Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [135]
“Ishwar Allah Tero Naam
Sabko Sanmati de Bhagavan.”
“Ishwar and Allah are both your names
Give everyone this wisdom, Lord.”
The national tricolour had been hoisted above the Speed-Tek Cyber-Café; Masterji saw it reflected in the tinted window of a moving car, streaming in reverse like a dark meteor over Vakola.
In the middle of the night, Ashvin Kothari woke up sniffing the air.
“What is that smell?”
He turned on his bedside lamp. His wife was staring at the ceiling.
“Go back to sleep.”
“What is it?”
“Go back to—”
“It’s something you women are doing, isn’t it?”
The Secretary followed the smell down the stairs to the third floor.
Something brown, freshly applied by hand, the fingermarks still visible in it, covered Masterji’s door. A fly buzzed about it.
The Secretary closed his eyes. He raced up the stairs to his flat.
His wife was on the sofa, waiting for him.
“Don’t blame Mrs. Puri,” she said. “She asked me and I agreed.”
The Secretary sat down with his eyes closed. “O Krishna, Krishna ….”
“Let him smell what we think of him, Mr. Kothari. That’s what we women decided.”
“… Krishna ….”
“It’s Ramu’s shit—that’s all. Don’t become melodramatic. Masterji talked to the Mumbai Sun, didn’t he? Famous man. He wants Mrs. Puri to clean it herself for the rest of her life, doesn’t he? So let him clean Ramu’s shit one morning, and see how much he likes it. Let him use that same Sun to clean it.”
With his fingers in his ears, her husband chanted, as his father had taught him to do, years ago in Nairobi, the name of Lord Krishna.
Their noses covered with handkerchiefs, saris, and shirtsleeves, they filled the stairs to see what had been done to the door of 3A. Hunched over, Masterji was scrubbing his door with a wet Brillo pad. He had a bucket of water next to him, and every few minutes squeezed the Brillo pad into it.
Brought back down the stairs by his sense of responsibility, the Secretary dispersed the onlookers. “Please go back to bed,” he whispered. “Or the whole neighbourhood will find out and talk about us.”
The door to 3C opened.
Had Masterji shouted, Mrs. Puri would have shouted back. Had he rushed to hit her, she would have pushed him down the stairs. But he was on his knees, scraping the grooves and ridges into which Ramu’s excrement was hardening; he glanced at her and went back to his work, as if it did not concern her.
A man pushed from behind Mrs. Puri and stepped into the corridor.
Sanjiv Puri saw what was on Masterji’s door; he understood.
“What have you done, Sangeeta?” He looked at his wife. “What have you done to my name, to my reputation? You have betrayed your own son.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Puri,” the Secretary whispered. “Please. People will hear.”
Sangeeta Puri took a step towards her husband.
“It’s all your fault.”
“My fault?”
“You kept saying we couldn’t have children till you had a manager’s job. So I had to wait till I was thirty-four. That’s why Ramu is delayed. The older a woman is, the greater the danger. And now I have to clean his shit for the rest of my life.”
“Sangeeta, this is a lie. A lie.”
“I wanted to have Ramu ten years earlier. You talked of the rat race. You complained that migrants were taking the jobs, but you never fought back. You never became manager in time for me to have a healthy child. It was not the Evil Eye: it was you.”
Masterji stopped scrubbing.
“If you shout, Sangeeta, you will wake Ramu. No one did this thing. Sometimes plaster falls from the ceiling, because it is an old building. I say the same thing has happened here. Now all of you go to sleep.”
The Secretary got down on his knees and offered to help with the scrubbing, but Masterji said: “I’ll do it.”
He closed his eyes and remembered the light from behind the buildings at Crawford Market. Those labourers pulling carts under the JJ Flyover did work that was worse than this every day.
2 OCTOBER
The compound wall was dark from Mary’s morning round with the green garden hose.