Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [62]
Leaving light and noise behind him, he came to a car park … metal fence stood behind the car park, and dark water beyond it. At the end of the water, he saw the lights of Navy Nagar: the southern tip of Mumbai.
Shah pressed his face on the cold metal ringlets of the fence. He gazed at the distant lights, and then rotated his face until he was looking at the earth.
This fence was supposed to mark the land’s end, but a promontory of debris, broken chunks of old buildings, granite, plastic, and Pepsi-Cola had sneaked past it—the enterprising garbage pushed several feet into water. Shah’s fingers pulsed as he gazed at the amphibian earth of Nariman Point. Look: how this city never stops growing: rubble, shit, plants, mulch, left to themselves, start slurping up sea, edging towards the other end of the bay like a snake’s tongue, hissing through salt water, there is more land here, more land.
A churning began in the promontory—plastic bags and pebbles started to ripple, as if mice were scurrying beneath them; then a sparrow shot out of the detritus. It’s coming to life, Shah thought. If only Satish were here to see it. All of Bombay was created like this: through the desire of junk and landfill, on which the reclaimed city sits, to become something better. In this way, they all emerged: fish, birds, the leopards of Borivali, even the starlets and super-models of Bandra.
Now a homeless man began moving over the debris; he must have found a hole in the fence. He squatted and spat. His spit contributed to the reclaiming thunderhead, as would his shit, soon to follow. Shah closed his eyes and prayed to the debris, and to the man defecating in it: Let me build, one more time.
“Sir ….” He felt a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not clean here.”
Shanmugham, in his white shirt and black trousers, was standing behind him.
They returned to light and noise.
“What is that Secretary doing?” Shah asked, as they walked back to the street fair.
He had just heard the bad news: the four Nos at Vishram had become three, but those three Nos were simply not budging. And the Secretary protested on the phone that there was nothing he could do to make them sign the agreement.
“I don’t know why they made him Secretary, sir,” Shanmugham said. “He’s useless. But there is someone else … a broker … who might help us. He has asked for money.”
“That’s fine. Spend another lakh, or two lakhs, if you have to. Spend even more than that, if absolutely necessary. October the third is nearby.” Shah cupped his hand around his ear. “Every day I can hear it coming closer. Can you hear it too?”
“Yes, sir,” Shanmugham said. “I can hear it. I can hear October the third coming closer.”
The builder stopped and turned his head. A sugarcane juice stand had been brought to the side of the road as part of the fair. His eyes rose to the top of the stand, where the canes had been piled, six foot high, the tallest of them curling down at the ends, like the claws of a crab.
The cane-crushing machine was lit up by naked electric bulbs. In a square of raw light, a boy turned a red wheel, which turned smaller green wheels, which tinkled and crushed the cane, whose juice, dribbling down a gutter full of irregular chunks of ice, passed through a dirty strainer into a stainless-steel vessel that fogged up from the cold liquid. Poured into small conical glasses, and sold to customers for five rupees each, seven for a larger glass.
“I used to live on this juice when I came to Bombay, Shanmugham. Live on it.”
“Sir: they use dirty water to make the ice. Jaundice, diarrhoea, worms, God knows what else.”
“I know. I know.”
The bright, fast, musical wheels turned once again, crushing the cane—Shah imagined bricks rising, scaffolding erected, men hoisted miles into the air on such tinkling energy. If only he were new to Bombay again: if only he could drink that stuff again.
On the drive back, in his mind’s eye he continued to see them, the sugarcane-crusher’s wheels turning under the naked light bulbs, discs of speeding light