Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [88]
“Boycott?” Masterji said. “What does that mean?”
“Ramu ….” Mrs. Puri smiled again. “… Masterji, being a famous teacher, must know all about Gandhi and Nehru and what they did to the British. So tell him not to ask us what a boycott is.”
“Gandhi and Nehru and … Mrs. Puri, this is madness.”
“Madness?” Mrs. Puri chuckled. Ramu, at the table, joined in the fun.
“And refusing an offer of 250 per cent the market value of his flat is not madness, Ramu? Some people should not speak of madness, Ramu.”
“I haven’t said no. I’m still thinking about Mr. Shah’s proposal.”
Mrs. Puri looked at her neighbour.
“Still thinking? You’ve always been happy to share your deep thoughts with us, haven’t you, Masterji? Have we ever asked you to be Secretary of this Society? What does that tell you about how we felt about your deep thinking?”
“I haven’t said no. But I won’t be forced into—”
Mrs. Puri shut the door in his face. Returning to his flat, Masterji sat by the teakwood table and tapped the arms of his chair, as if he did not really believe that the boys would not come.
24 JULY
Masterji opened the door. His rubbish bin had been overturned.
Pieces of rubbish—the banana peel, for example—had been flung far from his doorstep, as if someone had kicked them there.
He got down on one knee and began gathering in the errant garbage.
A young woman’s foot scraped the banana peel towards him.
“Leave it alone, Ms. Meenakshi, I’ll clean it.”
“I’m only trying to help.”
His neighbour’s sleek black jeans exposed inches of skin above the ankles, and she wore no socks; bunched together within the silver criss-crossing of her sandals, her plump white toes, incarnadined with lacquer, looked like bonsai cleavage. Once she got rid of the braces and bought better glasses, Masterji decided, she would make a very good marriage.
He put pressure on the wrong leg as he stood up: a sharp angular pain cut into his left knee like an accent over a French “e.”
Accent aigu. He sketched it in the air: pleased that he could civilize his arthritis by connecting it to a beautiful language.
Ms. Meenakshi leaned on her doorway, grinning and exposing her braces.
“That woman must hate you even more than she hates me.” She leaned her head towards Mrs. Puri’s door. “She just looks through my rubbish.”
“This is the early-morning cat, Ms. Meenakshi,” Masterji said, massaging his knee-cap. “Mrs. Puri has not done this.”
His neighbour adjusted her hexagonal glasses before closing her door. “Then why is your rubbish bin the only one that has been overturned?”
At one o’clock that day, Ibrahim Kudwa, uninvited, came and joined the Pintos’ table for lunch.
Perhaps because Kudwa, the only Muslim in the building, was considered a fair-minded man by the others—or perhaps because, being the owner of a not-so-busy internet café, he could leave his business in the afternoon—he had been designated a “neutral” in the dispute, and sent, in this capacity, by the rest of the Society. Halfway through lunch, when Nina, the maid-servant, was serving steaming appams, he said: “Masterji, I don’t approve of this thing. This boycott.”
“Thank you, Ibrahim.”
“But Masterji … understand why people are doing this. There is so much anguish in the building over your strange actions. You say you’ll sign, then you go to see your son, and say you won’t sign.”
“I never said yes, Ibrahim.” Masterji wagged his finger. “I said maybe.”
“Let me teach you something today, Masterji: there is no maybe in this matter. We think you should go and meet Mr. Shah in his house. Have a talk with him. He holds teachers in high regard.”
Ibrahim Kudwa washed his mouth and wiped his lips and beard on the Pintos’ hand-towel. He put the towel back on its rack and stared at it.
“Masterji, when the builder’s offer was made, I suffered, because I did not know what to do with the money—I took an antacid to sleep. Now that there is the possibility of the money I never had being taken away from me—I need two antacids to sleep.”
He wiped his hands again and left, apparently