Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [61]
In a little while, someone had come by to check on her. It was the Battleship herself.
Wiping her hands on her sari, Mary came out to talk.
“Today was a false alarm, Mary, but sooner or later they will come to demolish this place. You should move while you can.”
“This is my home, madam. Would you leave yours?”
She asked the Battleship about Timothy, her son. “Is he playing cricket by the temple?”
“Let him play, Mary. He’s a child. There won’t be time to play later on.”
“Those other boys don’t go to school, madam. Some of them are nearly twenty years old. Do you let your son play with them?”
Mrs. Rego, about to put Mary in her place, restrained herself.
“I’m the one who gives lectures here, Mary. I’m not used to hearing them from people who live by the nullah. But let’s not fight. Both of us had good news today.”
She was on her way home from the office of a lawyer in Shivaji Park who specialized in Housing Societies and their disputes. Not true, he had told her, that every member of a Society has to say “Yes” before it can be demolished. A three-quarters majority vote in favour may be enough, legally speaking. But the law spoke ambiguously on this matter. As on most matters, the lawyer added. The law in Mumbai was not blind: far from it, it had two faces and four working eyes and saw every case from both sides and could never make up its mind. But an ambiguous, ambivalent, and ambidextrous law was not without its advantages. The issue here—individual right vis-à-vis collective well-being—was so complicated that if a single resident of Vishram went to court, the demolition would be postponed for years while the judge scratched his head over the case and tried to find a pattern in half a century of conflicting legal precedents. Mr. Shah would give up and go somewhere else.
Mary came out of her hut with an axe and started cutting firewood for her evening cooking.
Mrs. Rego had wandered a few huts down the nullah.
“How many times have I told you,” she was shouting at a man who had a well-known drinking problem, “not to even think of raising a hand at your wife?”
Mary was thinking of her Timothy. He should be in here, studying, not out there by the Tamil temple, playing cricket with those older, rougher creatures. He would soon start to look up to them.
She might hit him too hard for breaking her orders: better to take it out on the firewood. She swung and chopped.
“I used to take you and your mother to a street fair in Bandra when you were this high. I’m sure you remember.”
At the other end of town, Dharmen Shah walked with his son past coloured balloons and fluorescent plastic loops. They had had an awkward tea in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, and emerged to find Nariman Point closed to traffic for a street fair. Blobs of vanilla ice cream, in cones or in cups, materialized around them like snowballs; horses, drawing chariots plated with silver-foil and shaped like swans, clattered up and down the avenue.
“When am I getting my credit card back?”
“When I feel like giving it back. Have you been seeing those gang boys again?”
Satish stopped. “Horse shit. Everywhere,” he said. The bottoms of his jeans dragged on the dirty road, but Shah assumed it was the reigning style and checked himself.
“I asked you a question about the gang, Satish. Do you still ….”
The boy had put his fingers on his nose. “I want to go home,” he said. His father asked only if he had money for a taxi.
Shah dialled for Shanmugham, who was at Malabar Hill, waiting to deliver the evening report to him.
“Come over to Nariman Point.”
He stood behind a row of children who had lined up to buy red crystalline ice candy in a cup. The children looked at him and giggled; he smiled. All around him he saw men with their wives and sons.
I’m losing my boy, he thought. He knew that Satish had probably not told his taxi to go to Malabar Hill—he was headed straight to the home of one of his friends.
A cluster of yellow balloons rose above the