Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 18 of 40

Mrs. Kanetkar

She died on the nineteenth of April 2005, at about four in the morning, in the transit flat at Kopar, of a heart that had been giving notice for two years and about which she had told nobody except a doctor at the corner clinic who had told her to tell somebody.

She was seventy-nine. She had been out of her own house for one year, ten months and twenty-seven days.

Her son Sanjay — not the Ranades’ Sanjay; the other one, Mrs. Kanetkar’s son, who was fifty and lived in Mulund and had driven down on the day of the shifting after all — arrived at seven, and Bhalerao at half past, and the news reached the office above the bank at ten past ten when Pallavi took the call and stood up while taking it, which she did not do.

Jagdish was at the Titwala enquiry. He was back by twelve.

There is nothing to be made of the timing and the temptation to make something of it should be resisted.

She did not die because the building was late. She died because she was seventy-nine and her heart stopped. She had been examined in February and had been told what she was going to be told, and she had gone home and had not mentioned it, and had continued to walk to the shop on the corner every second day, on the first floor of a building with no lift, which was the floor Meera Wagh had moved heaven and a lakh and a half to put her on.

Nobody in this story killed her. That needs saying because the eleven families never once said otherwise, in the hall in November, in the hall in August 2006, or in any of the two hundred and six entries in Bhalerao’s register. Nobody ever stood up and said she died because of you.

They did not need to. There was no version of the sentence anybody had to say out loud.

Jagdish went to Kopar at half past twelve and did what there was to do, which was not much and which he did well.

He carried, at one end, with three other men. He stood at the back at the crematorium. He gave Sanjay Kanetkar the name of a man who handled society transfer paperwork and would not charge him, and telephoned that man himself the same evening. He said very little to anybody, which was correct, and which several people afterwards described as dignified and one person described, accurately, as the behaviour of a man who has decided not to speak in case of what comes out.

The flat was full. Kopar transit flats were small and there were perhaps forty people in and around it through the afternoon, on the landing, on the stairs, standing in the compound.

Jagdish went in at about four to say what you say, and it was in the back room, when he was getting out of the way of a woman carrying chairs, that he saw the cartons.

Four of them, stacked against the wall behind the door, where they had been since June 2003.

Newspaper, twine. His knots — he recognised his own knots, which was the detail he was least prepared for. And on the side of each one, in marker, in English, and underneath it in Marathi in the same hand:

KITCHEN.

BEDROOM.

DEVGHAR.

BEDROOM.

He had written those twice each on a Sunday afternoon in June 2003 with a woman of seventy-eight sitting on a stool telling him he was doing it wrong, because, she had said, the man carrying it would not be an English-reading man, and why should the man carrying it have to work harder than the man writing on it.

Seven cartons had been opened over twenty-two months. Four had not.

They were not the cartons of things she did not need. The one marked DEVGHAR had the lamps in it, and the brass she had made him wash, and the stopped clock was in the second BEDROOM carton under three sheets of newspaper, and everything that was in those four boxes was a thing she had used every day of her life for forty-one years in a flat two kilometres away.

She had not unpacked them because unpacking them would have been a statement about how long she was going to be there.

Jagdish Wagh stood in the back room of a transit flat in Kopar on the nineteenth of April 2005 and looked at four cartons with his own handwriting on them, in two scripts, and understood several things in an order he was never afterwards able to reconstruct.

That he had told her twenty-six months and she had said don’t tell me twenty-six months, tell me a Diwali, and he had said 2005, and she had believed him, and she had died believing him, which meant that the last thing he ever gave her was accurate as of the day he said it and had been wrong for twenty months.

That she had never once in twenty-two months telephoned the office to ask.

That the true completion date, as of that morning — as of the sums nobody in the firm had done on paper, that Salvi was carrying in pieces and that Meera had been carrying since a Tuesday in April four days earlier — was not 2005 and had not been 2005 since the summer before last.

And that the boxes were going to have to be carried down a flight of stairs by somebody, and out to a car, and that it was not going to be him, because they were going to Mulund.

He did not carry them. Sanjay’s brother-in-law and a neighbour did it on the Thursday.

He was asked, and he said no, and he did not explain, and it was taken for the ordinary reluctance of an important man to do a small job, and one of the men on the stairs made a remark about it that got repeated twice in Kopar and then died out.

The society was allotted flat 4 on the first floor in the name of Sanjay Kanetkar in August 2006, and the transfer went through in November, and he sold it in 2009 to a family from Diva for a figure that made him quiet for a week.

He did not want it. He had a flat in Mulund and two children in school there and no reason on earth to own a first-floor flat in Dombivli except that his mother had voted for it in a hot hall in March 2003 with nine others, and had been moved down two floors so her knees would manage, and had asked for a Diwali.

He came to the handover. He stood at the back. When Jagdish came over to him he shook hands and said the correct things and did not stay for the tea.

The rangoli was done in that doorway for the first time in Diwali of 2006, by the family from Diva’s daughter, three years and four months after it was promised at a gate, for a woman none of them had ever heard of.