Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [101]
He saw a drunk, half asleep; a foreign tourist who had clearly not slept in a long time; two vendors from the market who had probably been behind on their payments to the station; and then the men with vague, varied, and never-ending business who populate any police station.
“Masterji,” a pot-bellied constable saluted him. “Did your wife lose her handbag again?”
He remembered that he had taught this constable’s son. (Ashok? Ashwin?)
He sat down and explained his situation. The constable heard his story and made sure that the senior inspector at the station, a man named Nagarkar, heard it too.
“These calls are hard to trace,” the inspector said, “but I will send a man over—that’s usually all it takes, to frighten these builders and their goondas. This isn’t a neighbourhood where a teacher can be threatened.”
“Thank you, sir.” Masterji put his hand on his heart. “An old teacher is grateful.”
The inspector smiled. “We’ll help you, we’ll help you. But, Masterji. Really.”
Masterji stared.
“Really what, sir?”
“You’re holding out to the very end, aren’t you?”
Now he understood: the policemen thought this was about money. They were not the police force of the Indian Penal Code, but of the iron law of Necessity: of the notion that every man has his price—a generous figure, to be sure, but one he must accept. Say—I have no figure—a cell door swings open, and you find yourself in with the drunks and thugs. Above the head man’s desk, he saw a glass-framed portrait of Lord SiddhiVinayak, blood-red and pot-bellied, like the living incarnation of Necessity.
The inspector grinned. “Your Society’s famous man is here, by the way.”
Masterji turned in his chair; at the entrance to the station stood Ajwani.
The entire station warmed at his appearance. Any person looking to rent in a good building had to furnish, by law, a Clearance Certificate from the local police station to his prospective Society. In a less-than-pucca neighbourhood like Vakola, people were always turning up at Ajwani’s office without authentic drivers’ licences, voter ID cards, or PAN cards; men with flashy mobile phones and silk shirts who could afford any rent demanded of them yet could not prove (as the Clearance Certificate required) that they were employed by a respectable company.
The broker came here to procure the necessary certificates for these men, in exchange for the necessary sums of money. With a smile and a hundred-rupee note, he invented legitimate occupations and respectable business offices for his clients; conjured wives for unmarried men, and husbands and children for single women. The real-estate broker was a master of fiction.
This is the real business of this station, Masterji thought. I should get out of here at once.
It was too late. Ajwani had spotted him; he saw the broker’s eye ripening with knowledge.
Mr. Pinto’s white hair was loose in the wind, and he kept patting it back into place. He was still sitting on the bench at the roadside stall.
The burly man who had been pressing clothes near the tea stall had finished his work, which was piled on his ironing board; kneeling down, he opened the jaws of his enormous pressing iron. The black coals that filled it began to fume; Masterji watched an exposed part of the machinery of heat and smoke that ran his world.
Mr. Pinto got up.
“How did it go, Masterji? I was going to come, but I thought you might not want ….”
Masterji held back the words of reproach. Who could blame Mr. Pinto for being frightened? He was just an old man who knew he was an old man.
“I told you not to worry, Mr. Pinto.”
A group of schoolgirls wearing white Muslim headscarves over their navy-blue uniforms stood by the side of the road, waving little Indian flags, tittering