Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [79]
Before going into the building, he stopped by Mrs. Puri’s chair in parliament, and told her that he would go see his son tomorrow. Not in the morning, though. The rush on the trains would be too great then.
“It’s over. Even Masterji has agreed,” Mary said.
Standing outside Silver Trophy Society, she explained her situation to the security guard: “When this Shanghai comes up, they’ll have maids who wear uniforms and speak English. They won’t want me. I have a son in school; I can’t miss a month’s pay.”
The guard was a lean light-skinned man; he assured Mary he would keep an eye out, but then asked about her “family” with a gleam in his eye that could only signify lechery.
The guard at a building near the Dhobi-ghat had told her to check with him after noon; a doctor’s family had just moved in from Delhi.
Rain clouds were regrouping in the evening sky. Mary crossed the road, and walked past the rows of fish-sellers with their glistening fresh catch, to be told:
“Those people from Delhi found a servant girl just ten minutes ago. Not even ten.”
Thanking the guard, she sat on a stone wall near the fish-sellers, and breathed into a fold of her sari. She had been out since seven in the morning. On either side of her, in baskets, or spread on blue tarpaulin sheets on the ground, she saw dried anchovies, fresh crabs, prawns in plastic buckets, and small slimy things that were still wriggling. An old fisherwoman scraped the scales off a two-foot yellow-finned tuna with a curved knife.
As if the departed souls of the fish were rising in a great host, a boom filled the air.
Mary looked up. A Boeing, climbing up from the Santa Cruz airport, cut through the darkening sky.
A blind man sat selling jasmine in the compound of the Tamil temple. The gate of the altar was open, and a small oil lamp glowed in front of a black Ganesha, resinous from decades of holy oil.
The side wall of the temple with the painted demon’s mouth was once again doing duty as a wicket.
Kumar, who worked as a cleaner in the kitchen of a nearby hotel, stood near the side wall, slapping his thighs in anticipation.
Dharmendar, the cycle mechanic’s boy, was running up to bowl with the red rubber ball in his hand.
Timothy, who had “bunked” school to be here, had been given the honour of batting first, and took guard in front of the demon’s mouth.
Instead of releasing the red ball, Dharmendar dropped it and grinned.
“It’s your lucky day, Timothy. Your mother is coming.”
“Shit.”
The boy dropped his bat, grabbed his school satchel, and ran. Screaming his name—as the cricketers whistled with glee—Mary chased after him with her right hand raised and her fingers flexed.
Lightning forked over their heads, and large drops of rain fell on mother and son as they ran towards the nullah.
6 JULY
An old man leaned out of the open door, relishing the wind in his hair like a fourteen-year-old on his first unaccompanied ride. He stared at a train going in the opposite direction.
What power. The passing locomotive was a vector of raw momentum, rushing from another dimension at an angle through this one. A fragment of a dream slicing into the waking world.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon.
The first-class compartment was almost empty. But on an impulse Masterji had got up from his seat and done something he had not for decades—come to the open door of the compartment.
Insanity.
He, above all other men, should know the danger of standing here: he who had warned his students so many times against doing so: he, who had suffered so much from the tracks.
Another express sped past, and this time, the warm wind rushing between the trains felt like a spell. The faces of the commuters opposite him looked potent, magical, even demonic—as if they were creatures from another world: