Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [89]
“Boycott—it’s just a word,” Masterji told Mr. Pinto. “Remember the time Sangeeta’s AquaGuard machine leaked water into Ajwani’s kitchen, and from there into Abichandani’s kitchen? Remember how they stopped talking to her until she paid for the repairs? She never agreed to it. After two weeks they were talking to her again.”
After an hour, he went down the stairs, kicked aside the stray dog, and sat on the “prime” chair in front of Mrs. Saldanha’s window. The small TV was on in her kitchen, a ghostly quadrilateral behind the green curtain; a slice of the newsreader’s face showed through the almond-shaped tear like a kernel of truth. As he watched, Mrs. Saldanha came to the window and closed its wooden shutters.
Masterji surveyed the compound of his Society as if nothing had happened.
On his way up the stairs, he saw the sick dog lying once again on the landing. At least it looked at him the same way as it had before. He let it lie there.
He was looking so intently at the dog that he almost missed the handwritten sign that had been stuck with Scotch tape to the wall above it.
SOME FACTS ABOUT “A CERTAIN PERSON” WHO HAS
RECEIVED RESPECT FROM US FOR THIRTY YEARS.BUT WHY?
NOW WE FIND OUT THE TRUTH.
1. Because he was a retired teacher, he got respect from all of us. He offered to help children with exams, true. But what kind of help? He would talk about the parts of the sun, like the corona, and the dense core of hydrogen and helium, and so on, far beyond the strict requirements of the syllabus, which meant that when the exam papers appeared, the children found nothing of use in his tutorials. So to go to him for tuition, or private lessons, was the “kiss of death.”
2. For DEEPAVALI, CHRISTMAS, OR EID, he has never given one rupee in baksheesh to Ram Khare. He is always saying, I have no money, I am retired, but is this true? Do we not know otherwise?
3. Even though he liked to boast loudly “he had no TV,” every evening he would sit in front of Mrs. Saldanha’s kitchen in the exact position where he would block everyone else’s view and then he would watch TV.
4. NEVER GIVES TIPS, for large waste material left outside the door, to the khachada-wali.
So why have we respected him blindly?
He read it twice before he could understand it. Tear it down? He withdrew his hand. A man is not what his neighbours say he is. Laugh and let it go.
When he bent to his sink a few minutes later to wash his face, the water burned his eyes and nose.
But a man is what his neighbours say he is.
In old buildings truth is a communal thing, a consensus of opinion. Vishram Society had retained mementoes, over forty-eight years, of all those who had lived in it; each resident had left a physical record of himself here, like the kerosene handprint made by Rajeev Ajwani on the front wall on the day of his great tae kwon-do victory. If you knew how to read Vishram’s walls, you would find them covered with handprints. These prints were permanent, but they could move; a person’s record was alterable. Now Masterji felt the opinion of him that was engraved into the building—in its peeling paint and forty-eight-year-old brickwork—shift. As it moved, so did something within his body.
He could not say, looking at his wet face and dripping moustache, how much of what was written in the poster was untrue.
He went down and read it again. Nothing about the Pintos in it: they were hoping to drive a wedge between them. He ripped it down.
But that evening another appeared glued to the lift door, different in handwriting, similar in its complaints (“never taught English to students even though he knew Shakespeare and other big writers who were part of the examinations”)—and then there was one on Ram Khare’s guard-booth (“Put your own poster up,” he said, when Masterji protested). Though he tore each one down, he knew another would go up: the black handprints were multiplying.
31 JULY
In the old days, you had caste, and you had religion: they taught you how