Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [118]
“It’s me. Your father. I’m calling from Bandra. Something very bad has just happened.”
There was silence.
“What is it, Father? I’m at work.”
“Can you speak now? It’s urgent, Gaurav. No, it’s a payphone. I’ll call back from this same number. Ten minutes.”
Telling the grocery store owner to keep the phone free for him, he ran over to the fried-snacks store, and bought another vada pav.
Munching on the batter-fried potatoes, he walked back to Parekh’s office: at the barber’s shop, he saw a familiar dark face reflected in one of the mirrors.
He turned and found a man in a crisp white shirt standing right outside the Loyola Trust Building.
He stared at Mr. Shah’s left-hand man. The metal grilles of the building groaned as pigeons landed on them.
“Mr. Masterji ….” Shanmugham held out his hand. “Don’t do this to yourself. This is the last chance.”
Masterji shivered at the sight of that hand. Without a word he walked away from his ex-lawyer’s office.
“Hire another lawyer,” Gaurav said, when his father, calling him from the pay telephone, had explained everything. “There are thousands in the city.”
Masterji found his son’s voice changed, ready to listen.
“No,” he told Gaurav. “It won’t work. The law won’t work.”
He could hear the builder’s tongue vibrating within Parekh’s mucus. Just like the tuning fork he had used in class for an acoustics experiment. Corruption had become physics; its precise frequency had been discovered by Mr. Shah. If he engaged another lawyer, that thick tongue would fine tune him too.
“My last hope is Noronha. At the Times. I’ve written letter after letter, and he won’t write back. If there’s some way to reach him, so ….”
More silence. Then Gaurav said: “I have a connection at the Times. I’ll see if we can reach Noronha. In the meantime you go home and lock the door, Father. When my connection gets back to me, I’ll phone you.”
“Gaurav,” he said, his voice thickening with gratitude. “I’ll do that, Gaurav. I’ll go home and wait for your call.”
A cow had been tied up by the side of the fried-snacks store, a healthy animal with a black comet mark on its forehead. It had just been milked, and a bare-chested man in a dhoti was taking away a mildewed bucket inside which fresh milk looked like radioactive liquid. Squatting by the cow a woman in a saffron sari was squeezing gruel into balls. Next to her two children were being bathed by another woman. Half a village crammed into a crack in the pavement. The cow chewed on grass and jackfruit rinds. Round-bellied and big-eyed, aglow with health: it sucked in diesel and exhaust fumes, particulate matter and sulphur dioxide, and churned them in its four stomachs, creaming good milk out of bad air and bacterial water. Drawn by the magnetism of so much ruddy health, the old man put his finger to its shit-caked belly. The living organs of the animal vibrated into him, saying: all this power in me is power in you too.
I have done good to others. I was a teacher for thirty-four years.
The cow lifted her tail. Shit piled on the road. When they saw Masterji talking to the cow and telling her his woes, those who had been born in the city perhaps thought that he was a mad old man, but those who had come from the villages knew better: recognizing the piety in his act, the woman in the saffron sari got up. The two children followed her. Soon the cow’s forehead was covered with human palms.
Giri laid out dinner on the table. White rice, spinach curry, curried beans, and pappad, around a hilsa fish, grilled and chopped, mixed with salt and pepper, and served in a porcelain bowl. The fish’s head sat on top, its lips open, as if pleading for breath among its own body parts.
The hilsa made Shah’s mouth water. He walked around the dinner table in his Malabar Hill home with a piece