Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [161]
“Ibby,” Mrs. Kudwa said. “Ibby.”
At once, Ibrahim Kudwa lifted the hammer he had brought from the Secretary’s office, lunged forward, and hit Masterji on the crown of his head. Who, more from surprise than anything else, fell back into his chair with such force that it toppled over and his head landed hard on the floor. Masterji lay there like that, unable to move, though he saw things with clarity. Ibrahim Kudwa stared with an open mouth; the hammer dropped from his hand. I should reach for the hammer, Masterji thought, but the Secretary lunged and picked it up. Now he felt a weight on his chest: Kothari, pressing a knee on his torso, turned the hammer upside down and stubbed it on his forehead using both his hands. It hurt. He tried to shout, but he heard only a groan from his mouth. Now something, or someone, sat on his legs, and he lost control of them; he was aware that Kothari was pounding his forehead with the hammer again and again. The blows were landing somewhere far away, like stones falling on the surface of a lake he was deep inside. He thought of a line from the Mahabharata: “… King Dhritharashtra’s heart was like a forest lake, warm on the surface but icy at the bottom.” Kothari stopped and took a breath. Poor man’s arms must be aching by now, Masterji thought. He was sure he had never seen anyone move as fast as Kothari was moving with the hammer, except for the boy at the McDonald’s on Linking Road when he lifted French fries from the hot oil, slammed them into the metal trough, and put the empty container back in the oil. Then the hammer hit his forehead again. “Kothari. Wait.” Now Sanjiv Puri came from the bedroom with a large dark thing, which he lowered onto Masterji’s face. When the dark thing touched his nose, Masterji understood. Yes. The pillow from his bed. It pressed down on his nose and crushed his moustache: he understood that Sanjiv Puri was sitting on it. His legs thrashed: not to free themselves, but to take him down to the bottom of the lake faster. He was in very cool and black water now.
“He’s unconscious. Sanjiv, enough. Get up.”
Sanjiv Puri looked at his wife, who was sitting on Masterji’s legs, and then at Ibrahim Kudwa, who was watching things with an open mouth.
“Quickly. You take the feet, Kothari will take the head,” Mrs. Puri told her husband. “Ibby, pick up that hammer. Don’t leave it here.”
Kudwa, rubbing his forearms, stood still. “Oy, oy, oy,” he said.
“Wait,” Sanjiv Puri said. “First put some more tape on his mouth. In case he wakes up.”
Kothari did so. Then the two men lifted Masterji’s body, and moved towards the door. Mr. Puri winced: “I stepped on something.” His wife kicked the Rubik’s Cube out of their path.
She opened the door for the men, and checked the corridor.
“Wait for the lift. I’ve hit the button.”
“It never works, let’s take the stairs, there’s two strong men here. He has lost a lot of weight.”
“It was working in the morning. Wait.”
Mrs. Puri jabbed the “call” button again and again.
Sanjiv Puri had given up on the lift, and had begun moving with Masterji’s feet (his end of the dazed body) towards the stairs, when the machine clicked—the whirls and wheezes began—and a circle of light moved up towards them.
His wife held the door open from the outside until the three bodies were in. The Secretary managed to reach the button for the fifth floor. The two men saw, in the round white light on the roof of the lift, three tiny dark shapes. Wasps, which must have flown into the light a long time ago: six undecomposed wings.
When they reached the fifth floor, Sanjiv Puri prepared to press against the lift door; but it swung open of its own accord. His wife, despite her bulk, had come up the stairs faster than they had.
While they brought the body out of the lift, she pushed open the door leading to the roof terrace.
“We’ll never take him up that way,” the Secretary said, looking at the steep narrow staircase.
“One step at a time. You can do it,” Mrs. Puri said, from above them. “One step at a time.