Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [74]
“What did you do, Mummy?”
“I said no, of course. He said we could think about it and let him know.”
Sunil covered his mouth with his palm. Sarah did the same as her brother did.
“What do we do now? Should we call your father in the Philippines and ask him?”
“No, Mother,” Sunil said sternly. “How could you even think of that? After all that he’s done to us?”
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
“Are you calling Daddy?” Sarah kicked her legs about. “Daddy in the Philippines?”
Sunil put his finger on his lips and glared at his sister.
“Let’s take a walk, Mummy.”
Mrs. Rego understood. The walls of Vishram were thin.
Mother and children, hand in hand, went to the main road, where she told them again, in slightly different words, all that had happened; and soon they were at the Dhobi-ghat, the part of Vakola where clothes were washed in the open air, in small cubicles seething with soap-suds and foam. Mother and children stood outside a laundry cubicle and talked. Behind them a long white petticoat rose and fell like a sail in a storm, as it was slapped on a granite slab. On the other side of the road, a bhelpuri-vendor sliced a boiled potato into cubes while his lentil broth simmered.
Mrs. Rego turned around: the washerman had stopped his work to watch them.
Hailing an autorickshaw, Mrs. Rego and Sunil said, almost in one voice: “Bandra.”
The dividing wall between the west and the east of Mumbai is punctured at Santa Cruz at just three places—indeed, the difficulty of passage is the harshest kind of tax imposed on the residents of the poorer east (for it is usually they who have to make this passage). Two of these passages are called “subways,” tunnels under the railway tracks, and both of these, Milan and Khar, are equally congested at rush hour. The third option, the Highway, is the most humane—but, being the longest, is also the most expensive by autorickshaw.
For reasons of economy, Mrs. Rego asked that their driver take the Khar subway; turning left just before the station, their rickshaw joined the queue of vehicles hoping to make it through the tunnel to the west.
South Mumbai has the Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Building, but the suburbs, built later, have their own Gothic style: for every evening, by six, pillars of hydro-benzene and sulphur dioxide rise high up from the roads, flying buttresses of nitrous dioxide join each other, swirls of unburnt kerosene, mixed illegally into the diesel, cackle like gargoyles, and a great roof of carbon monoxide closes over the structure. And this cathedral of particulate matter rises over every red light, every bridge and every tunnel during rush hour.
In a narrow passageway like the Khar subway, the pollution chokes, burns, ravages human tissue. When their rickshaw finally came, after twenty minutes of honking and crawling, to the mouth of the tunnel, Mrs. Rego covered Sarah’s nose with her kerchief, and instructed the boy to cover his face too. The line of autos moved into the choked tunnel, passing under a giant advertisement offering cures for kidney stones by the latest ultrasonic methods to make, in this primitive fashion, the passage to the west.
Ahead in the distance, where the tunnel ended, the three Regos could see light, clean air, freedom.
In the shade of a group of king palms, a woman in a burqa lifted up her face-mask and whispered to a young man. Watching them, Mrs. Rego thought: I am almost old. I am forty-eight years old.
Hand in hand, she and her children walked down the Bandra bandstand.
They spilled over, as if from the ocean: girls with golden straplets on their handbags, boys with buff shaved chests showing through their white shirts, on every brow and lip the moisture placed there by the warm night, and sucked away by the ocean breezes.
Mrs. Rego waited for darkness to fall.
An old woman’s night is so small: a young woman’s night is the whole