mr Pinto sitting in the middle of the array of chairs, his hand on the vacant white seat next to him, looking up.
Masterji raised his right hand – coming, coming.
The phone rang again. It was Gaurav, for the second time in an hour.
‘No, the real-estate developer hasn’t come. Of course I’m going down to listen to him. Yes, I’ll keep an open mind. Now: goodbye, and tell Ronak his grandfather will take him to the aquarium one of these days.’
Back at the window, Masterji saw the person he had been waiting for. He had guessed that a journalist wouldn’t miss an event like this. She moved through the crowd, taking care not to tread on the feet of older and slower people.
He waited with his ear to the door: listening for footsteps on the stairs. He had to do this: had to apologize to the girl. What did his neighbours call him? English gentleman.
‘Ms Meenakshi,’ he said, opening the door. ‘Would you wait a minute? Just a minute?’
His neighbour, who had already put her key into the door of 3B, did not stop.
‘I’m sorry for the other night. I shouldn’t have pushed your friend. The young man. Please tell him I’m sorry.’
Her face partly hidden behind her door, the girl looked at him.
‘Why did you do it? He wasn’t harming you.’
‘Would you come into my room for a minute, Ms Meenakshi? It’ll be easier for you to understand in here. I was a teacher at St Catherine’s School for thirty-four years. My students have good jobs throughout the city. You may have heard of Noronha, the writer for the Times. You have nothing to fear.’
*
He showed her the glass cabinet, filled with the little silver trophies and citations in golden letters that testified to his three decades of service; the photograph of his farewell party at St Catherine’s, signed by two dozen old boys; and the small framed photo, next to it, of a pale, oval-faced woman in a blue sari.
‘My late wife.’
The girl moved towards the photograph. She wore braces, and her dark steel-rimmed glasses echoed the metal on her teeth. The frames were hexagonal. Masterji counted the number of edges a second time. An ungainly shape: why had it ever come into fashion?
Reading the date below the photograph, she said,
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s been almost a year now. I’m used to it. She would have liked you, Ms Meenakshi. My daughter would have been your age. Your name is Meenakshi, isn’t it?’
She nodded.
‘Where is your daughter these days? In Mumbai?’ she asked.
‘She died many years before her mother did.’
‘I keep saying the wrong thing.’
‘Don’t worry, Ms Meenakshi. If you don’t ask about people, you don’t find out about people. Here,’ Masterji said, ‘this is her drawing book. I just found it yesterday inside my cupboard.’
He wiped the dust off the book – ‘SANDHYA MURTHY SKETCH & PRACTICE JOURNAL’ – and turned the pages for her.
‘That’s our local church. Isn’t it?’
‘Yes. St Antony’s. And this drawing is of the Dhobi-ghat, see the people washing. No, not the famous one in Mahalakshmi. The one right here. And this is a lovely drawing. This parrot. The best my daughter ever did. She was nineteen years old. Only nineteen.’
; He could see from Ms Meenakshi’s eyes that she wanted to know how the artist’s life had ended. He closed the album.
‘I don’t wish to bore you, Ms Meenakshi. I wanted to apologize, that was all. When men grow old, contrary to what you may have heard, they do not become wiser. Are you going down to see Mr Shah?’
Her eyebrows arched.
‘Aren’t you? He’s giving you all this money.’
‘He says he’s giving us all this money. You must know about developers. You’re a journalist, aren’t you?’
‘No. Public Relations.’
‘What does that mean, exactly? All the young people now want to be in Public Relations.’
‘I’ll come back one day and explain.’
Thanking her for her graciousness in accepting his apology, and inviting her over another day for some ginger tea, he closed the door.
Down below, the hubbub grew. The Secretary’s voice boomed over the microphone: ‘Can everyone hear me? Testing, testing. Can everyone…’
Masterji sat down. Why should he go down? Just because some rich man was coming? He hated these formal gatherings of the Society: every time they held an annual general meeting, the bickering among his neighbours, the petty accusations – ‘your son pisses on the compound wall’, ‘your husband’s gargling wakes me up in the morning’ – always embarrassed him.
