Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [71]
Saying goodbye to her two advisers at the gate—they would catch their school bus from the market—Mrs. Rego went the other way. Her fingers touched her black handbag, her elbow thrust out at a sharp angle; her lips were sucked in and her eyes were narrowed. Not a square inch of vulnerable surface.
She pitched the black bag into the open rubbish pit, where, to her delight, a stray hog took an interest in it. She wished she had rubbed some honey over the Confidence Group Ganeshas she had removed from the doors.
“Liar,” Mrs. Rego said, as if goading the animal to attack. “Liar, liar, liar”: she clapped three times.
Leaving the hog to enjoy Mr. Shah’s gifts to Vishram, she walked towards her institute.
A life like Mrs. Rego’s provided an excellent schooling in the ways of liars.
Georgina Rego, the “Battleship,” was one of two daughters of a famous Bandra doctor who would have been rich if he had not trusted every man he met on the street. Catherine, the younger sister with whom she played her game of “trump,” still lived in Bandra, in a flat in the Reclamation. Disobeying their father, Catherine had married an American exchange student, a half-Jew—a scandal in the community in those days; now the foreign husband, a quiet, goateed man, wrote articles on village life in India that were published in foreign magazines and in the copies of the Economic and Political Weekly that came to Mrs. Rego’s desk at the Institute.
Her own husband, Salvador, had been picked by her father. A Bombay Bandra Catholic who liked worsted wool suits and dark shirts embroidered with his initials: “S.R.” After two years in Manila working for a British merchant bank he confessed one evening by long-distance that he had found another, a local, younger. Naturally, a Catholic. They were all good Catholics in the Philippines. “You were never going to be enough for a man like me, Georgina.”
He cleaned her out.
Her entire dowry. Sixteen George V half-sovereigns, her father’s share certificates in the Colgate-Palmolive Company, two heavy silverware sets—all smuggled in her husband’s luggage to Manila. Her father was dead and she could not live off Catherine’s handouts, so she had left Bandra, a single mother with two children, and moved to the eastern side of the city, to a neighbourhood without roads and reputation, but with Christians. Va-kho-la. (Or was it Vaa-k’-la? She still wasn’t entirely sure.)
From Catherine she heard about big changes in Bandra. One by one, the old mansions on Waterfield Road were melted down like ingots—even her own Uncle Coelho’s. It was always the same builder, Karim Ali, who broke down the houses. When he wanted to snatch Uncle Coelho’s house on Waterfield Road to put up his apartment block for Bollywood stars, he too had come with sweets and smiles—it was all “Uncle and Aunty” at first. Later on, the threatening graffiti on the walls and the late-night phone calls, and finally the day when four teenagers burst in when Uncle Coelho was having dinner, put a cheque on one side of the table, a knife on the other, and said: “Either the knife or the cheque. Decide before dinner is over.” This Confidence Shah was the same kind of man as that Karim Ali—how could anyone believe those oily smiles, those greasy sweets? Behind the smiles were lies and knives.
“Hey!” Mrs. Rego shouted. “Turn your phone off while driving!”
A motorcyclist was wobbling down the road, his head propped to one side as he talked on his phone. He grinned as he passed her, and kept talking.
Breaking the law in broad daylight. Did the police care? Did anyone care? You would never get away with talking on your phone while driving in Bandra—that much had to be said for the western side of the railway lines. Raise property prices in Vakola by 20 per cent, and fellows like this—she snapped her fingers—evaporate.
The Institute for Social Action lay halfway between Vishram Society and the slums that lay further down the road. An old tiled building, the door left open at all times.
Saritha was standing outside the door, waiting for Mrs. Rego.