Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [11]
The old teacher shook his head. “I live on a pension, Sunil: ask someone else for a donation.”
Embarrassed that he had to say this in front of the others, Masterji pushed the boy, perhaps too hard, out of the room.
After dinner, Mrs. Puri, folding Ramu’s laundry on the dining table, looked at a dozen ripe mangoes. Her husband was watching a replay of a classic India versus Australia cricket match on TV. He had bought the mangoes as a treat for Ramu, who was asleep under his aeroplane quilt.
Closing the door behind her, she walked up the stairs, and pushed at the door to Masterji’s flat with her left hand. Her right hand pressed three mangoes against her chest.
The door was open, as she expected. Masterji had his feet on the small teakwood table in the living room, and was playing with a multicoloured toy that she took a whole second to identify.
“A Rubik’s Cube,” she marvelled. “I haven’t seen one in years and years.”
He held it up for her to see better.
“I found it in one of the old cupboards. I think it was Gaurav’s. Works.”
“Surprise, Masterji.” She turned the mangoes in her right arm towards his gaze.
He put the Rubik’s Cube down on the teakwood table.
“You shouldn’t have, Sangeeta.”
“Take them. You have taught our children for thirty years. Shall I cut them for you?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t have sweets every day—once a week: and today is not that day.”
He would not bend on this, she knew.
“When are you going to see Ronak?” she asked.
“Tomorrow.” He smiled. “In the afternoon. We’re going to Byculla Zoo.”
“Well, take them for him then. A gift from his grandfather.”
“No,” he said. “The boy shouldn’t be spoiled with mangoes. You are too generous in every way, Sangeeta. I see that there is a stray dog lying on the stairs now. It seems to be ill—there is a smell from it. I hope you didn’t bring it into the Society, as you have done before.”
“Oh, no, Masterji,” she said, tapping on the mangoes. “Not me. It was probably Mrs. Rego again.”
Though she had not actually given Masterji the mangoes, Mrs. Puri felt the same sense of neighbourly entitlement that would have resulted from the act, and moved to his bookshelf.
“Are you becoming religious, Masterji?”
“Certainly not,” he said.
Sliding out a thin paperback from the shelf, she showed it to him as evidence; on the cover was an image of the divine eagle Garuda flying over the seven oceans.
The Soul’s Passageway after Death.
She read aloud from it: “In its first year out of the body, the soul travels slowly and at a low altitude, burdened by the sins of it ….”
“Purnima’s first anniversary is not so far away. She wanted me to read about God when she was gone ….”
“Do you think about her often, Masterji?”
He shrugged.
For his retirement, Masterji had hoped to re-read his collection of murder mysteries, and history books of old Rome (Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars; Tacitus, The Annals; Plutarch, Illustrious Figures of the Roman Republic) and old Bombay (A Brief Life of Mountstuart Elphinstone; The Stages of the Creation of the City of Bombay, fully illustrated). An Advanced French Grammar (with Questions and Answers Provided), bought so he could teach his children at home, also stood on the shelf. But since the murder novels were in demand throughout the Society, and neighbours borrowed them frequently (and returned them infrequently), he would soon be left only with history and foreign grammar.
Mrs. Puri claimed one of the last Agatha Christies from the bookshelf and smiled—there were a few Erle Stanley Gardners too, but she was not that bored.
“Does it say on my door, Agatha Christie lending library?” Masterji asked. “I won’t have any books to read if people keep borrowing them.”
“I’m taking this for my husband. Not that I don’t read, Masterji. I was such a reader in my college days.” She raised her hand over her head, to indicate its extent. “Where is the time now, with the boy to look after? I’ll bring it back next week, I promise you.”
“Fine.” He had begun playing with the Cube again.