Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 14 of 40

Bhalerao

Bhalerao bought the register on the fourteenth of March 2005 at a shop near Kopar station, long, ruled, hard-backed, the kind sold to small businesses for stock, and it cost forty-two rupees.

He did not buy it in a temper. He had not had a temper about the Shivaji Chowk project at any point in two years and would not develop one for another sixteen months. He bought it for the reason he had bought every register of his life, which was that he had begun to be asked questions he could not answer, and a man who is asked questions he cannot answer either writes things down or becomes a man whose answers are not worth having.

The questions had started in January and they were not from the corporation, the bank, or a lawyer.

They were from the ten other families.

What’s the date now?

That was the whole of it. There was no accusation in it in the spring of 2005. Eleven households had been out of their homes for twenty months against a period they understood as twenty-six, and they had reached the point in that period where a man in a lift or on a stair asks the secretary, without heat, whether it is still August.

Bhalerao had been answering “August” since June 2003. He had answered it perhaps two hundred times. He answered it because it was the date in the agreement and because nobody had ever told him another one.

In January the elder Deshpande, in the course of the four-minute telephone call he made to everybody about everything, mentioned to Bhalerao that he had driven past the site on a Sunday and that there were nine floors of structure up and no plaster on anything, and asked whether that was normal for six months out, and Bhalerao said that he did not know, and discovered as he said it that this was true and that he minded.

He drove past himself the following Sunday.

He was a bank clerk by profession, retired, and he knew nothing whatever about building. What he saw was nine floors of grey frame in a tight compound with brickwork running about four floors behind the top, and two mixers, and — he counted, because he was the kind of man who counted — somewhere between thirty and forty men on a Sunday, which he could not evaluate at all.

He came home and wrote nothing, because he had nothing to write on.

What had actually happened, and what nobody in Kopar could have known, was that the channel had closed in October 2003.

Until then the arrangement had worked and had worked well. Bad news went from the ground to Salvi to Jagdish to Bhalerao to eleven families, and it had travelled exactly once — in February 2003, over the piling, before the vote — and it had cost Jagdish ten lakh and bought him nine votes and a reputation on a step in Kopar.

After the well, nothing travelled. Not the twenty-six lakh. Not the four months on the amendment. Not the fifteen weeks, or the thirty-two days, or the nine, or the six.

Jagdish had not announced the closure, because a man does not announce a thing he has not noticed doing. Bhalerao had not noticed it either, because a channel that carries nothing looks exactly like a channel with nothing to carry, and for eighteen months he had drawn the natural inference, which was that the project was going normally.

So the register on the fourteenth of March 2005 was not the beginning of a case.

It was a man in Kopar building his own instrument, because the one he had been reading had gone dark and he had only just realised that he could not tell the difference between dark and nothing-to-report.

He wrote in it the way he wrote everything: date on the left, entry, no adjectives.

14/3/05 — Register begun. Cheque recd 1/3. Site visit 6/3 (self). Struct approx 9 flrs. Brick approx 5 flrs. Plaster nil. Men counted 34 (Sun).

2/4/05 — Cheque recd 1/4.

9/4/05 — Asked Wagh saheb office by phone re date. Pallavi bai says will ask. No reply as at 16/4.

17/4/05 — Site visit (self). Struct 10 flrs.

1/5/05 — Cheque recd 1/5.

8/5/05 — Deshpande (elder) says heard from someone that steel supplier changed. Not verified.

That last entry is the only one in the entire register that contains a rumour, and it is the only one in which Bhalerao wrote the words not verified, and he never wrote them again because he never again wrote down anything he had not seen himself or received on paper.

There are two hundred and six entries. They run from the fourteenth of March 2005 to the nineteenth of November 2006. Nineteen of them are about the transit rent and eighteen of those record it arriving on time.

That is the character of the document, and it is why, when it was finally opened on a table in front of a lawyer, nobody could do anything with it except read it.

In September 2005 he telephoned the office and asked, directly, for a revised completion date.

Pallavi said she would ask Wagh saheb. She did ask, that afternoon, and Jagdish was in the car between Thakurli and the site and said, “Tell him I’ll come and see them,” and meant it entirely at the moment he said it.

20/9/05 — Phoned office re date. Pallavi bai: Wagh saheb will come and meet society. No date given for meeting.

He came in November.

Between the twentieth of September and the meeting in November there were fifty-three days, and in Bhalerao’s register there are eleven entries in that period, and every one of them is accurate, and not one of them is unfair, and taken together they are the most damaging eleven lines in the book — not because of what they say, but because a man who writes Wagh saheb will come and meet society and then writes ten more entries before he comes has produced, without intending anything at all, a record of a gap.

Jagdish would see the register for the first time on the ninth of August 2006.

He would read the entry for the twentieth of September 2005 twice, and then he would put his finger on the eleven entries after it, and he would understand — faster than his own lawyer, who was still looking for the clause it breached — that there was nothing in the document to argue with and that this was the problem.