Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [7]
Mrs. Puri was walking back to Vishram Society with her eighteen-year-old son Ramu, who kept turning to a stray dog that had followed them from the fruit and vegetable market.
Mrs. Puri, who moved with a slight limp due to her weight, stopped, and took her son by the hand.
“Oy, oy, oy, my Ramu. Slowly, slowly. We don’t want you falling into that.”
A pit had materialized in front of Vishram Society. It swallowed everything but the heads and necks of the men digging inside it, and an occasional raised muddy arm. Pushing her son back, Mrs. Puri looked in. The soil changed colour every two feet as it went down, from black to dark red to bone-grey at the very bottom, where she saw ancient cement piping, mottled and barnacled. Wormy red-and-yellow snippets of wire showed through the strata of mud. There was a sign sticking out of the pit, but it faced the wrong direction, and only when Mrs. Puri went all the way around the hole did she see that it said:
WORK IN PROGRESS
Inconvenience Is Regretted
BMC
Ramu followed her; the dog followed Ramu.
Mrs. Puri saw the Secretary was at the guard’s booth, reading the register and holding a hand up against the early-evening sun.
“Ram Khare, Ram Khare,” he said, and turned the register around so it confronted the guard. “There is a record of the man today, Ram Khare. Here.” He tapped the entry the inquisitive visitor had made. “But ….” He flipped the page. “… there is no record of him in here yesterday.”
“What are we talking about?” she asked.
Ramu took the stray dog with him to the black cross, where he would play until his mother called him in.
When the Secretary described the man, she said: “Oh, yes. He came yesterday. In the morning. There was another one with him, too. A fat one. They asked all these questions. I answered some, and I told them to speak to Mr. Pinto.”
The Secretary stared at the guard. Ram Khare scraped the ledger with his long fingernails.
“If there is no record in here,” he said, “then no such men came.”
“What did they want to know?” the Secretary asked Mrs. Puri.
“Whether it is a good place or a bad place. Whether the people are good. They wanted to rent a flat, I think.”
The fat man with the gold rings had impressed Mrs. Puri. He had red lips and teeth blackened by gutka, which made you think he was lower class, yet his manners were polished, as if he were of breeding, or had acquired some in the course of life. The other man, the tall dark one, wore a nice white shirt and black trousers, exactly as the Secretary had described him. No, he said nothing about being in chemicals.
“Maybe we should tell the police about this,” the Secretary said. “I don’t understand why he came again today. There have been burglaries near the train station.”
Mrs. Puri dismissed the possibility of danger.
“Both of them were good men, polite, well dressed. The fat one had so many gold rings on his fingers.”
The Secretary turned, fired—“Men with gold rings are the biggest thieves in the world. Where have you been living all these years?”—and walked away.
She folded her fat forearms over her chest.
“Mrs. Pinto,” she shouted. “Please don’t let the Secretary escape.”
What the residents called their sansad—parliament—was now in session. White plastic chairs had been arranged around the entrance of Tower A, right in front of Mrs. Saldanha’s kitchen, an arrangement that allowed those seated a glimpse, through an almond-shaped tear in the green kitchen curtain, of a small TV. The first “parliamentarians” were about to sit on the plastic chairs, which would remain occupied until water returned to the building.
A small, slow, white-haired man, refined by age into a humanoid sparrow, lowered himself into a chair with a direct view of the TV through Mrs. Saldanha’s torn curtain (the “prime” chair). A retired accountant for the Britannia Biscuit Company, Mr. Pinto (2A) had a weak vascular system and kept his mouth open when walking. His wife, almost blind in her old age, walked with her hand on his shoulder, although she knew the compound well