Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [38]
When he got to the city, knowing no one here, he had stood in line outside a Jain temple in Kalbadevi and been fed there twice a day; a store owner pitied his feet and threw him his own chappals; he began working as a delivery boy for that store owner, and within a year he was managing a store himself.
In a socialist economy, the small businessman has to be a thief to prosper. Before he was twenty he was smuggling goods from Dubai and Pakistan. Yes, what compunction did he have about dealing with the enemy, when he was treated as a bastard in his own country? The pirateering felt natural; on the back of trucks marked as “emergency wheat supplies,” he shipped in cartons of foreign-made watches and alarm clocks into Gujarat and Bombay. But then the Constitution of India was suspended; the Emergency was imposed—the police given orders to arrest all blackmarketeers, smugglers, and tax-dodgers. Even if you hated that period, you had to admire the guts: the only time when anyone showed any will power in this country. He had to get rid of his black money—Man has risen from the earth, he thought, he may as well put his money back into the earth. A construction company was formed—with an English name, of course: it was part of the new world of talent-and-nothing-else. Smuggling was for small men, he found out; the real money in this world lies on the legitimate side of things. Starting out as a contractor for another builder on Mira Road, he soon realized that much as he loved cement and steel, he loved people more. The human being was his clay to squeeze. Poorer human beings, to begin with. He entered the business of “redeveloping” chawls and slums—buying out the tenants of ageing structures so that skyscrapers and shopping malls could take their place; a task requiring brutality and charm in equal measure, and which proved too subtle for most builders—but one he negotiated with skills from his smuggler years, allying himself with politicians, policemen, and thugs to bribe and bounce people out of their homes. With an instinct for fairness that taught him to prefer (unlike many others in his profession) the use of generosity over violence, he earned a reputation as a man who made other men rich, always preferring to entice a recalcitrant tenant out of a building with a cheque rather than with a knife, and waiting until there was no other option but to order Shanmugham (as he had done in his most recent redevelopment project, in Sion) to go all the way: to shove a man’s head out of a window and indicate that the rest of him would follow in three seconds—unless a signature appeared on the appropriate document. (It did.)
Rosie fed more bread into the toaster. Shah heard the click of the toaster and thought of her with gratitude, bringer of toast and floral perfume into his life, this chubby girl from the provinces—All the way from Ranchi, would you believe it? He licked his fingers and waited for more bread. How little it takes to be happy in life: soft white beds, buttered toast, and plump young girls, three pleasures that are essentially interchangeable.
In the shower the hot water flowed through gilded fittings; he stood on green onyx and felt the warmth on his scalp.
His wife had died five years ago. After a year in which he kept to himself, he had started taking women to hotel rooms. Then he built his own hotel here, in the seventh floor of this Versova building. Down pillows and cushions, pure white bedsheets of 2.8 micron pore size to repel allergens. Lights that turn themselves on as you clap your hands: so you don’t even have to move from bed. The flat in Malabar Hill