Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [90]
It was nearly 8 a.m. He was still in bed, listening to savages screaming below him.
Down in 2C, Rajeev and Raghav Ajwani practised tae kwon-do under their father’s supervision.
He imagined he could hear similar noises from all the rooms of his Society: all of them were jabbing fists and lancing kicks to gouge him out of Vishram.
Now he heard the Secretary’s footsteps from above. He was sure they were louder than they had been for the past twenty-five years.
He did not want to get up; did not want to walk down the stairs and read the new notices they had posted about him.
If, in the early days of the “boycott,” there was an apologetic smile on the Secretary’s lips when he evaded Masterji’s attempts to make small talk, now there were neither smiles nor apologies.
They treat me like they would treat an untouchable in the old days, he thought: even at the thought of his shadow falling on them, his neighbours cringed and withdrew.
Degree by degree, they were turning their faces from him, until, as he passed the parliament, he confronted a row of turned backs.
If, in defiance, he sat among them, they got up and left. The moment he went up the stairs, they would regather. Then the taunts began. Always directed at him, never at the Pintos.
“… if only Purnima were alive, wouldn’t she be ashamed of him?”
“… his own son. A man who does not care for his own son, what do you ….”
So this is what they mean by the word: boycott. Even in his bed he felt it, their contempt, like the heat radiating from a brick wall on a summer night.
He went down to the bottom of the stairwell. Through the octagonal stars of the grille, he saw Ajwani, pacing about the compound, talking on his mobile phone—to a client, no doubt.
I could never do that, Masterji thought: negotiate. Use the “personal touch.” He had none of the small-bored implements of personality that other men did; no good at charm and fake smile, he never bartered or traded in the normal human way. Which is why he had only two real friends. And for the sake of those two friends he was rejecting a windfall. Not so long ago they had called him an English gentleman for doing this. These very people.
He struck the grille with his fist.
It was a top-up day; he looked at the round water stains on the ceiling of his living room and saw asteroids and white dwarves. In the cursive mildew he read E = mc2.
He straightened out the books in his cabinet (where had all the Agatha Christies vanished?), dusted the teakwood table, tried to limit his use of the Rubik’s Cube by hiding it on a shelf of his wife’s cupboard, and drew the blinds and lay in bed.
He closed his eyes.
He did not see her until too late. The old fish-seller had a leathery face, cunning with wrinkles, and she walked with a basket on her head. Closer and closer she came towards him, grinning all the time: and just as she passed him he saw that a large wet tail was poking out of her basket.
He awoke to find his face and arms smelling like fish. He swatted the pillows off his bed and got up.
I’ve slept during the day, he thought. Around him the living room trembled, like a cage from which light had just sprung out. It was thirty-five minutes past four.
To expunge the sin of afternoon indolence, his first lapse since childhood, he washed his face in cold water three times, slapped his cheeks, and decided to walk all the way to the train station and back.
Tinku Kothari, the Secretary’s son, dressed in a crumpled school uniform, stood outside his door. Masterji paused with the key in his hand.
“They’re calling you.”
“Who?”
The fat boy went down the stairs. Still holding the key in his palm, Masterji followed the boy through the gates of Vishram; every now and then,