Last Man in Tower Read Free Page B

never known him to express any opinion, unless it was related to the game of cricket. Some believed that he was always on his guard because as a young man he had committed an indiscretion; his wife was rumoured to be his cousin, or from another community, or older than him by two years; or even, by the malicious, his ‘sister’. They had one son, Tinku, a noted player of carom and other indoor sports, fat and white-skinned, with an imbecilic smile pasted on his face at all times – although whether he was truly stupid, or whether, like his father, merely hiding his ‘nature’, was unclear.
    The Secretary threw his sandwich wrapper into the waste bin. His breath was now a passion of raw onion and curried potato; he returned to work.
    He was calculating the annual maintenance fees, which paid for the guard, Mary the cleaning lady, the seven-kinds-of-vermin man who came to fight invasions of wasps and honeybees, and the annual heavy repairs to the building’s roofing and general structure. For two years now Kothari had kept the maintenance bill constant at 1.55 rupees a square foot per tenant per month, which translated into an annual bill of (on average) 14,694 rupees per year per tenant, payable to the Society in one sum or two (in which case the second instalment was recalculated at 1.65 rupees a square foot). His ability to keep the maintenance bill steady, despite the pressure of inflation in a city like Mumbai, was considered his principal achievement as Secretary, even if some whispered that he pulled this off only by doing nothing at all to maintain the Society.
    He burped, and looked up to see Mary, the Khachada-wali , who had been sweeping the corridor with her broom, standing outside his office.
    A lean silent woman, barely five feet tall, Mary had big front teeth erupting out of her concave cheeks. Residents kept conversation with her to a minimum.
    ‘That man who asked all the questions is taking a long time to make up his mind,’ she said.
    The Secretary went back to his figures. But Mary still stood at the doorway.
    ‘I mean, to ask the same set of questions for two days in a row. That’s curiosity.’
    Now the Secretary looked up.
    ‘Two days? He wasn’t here yesterday.’
    ‘You weren’t here yesterday morning,’ the servant said. ‘He was here.’ She went back to her sweeping.
    ‘What did he want yesterday?’
    ‘The same thing he wanted today. Answers to lots and lots of questions.’
    Mr Kothari’s bulbous nose contracted into a dark berry: he was frowning. He got up from his desk and came to the threshold of the office.
    ‘Who saw him here yesterday other than you?’
    With a handkerchief over his nose he waited for Mary to stop sweeping, so he could repeat the question.
    Mrs Puri was walking back to Vishram Society with her eighteen-year-old son Ramu, who kept turning to a stray dog that had followed them from the fruit and vegetable market.
    Mrs Puri, who moved with a slight limp due to her weight, stopped, and took her son by the hand.
    ‘Oy, oy, oy, my Ramu. Slowly, slowly. We don’t want you falling into that .’
    A pit had materialized in front of Vishram Society. It swallowed everything but the heads and necks of the men digging inside it, and an occasional raised muddy arm. Pushing her son back, Mrs Puri looked in. The soil changed colour every two feet as it went down, from black to dark red to bone-grey at the very bottom, where she saw ancient cement piping, mottled and barnacled. Wormy red-and-yellow snippets of wire showed through the strata of mud. There was a sign sticking out of the pit, but it faced the wrong direction, and only when Mrs Puri went all the way around the hole did she see that it said:
    W ORK IN P ROGRESS I NCONVENIENCE IS R EGRETTED BMC
    Ramu followed her; the dog followed Ramu.
    Mrs Puri saw the Secretary was at the guard’s booth, reading the register and holding a hand up against the early-evening sun.
    ‘Ram Khare, Ram Khare,’ he said, and