Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [142]
Mr. Pinto turned and gestured to the table.
“Come have breakfast with us. It’s the three-egg omelette. Your favourite. Nina—one more omelette, at once. Come, Masterji, sit at the table.”
“Did you know what was going to happen last night?” Masterji asked. “Did the Secretary tell everyone to keep quiet when I screamed? That was something else I didn’t think about until this morning. No one came to help me.”
Mr. Pinto gestured helplessly. “For our part, honestly, we heard nothing. We were asleep. Ask Shelley.”
Mrs. Pinto, rising from the breakfast table, stood next to her husband, and took his hand in hers.
“We wanted to save you, Masterji,” she said in her rasping voice. “They told us if we kept quiet we would save you.”
“Shelley, shut up. Go back to the table. We didn’t know anything, Masterji. We thank God that you are safe. Come in and eat now—”
“You’re lying, Mr. Pinto.”
Masterji pulled the front door from Mr. Pinto’s grasp and closed it on himself. He pressed his forehead against the door. Rajeev and Raghav Ajwani, in their school uniforms, tried to tiptoe past him.
Hearing voices from below, Masterji went down the stairs.
Three women sat in the white plastic chairs.
Mrs. Puri was speaking to the Secretary’s wife; Mrs. Ganguly, bedecked in gold and silk, apparently on her way to a wedding ceremony, was listening.
“So what if the Sisters at the Special School want Ramu to play David Slayer of Goliath in the pageant? What is it to me that David was a Christian and we are Hindus? Jesus and Krishna: two skin colours, same God. All my life I have gone in and out of churches like a happy bird.”
“You’re right, Sangeeta,” the Secretary’s wife responded. “What difference is there, deep down?”
Masterji went from Mrs. Puri to Mrs. Kothari to Mrs. Ganguly, trying to find a face that revealed guilt when he stared at it. None paid the slightest attention to him. Am I looking at good people or bad? he thought.
Mrs. Puri brushed a housefly from Mrs. Kothari’s shoulder and continued.
“Didn’t I pray at St. Antony’s and then at St. Andrew’s and then at Mount Mary that the doctors should be wrong about Ramu? Just as I prayed in SiddhiVinayak Temple, Mrs. Kothari.”
“You are a liberal person, Sangeeta. A person of the future.”
“Did all of you know what was going to happen last night?” Masterji asked. “Am I the only human being in this building?”
Mrs. Puri continued to talk to the Secretary’s wife.
“I make no distinction between Hindu and Muslim and Christian in this country.”
“So true, Sangeeta. Let the heart be good, that’s what I say.”
“I agree with you 100 per cent,” Mrs. Ganguly joined in. “I never vote for the Shiv Sena.”
Now Masterji saw Tinku Kothari, the Secretary’s son. Squished into a plastic chair with his miniature carom board, the fat boy was playing by himself, alternately striking black and beige pieces. With his fingers tensed to hit the blue striker, he paused, turning his eyes sideways to Masterji.
He was chuckling. His jelly-like flesh rippled beneath his tight green T-shirt with its golden caption, Come to Ladakh, land of monasteries. The grins of Tibetan monks on the boy’s T-shirt widened.
The blue striker scattered the carom pieces. One black piece ricocheted over the board’s edge, and rolled through parliament, until it touched Masterji’s foot: he shivered.
He went up the stairs to his living room and waited for his old friend. If only Shelley would persuade that stubborn old accountant to knock on the door and say one word. “Sorry.”
Just one word.
He waited for half an hour. Then he got up and reached for the No-Argument book, still wrapped in a blue rubber band, lying on top of The Soul’s Passageway after Death in the bookshelf.
He undid the rubber band. He tore the pages out of the No-Argument book one by one, then tore each page into four pieces, and then tore each piece into smaller pieces.
Down in 2A, Mr. Pinto, sitting at his dining table, turned to the window to watch the snowfall of paper pieces: all that was left of a thirty-two-year-old friendship.
A scraping noise began