Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [100]
Shanmugham tied the straps of his helmet. “Some things,” he said, “you don’t tell even your first cousins.”
Kicking the Hero Honda to life, he drove off into the night.
2 AUGUST
The banging noise on the door woke Masterji. Seizing The Illustrated History of Science, he got up from the sofa, and checked the safety catch. He stood by the door with the book raised in both hands.
The Pintos waited at the threshold of their dark bedroom.
“Not here,” Mrs. Pinto whispered. “Upstairs. They’re banging on your door.”
Mr. Pinto reached for the light switch.
“Wait,” Masterji said.
Now they heard footsteps coming down the stairs.
“Let’s call the police. Someone please call the ….”
“Yes,” Masterji said from the door. “Call them.”
“But Masterji pulled the phone cord out of the wall. You have to put it back in, Mr. Pinto.”
The footsteps grew louder. Mr. Pinto got down on his knees and slapped at the wall. “I can’t find the plug ….”
“Quickly, Mr. Pinto, quickly.”
“Keep quiet, Shelley.”
“Don’t fight!”—Masterji from the door. “And both of you keep quiet.”
The banging started on the Pintos’ door.
“Stop that at once, or I’ll call the police!” Masterji shouted.
There was a jangling of bangles from outside, and then:
“Ramu, tell your Masterji who it is.”
“Oh, God. Sangeeta.” Masterji lowered The Illustrated History of Science. He turned on the light. “Why are you here at this hour?”
“Ramu, tell your Masterji we are all walking to SiddhiVinayak Temple. We’ll pray for his heart to soften. Now come, Ramu,” she said, “and no noise: we don’t want to wake up the good people.”
The Puris were taking that boy on foot to SiddhiVinayak? How would Ramu walk such a distance?
He almost opened the door to plead with Mrs. Puri not to do this to Ramu.
It was three in the morning. Another three and a half hours before it was light and they could go to the police station. With The Illustrated History of Science lying on his ribs, he closed his eyes and stretched out on the sofa.
Six and a half hours later, he was walking with Mr. Pinto down the main road.
“I know we’re late. Don’t blame me. If you still had your scooter we could have gone to the station in five minutes.”
Masterji said nothing. Walking was good on a day like this. With each step he took, the threat of violence receded. He had lived in Vakola for more than thirty years, his bones had become arthritic on these very pavements. Who could threaten him here?
“It’s the fortunate men of Vishram!”
Bare-chested Trivedi, the Gold Coin priest, came towards them with embracing arms. He had just performed a little cleansing ritual at the police station, he explained. Someone had died in the station years ago, and they called him in once a year to purge the ghost.
“Let me buy you a coffee or tea. A coconut?”
“Tea,” Mr. Pinto said.
“We have to go,” Masterji whispered. “We’re late already.”
“Just a few minutes,” Mr. Pinto said.
He followed the priest to a roadside tea shop, beside which a burly man in a banian stood pressing clothes with a coal-fired iron. A metal trough full of spent coals rested by the side of his ironing board.
With a glass of chai in his hand, Pinto motioned for Masterji to join him and Trivedi at the tea shop.
It had been a morning full of delays, Mr. Pinto at every stage misplacing something—his glasses, umbrella. Now, watching the trembling tea glass in his old friend’s hand, Masterji understood.
“I’ll go into the station and file the complaint. You can go home alone, Mr. Pinto. It’s perfectly safe in daylight.”
The police station of Vakola stands right at the traffic signal leading in from the highway, giving the impression you are coming into a suburb where the law is securely in charge.
From the chastening aromas of coal and laundry outside the station, Masterji walked into an atmosphere of burning incense and marigold flowers.
It was his first visit to the station in nearly a decade; in the mid-1990s Purnima’s handbag had been snatched just outside the school on a Saturday afternoon—such an unusual event that it had led to neighbourhood