Last Man in Tower

With his book in his hand, Masterji walked past the old buildings of Marine Lines, some of the oldest in the city – past porticos never penetrated by the sun and lit up at all times of day by yellow electric bulbs, stone eaves broken by saplings and placental mounds of sewage and dark earth piled up on wet roads. Along the Marine Lines train station he walked towards Churchgate.

He looked at the blue book in his hand. Was that flat so small they couldn’t keep even one book of his in it? The boy’s own grandfather – and they had to shove my gift back in my hands?

He opened the blue book and saw an illustration of Galileo.

‘Hyena,’ he said, and closed the book. That was the word he had not been able to find for Ronak.

‘Hyena. My own daughter-in-law is a hyena to me.’

Don’t think badly of her. He heard Purnima’s voice. It is your ugliest habit, she had always warned him. The way you get angry with people, crush them into cartoons, mock voices, manners, ideas; shrink flesh-and-blood humans into fireflies to hold in your palm. She would cut his rage short by touching his brow (once holding a glass of ice-cold water to it) or by sending him out on an errand. Now who was there to control his anger?

He touched the Illustrated History of Science to his forehead and thought of her.

It was dark by the time he reached the Oval Maidan. The illuminated clock on the Rajabai tower, cloudy behind generations of grime and neglect, looked like a second moon, more articulate, speaking directly to men. He thought of his wife in this open space; he felt her calm here. Perhaps that calm was all he had ever had; behind it he had posed as a rational creature, a wise man for his pupils at St Catherine’s and for his neighbours.

He did not want to go home. He did not want to lie down on that bed again.

He looked at the clock. After his wife’s death, Mr Pinto came to him and said, ‘You will eat with us from now on.’ Three times a day he went down the stairs to sit at the Pintos’ dining table, covered with a red-and-white chequerboard oilcloth they had brought back from Chicago. They did not have to announce that food was served. He heard the rattling of cutlery, the shaking of the chairs and, with the clairvoyance provided by hunger, he could look through his floorboards and see Mrs Pinto’s maid Nina placing porcelain vessels filled with steaming prawn curry on the table. Raised as a strict vegetarian, Masterji had learned the taste of animals and fish in Bombay; exchanging his wife’s lentil-and-vegetable regimen for the Pintos’ carnivorous diet was the only good thing, he said to himself, that had come of her death. The Pintos asked for nothing in return, but he came back every evening from the market with a fistful of coriander or ginger, which he deposited on their table. They would be delaying their dinner for him; he should find a payphone at once.

A loose page of the Times of India lay on the pavement. A student of his named Noronha wrote a column for the paper; for this reason he never stamped on it. He took a sudden sideways step to avoid the paper. The pavement began to slide away like sand. His left knee throbbed; things darkened. Spots twinkled in the darkness, like silica in a slab of granite. ‘You’re going to faint,’ someone seemed to shout from afar, and he reached out to that voice for support; his hand alighted on something solid – a lamp post. He closed his eyes and concentrated on standing still.

Leaning against the lamp post. Breathing in and out. Now he heard the sound of wood being chopped from somewhere in the Oval Maidan. The blows of the axe came with metronomic regularity, like the hour hand on a grandfather clock: underneath them, he heard the crisp ticking of his own wristwatch, like little live splinters of seconds flying from the log. The two sounds quickened, as if in competition.

It was almost nine o’clock when he felt strong enough to continue home.