Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [54]
Fruit- and vegetable-vendors drew towards the red stool, looking its occupant up and down with wonder, as if he had been struck by lightning and survived.
“My greatness—if there be any—is to do with my students,” Masterji explained.
He pointed to the discarded newspapers that the onion-seller had piled on his cart, to wrap his produce in: “You’ll find an article written by a man named Noronha in the Times. My student. Oh, I take no credit for Noronha. A smart boy, so hard-working—used to walk to school every day from Kalina. Boys were hard-working in the old days. I wonder where those days have gone ….”
One of the vendors, a big swarthy man whose plump face was dotted with white stubble, turned to the onion-seller and asked loudly: “Ram Niwas, there’s a man here asking for ‘the old days.’ Are you selling them? Because I’m not. I’m selling only potatoes.”
And then he laughed at his own joke, before returning to his potatoes.
A horn sounded through the market. A man on a scooter was waving at Masterji.
“My wife told me you called—I came at once, came at once looking for you.”
Everyone in Vakola was familiar with the sight of Shankar Trivedi’s shirtless, mesomorphic torso—a white shawl draped over the shoulders—dramatically entering or leaving a building on a red Honda scooter, like an angel of birth or death. He had been recruited by Purnima to conduct, each year, the memorial service for their daughter Sandhya; a service that Masterji, for his wife’s sake, had always attended. When Purnima died, it was Trivedi who had performed the last rites, with coconuts and incense, at a temple in Bandra.
Drawing the old teacher away from the vendors, he pumped Masterji’s hand in his. “Congratulations, congratulations,” he said.
“Trivedi, Purnima’s one-year death anniversary is coming up. October the fifth. It is five months away, but I wanted to make sure you mark it on your calendar. A very important day for me, Trivedi.”
The priest let go of Masterji’s hand: he gaped.
“Masterji: when your daughter passed away, who performed the rites for her?”
“You did, Trivedi.”
“When your wife passed away, who performed the rites for her?”
“You did, Trivedi.”
“And when my son needed a science ‘top-up,’ who taught him?”
“I did, Trivedi.”
“So what’s this talk of appointment and disappointment, Masterji? It’ll be an honour to perform your late wife’s first-year Samskara. Don’t worry.”
Trivedi offered to buy Masterji a little something for the heat—a coconut. Masterji knew the priest as a tight-fisted, even unscrupulous man—there was always some unpleasantness over the bill for his ceremonies—and he succumbed to the sheer novelty of the offer; with Trivedi walking his scooter, they went to the coconut-man who sat near the entrance to St. Catherine’s with a black knife and a large wicker basket that groaned with coconuts.
As the coconut-man began tapping on the green nuts to sound out the water in each, Masterji watched Trivedi’s face. The priest, in between births, marriages, and deaths, gave lessons in the proper recitation of Sanskrit verse to paying pupils. The well-oiled moustache that sat on his lips was itself a fine line of poetry: supple and balanced, robustly black with a tinge of grey at the edges, punctuated in the middle by a perfect caesura. Trivedi was curling its ends and smiling, but the truth was leaking out of his eyes and nose.
He was almost on the verge of tears.
Burning with jealousy, Masterji thought. Indeed, it now seemed to him that a good portion of everyone’s professed admiration for Vishram all these years had been a kind of condescension for an old, crumbling building. And now they had been startled into real respect for its inhabitants.
“I’ll give you good news, Trivedi,” he said, taking pity on the man.
With a curved knife the coconut man slashed open the mouth of one of the nuts.
The priest’s eyes grew large.
“This Shah is going to make an offer for our place too?”
“No. The good news for you is that there is no good news for us.