Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [147]
Suddenly, someone began to scream from the stairwell.
“A simple thing, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Puri said.
All of them looked up at the roof: Masterji was up there, hands clasped behind his back, walking round and round.
A few hours earlier, he had been standing at his window: in the garden he saw Mary’s green hosepipe lying in coils around the hibiscus plants.
Things, which had seemed so simple that evening at Crawford Market, had now become so confusing.
Something rattled against the wall of the kitchen: Purnima’s old calendar.
Masterji searched among the crumpled clothes by the washing machine, picked a shirt that was still fresh-smelling and changed into it.
Out in the market, Shankar Trivedi was enjoying, in between the chicken coop and the sugarcane-crushing machine, the second of his daily shaves. His face was richly lathered around his black moustache. He held on to a glowing cigarette in his right hand, as the barber unmasked him with precise flicks of his open blade.
“Trivedi, it’s me.”
The priest’s eye moved towards the voice.
“I’ve been trying to find you for days. It’s tomorrow. Purnima’s anniversary.”
The priest nodded, and took a puff of his cigarette.
Masterji waited. The barber oiled, massaged, and curled the priest’s luxuriant moustache. He slapped talcum powder on the back of Trivedi’s neck—gave a final thwack of his barber’s towel—and discharged his customer from the blue chair.
“Trivedi, didn’t you hear me? My wife’s death anniversary is tomorrow.”
“… heard you … heard you ….”
The freshly shaved priest, now a confluence of pleasing odours, took a long pull on his cigarette.
“Don’t raise your voice now, Masterji.”
“Will you come to my home tomorrow—in the morning?”
“No, Masterji. I can’t.”
Trivedi drew on his cigarette three times, and threw it down.
“But … you said you would do it … I haven’t spoken to anyone else because you ….”
The priest patted fragrant talcum powder from his right shoulder.
The moral evolution of an entire neighbourhood seemed compressed into that gesture. Masterji understood. Trivedi and the others had realized their own property rates would rise—the brokers must have said 20 per cent each year if the Shanghai’s glass façade came up. Maybe even 25 per cent. And at once their thirty-year-old ties to a science teacher had meant no more to Trivedi and the others than talcum powder on their shoulders.
“I taught your sons. Three of them.”
Trivedi reached for Masterji’s hand, but the old teacher stepped back.
“Masterji. Don’t misunderstand. It’s easy to rush to conclusions, but ….”
“Who was the first man to say the earth went around the sun? Anaxagoras. Not in the textbook but I taught them.”
“When your daughter died, I performed the last rites. Did I or did I not, Masterji?”
“Just tell me if you will perform my wife’s one-year ritual, Trivedi.”
The baby-faced barber, resting his chin on the blue chair, had been watching the entertainment. Trivedi now addressed his appeal to him.
“Tell him, everyone in Vakola knows that he is under so much mental stress. I am frightened to do anything in his place. Who knows what might happen to me in there?”
“Mental stress?”
“Masterji: you are losing weight, your clothes are not clean, you talk to yourself. Ask anyone.”
“What about those who smeared excrement on my door? What about those who are paying thugs to attack me? Those who call themselves my neighbours. If I am under stress, what are they under?”
“Masterji, Masterji.” Trivedi turned again to the barber for some support. “No one has attacked you. People worry about your stability when you say things like this. Sell 3A. Get rid of it. It is killing you. It is killing all of us.”
I should have told my story better, Masterji thought, on his way back to Vishram Society. Ajwani