Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [60]
Mary looked at the red box: large spots of grease stained its cardboard sides.
Two scavenger-women had been waiting for Mary to toss out the contents of the blue bin; one was holding a car’s windscreen-wiper. Now they went barefoot through the wet refuse, old jute bags on their shoulders, sifting through the rubbish with the wiper. They left Mrs. Puri’s bag alone. They were not looking for information: merely plastic and tin.
Back in Vishram, Mary hid the sweet-box in the servant’s alcove, then swept the common areas, the stairwell, and the compound.
Half an hour later, with the sweet-box in one hand, she was buying vegetables at the market. Something fresh for her son. Beetroots. Good for children’s brains, Mrs. Puri said, who was always cooking them for her boy. She should give me the beetroots, Mary thought. What was the point of wasting them on that imbecile?
Balancing a pav of beetroots on top of the red sweet-box, she came to Hibiscus Society.
“Why are you looking for work here? Don’t you have a job at Vishram?” the security guard asked.
“The builder has made them an offer. Everyone leaves on October 3.”
“Oh, a redevelopment.” The guard sucked his teeth. He was an old man; he had seen Societies. “It will take years and years. Someone will go to court. You don’t have to worry now.”
“Anyone living in the slum by the nullah—attention!”
A man came running through the market. He cupped his hands to his mouth: “Slum clearance! The men are here!”
The guard at Hibiscus Society, scratching his head and contemplating Mary’s proposal, said, “All right. But what’s my interest in this? Do I get a monthly cut? If I don’t, the ….”
But where the maid-servant had stood, a red box of sweets now lay on the ground, beetroots rolling around it.
Bumping into people, she ran. Pushing cycles and carts, she ran.
Past Vishram Society, past the Tamil temple, past the construction site where the two towers were coming up, and into the slums; passing narrow lane after narrow lane, dodging stray dogs and roosters to run into the open wasteland beyond. A plane soared above her. Finally she reached the nullah, a long canal of black water, on whose banks a row of blue tarpaulin tents had risen.
Her neighbours were chopping wood; a rooster strutted round the huts; children played on rubber tyres tied to the trees.
“No one is coming here, Mary,” her neighbour told her in Tamil. “It was a false alarm.”
Slowing down, breathing deeply, Mary came to her tent, and looked inside its blue tarpaulin cover, held aloft by a wooden pole. Everything intact: cooking oil, cooking vessels, her son’s school books, photo albums.
“They won’t come till after the monsoons,” her neighbour shouted. “We’re safe till then.”
Mary sat down and wiped her face.
Among the patchwork of fully legal slums, semi-legal slums, and pockets of huts in Vakola, this row of tents next to a polluted canal, the nullah that cut through the suburb, led the most precarious existence. Because they had come here after the last government amnesty for illegal slums, and because the canal could flood during a heavy monsoon, the squatters had not been granted the identification cards which “regularized” a slum-dweller’s existence and gave him the right to be relocated to a pucca building if the government bulldozed his hut. Municipal officials had repeatedly threatened the dwellers by the nullah with eviction, yet someone had always intervened to save them, usually a politician who needed their votes at the next municipal election. Last month, Mrs. Rego had come down to explain to them that things had changed. It was now a season of will power in Bombay: the coalition of corruption, philanthropy, and inertia that had protected them for so long was disintegrating. A new official had been put in charge of clearing the city’s illegal slums. He had smashed miles of huts in Thane and promised to do the same in Mumbai. Every day their slum survived should be considered a miracle.
The huts along the nullah were now glowing from inside. Mary had been given an old