He expected another bloodbath this evening, Mrs Rego and Mrs Puri shouting at each other like women at the fish market.
With his feet on the teakwood table, he turned the pages of Sandhya’s album until he reached the parrot. The sketch was incomplete; perhaps she had still been working on it when… He placed his fingers on the edges of the drawing, which felt as if they were still growing. Her living thought.
Where is your daughter these days?
The same place she has been for eleven years.
She had been on her way to college, when someone had pushed her out of the train. A packed compartment in the women’s first class in the morning – someone had elbowed her out. She had fallen head first on to the tracks, and lain there like that. Not one of her fellow passengers stopped the train. They didn’t want to be late for their work. All of them women, good women. Secretaries. Bank clerks. Sales managers. She had bled to death.
This child that he had made, the tracks had unmade. Her brains, oozing from her broken head, because the passengers did not want to be late. Surely in the men’s compartment someone would have pulled the emergency chain, jumped out, surely someone would have…
For three months he could not take the train. He used to take one bus after the other, and walk when there was no bus around. His revolt had to end eventually. He was helpless before Necessity. But he could never look again at a women’s compartment. Who said the world would be a better place run by women? At least men were honest about themselves, he thought.
He turned the page.
She had drawn the hibiscus plants that grew by the back of the compound, and the little spider’s webs between their leaves, shiny and oval and gliding over one another like parallel Milky Ways. Father and daughter, in the old days, had often stopped in the garden to look at the webs and talk of the differences between men and spiders. He remembered one difference they had agreed on. A spider’s mind is outside him; every new thought shoots off at once in a strand of silk. A man’s mind is inside. You never know what he’s thinking. Another difference. A spider can live without a family, all alone, in the web he makes.
A smattering of applause from below; the builder must have arrived.
Mr Pinto is holding a chair for me. With Sandhya’s sketchbook in his hand, he stood by the window.
A fat man with a gold necklace stood by the black Cross between the two Secretaries.
‘… to me you are now members of my own family. I say this, and the proof is in the motto of the Confidence Group: from my family to…’
Poor Mr Pinto had given up his fight to protect the vacant seat. Someone from Tower B had taken it.
Standing at the window, he turned the pages of the sketchbook back and forth. Parrots, churches, washing, trees, Sandhya’s school dress, her face, her brushed and shampooed hair, as if they were corpuscles of sunlit water, bobbed up and down around him. Every now and then, in the distracted way that a man busy at the office might overhear the odd snippet of cricket commentary from a colleague’s desk, he heard voices from the meeting.
‘… I speak for everyone here, Mr Shah, when I ask: are you serious about this offer? Will you honour it in all its details?’
‘… it is normal for developers to offer members of the existing Society units in the new building. Why are you not…’
‘Why are the residents of Tower B, which is newer and in better condition in every way, not getting a higher rate per square foot than…’
He turned to the last page. Here she had scribbled in pencil: ‘Je tien. Vous tenez. Il tient. Vous Tenez. Nous…’ Practising the French that he had been teaching her at home, two evenings a week. Masterji scraped on the ‘tien’ with a finger and looked around for a red pen. He did not want his daughter speaking incorrect French for all of eternity.
A piercing voice – the Battleship’s – made him turn to the window:
‘We do not want your money, whether it is 200 per cent or 250 per cent. This is our home and no one can ask us to leave it.’
Silence from down below. The Battleship and both her children had risen to their feet.
‘By our Lord Jesus Christ I will fight you. I know builders, and they are all liars and criminals. Better you leave now. Right now.’
It was one thing to oppose the deal, but why this personal attack? Did she know this Mr Shah to call him a liar? He closed the window.
He saw the Rubik’s Cube lying on the teakwood table. It was stiff with age, and rotating the colours took effort, as if he were working the jaws of a small animal.
Half an hour later, when Mr Pinto walked in through the open door, he found Masterji asleep at the table, his daughter’s sketchbook on the floor, its pages fluttering in the breeze from the window.
He shut the door, and went back down to 2A, where his wife lay in bed.
