Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [122]
He turned off the lights inside the flat, and opened the door to find Shanmugham, with his arms folded.
“When is the boss going to give me an answer?” the left-hand man asked. “If we’re going to break that old teacher’s arms and legs, we have to do it now.”
3 SEPTEMBER
It was not yet four o’clock.
Masterji stopped at Flora Fountain to wipe his face with a handkerchief; cool water trickled down the old stained marble, down its goddesses and trees and porpoise.
He passed the bronze statue of Dadabhai Naoroji and went through the shade of arcaded buildings towards the Times of India office. Half expecting to find Shanmugham behind him, he kept glancing over his shoulder, and for this reason missed it until it was right in front of him.
Victoria Terminus.
It had been years since he had seen the great train station, the city’s grandest Gothic structure. Demons, domes, gables, and gargoyles grew all over the crazy mass of coloured stone. Stone mastiffs flew out from the central dome; rams, wolves, peacocks, other nameless hysterical beasts, all thrusting out of the station, screamed silently above the traffic and clutter. Multiplying the madness, a cordon of palm-trees fanned the building—frolicking, sensual, pagan trees, taunting, almost tickling, the gargoyles.
The heart of Bombay—if there is one—it is me, it is me!
The Times of India Building was just around the corner; he still had an hour. He crossed the road. In the cool portico of the station, he saw stone wolves perched on the capitals of columns, as if about to spring down on the people below. Taped to one of the pillars of the station, he saw a poster for a boy gone missing in the city: like a real victim of the imaginary wolves of the architecture. The print, in Hindi, was smudged, and he read it with difficulty, thinking of the lonely parents looking for this boy, begging the indifferent police for information, until they went back on a train to Bhopal or Ranchi, worn out and defeated.
He had once been a migrant like these ones pouring through the door of the station into the city, men and women from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh carrying everything they owned in bundles of cloth. They stepped out of the shade of the stone wolves and blinked in the harsh light of Mumbai. But their bundles did not contain what his did, an education. How many of them would end up like the boy in the poster—beaten, kidnapped, or murdered? His heart filled with pity for their lesser struggles.
“Point! Point! Point!”
The taxi-drivers who were waiting by the station demanded to take him to Nariman Point. He shook his head: yet the yelling went on and on. He could feel their will power as something physical, a battering ram, trying to crush his own.
Entering the lobby of the Times of India Building, he looked at a giant mural of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi scanning a copy of the Times. He sat down and waited. Half an hour to go. People streamed in and streamed out of the lobby. How many, he wondered, have come to see Noronha? He felt the familiar pride at seeing a student prosper, which is like the rush of growth hormone that straightens out a sapling, and makes an old teacher eager for another round of living.
He found a chair. He began to snooze. When he opened his eyes he saw Gaurav, in a blue business shirt, pleated trousers and tie, shaking him by the shoulder.
“Sorry, son. I was tired.” Masterji got up from his chair. “Shall we go in now to see Noronha?”
The words were sitting there on Gaurav’s tongue—I. Didn’t. Call. Noronha. I. Didn’t. Call. Him—but when they came out, they had become: “Yes. But I want to eat something first, Father.”
“What about our appointment?”
“We have time, Father. Plenty. I’m hungry now.”
Father and son went to the McDonald’s across from Victoria Terminus station. Masterji sat at an outdoor table and waited for Gaurav to come out with his food. He wished he had his