Last Man in Tower (37 page)

He got off at Charni Road. Grant Road would have been closer, but he wanted to see the ocean before seeing the girls.

He crossed Marine Drive to the ocean wall and stood on it. Except for a rag-picker down among the tetrapod rocks, he was alone.

All his life he had dreamed of something grand – going across the
Kala Paani
to a new country. Like Vasco da Gama. Like Columbus.

‘Just a push,’ he said aloud. He practised pushing a phantom body off the ocean wall into the rocks, and then did it again.

At Chowpatty beach he crossed the road to stop at Café Ideal for an ice-cold mug of draught beer. Done with his drink, he was startled to find a phrase written all over the
Times of India
real-estate page: ‘Just a push’. Ripping the paper to shreds, he asked the waiter to make sure it went into the waste bin.

Outside, he hailed a taxi and said: ‘Falkland Road.’

Marine Drive is flooded with light from ocean and open sky; but a simple change of gear, three turns on the road, and the ocean breeze is gone, the sky contracts, and old buildings darken the vista. When you have gone deep enough into this other Bombay, you will come to Falkland Road.

Ajwani stopped the taxi, and paid his fare with three ten-rupee notes from a wad in his pocket.

‘I don’t have any change,’ the driver said.

Ajwani told him not to worry. One and two rupee coins wouldn’t matter after today.

He put the wad of notes back in his pocket, patted it, and felt better. Having money made things so much simpler, as one grew older.

There were friendly hotels by the Santa Cruz station and all along the highway, but it would do a man no good to look for pleasure where he might be recognized. In the old days – oh, five, six years ago – Ajwani went to Juhu and visited a pretty young actress there once or twice a month. Then real-estate prices went up in Juhu. Even those holes-in-the-wall became too costly for that actress and the other nice girls like her. They packed up and went north: to Versova, Oshiwara, Lokhandwala. Ajwani’s trips grew longer. Then real-estate prices went up in the north too. The girls moved to Malad, too far for him. And that wouldn’t be the end of it. Sooner or later a man would have to drive all the way to Pune for a blowjob. Real-estate speculation was destroying Bombay.

Thank God
, Ajwani thought,
there will always be Falkland Road
.

Greying multi-storeyed buildings stood on either side of the road, each collapsing in some way. Some of the windows had been gouged out, and men in
banians
sat in the open holes, looking down. Ajwani passed dental shops with plaster-of-Paris dentures on display, dim restaurants as greasy as the biryani they served, and cinema theatres with garish film posters (collages of violent action and sympathetic cleavage) outside which young migrant men stood in queues, withering in the heat and the shouting of theatre guards. Muck was congealed in between the buildings, and spilled on to the road. As if summoned for contrast, a row of silvery horse carriages shaped like swans, the kind that took tourists on joyrides near the Gateway of India, had been parked by the rubbish. Neither the horses nor the drivers were around, but women leaned on the carriages, sucking their teeth at Ajwani.

He smiled back at them.

This early in the day, Kamathipura would be quiet, and the second floor of the discreet building behind the Taj Hotel would be closed, and Congress House might or might not accept gentlemen callers. But Falkland Road was always open for business. The women waited in bright blue doorways, squatted on thresholds, and stepping forward from the silvery carriages taunted Ajwani.

A girl in a green petticoat sat hunched over in a bright blue doorway; cigarette smoke rose up her face like sideburns.

He was about to speak to her when he heard metallic noise, and saw flashes of light behind the prostitute.

Smiling at the warm green petticoat to indicate that he’d be back, Ajwani took a few steps down the lane behind her brothel.

The bylane, like the others around the red-light district, was busy with the hammering of iron and the hiss of white-blue oxyacetylene flame. In an economy typical of the city, the metal-working district is packed into the mazy lanes around Falkland Road – the pounding of steel and sex combined in the same postcode. Ajwani had seen the metal-cutting shops in passing many times before.

Now he walked about the glaring and hissing workshops like a man who had stumbled into a new country. Outside one shop, the metal worker lifted up his rusty visor and stared at him.

