Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [45]
He showed her the glass cabinet, filled with the little silver trophies and citations in golden letters that testified to his three decades of service; the photograph of his farewell party at St. Catherine’s, signed by two dozen old boys; and the small framed photo, next to it, of a pale, oval-faced woman in a blue sari.
“My late wife.”
The girl moved towards the photograph. She wore braces, and her dark steel-rimmed glasses echoed the metal on her teeth. The frames were hexagonal. Masterji counted the number of edges a second time. An ungainly shape: why had it ever come into fashion?
Reading the date below the photograph, she said,
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s been almost a year now. I’m used to it. She would have liked you, Ms. Meenakshi. My daughter would have been your age. Your name is Meenakshi, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“Where is your daughter these days? In Mumbai?” she asked.
“She died many years before her mother did.”
“I keep saying the wrong thing.”
“Don’t worry, Ms. Meenakshi. If you don’t ask about people, you don’t find out about people. Here,” Masterji said, “this is her drawing book. I just found it yesterday inside my cupboard.”
He wiped the dust off the book—“SANDHYA MURTHY SKETCH & PRACTICE JOURNAL”—and turned the pages for her.
“That’s our local church. Isn’t it?”
“Yes. St. Antony’s. And this drawing is of the Dhobi-ghat, see the people washing. No, not the famous one in Mahalakshmi. The one right here. And this is a lovely drawing. This parrot. The best my daughter ever did. She was nineteen years old. Only nineteen.”
He could see from Ms. Meenakshi’s eyes that she wanted to know how the artist’s life had ended. He closed the album.
“I don’t wish to bore you, Ms. Meenakshi. I wanted to apologize, that was all. When men grow old, contrary to what you may have heard, they do not become wiser. Are you going down to see Mr. Shah?”
Her eyebrows arched.
“Aren’t you? He’s giving you all this money.”
“He says he’s giving us all this money. You must know about developers. You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”
“No. Public relations.”
“What does that mean, exactly? All the young people now want to be in public relations.”
“I’ll come back one day and explain.”
Thanking her for her graciousness in accepting his apology, and inviting her over another day for some ginger tea, he closed the door.
Down below, the hubbub grew. The Secretary’s voice boomed over the microphone: “Can everyone hear me? Testing, testing. Can everyone ….”
Masterji sat down. Why should he go down? Just because some rich man was coming? He hated these formal gatherings of the Society: every time they held an annual general meeting, the bickering among his neighbours, the petty accusations—“your son pisses on the compound wall,” “your husband’s gargling wakes me up in the morning”—always embarrassed him.
He expected another bloodbath this evening, Mrs. Rego and Mrs. Puri shouting at each other like women at the fish market.
With his feet on the teakwood table, he turned the pages of Sandhya’s album until he reached the parrot. The sketch was incomplete; perhaps she had still been working on it when … He placed his fingers on the edges of the drawing, which felt as if they were still growing. Her living thought.
Where is your daughter these days?
The same place she has been for eleven years.
She had been on her way to college, when someone had pushed her out of the train. A packed compartment in the women’s first class in the morning—someone had elbowed her out. She had fallen head-first on to the tracks, and lain there like that. Not one of her fellow passengers stopped the train. They didn’t want to be late for their work. All of them women, good women. Secretaries. Bank clerks. Sales managers. She had bled to death.
This child that he had made, the tracks had unmade. Her brains, oozing from her broken head, because the passengers did