Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [96]
Only a man must want something; for everyone who lives here knows that the islands will shake, and the mortar of the city will dissolve, and Bombay will turn again into seven small stones glistening in the Arabian Sea, if it ever forgets to ask the question: What do you want?
Lunch at the Pintos’ was served, as usual, at fifteen minutes past one o’clock. Nina went around the dining table, ladling out steaming prawn curry over plates of white rice. As Masterji settled into his chair, Mr. Pinto asked: “Is anything wrong with your phone?”
Masterji, about to stab a prawn with his fork, looked up.
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Mr. Pinto said, as he mixed curry into his rice.
Sometime before two o’clock, Masterji said goodbye to the Pintos. The moment he opened the door of his flat, the phone rang.
“Yes?”
A few minutes later, it rang again.
“Who is it?”
As soon as he put his phone down, he heard the phone ringing in the Pintos’ living room. Then his rang again, and the moment he picked it up it went dead and the Pintos’ was ringing again.
The door of the Pintos’ flat was open. They were sitting side by side on the sofa, and Nina, their maid, stood next to them, protectively.
“It’s just the children,” Masterji said, standing by the door with his arms folded. “It must be Tinku or Mohammad. At school there was a boy who stuck notes on the backs of teachers. Tall boy. Rashid. Kick Me. I Love Girls. I caught him, and he got two weeks’ suspension. The maximum penalty, short of expulsion.”
“I wonder why God made old age at all,” Mrs. Pinto said. “Your eyes are cloudy, your body is weak. The world becomes a ball of fear.”
“We’re the Vakola triumvirate, Mrs. Pinto. Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. No one can make us budge.” Masterji refused a glass of cold water that Nina offered. “I’ll go down and speak to Kothari.”
“Someone rings and hangs up the phone,” he explained to the Secretary, who sat in his office, reading the real-estate pages of the Times of India. “I think it’s someone inside the building.”
The Secretary turned the page.
“Why?”
“Because the moment I enter my room, they start calling. And when I leave, they stop calling. So they know where I am.”
The Secretary folded his newspaper. He patted his comb-over into place and leaned back in his chair, exhaling a breath of curried potatoes and onions.
“Masterji”—he burped—“do you know, another person died in a building collapse on Tuesday?”
Kothari grinned; the lynx-whiskers spread around his slitted eyes.
“I forget the name of the place now. Someone in that slum near the ocean … that wall near their slum collapsed when the rains … it was in the papers ….”
“Are you the one making the phone calls, Kothari?” Masterji asked. “Are you the one threatening us?”
“See?” Kothari said, gesturing helplessly to a phantom audience in his office. “See? For two thousand years we’ve played this game, this man and I, and now he asks if this is a threat. And then he hears phone calls. And soon he’ll see men with knives and hockey sticks coming after him.”
Back in the Pintos’ flat, they talked it over.
“Maybe it is just in our minds,” Mr. Pinto said. “Maybe Kothari is right.”
“When in doubt, make an experiment,” Masterji said. “Let’s put the phone back on the hook.”
When no one had called for an hour, Masterji walked up to his room. As he turned the key in his door, the phone rang. The moment he picked it up, it went dead.
At midnight, he went down the stairs and knocked on the Pintos’ door. Mr. Pinto opened it, went to the sofa, and held his wife’s hands.
“I heard it,” Masterji said.
The Pintos’ children in America did sometimes miscalculate the time difference and call late at night; but the phone had rung four times without being picked up. Now it began to