Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [72]
Along with Julia and Kamini, Saritha was one of the three socially committed girls from good families (employment at the Institute was strictly restricted to good families) who answered to Mrs. Rego. Saritha’s role was to conduct research into public interest litigation on slum redevelopment, and kill the lizards that overran the walls. For if there was much compassion at the Institute for the poor, there was none for reptiles or arachnids; Mrs. Rego hated and feared anything that crawled on walls.
“What is it?” she shouted at Saritha. “Is there a lizard in the office?”
Saritha tilted her head.
Now Mrs. Rego saw it: there was a black Mercedes parked right by the Institute. Shanmugham stood by the car. He smiled, and made a sort of salute, as if he worked for her.
“Mrs. Rego, my boss wants to have a word with you. He sent the car for you.”
“How dare you,” she said. “How dare you! Get out of here, or I’ll call the police.”
“He just wants to have lunch with you, Mrs. Rego. Please … just for ten minutes.”
She went into her office and closed the door. She took up the papers on her desk and read. A reply from a German government-run social welfare body; yes, there was funding available for those doing work for the poor in Mumbai. The deadline, unfortunately, had … A request from a social worker studying for her Ph.D. at the University of Calicut. She was collecting data on child sponsorship; did the Institute have any information on children …
Mrs. Rego looked at the clock.
“Is that man still outside?” she shouted.
Saritha came into the office and nodded.
From her office window, she saw Mr. Shah’s half-built towers in the distance: blue tarpaulin covered them against the rains, and work went on inside the covers.
A gust of wet wind blew through the window; Mrs. Rego rubbed her goosebumpy forearms.
“That’s a shark, sir. Freshwater. A small one. But authentic.”
The smell of beer, prawn, curry, butter, oil thickened the recycled air-conditioned air inside the restaurant. An aquarium had been set into the near wall. The thing that had been called a shark gaped with a stupid open mouth in one corner, while smaller fish glided around, scoffing at its sharkish pretensions.
Mr. Shetty, the manager, stood with his hands folded in front of his crotch.
“A recent addition to the aquarium,” he said. “I hope you approve of it.”
In the restaurant in Juhu—Mangalorean seafood, his favourite cuisine—Dharmen Shah sat in silence at a table with a view of the door. The ceiling of the restaurant was vaulted, an allusion to the caves of Ajanta; the wall opposite the aquarium was covered with a bas-relief, in plaster of Paris, of the great civic monuments of the city—VT, the Rajabai Tower, the columned façade of the Asiatic Society library.
The manager waited for Mr. Shah to say something.
A waiter brought a whole lobster on a plate and placed a bowl of butter by the side. More food came: crab, fish curry, a prawn biryani. Wrapped in aluminium foil, a stack of glistening naans arrived in a wicker basket. Four flavoured cream spreads were placed next to it: pudina, garlic, lemon, and tomato.
Maybe she isn’t going to come, Shah thought, as he tore apart the bread with his fingers.
She had quoted God’s name, after all. “By the Lord Jesus Christ I will ….”
He wondered which of the four cream spreads to dip his bread in.
Remember, Dharmen: he told himself. A person who quotes Jesus is not, in real-estate terms, a Christian. No. A person who quotes Jesus is looking for a higher price to sell.
Humming a Kishore Kumar tune, he dipped the bread into the pudina cream.
Next he went for the buttered crab. With a long thin spoon, Shah scooped the baked flesh from the salted and peppered exoskeleton of the crab; when all the easy meat had been carved from the chest and eaten, he tore the limbs apart, and chewed on them, one at a time, biting into the shell and chewing till it cracked open, before sucking at the warm white flesh. The waiters were prepared to carve out the flesh and bring it on a small plate, but Dharmen Shah did not want