Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [70]
No.
Ninety-nine days left.
Down in the compound, a last firecracker exploded.
29 JUNE
Friday mornings in 1B, Vishram Society Tower A. Kellogg’s, warm milk, lots of sugar. Marmalade on toast. Wedges of Amul cheese.
The dishes had been cleared from the dining table and immersed in a kitchen sink brimming with frothy soap-water.
Sitting on their mother’s bed, Sunil and Sarah watched as Mrs. Rego, at her reading table, slit open the latest letter from her younger sister, Catherine, who lived in Bandra.
Hair brushed, double-windsor-knotted, wearing his navy-blue-and-white school uniform, fourteen-year-old Sunil, Mummy’s “senior adviser,” closed his eyes to concentrate. Next to him in her pretty uniform (pink and white), Sarah, eleven, the “junior adviser,” kicked her legs and watched a dragonfly.
A black-and-white photograph of Arundhati Roy hung from the bedroom wall next to a framed poster for a Vijay Tendulkar play performed at the Prithvi Theatre.
Putting on her glasses, Mummy read Aunty Catherine’s letter out loud, until she reached the sentence that began: “Even though you have not written for a week, as it is your wont to do ….”
Reading it aloud a second time, Mrs. Rego put a hand to her heart. Gasp. “Wont” was a most stylish word, she explained to her children. Which meant that the three of them had been well and truly “trumped.”
The aim of this Friday-morning epistolary jousting was for each sister, in an apparently banal letter to the other, to slip in a “stylish” word or phrase, which would catch the other off guard, and force her to concede that she had been “trumped.” Even though they were just minutes apart from each other (depending on the traffic in the east-west passage), Mrs. Rego each Friday sealed a blue prepaid letter, addressed it with formal pomp (“Mrs. Catherine D’Mello-Myer of Bandra West”) and walked over to the postal workers’ colony near the Vakola mosque to drop it into the red box there.
A week later, the postman would deliver the riposte from Bandra.
Now Mrs. Rego had to “trump” Aunty Catherine back.
Taking out her best Parker fountain-pen, using her most florid hand, she wrote on the blue prepaid letter:
Dearest Darling Catherine …
… while preparing for an important executive meeting at the Institute, I found, quite serendipitously, your lovely little letter ….
“ ‘Serendipitously’ is a very stylish way of saying ‘by chance,’ ” Mrs. Rego explained to the children. The three shared wicked giggles. The moment she got to the line, Catherine would have to swivel about in her chair, saying, “Oh, but I’ve been trumped.”
Sunil took Mummy’s Parker and underlined the phrase three times, just to stick it to his aunty Catherine.
“Time for school, children.” She rose from the bed. “I’ll get a plastic bag.”
Mrs. Rego went into the kitchen to check on Ramaabai, the maid. Standing at the sink, the old woman removed one wet utensil after the other from the foamy water, like a psychoanalyst extracting submerged memories, and wiped each one clean with a pink Brillo pad.
“Ramaabai, if you break any of the glasses today I’ll deduct the cost from your month’s salary,” Mrs. Rego said. “And be on time in the evening.”
The maid kept cleaning the dishes.
Mrs. Rego and her children went from floor to floor in Vishram Society, inspecting the doors. Another shipment of sweets had arrived from the builder last night, to celebrate Tower B’s (unanimous) acceptance of his plan, and Mrs. Rego knew from the last time what would happen. The golden Ganeshas from the red sweet-boxes, cut out by those who did not wish to discard a god’s image, had turned up alongside the overlapping Shivas and Jesuses on the doors.
Mrs. Puri, naturally, had put up a Confidence Group Ganesha on her door. Two of them, in fact. Mrs. Rego’s nails scraped at the god’s pot belly until it bulged out. She did the same to the second Ganesha. Sunil held up the black bag; his mother flicked