Ajwani turned away from his gaze. He walked further down the lane. Strings of glossy ribbons led down to a bulbous green mosque at the end. An acrid industrial stench. Behind a chink in a blue door, a man in a visor squatted on the floor and seared a rod with a flame. Metal grilles for windows were stacked outside another shop. A worker stood tapping on the grilles; a customer in a grey suit was listening to him.

‘… a flower pattern in the iron rods is normal, it’s free. But this thing you want, two flowers joining together… I’ll add two rupees per kilogram…’

‘Oh, that’s too much,’ the customer said. ‘Too much, too much.’

Suddenly both the worker and the customer turned and faced Ajwani.

He walked to the end of the lane. Right in front of the green mosque, he saw a buffalo tied to a tree; the restless head and horns of the animal emerged from the deep shade and then drew back into it.

A door opened in what he had thought was the mosque wall. A piece of corrugated iron roofing emerged from it. Two bare-chested men carried it in front of Ajwani, and he saw his own shadow ripple over the folds of iron.

He stared at the disappearing shadow; he shivered.

‘It is not just a push,’ he said aloud, and turned, to make sure the buffalo had not overheard him.

Ajwani sneaked past the workshops to the main road. Leaning on the horseless silver carriages, the prostitutes sucked their teeth for him as he left Falkland Road. His eyes full of oxyacetylene, his sinuses full of fumes, the broker staggered back towards Marine Drive.

He still heard hammer blows from the workshops that were far behind him; his nose still burned, as if reality had been brought red-hot right up to it. He stopped for breath. Ahead, foreshortened by the perspective, the massed buildings skidded like a single lightning bolt of stone and masonry towards Chowpatty beach. The plunge in the city’s topography worked a corresponding effect in Ajwani’s mind; all other thoughts fell away, isolating a lone enormous truth.

…
it is not ‘just a push’. It is killing a man.

A rubber ball struck the demon’s face painted on the wall of the Tamil temple.

Masterji opened his eyes, and stood up in the shade of the fruit tree. He realized he had gone to sleep. As he rubbed his eyes, he heard a woman’s voice booming: ‘Rakesh: is that how to bowl? Don’t you watch TV?’

Masterji hid behind the tree; he had recognized the voice.

‘Yes, Aunty. Sorry.’

‘I am not your aunty.’

Half a dozen boys converged around Mrs Rego. Sunil and Sarah were with her, and also Ramu, who was dressed in a red shirt, with make-up on his face and a golden sword in his hand. The pageant day must have ended. Why was Mrs Puri not around? Why had she left Ramu with Mrs Rego, of all people? But he no longer had any right to ask about their lives.

‘… boys, a promise is a promise, I know, but I just can’t go today. I
will
take you to the beach, and all of us will have sugarcane juice there. In the meantime I hope all of you have been staying out of trouble and…’

‘Aunty, no trip to the beach
and
a lecture? That’s not fair, is it?’

‘I am sorry, Vikram. I will take all of you one day.’

The cricket game continued after Mrs Rego left. One of the boys chased the ball into the temple courtyard.

‘Masterji,’ he said. ‘I’m Mary’s son. Timothy.’

Taking the old teacher by the hand he brought him out to show the other boys. At once, two of them ran away.

‘What happened?’ Masterji asked.

‘Oh, that Kumar, he’s a strange boy. Dharmendar too.’

Timothy smiled.

‘Will you take us to the beach, Masterji? Mrs Rego Aunty was supposed to take us.’

‘Why do you want to go to the beach?’

‘Why do you think? To play cricket there.’

‘So go on your own.’

‘Well, someone has to pay for bus fare. And sugarcane juice afterwards, Masterji.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll take you there one of these days. If you can answer this question: why are there tides at the beach?’

‘No reason.’

‘There is a reason for everything.’ Masterji pointed to the boy who had been bowling at Timothy. ‘What is your name?’

‘Vijay.’

‘Do you know the reason, Vijay?’

He picked up a red stone, went to the wall of the Tamil temple, and drew a circle above the demon’s wide-open mouth.

‘This is the earth. Our planet. In infinite space.’

Masterji saw shadows on the wall – he felt sweat and heat nearby – he realized that they had all gathered behind him.

‘Our earth is that small?’ someone asked.

About to reply, Masterji stopped and said: ‘I can start a school here. An evening school.’

