Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [80]
A touch on his shoulder.
“Radium, sir? It works. Real radium.”
Masterji turned round. It took him a second to recover from the illusion of the passing demon-faces.
A man in a dirty shirt was offering him a packet of glow-in-the-dark stars: “Radium for Children.” Ten rupees. Suitable for bedroom walls. Sparks the intellect, sends them to university.
Masterji looked at the packet; he had forgotten to bring a gift for Ronak.
Paunchy, with his breasts pressing against a patterned silk shirt, Gaurav Murthy walked down the aisle of the grocery store. He pointed at peanut chikkis and golden ladoos, at fried banana chips and spicy farsan packets; the storekeeper swept them all into a plastic bag.
Ten-rupee packets of peanuts, natural and masala batter-coated, one packet of Frito-Lay’s masala kurkure. One more packet of peanuts? Why not.
“My father is coming home again, you see.”
“A happy occasion,” the store owner said. “Buying sweets for him. You’re a good son.”
“Why not give me some banana chips, just in case? A small packet will do.”
With a half-kilo of snacks in a bag, Gaurav Murthy walked home. A quarter to five. His father had said he would come at five. Which meant he was already there.
He shouldn’t have strayed this far from his Society, but the snacks in Dhobi Talao, just around the corner, were cheaper. Stopping outside his building to catch his breath, he noticed a star from last Deepavali on the terrace; he was sure his father had noticed it too. (“Why is it still up there? Don’t you pay the maid to ….”) Reaching into his shopping bag, he ripped open a packet of chikki. He chewed the peanuts. His father would mock him for having put on weight; he chewed faster.
“His father’s tail.” That was what his mother had called him in the earliest days, when with a dumb, animal joy he had jumped up when the doorbell rang in the evening and had followed his father around the house, even into the bathroom, which he had to be pushed out of. The disenchantment began when he was fourteen, and his mother came back from Suratkal robbed by his uncles: he discovered that his father, who struck him on the knuckles with a steel foot-ruler for minor infractions, could not stand up to two provincial thieves. Contempt was born in Gaurav, the contempt of a son who has been hit by a weak father. As his shoulders grew, the contempt grew with them. His father wanted him to become a scientist or a lawyer, a man who worked with his mind; he decided to study commerce. In the university library he looked up from his textbooks of finance and thought of something his father had done or said the previous day: like a common stock on the Bombay Sensex, the value of Yogesh Murthy’s reputation was recalculated daily in his son’s mind, and daily it fell.
A man has no choice in his father; but if he keeps his distance from an unlikeable one, Society always blames him. It seemed wildly unfair to Gaurav.
As he pressed the doorbell, he could hear screams from the compound of his Society; he identified the particular shrillness that was his son’s. Why hasn’t the boy come up right away?
The maid opened the door. His father stood in the living room, admiring Sonal’s latest acquisition: a large bronze ornamental plate, filled to the brim with water, on which floated red gulmohar petals.
“Look, Gaurav: Father-in-law has brought a nice gift for Ronak,” his wife said, showing him the packet of Radium stars. “How sweet of him to spend the money.”
Saying it was time to feed her father, she retreated into an inner room, leaving the two men to the business of the day.
“Life is difficult, Father. Sonal’s life is very difficult.”
“I thought you had a good job, son.”
When Gaurav spoke, Masterji had the impression he was addressing someone on his right shoulder. He moved his head to intercept his son’s gaze; the boy shifted his eyes further to the right.
“Job is good, Father. Other things in life are not good. Stress. All the time.