Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [69]
He closed the door behind all of them.
How did she know what Ajwani asked me to do? he wondered. Are they talking about me behind my back?
He read what Mrs. Puri had left for him:
NOTICE
Vishram Co-operative Hsg Society Ltd, Tower B, Vakola, Santa Cruz (E), Mumbai—40055
Minutes of the extraordinary general meeting held on 24 June
Theme: Dissolution of Society (Approved)
As the quorum was sufficient, the meeting commenced on time, at 12:30 p.m.
Mr. V. A. Ravi, Secretary, suggested that the members should dispense with formalities and deal with the main issue, which was to consider the generous offer of redevelopment presented by …
He opened the window and tried to get a good view of Tower B. Standing in front of their building, men and women were lighting sparklers, rockets, dizzying sudarshana-chakras, and things in bottles with no purpose but to emit raw noise and light.
The doorbell rang.
“Masterji … Please … just go down and look at Mr. Shah’s …”
Mrs. Puri had brought Ramu with her this time. The boy smiled; he too was pleading with his Masterji.
A tower of Babel of the languages of construction.
Bricks, concrete, twisted steel wires, planks, and bamboo poles held up the interiors. Long metal spokes stuck out from the floors with green netting, which sagged between the spokes like webbing, as if a fly had been squashed into the blueprint of the building. Holes in the concrete as big as a giant’s eyes, and massive slabs that appeared to be aligned incorrectly, overlapping and jutting over each other. Everything was an affront to a man’s sense of scale and order, even the sign that identified the thing, large as a political advertisement, and lit from beneath:
THE CONFIDENCE EXCELSIOR
Masterji stood before the two half-built concrete towers.
One day they would be glassed and sheathed, but now their true nature was exposed. This was the truth of twenty thousand rupees a square foot. The area already had a water shortage, how would it support so many new homes … and what would happen to the roads?
Lights came on at the top of the second tower: somehow a crane had been lifted up there, and it began to move. In the glare of the lights Masterji saw men sitting on the dark floors like an advance army concealed in the entrails of the building.
He lifted his foot just in time: a dead rat lay before him imprinted with a tyre-track.
He walked past the huts and the Tamil temple, to return to the gate of his Society. The celebrations continued outside Tower B.
He was halfway up the stairs, when a red missile hurtled down in the opposite direction.
“Sorry, Masterji.”
It was Ms. Meenakshi, his next-door neighbour: wearing a red blouse that did not quite reach her jeans.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Meenakshi. How are things?”
She smiled and kept going down the stairs.
“How is your boyfriend?” he shouted.
From somewhere near the ground floor, she laughed. “My boyfriend is scared of you, Masterji. He won’t come here any more.”
He listened to her charge out of the building. Exactly the way Sandhya, when her friends called her for a game of volleyball, dropped her sketchbook and rocketed downstairs.
He placed his hand on the warm building. Just as when a drop of formaldehyde falls on a dead leaf in a science class, revealing a secret life of veins, Vishram throbbed with occult networks. It was pregnant with his past.
Back in his flat, he turned the tap at the washbasin sink. He slapped it. Water spurted out brown and then red and then stopped. He slapped it again, and now the tap spat out a stone. A final red spurt, and finally the water flowed clear and strong.
Who says it is falling down? he thought, washing his face in the cold water. It will last for ever, if we take care of it.
From the kitchen, the old calendar tapped against the wall in a frenzy of approval.
Turning its page to October, where some dates had been circled by his wife (7 October—Dentist), he added a circle of his own in red. 3 October. He flipped the calendar’s pages back to June. Last year’s