Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [66]
“Come this way, sir. And the child. And you too, madam. I’m sorry, I have another appointment after this.”
“He’s not a child. He’s eighteen years old.”
“Yes, of course,” their guide said. “Observe the fittings and finishings. The Rathore Group is all about fittings and finishing ….”
“Why are there no curtain rods in the rooms?”
“Madam is correct. But the Rathore Group would be happy to add curtain rods for someone like Madam.”
Red curtains would be perfect here. The place would look like a lighthouse at night. Neighbours would notice; people on the road would look up and say, “Who lives there?”
Mrs. Puri pressed the soft hand that was in hers. Who else?
What an enormous, high-ceilinged, light-welcoming apartment. And look at the floor: a mosaic of black and white squares. A precise, geometrical delineation of space, not the colourless borderless floors on which she had fought and eaten and slept all her married life.
In the lift, she asked her husband: “You didn’t tell anyone you were coming here, did you?”
He shook his head.
The Evil Eye had blighted Mrs. Puri’s life once. Back when she was pregnant, she had bragged to her friends that it was going to be a boy for sure. The Evil Eye heard her and punished her son. She was not going to make that mistake again.
She had kept up the same charade for weeks now, announcing to Ram Khare that she and the boy were off “to the temple”—before catching an autorickshaw to the latest building she was inspecting. Her husband arrived directly. Everything was hush-hush. The Evil Eye would not hear of her good fortune this time.
Mr. Puri placed his hand on his son’s head, tapping along the close-cropped hair to the whorl at the centre.
“How many times have I told you not to do that?” Mrs. Puri pulled Ramu away from his father. “His skull is sensitive. It’s still growing.”
When the door opened, Ritika, her friend from Tower B, and her husband, the doctor, were waiting outside.
They stared at each other, and then burst out laughing.
“What a surprise, if we ended up neighbours again,” Mrs. Puri said, half an hour later. “A lovely surprise, of course.”
The two families were at a South Indian restaurant just below the Rathore Towers, in an air-conditioned room with framed photographs of furry foreign dogs and milkmaids.
“Yes,” Ritika smiled. “Wouldn’t it be?”
Mrs. Puri and Ritika had been at the same school in Matunga, then together at KC College in Churchgate. Mrs. Puri had had her nose ahead. Debating. Studies. Prize competitions. Even when they were looking at boys to marry. Her groom had been taller. Two inches.
Now Ritika’s two children by her short husband were short, ugly, and normal.
“How much are you getting for your place?” Ritika asked. “We have 820 square feet.”
“Ours is 834 square feet. They were going to put common toilets in Tower A, then added that little bit of floor space to the C flat. There are advantages to being in an old building.”
“So that means you’re getting ….” Ritika looked around for pen and paper, before sketching into the air.
“One point sixty-seven crores,” Mrs. Puri said. “And you?”
Ritika withdrew her finger from the air, smiled with dignity, and asked: “Did you see one of those three-bedroom places on the top floor? That’s what we were thinking of buying.”
“We can’t spend more than sixty-five lakhs.” Mrs. Puri mouthed the next sentence: “The rest is for Ramu’s future. Only problem is, this gentleman ….” She leaned her head towards her husband. “… wants to leave the city.”
Fighting, like love-making, should be hidden from the child: the eighteen-year rule in the Puri household. But this was open provocation.
“Why would anyone want to live in Mumbai today?” Mr. Puri snapped at his wife. “Let’s go to a civilized place like Pune. Some place where ten thousand beggars don’t come every morning by train. I’m sick of this city, I’m sick of its rat race.”
“The thing