Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [8]
“You have been asked to wait,” said Mrs. Pinto, as the Secretary tried to make his way around the plastic chairs into his office. She was the oldest woman in the Society; Mr. Kothari had no choice but to stop.
Mrs. Puri caught up with him.
“Is it true, Kothari, what they say the early-morning cat found in 3B’s rubbish?”
The Secretary, not for the first time during his tenure, cursed the early-morning cat. This cat prowled the waste bins that the residents left out in the morning for Mary to collect, in the process spilling beans, bones, and whisky bottles alike. So the residents of the building knew from the rubbish who was a vegetarian and who merely claimed to be one; who was a rum-man and who a gin-man; and who had bought a pornographic magazine when on holiday in Singapore. The main aim of this cat—ginger and scrawny, according to some, black and glossy according to others—indeed, was to make sure there was no privacy in the building. Of late the ginger (or black) fellow had led Mrs. Puri to a vile discovery when it knocked over the waste bin of 3B (the flat Kothari had shown to the inquisitive stranger).
“Among young people today, it is a common thing for boy and girl to live without marriage,” he said. “At the end, one says to the other, you go your way, I go my way. There is no sense of shame in the modern way of life, what do you expect me to do about it?”
(Mr. Pinto, distracted by a stock market report on the TV, had to be filled in on the topic of discussion by his wife. “… the modern girl on our floor.”)
Turning to her left, Mrs. Puri called: “Ramu, have you fed the dog?”
Ramu—his soft, pale face hinted at the presence of Down’s syndrome—looked perplexed. His mother and he left a bowl full of channa near the black cross to feed stray animals that wandered into the Society; he looked about for the bowl. The dog had found it.
Now Mrs. Puri turned back to the Secretary to make one thing clear: the modern, shame-free way of living counted for nothing with her.
“I have a growing son—” She dropped her voice. “I don’t want him living with the wrong kind of people. You should call Import-Export Hiranandani now.”
That Mr. Hiranandani, the owner and original resident of 3B, a shrewd importer-exporter of obscure goods, known for his guile in slipping phosphates and peroxides through customs, had moved to a better neighbourhood (Khar West) was understandable; all of them dreamed of doing the same thing. Differences of wealth among the members did not go unnoticed—Mr. Kudwa (4C) had taken his family last summer to Ladakh, rather than nearby Mahabaleshwar, as everyone else did, and Mr. Ajwani the broker owned a Toyota Qualis—yet these were spikes and dips within the equalizing dinginess of Vishram. The real distinction was leaving the Society. They had come to their windows and cheered Mr. Hiranandani when he departed with his family for Khar West; yet his behaviour since had been scandalous. Not checking the identity of this girl tenant, he had taken her deposit and handed her the keys to 3B, without asking the Secretary or his neighbours if they wanted an unmarried woman—a journalist, at that—on their floor. Mrs. Puri was not one to pry—not one to ask what was happening within the privacy of a neighbour’s four walls—but when the condoms come tumbling onto your doorstep, well, then!
As they were talking, a trickle of waste water moved towards them.
A pipe from Mrs. Saldanha’s ground-floor kitchen discharged into the open compound; although she had been chided often, she had never connected her kitchen sink into the main sewage—so the moment she began her cooking, it burped right at their feet. In every other way, Mrs. Saldanha was a quiet, retreating woman—her husband, who was “working in Vizag,” had not been seen in Vishram for years—but in matters of water, brazen. Because she lived