‘Evening school?’ Timothy asked. ‘For
who
?’

The boys looked at one another; Masterji looked at them and smiled, as if the answer were obvious.

The sun had slipped in between two skyscrapers on Malabar Hill; the nearer of the buildings had become a flickering silhouette, a thing alternately of dark and light, like the lowest visible slab of a ghat descending into a river.

Ajwani sat on the sea wall of Marine Drive, looking at the tetrapod rocks below him and the waves washing around them.

He had been thinking for over an hour, ever since he had come down here from Falkland Road. It all made sense to him now. So
this
was why Shah paid Tower B ahead of time. To get everyone at Vishram desperate. This was why he did nothing when the story ran in the newspaper. He wanted
them
to do it.

‘And making Shanmugham tell me his life’s story,’ Ajwani said, aloud, surprising a young Japanese man who had sat down by his side to take photographs of the city.

Ajwani thought about the details of Mr Shah’s story. Now it seemed to him that something was wrong with the information. If Shah had come to Mumbai with only twelve rupees and eighty paise, and no shoes on his feet, how did he manage to open a grocery store in Kalbadevi? There was a father in the village – he must have sent him money. Men do have a sense of responsibility to their first wife’s sons. Ajwani struck his forehead with his palm. These self-made millionaires always hide a part of the story. The truth was as obvious as the ocean.

‘It’s been cat and mouse. From the start.’

And the cat had always been Dharmen Shah.

I’m trapped
, Ajwani thought, as he walked on the ocean wall towards Churchgate station. Mrs Puri and the Secretary were waiting for him. He, more than anyone else, had moved his
nothing
Society to this point. He could not fail them now. He looked down and thought if only he could live there, by the crabs, among the rocks by the breaking water.

Inside the station, Ajwani paid five rupees for a white plastic cup of instant coffee. His stomach needed help. All that industrial smoke from the metallurgical shops. Sipping the coffee, he walked to his platform; the Borivali local was about to depart.

Now he had industrial smoke
and
instant coffee in his stomach. He felt worse with each shake and jerk of the train.

He cursed his luck. Of all the things to pick up from Falkland Road – all the horrible names he had worried about for all these years – gonorrhoea, syphilis, prostatitis, Aids – he had to pick this up: a conscience.

‘You are at the
Kala Paani
,’ he told himself. ‘You
have
to cross it.
Have
to be one of those who get things done in life.’

A fellow passenger was staring at him. Lizard-like, stout, thick-browed, massively lipped, the man clutched a small leather bag in his powerful forearms: his eyes bulged as they focused on Ajwani.

The lizard-man yawned.

When he shut his mouth, he had taken on the face of the man aging director of the Confidence Group. In a moment the train compartment was full of Shahs.

‘Fresh air, please. Fresh…’ Ajwani moved through the crowd to the open door of the moving train. ‘Please please let me breathe.’

Migrants had squatted on the wasteland at the edge of the tracks; they had turned it into a vegetable patch, seeding and watering it. Ajwani held on to the rod in the open door of the train. Behind the little green fields he could see the blue tents they lived in. The sight was chastening; his stomach wanted to call out to them.

He began to vomit on to the tracks.

The lights were coming on in the market as the Secretary scraped his shoes on the coir mat outside the Renaissance Real-Estate office.

‘Come in, sir,’ Mani had said. Ajwani had told him what to do when Kothari arrived.

He showed the Secretary past the Daisy Duck clock into the inner room and told him to sit on the bed.

‘Your boss isn’t here?’ the Secretary said, looking at the empty cot. ‘I was hiding in my mother-in-law’s house all day long. In Goregaon. Near the Topi-wala building. I just got back to Vakola. Where is he?’

Mani shrugged.

‘He isn’t even picking up the phone. Maybe I should wait outside for him.’

‘It’s better that you wait here, sir, isn’t it?’ Mani’s eyes shone with their usual half-knowledge of his master’s dealings.

The Secretary sat on the cot in the inner room, looking at the wicker basket full of coconuts and wondering if the broker had counted them. A few minutes later the door creaked open.

‘You?’ Mrs Puri asked, as she came into the inner room. ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’

‘I kept worrying about you, Mrs Puri. I came to check that you were all right,’ the Secretary said.