Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [97]
“Don’t touch it,” Mr. Pinto warned. “They are speaking to us now.”
Masterji picked up the receiver.
“Old man, is that you?” It was a high-pitched, taunting voice.
“Who is this calling?”
“I have a lesson for you, old man: if you don’t leave the flat, there will be trouble for you.”
“Who is this? Who told you to call? Are you Mr. Shah’s man?”
“There will be trouble for you and for your friends. So leave. Take the money and sign the paper.”
“I won’t leave, so don’t call.”
“If you don’t leave—we’ll play with your wife.”
“What?”
“We’ll take her down to the bushes behind the building and play with her.”
Masterji let out a laugh.
“You’ll play with a handful of ashes?”
Silence.
“It’s the other one who has a—” A voice in the background.
The phone went dead. Within a minute it rang again.
“Don’t pick it up, please,” Shelley said.
He picked it up.
“Old man: old man.”
This time it was another voice: lower, gruffer. Masterji was sure he had heard this voice somewhere.
“Act your age, old man. Grow up. Take the money and leave before something bad happens.”
“Who is this? I know your voice. You tell your Mr. Shah ….”
“If anything bad happens, you alone are responsible. You alone.”
Masterji slammed down the phone. He walked up the stairs to Mrs. Puri’s door and knocked; when there was no response, he banged. She opened the door, with bleary eyes, as if she had been sleeping.
“What is this about, Masterji?”
“The phone calls. They just called us again. They’re threatening us now.”
Mrs. Puri swallowed a yawn.
“Masterji, you have been talking and talking about these phone calls but no one else can hear them.”
“Either someone in the building is calling, or someone in here is giving a signal to the callers. Their timing is too good. I’m sure I recognized one of the voices.”
She laughed.
“Mine? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No … I don’t think so.”
“I am not making the phone calls. Shall I ask Ramu if he is making the calls?”
She began to close the door: but Masterji pushed it back towards her.
“What about your sense of shame, Sangeeta? I am your neighbour. Your neighbour of thirty years.”
“Our sense of shame? Masterji, you say our …? After the way you behaved at Mr. Shah’s house? After the way you lied to your own son about accepting the offer?”
When she closed the door on him, Masterji struck it with his fist.
“You borrowed money from my wife, and never repaid it. Do you think I didn’t know?”
He walked down into the compound. In the darkness, distances were obscured; masses dissolved; lit window called out to lit window; he saw rhymes in light. One lamp went out in a nearby Society; another came on in Tower B.
Were they doing it?
An autorickshaw drove past the gate, heading towards the slums.
Woken up in his room at the back of the Society, Ram Khare, when the situation was explained to him, pouted his lower lip.
“Speak to the Secretary. Phones are not the guard’s responsibility.”
He turned on his bedside lamp. His khaki shirt hung on a nail from the wall; old black-and-white photographs in which a bare-chested yoga teacher demonstrated the four stages of the Dhanush-asana were taped above his bed.
“What does that mean, Ram Khare? We’re being threatened. It’s night-time: you’re the guard.”
A half-bottle of Old Monk rum stood on the only other piece of furniture in the room, a wicker table. Exhaling boozy breath, Ram Khare crossed his arms and scratched his back with long fingernails.
“I warned you, sir. I warned you.”
He turned in bed, and, showing his visitor his back, bumpy with mosquito-bites, went back to sleep.
“Why don’t you call Gaurav,” Mr. Pinto asked, when Masterji was back in their flat, the door safely locked behind him.
“Ask him to come over and spend the night with us. In the morning we’ll go to the police.”
Masterji thought about it, and said: “We don’t need anyone’s help. We’re the triumvirate.”
He yanked the Pintos’ telephone cord out of the wall and threw it on the floor.
“All three of us will sleep right here. First thing in the morning we’ll go to the police.