Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [56]
“Then who can help us?”
Ajwani shrugged.
“Let me ask you this. How many people in Vishram Tower A are saying no to the offer?”
“Four.”
Ajwani tapped the table with his mobile phone.
“Wrong. Only one person really opposes it. The other three don’t know what they want.”
“Which one?”
The waiter placed the sugar on the table; Ajwani tucked his mobile phone into his pocket. He smiled.
“The deadline is too tight, Mr. Shanmugham. A project like this will take two years, minimum. Why is your boss pushing so hard?”
Shanmugham’s eyes glistened. He drank his tea and moved the empty glass back to the centre of the table.
“Which one?”
Reaching for the sugar, Ajwani took a spoonful, and held it poised over his cup. “You want information from me ….” He vibrated the spoon. “… for nothing. That’s greed. Give me a sweetener. Another thousand rupees a square foot.”
Shanmugham rose to his feet.
“I came to Vakola to deliver boxes of sweets to your Society. You will find one for you at the gate, Mr. Ajwani. Other than that, I have nothing to give you.”
The broker stirred the sugar into his tea.
“You will never get Vishram Society to accept your offer without my help.”
Stopping at the gate of the building, Ajwani discovered that Shanmugham had been telling the truth about the sweets.
Red boxes, each with an image of Lord SiddhiVinayak. Inside each one was 300 grams of dough-and-cashew sweets, cut into diamond-shaped slices. A handwritten letter strapped to every box. Signed. “From my family to yours. Dharmen Shah. MD, Confidence Group.”
“I gave your box to your wife,” Ram Khare said.
Ajwani pointed to the stack by the guard’s side. “Why are there four boxes there?”
“Four people said they didn’t want the sweets,” the guard said. “Can you believe that?”
Ajwani peered at the boxes. “Which four?”
A sunny smile from Ibrahim Kudwa’s bearded face was a sure thing as one of his neighbours passed the jumble of wire, vegetation, brick, cheap roofing, and peeling paint that went by the title SPEED-TEK CYBER ZONE CYBER-CAFÉ. The trunk of the banyan by the cyber-café had been painted white, in simulation of snow. Kudwa’s long-time assistant, Arjun, had apparently converted to Christianity some years ago; last Christmas, he won the banyan tree over to his religion and placed a private crib with toy figures, arranged in a splendour of cotton-snow, at its foot. Other evidence of Christmas could be found in the large five-pronged star, surrounded by bunting, that Arjun had hung over the roof of the café; months later, it was still there, unexpected, colossal, the bunting fraying, and, with the light behind it in the morning, looking like a symbol of the Apocalypse. As if drawn to the mystic star, a Hindu holy man sometimes sat outside the café. Mr. Kudwa saw no objection to his doing so; indeed he had even encouraged the man with the occasional two-rupee coin.
Man of enterprise, Ibrahim Kudwa; lead singer in a rock-and-roll band at university, he had chosen, after graduation, not to remain in the Muslim-only building in Bandra East where his brothers and sisters still lived. Vishram was old, but he wanted his children to mix with Hindus and Christians. On the advice of a magazine article, he had decided that the future was in technology. Rejecting an offer from his brother to join the family hardware store in Kalanagar, he opened a cyber-café in the neighbourhood in 1998. Easy money. His rates rose from ten rupees per hour, to fifteen, to twenty, and then declined again to fifteen, and then to ten. A treacherous thing, technology. Within six months, an internet connection had become so cheap that only the rough, the rowdy, and the tourists needed a cyber-café. Hardware held its price; his brother had recently bought a second two-bedroom flat as an investment property. Then the government decided that anyone using a cyber-café was a potential terrorist. User name, phone number, address, driving licence, or passport number—the café owner was legally obliged