Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga

Author:Aravind Adiga
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction.Contemporary
ISBN: 9780307700407
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

24 JULY

Masterji opened the door. His rubbish bin had been overturned.

Pieces of rubbish—the banana peel, for example—had been flung far from his doorstep, as if someone had kicked them there.

He got down on one knee and began gathering in the errant garbage.

A young woman’s foot scraped the banana peel towards him.

“Leave it alone, Ms. Meenakshi, I’ll clean it.”

“I’m only trying to help.”

His neighbour’s sleek black jeans exposed inches of skin above the ankles, and she wore no socks; bunched together within the silver criss-crossing of her sandals, her plump white toes, incarnadined with lacquer, looked like bonsai cleavage. Once she got rid of the braces and bought better glasses, Masterji decided, she would make a very good marriage.

He put pressure on the wrong leg as he stood up: a sharp angular pain cut into his left knee like an accent over a French “e.”

Accent aigu. He sketched it in the air: pleased that he could civilize his arthritis by connecting it to a beautiful language.

Ms. Meenakshi leaned on her doorway, grinning and exposing her braces.

“That woman must hate you even more than she hates me.” She leaned her head towards Mrs. Puri’s door. “She just looks through my rubbish.”

“This is the early-morning cat, Ms. Meenakshi,” Masterji said, massaging his knee-cap. “Mrs. Puri has not done this.”

His neighbour adjusted her hexagonal glasses before closing her door. “Then why is your rubbish bin the only one that has been overturned?”

At one o’clock that day, Ibrahim Kudwa, uninvited, came and joined the Pintos’ table for lunch.

Perhaps because Kudwa, the only Muslim in the building, was considered a fair-minded man by the others—or perhaps because, being the owner of a not-so-busy internet café, he could leave his business in the afternoon—he had been designated a “neutral” in the dispute, and sent, in this capacity, by the rest of the Society. Halfway through lunch, when Nina, the maid-servant, was serving steaming appams, he said: “Masterji, I don’t approve of this thing. This boycott.”

“Thank you, Ibrahim.”

“But Masterji … understand why people are doing this. There is so much anguish in the building over your strange actions. You say you’ll sign, then you go to see your son, and say you won’t sign.”

“I never said yes, Ibrahim.” Masterji wagged his finger. “I said maybe.”

“Let me teach you something today, Masterji: there is no maybe in this matter. We think you should go and meet Mr. Shah in his house. Have a talk with him. He holds teachers in high regard.”

Ibrahim Kudwa washed his mouth and wiped his lips and beard on the Pintos’ hand-towel. He put the towel back on its rack and stared at it.

“Masterji, when the builder’s offer was made, I suffered, because I did not know what to do with the money—I took an antacid to sleep. Now that there is the possibility of the money I never had being taken away from me—I need two antacids to sleep.”

He wiped his hands again and left, apparently abandoning whatever remained of his neutrality on the wet hand-towel.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.