Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [152]
“Hey-a! Hey-a!”
The two of them kicked; Father watched from the sofa, yawning.
“Harder. Much harder.”
Then the three of them sat down at the green dinner table for a breakfast of their mother’s toast.
Now in their blue ties and white school uniforms, Rajeev and Raghav lined up for the spoon full of shark liver oil that their father held out for them. Wetting his fingers at the kitchen tap, he wiped shark liver oil from each boy’s lips and sprinkled his face to make him laugh.
“All right. Off to school.”
Ajwani’s wife, a heavy swarthy woman, was frying something in sunflower oil in the kitchen. She shouted out: “Will you bring some basmati rice in the evening?”
“If I remember,” he shouted back, and slapped his armpits with Johnson’s Baby Powder, before putting on a safari suit, and shutting the door behind him.
Halfway down the stairwell, he stopped and did a set of push-ups leaning against the banister.
Some time after 10 a.m., Masterji returned from the market with a packet of sweets.
He walked past the gate of Vishram Society, down to the Tamil temple. He remembered it from the evening he had gone through the slums to see Mr. Shah’s new buildings.
The sanctum of the temple was locked, and two old women in saris sat on its square verandah, in the centre of which a tree grew.
He put the sweet-box before the old women. “Please think of my departed wife, Purnima, who died a year ago.”
Ripping open the plastic packaging around the sweets the old women began eating. He sat on the verandah with them. Through the grille door with the shiny padlock, he could see the small black Ganesha idol inside the dim temple, anointed with oil and kumkum and half buried under marigolds.
He watched the old women gobble; he felt their filling stomachs refuelling her flight. Their belches and grunts were a benediction on Purnima’s soul. Through the grille door, he watched the Ganesha, a distant cousin of the red idol at SiddhiVinayak. He was a jolly god, Ganesha, always game for a bit of mischief, and when the wind blew Masterji thought he heard someone whisper: “I’ve been on your side the whole time, you old atheist.”
A blind man sat outside the temple with a tray that held flowers of four colours, strung into small garlands. A few red petals had flown from his tray and floated on a sunken manhole cover that had filled up with black water. Masterji thought of the beautiful bronze tray with petals floating on it that he had seen at Gaurav’s home.
Water buffaloes came near the temple, coated in dust and dung, their dark bulging bellies spangled by flies.
Leaning back against the wall of the temple, he saw, through the coconut trees, Mr. Shah’s two buildings. The work appeared to be complete: a continuous row of windows sparkled down the side of each building. Soon, catching the angle of the setting sun, the buildings would flash like side-by-side comets. He remembered the blue tarpaulin that had covered their structures when he had last seen them; that must have been in June or July. He became aware of the passage of time, and it occurred to him that the deadline had really passed now. The fifth of October.
“It is over,” he said softly. And then, he got up and said, in the direction of Mr. Shah’s two buildings: “You have lost.”
The tree in the courtyard began to shake. A boy was up in the branches, while a girl held out her blue skirt to collect what he was throwing down.
“What are you doing up there, fellow?”
The boy smiled and half opened his hand, revealing three tiny green fruits.
“And who’re you?” he asked the girl.
She spoke into her skirt.
“What was that?”
“Sister.”
Masterji closed an eye against the sun and looked at the boy. “Throw me one, and I won’t tell the priest you’re taking his fruit.”
The boy let one of the fruits slip from his palm; Masterji caught and chewed on it. Citrus-like and sour, it reminded him of things he had once climbed trees for. That was before his thread ceremony in Suratkal at the age of fourteen, a full day’s business of chanting Sanskrit in front of