Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [172]
A lizard was running down her skirt.
“Who did that?”
Timothy and Dharmendar looked at each other, and everyone else giggled. Ajwani dispatched the plastic lizard towards the beach with a kick. Mrs. Rego resumed counting heads.
“What will you do now, Mr. Ajwani?” she asked, as she drank her juice.
“At first, I thought of leaving real estate entirely,” he said. “But then I thought, there are honest men in this business too. Let me add to their number.”
With one eye closed, she looked into her glass, and then put it back on the stall.
“Is it true, what they say: that you refused to take the builder’s money?”
He licked his lips and set his glass down by hers.
“At first. But I have a family. Two sons. A wife.”
A bearded man came up to the sugarcane juice stall; he peered at Mrs. Rego and then smiled.
“You’re the social worker who does good things in the slums, aren’t you?”
Mrs. Rego hesitated, then nodded.
“I’ve seen you in your office, madam,” the bearded man said. “I too used to be from Vakola. I lived in a slum: it’s where the Ultimex Group are now building their tower. Ultimex Milano.”
Ajwani and Mrs. Rego peered at the bearded man. He was wearing a white Muslim skullcap.
“Are you … the fortunate man? The eighty-one-lakhs man?”
“By the grace of Allah, sir, you could say that was me. I don’t have any money on me, now. Bought a two-bedroom in Kurla in a pucca building. A small Maruti Suzuki too.”
“You don’t look unhappy at all,” Mrs. Rego said.
“Why should I be unhappy?” The fortunate man laughed. “My children have never had a real home. Four daughters I have. Fate is good to many people these days. There’s a man here in Juhu, living in a slum, who has been offered sixty-three lakhs by a real-estate developer to move out. He’s a connection of a connection of mine, and I came to talk to him. About how to deal with these builders.”
The workers at the sugarcane stand had overheard, and now they asked the fortunate man for details; a nearby newspaper-vendor came to listen in. A fellow in a slum? Sixty-three lakhs? Nearby? Which slum? Which fellow? Are you sure it was sixty-three?
Mrs. Rego and Ajwani watched the bearded man, who had freckles on his large nose, perhaps from measles, wondering if those were the marks by which fortunate humans were identified.
Done with their sugarcane juice, the boys walked from the beach to the main road. Vijay, revitalized by the juice, had caught Dharmendar in a head-lock.
Mrs. Rego wished she hadn’t had the juice: the sudden sugar, as it always did, made her feel depressed. She licked her lips and spat away what remained of the sweet juice—the finest compensation the city could offer these boys for the dreams it wouldn’t make real.
“What will become of them, Mr. Ajwani? Such fine boys, all of them ….”
“What do you mean, what will become of them?”
“I mean, Mr. Ajwani, all this talent, all this energy: do these boys have any idea of what lies ahead for them? Disappointment. That’s all.”
The broker stopped. “How can you say this, Mrs. Rego? You have always helped others.”
She stopped by his side. Her face contracted into something smaller and darker with grief.
Ajwani smiled; the parallel lines on his cheeks deepened.
“I have learned something about life, Mrs. Rego. You and I were trapped: but we wanted to be trapped. These boys will live in a better world. Look over there.”
“Where?” She asked.
A bus passed by with an advertisement for a film called Dance, Dance; autorickshaws and scooters followed it. When they had passed, Mrs. Rego saw a group of white-uniformed dabba-wallahs with their pointed caps, seated in a ring, playing cards on the pavement.
“The light is not good. I can’t see what you’re ….”
After a while, Mrs. Rego saw, or thought she saw, what her former neighbour was pointing at.
Past the traffic, on the other side of the road, she saw the boundary wall of an old Juhu housing society, displaying three generations