Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [50]
Then he turned to the Secretary and asked: “Sewri? Why not Bandra or Andheri? You’ll have the money now.”
“The flamingoes, sir,” the Secretary said. “You know about them, don’t you?”
Of course, Shah knew. Sewri in winter was visited by a flock of migratory flamingoes, and bird lovers came to watch with binoculars. But he did not understand.
“Were you born here, Mr. Shah?” the Secretary asked.
“I was born in Krishnapur in Gujarat. But I am a proud tax-paying resident of Mumbai.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” the Secretary said quickly. “I have nothing against migrants, nothing. I meant, all of you at this table were born in India. Correct?”
“Of course.”
“Not me. Not me.”
The Secretary smiled. “I was born in Africa.”
His father, lured from Jamnagar to Kenya by an African-born cousin, had set up a grocery shop in Nairobi in the 1950s; the shop had prospered; a son had been born there. Ashvin Kothari spoke now of things even his wife had never heard. Of an African servant lady wiping a large porcelain dish and laying it on a table with a blue tablecloth; a market in Nairobi where his father was a big man; and then one more thing, a memory which blazed in his mind’s eye like a pink flame.
Flamingoes. A whole flock of them.
When he was not yet five, he had been taken to a lake in the countryside full of the wild pink birds. His father had put his thumbs under his armpits and lifted him up so he could see to the horizon; the flamingoes rose all at once and he had screamed over his father’s head.
Shah listened. The dream-merchant listened. Waiters gathered round the table.
Now the Secretary felt something he had felt only once in his life, when as a ten-year-old schoolboy he had recited the famous lines from the Ramayana:
Do as you will, evil king:
I, for my part, know right from wrong
And will never follow you,
said the virtuous demon Maricha
When the lord of Lanka
Asked him to steal Rama’s wife
so perfectly at a poetry competition that everyone in the audience, even his father, had stood up to applaud. He sensed that same shimmer now around his bald head: his comb-over felt like a laurel wreath.
“And then?” Shah asked. “What happened to your father?”
Kothari smiled.
“He found out that Africans did not like Indian men who did well.”
When he was eight years old, there was a threat to their business, and his father had sold it for a pittance to return to Jamnagar, to die there in a dingy shop full of green-gram and brinjal.
“That was how they treated us then,” the Bollywood actor remembered. “Idi Amin saying to the Indians, get up and get out.”
The builder coughed. “They look up to Indians in Africa now. We’re drilling for oil in Sudan.”
A quarter of an hour later, with a valedictory flourish of dance steps, the dream-merchant bowed and vanished. Mr. Shah looked at his guests and at once they knew it was time to leave. By the same power, Kothari was made to know he was not to leave. He sat at the table as hands came to shake the builder’s; some of them shook his hand too.
“Do you know why I did not invite Mr. Ravi of Tower B here tonight?”
The guests had left. Shah watched the waiters clear the buffet.
Kothari sensed that Mr. Shah, who had changed from a vivacious host into a sick man with a cough in the course of the evening, was now about to turn into yet another man. He shook his head. “No, sir.”
“His building won’t make any trouble: it’s full of young people. Reasonable people. So you are the key man, Mr. Kothari. Do you follow me?”
“Not exactly.”
The birthday boy joined the table, sitting between his father and the Secretary.
The builder moved his son out of his line of sight. He spoke