Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [68]
At this point, the ceiling lights go off—to add drama. Shadows are cast on the wall in the glow of the lamp light.
The preparations for the day’s top-up were all in place. With two hours to kill, Masterji picked up The Soul’s Passageway after Death and made another attempt to finish it.
He followed the atma’s flight of enlightenment over the seventh and final ocean of the afterlife, beyond which glittered the peaks of snowy mountains. Another ten thousand years of purgation awaited it here.
He closed his eyes. At the age of sixteen, when other boys his age in Suratkal were playing cricket in the maidan or chasing college girls, Masterji had gone through a “spiritual” phase, spending his afternoons reading Dr. Radhakrishnan on Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, performing exercises from a second-hand copy of B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, and teaching himself Sanskrit. This “spiritual” phase ended the night he watched his father’s corpse burning in the cemetery and thought: That’s all there is to life. Nothing more. After his father’s death, when he went to Mumbai to live with an uncle, he left Dr. Radhakrishnan and B. K. S. Iyengar behind him. Bombay was a new world, and he had come here to become a new man. Now it seemed to him that, oddly enough, he had spent his forty-four years in Bombay exactly in the manner prescribed by the Hindu philosophers: like a lotus in a dirty pond, be in the world but not of it. Nothing had made him cry for years. Not even his wife’s death. Was he really sorry that she had died? He did not know. The hypodermic needle of the outside world had bent at his epidermis and never penetrated.
He heard something strike the floor, and realized it was his book. “I’m falling asleep. During the day.”
Not once in his adult life, not even when sick, had he allowed himself this luxury; he had scolded his wife and daughter if he caught them napping in the afternoon, and punished, by a stroke of a steel foot-ruler applied to the knuckles, his son. With a concentrated exertion of will he broke through the settling surface of sleep and got up.
He turned the tap in the living-room sink to wash his face in cold water, but the customary trickle had dried up completely.
How, in the midst of the monsoons, could he have no water in his living room? He struck the tap with his fist.
From the stairwell, as if to taunt him, came the words:
“By the rivers of Bab-y-lon
Where we sat dowwwwwn.”
The song was in English and the voice was deep: Ibrahim Kudwa, going up to his flat.
An hour later, the children were in the room, and Masterji was casting shadows on the wall to show how a healthy star changes into a red giant.
He was still talking and casting shadows, when the red giant flickered on the wall and vanished. Flashes of light and great explosions from near at hand overwhelmed the stars and black holes of Masterji’s distant galaxies.
The residents of Tower B were setting off firecrackers.
The physics students watched from Masterji’s window, craning their necks to get the best view.
“What is going on?” Masterji asked. “Is it a festival today?”
“No,” Mohammad Kudwa said.
“Is someone getting married, then?”
The lights came on in the room: Mrs. Puri had walked in through the open door.
“Have you read the notice, Masterji?” she asked, her fat fingers still at the light switch. “They beat us to it. Tower B. They have accepted the offer.”
“You are interrupting the physics top-up, Mrs. Puri.”
“Oy, oy, oy ….” She flicked the light switch on and off. “Masterji. This cannot go on any longer. Speak to the Pintos. Must we all lose the light because of Shelley’s blindness? Here ….” She held out a paper. “… read this. And let the boys go. What kind of class can you have with all that noise outside?”
“All right,” Masterji shouted to the boys at the window. “Go down and play with those fellows. That’s what you want, isn’t it? No one cares about physics. Go. And you too, Mrs. Puri.”
She stood at the door with the notice in her hands.
“I’ll go, Masterji. But will you do what Ajwani asked? Will you go