Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [40]
With his head bent to the floor, covered in his towel, he heard feet thump on the floor, and a door going Slam! He rubbed his hair and asked the floor (dark green tiles with embedded white flakes, a favourite pattern, used in all his buildings): why, when she is worried about your interest in her, will a woman do the very things that will cause your interest to drop further?
Sitting on his chair, watching his ocean, swaying from his hip, Shah hummed his favourite Kishore Kumar song. Aa chal ke tujhe, mein … Leaning back from the chair, he pressed down on the bed with a finger, feeling the 2.8 micron pore width bedding on the premium spring mattress: he lifted the finger with a pinprick of recharging will power.
The path to a new building in Mumbai sparkled with small stones—police, litigation, greed—and he would need every ounce of his body fat to crush those stones, one by one. Before every new project, like a religious ritual, he had to come here, to this flat, to whichever girl he was with at that moment, Nannu or Smita or Rosie, to inhale her perfume, eat toast, watch the ocean, touch the golden fittings in the toilet. In the presence of luxury his capacity for violence was always heightened.
He knocked on her door: “I’ll count to five, Rosie.”
“No. I’ll never come out. You never take me to your home. Never—”
“One,” he counted. “Two. Three. Four.”
A woman’s face peeped from behind the opened door.
An hour later, Mr. Shah washed his face, hands, and chest in her bathroom. From the window he spotted a man in white shirt and black trousers down by the beach, sitting on rocks and doodling on the sand as he waited for his master’s phone call.
No assistant had done the job as long as this one had without giving in to fear or greed. But this Shanmugham was special. A thoroughbred Doberman.
He called Giri on his mobile phone.
“I’m going to SiddhiVinayak Temple at five o’clock and then to my Society in Vakola. Tell the boy to be at the temple. On time.”
Rosie lay on her right side, her face hidden in her arms. He lay down beside her, and clapped, turning the light in her room on. He clapped again—it went off—and again—until Rosie slapped his shoulder and said, “Stop acting like a child.”
Shanmugham, still sitting on the rock, had picked up a stone and was pounding it into the hot sand, again and again.
He had been tricked. Tricked.
By his own bank manager.
He remembered that greasy old white-haired man’s exact words—since he was such a valued customer, he would be getting a “little extra” on top of the scheduled interest rates (“the best rate legally obtainable in this city, I promise you”); and now he had discovered that a beach umbrella was advertising a higher interest rate!
Throwing the stone away, Shanmugham got up from the rock, and brushed the sand off his trousers.
After lunch at a Punjabi dhaba where he had to wash his hands with water from a plastic jug, he watched young women run on treadmills inside a gym called “Barbarian,” drank a fresh coconut by the side of a road at two o’clock, and ate pistachio ice cream from a porcelain plate at a restaurant at three.
He divided the slab of ice cream into sixteen parts, and ate one part at a time, to prolong his stay at the restaurant. By the fourteenth piece of ice cream, he was certain that the middle-aged man in shorts was that actor who used to be famous ten years ago. Amrish Puri.
Not Amrish. He punished a piece of ice cream by squashing it with his spoon. Om Puri.
Chewing the fifteenth piece, he thought: I am eating ice cream at a restaurant where a film actor strolls in for the same thing.
He would never have dreamed such a thing possible till that day, six years ago, when in his dingy real-estate office in Chembur he heard that a builder was looking for a labour contractor. They had met in a nearby South Indian restaurant. Mr. Shah had been pouring tea into his saucer.
“A simple question.” The fat man had shown him two gold-ringed fingers. “Two rooms. One is four by five, one is ten by two. Both are twenty square feet. Correct?