‘Asleep, Shelley. In his chair. I fought so hard to keep his seat for him.’
‘Mr Pinto. Don’t be so petty. When we said no to the offer, he said no at once.’
He grumbled.
‘Now go up and wake him. He hasn’t had any dinner.’
Mr Pinto looked out of the window. The crowd below had gathered in two nuclei; some residents stood around Mrs Rego (‘all builders are liars, and this one is no different’) and another group, right below his window, were listening to Ajwani, the broker.
‘Our place is 812 square feet. At 20,000 rupees a square foot, that is…’
Ajwani sketched the number of zeros in the air.
‘And mine is bigger than yours, Ajwani,’ Mrs Puri said. ‘Twenty-two square feet bigger. That means I get…’
With a thick finger she superimposed her figure on Ajwani’s figure. Now Ibrahim Kudwa added his on top of hers.
‘But mine is slightly bigger than yours, Mrs Puri…’
Mr Pinto shook his head.
‘Aren’t they going to work tomorrow?’ he whispered to his wife. ‘Don’t their children have to go to school? They’ve forgotten everything because of this money.’
‘They’re very excited, Mr Pinto. They’re going to agree to the proposal and throw us out of the building.’
‘What a thing to say, Shelley! This is a Registered Co-operative Society. Not a jungle. If even one person says no that means that the Society cannot be demolished. Let’s have dinner now.’
His wife got up from the bed.
‘Don’t be angry. Please go upstairs and wake Masterji. We should all have some soup and bread.’
‘All right,’ Mr Pinto said, and put on his shoes.
The black Mercedes had been stuck in traffic near the Vakola highway for half an hour. ‘Something’s b
othering you, Shanmugham.’
He turned from the front seat to face his employer.
‘No, Mr Shah.’
‘Don’t lie. I watched you while I was talking to those people in Vishram. You kept rubbing your hands.’
‘Nineteen thousand rupees a square foot, sir. Tower A was built in 1959 or 1960, sir. Ten thousand is a very good rate for a place like that.’
His employer chuckled.
‘Shanmugham. Six years you’ve worked for me and still you are an idiot. I’ve underpaid by a thousand rupees a square foot.’
The traffic jam began to clear; Shah looked at his assistant’s eyes in the driver’s mirror.
‘Those people would be thrilled at an offer of 10,000 a square foot. So 20,000 is unbelievable. Correct? And 19,000 is the same as 20,000 in a man’s mind.’ He hummed an old Hindi film song.
‘Turn left,’ Shanmugham told the driver, when they got on to the highway to Bandra. ‘Quickly. Turn left. Down the service road, until I tell you to stop.’
‘It’s still 200 per cent of the market rate, sir. We’ll have to sell the Shanghai at 25,000 a square foot – more – to make any profit. This is the east, sir. Who will pay that much money to live here?’
‘You can’t insult these people, Shanmugham. You can’t offer them ten per cent or fifteen per cent above market value. You’re asking them to give up their homes, the only homes some of them have ever had. You have to respect human greed.’
The driver now pulled on to the wasteland by the side of the highway.
‘The Secretary said he’d join us here, sir. He’ll give us a call when he reaches the highway.’
‘Let’s get out of the car, Shanmugham. I hate sitting still.’
A tall building stood at the end of the wasteland, bearing the letters ‘YATT’ in white, and a red arc below, like the finishing touch to a signature. Beyond it was the weak glow of Vakola. A few curious faces. Men crossing the wilderness to a row of huts in the distance.
‘See where they’ve set up a few tents—’ Shah pointed to a spot near the bushes. ‘In five days that will become an entire slum. No property deeds, no titles, legal rights. What a hunger for land.’ He rubbed his palms together, scraping his rings against one another. ‘I’ve got it too. Your boss – as you know – is a villager. He has no college degree, Shanmugham: he chews gutka, like a villager. But hunger is an excellence. Look’ – he pointed to the hotel – ‘they’ve lost the “H”. How careless posh people are. If it were my hotel I would have had the manager shot.’