Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [112]
1. Has persistently failed in payment of his dues to the Society
2. Has wilfully deceived his Society by giving false information
3. Has used his flat for immoral purposes or misused it for illegal purposes habitually
4. Has been in habit of committing breaches of any of the provisions of the bylaws of his Society, which in the opinion of the fellow members of his Society are serious breaches
Kudwa removed his glasses. “He hasn’t done any of these things.”
Mrs. Puri, her mouth open, turned to Ajwani.
“Hasn’t? Didn’t he say he would sign the form and change his mind? Isn’t that deceiving his Society? Hasn’t he invited the police into our gates? And the things that Mary has seen in his rubbish, tell him, Ajwani, tell him ….”
The broker tickled little Mariam’s belly rather than describe those things.
Kudwa took his daughter back.
“I want to please you by saying yes to this. This is my weakness. I wanted to please my friends in college, so I joined the rock-and-roll band. I send my boy to tae kwon-do because you wanted someone your boys could practise with. I want to please my neighbours who think of me as a fair-minded man, so I pretend to be one.”
Ibrahim Kudwa closed his eyes. He held Mariam close to him.
He wanted to tell her how different his early life had been from what hers would be.
His father had set up and closed hardware shops in city after city, in the north and south of India alike, before settling in Mumbai when his son was fourteen. The boy had never been anywhere long enough to make friends. From his mother he learned something better than having friends—how to sit in a darkened room and consume the hours. When she closed the door to her bedroom she slipped into another world; he did the same in his. Then the doorbell would ring, and they came out running into the real world together. Visitors, relatives, neighbours: he saw his mother bribe these people with smiles and sweet words, so they would let her return, for a few hours each day, into her private kingdom.
Only when he grew up did he understand what his upbringing had done to him. Instead of a man’s soul, he had developed a cockroach’s antennae inside him. What did this man think of the way he dressed? What did that man think of his politics? The way he pronounced English? Wherever he went, the opinions of the five or six people living near him became a picket fence around Ibrahim Kudwa. One day when he was fifteen or sixteen years old, playing cricket with his neighbours, he had chased the ball until it fell into a gutter. Black, fibrous, stinking, that swampy gutter was the worst thing he had ever seen in his life. But he knew his neighbours wanted him to get that ball; pressed down by their expectations, he had dipped his hands into the muck, up to the elbow, to find the ball. When it came out, his arm was green and black and smelled like rotten eggs. Ibrahim showed the dirty ball to the other boys, then turned around and tossed it back into the gutter; he never played cricket with them again.
Each time he detected the ingratiating impulse within him, he became rude, and from this he earned a reputation in his university years for being woman-like in his mood swings. When he married Mumtaz, he thought: I have found my centre, this girl will make me strong. But the shy dentist’s assistant had not been that kind of wife: she cried by herself when she was unhappy. She refused to steady his hand. Sometimes Ibrahim Kudwa wanted to abandon everything—even Mariam—and run away to Ladakh and live with those Tibetan monks he had seen on his recent holiday.
He looked at the document that Mrs. Puri and Ajwani had brought for him, but he would not touch it.
“Just three, four months ago you were calling him an English gentleman. Yes, you, Sangeeta-ji. And now ….”
“Ibrahim, do you know what the Kala Paani is?” Ajwani asked. “That’s what they called the ocean in the old days. Black water. Hindus weren’t allowed to sail on the Kala Paani. That is what kept us backward. Fear. All of us are now at the Kala Paani. We have to cross it,