Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [77]
“I’ve admired your way with words all these years, Mrs. Puri. Even when we fought.”
“In college you should have seen my short stories, my poems.” Mrs. Puri swiped her hand over her head, to indicate past glories. “I could’ve been a writer, anything I wanted. We have all had to accept other lives.”
“The Confidence builder gave me a bribe, Mrs. Puri. To accept the offer.”
Mrs. Puri nodded. “I know. Ajwani told me.”
“How does Ajwani know?”
“He knows all kinds of things. He’s like one of these lizards, going up every wall.” Mrs. Puri came closer to Mrs. Rego to say: “He is a dirty man.”
“Dirty?”
“He goes to unclean women. In the city. I know it for a fact. My husband once saw him near Falkland Road.”
Mrs. Rego, about to ask what Mr. Puri had been doing near Falkland Road, suppressed her question.
“Money is nothing to me,” Mrs. Puri said. “When I’m hungry I butter a loaf of bread and eat. But Ramu I have to think of. And Sunil and Sarah you have to think of. Even the poor live better than we do. When you drive on a high road over the slums, you see satellite TV dishes like lotus leaves on a pond. You’ve thought about the poor for years. Now think about your children. I know what I want to do with my money. Take care of Ramu. Buy a home in Goregaon. Do you know what I want to do with the rest? A clinic for injured dogs. This city is full of disfigured animals.”
“How Christian of you, Mrs. Puri.”
“I know you don’t like builders. Don’t do it for Mr. Shah. Do it for your children. When small people like us compromise, it is the same as when big people refuse to compromise. The world becomes a better place.”
Mrs. Puri needed another half an hour. Then the two women embraced; Mrs. Puri saw, through a veil of sincere tears, a shining wooden cupboard full of Ramu’s fresh, fragrant clothes. She closed her eyes in happiness. The harder she cried, the bigger the cupboard grew.
If anyone’s getting a small sweetener, she thought, eyes closed, patting her friend’s back, it’s me and Ramu.
In 2A, Vishram Society, Mrs. Pinto and her husband held hands across their dining table.
Masterji cracked his knuckles. He was on the sofa.
“So what if Mrs. Rego has changed her mind? There are three of us, and that is enough. In Rome they had this triumvirate. Caesar, Crassus, Pompey. We’ll be like that. The Vakola Triumvirate.”
“Do you want the money, Masterji?” Mr. Pinto asked. “If you want it, Shelley and I will agree. We don’t want to hold you back.”
“What a thing for you to ask, Mr. Pinto. What a thing for you to ….”
“Like a lemon being squeezed. That is how they feel with every passing day,” Mr. Pinto said, thinking of what Ajwani had told him in parliament the previous evening. “Yesterday Mrs. Saldanha smiled at me when I walked out of the gate. But she didn’t smile when I came back. In those five minutes she must have heard the ticking of the deadline clock.”
“I haven’t noticed anything changing,” Masterji said. “Our neighbours are solid people.”
“We’ll give in to Mr. Shah for your sake, Masterji. Won’t we, Shelley?”
Masterji felt things shifting beneath his feet, as if he were standing by the waves at Juhu beach. But I’m doing it for their sake, he thought.
He looked at Mr. Pinto’s old face staring into Shelley’s old face; he saw their osteoarthritic fingers knitted together on the table. They don’t want to be thought of as the people who are holding everyone else up.
His gaze moved to the dining table with the red-and-white cloth, where he had eaten his meals since his wife’s death.
“I do not want to take Mr. Shah’s offer,” he said. “I have lived in Vishram Society with my friends and I wish to die here with them. As there is nothing more to say, I will see you at dinner.”
In the crepuscular light of the stairwell he examined the old walls of his Society: the yellow paint, nicks, blotches, and rain-stains.
Now it seemed to him that Mr. Pinto was right. They had been changing for some time. His