Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [150]
“Here. We should write it down here. What time he goes up to the terrace and what time he comes down. This will help us tomorrow.”
“Ramu! Stop pushing the door!” Mrs. Puri raised her voice; the bedroom door stopped rattling.
“Write it down?” she asked her husband.
“Why not? It’s how they do it in the movies. In the English movies. They always plan the previous day. Let’s take this seriously,” Mr. Puri said, as if he had been the one to come up with the whole idea.
He put his ear to the wall.
“His door has opened.” He turned to his wife and whispered: “What time is it?”
So I have failed you again, Purnima. Masterji removed his shoes, went to his bed and lay down, his arm over his face.
He controlled his tears.
His shirt was wet from walking round and round the terrace; when he turned in the bed, it stuck to his back and made him shiver. A husband who survives his wife must perform her memorial rites. But all of them had got together to strip away even this final satisfaction from him.
He bit his forearm.
How obvious now that Mr. Pinto had wanted someone to threaten him outside the compound wall that evening. How obvious now that he and Shelley wanted the money. How obvious that the Secretary had been lying all this time about responsibility and flamingoes; he wanted money. He had been cheating them for years; he had been stealing from the funds. How obvious that Mrs. Puri wanted money for herself, not for Ramu.
He covered his face in his blanket and breathed in. The game he played as a child: if you cannot see them, they cannot see you. You are safe here.
Look down—he heard a whisper.
What is down there? he whispered back.
Look at me.
Under his blanket, Masterji felt himself sliding: trapdoors had opened beneath his bed.
Now he was again on the builder’s terrace on Malabar Hill, watching the darkening ocean. He heard blows like the blows of an axe. The water was ramming into Breach Candy—into the original wall that held the tides out of the great breach of Bombay.
He saw its horns rising out of the dark water: the bull in the ocean, the white bull of the ocean charging into the wall.
Now he could see the original breach in the sea wall reopen: and the waters flooding in—waves rising over prime real estate, wiping out buildings and skyscrapers. Now the white angry bull, emerging horns-first from the waves, charges. The waves have come to the edge of the towers, and flooded into them. Muscles of water smash into the Brabourne Stadium and into the Cricket Club of India; a hoof of tide has brought down the Bombay University …
A finger snapped, and a voice said: “Get up.”
He opened his eyes; he was too weak to move. Again the finger snapped: “Up.”
I cannot go back to bed. If I lie down, I will curse my neighbours and my city again.
He opened the door and went down the stairs. The moonlight pierced the octahedronal stars of the grille; it seemed as bright as the moon he had seen that night, so many years ago, in Simla.
Pinned by a moonbeam, he leaned against the wall.
The Republic, the High Court, and the Registered Co-operative Society might be fraudulent, but the hallways of his building were not without law; something he had obeyed for sixty-one years still governed him here.
He returned to his home; he closed the door behind him.
Opening his wife’s green almirah, Masterji knelt before the shelf with the wedding sari, and thought of Purnima.
Low, white, and nearly full, the moon moved over Vakola.
Ajwani could not stay at home on a night like this. He had walked along the highway, sat under a lamp post, then walked again, before taking an autorickshaw to Andheri, where he had dinner.
It was past eleven o’clock. After a beer at a cheap bar, he was returning along the highway in an autorickshaw. The night air lashed his face. He passed packed, box-like slum houses along the highway. Dozens of lives revealed themselves to him in seconds: a woman combing her long hair, a boy wearing a white skullcap reading a book by a powerful table lamp, a couple