Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [59]
Sitting next to her son, Mrs. Puri pointed to the sky. The lines of diminishing rain were sparkling: the sun was coming out.
“Remember what Masterji says? When there is rain and sun together, there is …. You know the word, Ramu. Say it. It’s a rai … a rain … a rainb ….”
Shielding Ramu’s wet head with her arm, Mrs. Puri looked up. A drop of rainwater was hanging from the ceiling. Vishram’s old walls glistened with bright seepage; moisture was snuggling into cracks in the paint, licking steel rods, and chewing on mortar.
Ramu, who could read his mother’s thoughts, reached for her gold bangles and began to play with them.
“We don’t have to worry, Ramu. We’re moving into a brand-new home. Just three months from now. One that won’t ever fall down.”
Ramu whispered.
“Yes, everyone, even Masterji and Secretary Uncle.”
The boy smiled; then plugged his ears and closed his eyes.
Mrs. Puri turned and shouted, “Mary! Don’t make so much noise with the rubbish. I have a growing son here!”
Mary, as she did every day, was dragging a mildewed blue barrel from floor to floor of Vishram Society, emptying into it the contents of the rubbish bins placed outside each door, and cleaning up the mess made by the early-morning cat as it looked for food.
The people of Vishram Society did not praise servants lightly: but Mary they trusted. So honest that even a one-rupee coin dropped on the floor would be put back on the table. In seven years of service not one complaint of theft. True, there was always dirt on the banisters and on the stairs, but the building was an old one. It secreted decay. Why blame Mary?
Her life was a hard one. She had married a pair of muscled arms that drifted into and out of her life, leaving bruises and a child; her father sometimes turned up under the vegetable stalls in the market, dead-drunk.
Done with 5B, the last flat on the top floor, she rotated the blue bin down the steps, filling the stairwell with a noise like thunder. (“Mary! Didn’t you hear me! Stop that noise at once! Mary!”) With the branching veins on her forearms in high relief, as if the bin were tied to them, she rolled it out of the Society and out of the gate and down the road to an open rubbish pit.
The rains had turned the pit into a marsh: cellophane, eggshell, politician’s face, stock quote, banana leaf, sliced-off chicken’s feet, and green crowns cut from pineapples. Ribbons of unspooled cassette-tape draped over everything like molten caramel.
Throwing plastic bags from her blue bin into the marsh, Mary, through the corner of her eye, saw a man walking towards her. She smelled Johnson’s Baby Powder. She took a step closer to the rubbish pile, preferring its odours.
“Mary.”
She grunted to acknowledge Ajwani’s presence. She disliked the way he looked at her; his eyes put a price on women.
“What was in Mrs. Puri’s rubbish bag this morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you find it for me?” he asked, with a smile.
She waded into the rubbish and picked out a plastic bag, which she threw at Ajwani’s feet. He turned it over with his shoe.
“Do you remember, Mrs. Puri said she was taking her Ramu to the temple yesterday? Sitla Devi in Mahim, she said, when I asked her. Now, when Hindus go to the temple they bring things back with them—flowers, coconut shells, kumkum powder—and you don’t see any of them in her rubbish. What does that tell you?”
Mary, having emptied the blue bin, scraped its insides with her palm. Three dark hogs began snivelling in the muck; a fourth, its eyes closed, stood stationary in the slush, like a holy meditating thing.
“I don’t know.”
“A man has no secrets from his rubbish bin, Mary. From now on, I want you to look through three rubbish bags every morning. Masterji’s, Mr. Pinto’s, and Mrs. Rego’s.”
“That is not my work,” she said. “It is the early-morning cat’s work.”
“Then become the cat, Mary.”
With a smile Ajwani offered a ten-rupee note. She shook her head.
“Take it, take it,” he said.
“This is for you too.” Ajwani held out a red box with the image of Lord SiddhiVinayak