Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [167]
Satish touched the note to his forehead in a salaam. “One day, Father, we’ll be proud of each other.”
On a pavement near the Mahim Dargah, Shah saw a dozen beggars, waiting for free bread and curry, sitting outside a cheap restaurant. Tired, lively, cunning, each dirty face seemed to glow. One blind man had his face turned skywards in a look of dumb ecstasy. Just a few feet away, a man with red bleary eyes, his head in his hands, appeared to be the most frightened thing in the world.
Shah watched their faces go past.
If only the traffic hadn’t been so light that evening the old teacher came to the Malabar Hill house. If only he had met face to face with that teacher, the matter would have ended right then. Blood need not have been spilled.
So why had they not met?
He had a vision of a blazing red curtain and a silhouette moving behind it: when the red curtain was torn away, he saw the faces of the beggars outside his car. All his life he had seen faces like these and thought: Clay. My clay. He had squeezed them into shape in his redevelopment projects, he had become rich off them. Now it seemed to him that these shining mysterious faces were the dark powers of his life. They made this thing happen. Not to get my Shanghai built. To get their city built. They have used me for their ends.
One of the beggars laughed. A choir of particulate matter shrilled inside Dharmen Shah’s lungs; he coughed again and again, and spat into a corner of the Mercedes.
Half an hour later, he lay shirtless on a cold bed. In the only place on earth where personalized service depresses you.
“We changed the size of the bed to suit your body”—the voice of the radiologist.
Doctors display such familiarity only with the chronically ill.
Face down he lay, the fat folds of his chest and belly pressed against the hard cushion. An X-ray machine moved above him, taking pictures of the back of his skull.
The X-ray machine stopped moving, and the radiologist went into another room, grumbling: “I don’t know if I’ve got the pictures, since you moved ….”
Shah, shirtless on a three-legged stool, waited like a schoolboy.
“I’m sorry. We didn’t get the X-rays. You have five minutes.”
He came out into the outpatient waiting room of Breach Candy Hospital. Rosie was waiting for him, in her shortest shortest skirt.
“Uncle.” She clapped. “My uncle.”
Her nose was still bruised, a pale strip of skin revealed where the bandage must have sat for days.
“I thought you weren’t coming, Rosie,” he said as he sat down by her side. “I really did.”
“Of course I wouldn’t leave you alone in the hospital, Uncle.” Dropping her voice, she asked: “Is the skirt short enough?”
The other patients waiting outside the radiologist’s office stared at this fat man with the well-rounded girl in skimpy clothes with her arms around him. Shah knew they were staring and he didn’t give a shit. Shameless in health, shameless he was going to stay in illness.
“It’ll warm the whole hospital.”
“That’s the plan, Uncle.” She winked. “They keep the AC on so high.”
He whispered into her ear.
“You can go home, Rosie. A hospital is no place for a girl like you.”
Rosie didn’t bother to whisper.
“My father was the son of a first wife. I never told you this, did I, Uncle? His mother died of blood cancer when he was eight. This country is full of first wife’s sons who ended up as losers. I like being around a winner.”
She kissed him on the cheek.
The wetness remained on Shah’s cheek and he recognized it for what it was: ambition. The girl didn’t just want a hair salon, she wanted everything: all his money, all his buildings. All his money above and below the earth. Marriage.
He wanted to laugh—a girl he had pulled out of jail!—and then he remembered the story Rosie had told him. The actress and the Punjabi producer. “Her blowjobs sing across the decades.”
How there is nothing small,