Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [149]
After half an hour, Mrs. Puri left with her boy.
As he watched the fat woman leave, Mani thought: What have they been talking about?
When he pushed open the glass door, he found the office deserted; from the inner room beyond the Daisy Duck clock came the noise of a coconut being hacked open.
Lying next to Ramu’s blue aeroplane quilt, Sanjiv Puri, who had been drawing cartoons of lizards, white mice, and spiders, now began to sketch, as if by logical progression, politicians.
As he was putting the final touches to the wavy silver hair of his favourite, ex-president Abdul Kalam, he looked up.
The lights were on in the living room: his wife had come home with his son.
“Ramu.” He put down his sketchbook and held out his arms.
Mrs. Puri said: “Play with your father later. He and I have to talk now.”
Closing Ramu’s bedroom door behind her, she spoke in a soft voice.
“You can’t come to Ramu’s pageant tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“Stay late in the office. Have dinner there. Use the internet. Don’t come home till after ten o’clock.”
He watched her as she went to the dining table, where she began folding Ramu’s freshly washed laundry.
“Sangeeta ….” He stood by her. “What is happening that I can’t come to my own home until ten?”
She looked at him, and said nothing, and he understood.
“Don’t be crazy. If they do it, Ajwani and the Secretary, well and good. Why should you dip your hands into it?”
“Keep your voice down.” Mrs. Puri leaned her head in the direction of you know who. “Ajwani is doing it. Kothari is going to hide somewhere all day long—so if Shanmugham comes in the morning, he will not be able to tell him that the Confidence Group has withdrawn its offer. And unless their letter is not handed to the Secretary of a Society in person, they cannot say they have taken back their offer. That is the law. In the evening Ajwani will do it. I’ll phone him when Masterji goes up to the terrace. That’s all there is to it.”
“But if anything goes wrong … it is a question of going to jail.”
She stopped, a blue towel over her forearm. “And living in this building for the rest of my life is better than going to jail?” She flipped the towel over and folded it.
Her husband said nothing.
Ramu popped his head out of his room, and Mummy and Daddy smiled and told him to go back to bed.
“My fingers still smell,” she whispered. “That man made me dirty my fingers. With my own son’s … He made me do that. I can never forgive him.”
Mr. Puri whispered: “But tomorrow is Ramu’s pageant.”
“So it’s perfect,” Mrs. Puri said, pushing the towels to one side, to start work on Ramu’s underwear. “No one will suspect me on a day like tomorrow. I will have to stay back at the school hall to help dismantle the pageant. Someone will remember me. Someone will get the time confused. I’m not asking you to do anything. Just stay away from home. That’s all.”
Mr. Puri went to the sofa, where he slapped magazines and newspapers onto the ground with his palm; then he walked over to the kitchen, where he stripped things off the fridge door, and then he shouted: “No. I won’t do it.”
His wife stood holding Ramu’s underwear against her chest. She stared.
“No.” He took a step towards her. “I’m not leaving you alone tomorrow. I’m staying here. With you.”
Letting the underwear fall, she put her fingers around her husband’s neck, and—“Oy, oy, oy”—kissed the crown of his head.
Ramu, opening his bedroom door just a bit, gaped at the show of affection between Mummy and Daddy.
Mrs. Puri blushed; she pushed the boy back into his room and bolted the door from the outside.
“He isn’t in his room now,” she said, putting her ear to the wall to check for any sound. “So he’s still up on the roof, then. He went up there yesterday and he went today. He will probably go tomorrow too. Ajwani will have to do it then. Up there.”
“Kothari?”
“He will say what we want him to say. When it’s all over. He promised me that much.”
Mr. Puri nodded. “It could work,” he said. “Could work.”
The sketchbook on which he had been doodling lizards and