Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [6]
Kothari brushed his hair from ear to ear to hide his baldness, an act that hinted at vanity or stupidity; yet his eyes were slit-like beneath snowy eyebrows, and each time he grinned, whiskery laugh-lines gave him the look of a predatory lynx. His position carried no salary, yet he was ingratiating at each annual general meeting, virtually pleading for re-election with his palms folded in a namaste; no one could tell why this bland bald businessman wanted to sit in a dingy Secretary’s office and sink his face into files and folders for hours. He was so secretive, indeed, that you feared one day he would dissolve among his papers like a bar of Pears Soap. He had no known “nature.”
Mrs. Puri (3C), who was the closest thing to a friend the Secretary had, insisted there was a “nature.” If you talked to him long enough, you would discover he feared China, worried about Jihadis on the suburban trains, and favoured a national identification card to flush out illegal Bangladeshi immigrants; but most had never known him to express any opinion, unless it was related to the game of cricket. Some believed that he was always on his guard because as a young man he had committed an indiscretion; his wife was rumoured to be his cousin, or from another community, or older than him by two years; or even, by the malicious, his “sister.” They had one son, Tinku, a noted player of carom and other indoor sports, fat and white-skinned, with an imbecilic smile pasted on his face at all times—although whether he was truly stupid, or whether, like his father, merely hiding his “nature,” was unclear.
The Secretary threw his sandwich wrapper into the waste bin. His breath was now a passion of raw onion and curried potato; he returned to work.
He was calculating the annual maintenance fees, which paid for the guard, Mary the cleaning lady, the seven-kinds-of-vermin man who came to fight invasions of wasps and honeybees, and the annual heavy repairs to the building’s roofing and general structure. For two years now Kothari had kept the maintenance bill constant at 1.55 rupees a square foot per tenant per month, which translated into an annual bill of (on average) 14,694 rupees per year per tenant, payable to the Society in one sum or two (in which case the second instalment was recalculated at 1.65 rupees a square foot). His ability to keep the maintenance bill steady, despite the pressure of inflation in a city like Mumbai, was considered his principal achievement as Secretary, even if some whispered that he pulled this off only by doing nothing at all to maintain the Society.
He burped, and looked up to see Mary, the khachada-wali, who had been sweeping the corridor with her broom, standing outside his office.
A lean silent woman, barely five feet tall, Mary had big front teeth erupting out of her concave cheeks. Residents kept conversation with her to a minimum.
“That man who asked all the questions is taking a long time to make up his mind,” she said.
The Secretary went back to his figures. But Mary still stood at the doorway.
“I mean, to ask the same set of questions for two days in a row. That’s curiosity.”
Now the Secretary looked up.
“Two days? He wasn’t here yesterday.”
“You weren’t here yesterday morning,” the servant said. “He was here.” She went back to her sweeping.
“What did he want yesterday?”
“The same thing he wanted today. Answers to lots and lots of questions.”
Mr. Kothari’s bulbous nose contracted into a dark berry: he was frowning. He got up from his desk and came to the threshold of the office.
“Who saw him here yesterday other than you?”
With a handkerchief over his nose he waited for Mary to stop sweeping,