Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 19 of 40

The Number

The twenty-second of August 2005 was a Monday and nothing happened on it.

That was the date. Twenty-six months from vacant possession on the twenty-second of June 2003: the figure said in a hot hall in February, written into clause 9 of a forty-one page agreement, carried on a board in permanent marker for two years and six months, given at a gate to a woman who had asked for a Diwali instead.

On that Monday the structure was topped out and had been for five months, the brickwork was complete to the ninth floor, internal plaster was running on floors two to five, the lift shafts were done and the lifts were not ordered, and there were eighty-one men on site.

It was, to any builder walking through it, a job going well. It was six to eight months from handover.

Nobody in the office above the bank said anything on the twenty-second of August. Nobody said anything on the twenty-third. Pallavi typed a letter about the water connection and Jagdish signed it, and the day was a day.

The first person to say it out loud said it on the twelfth of September, three weeks later, and it was Salvi, and he said it on the telephone in a voice Jagdish had not heard from him in eleven years.

“I want an hour. Not on site. In the office. And I want to bring the diaries.”

He came at four o’clock with three site diaries and eleven sheets of paper in his own handwriting, and he did not turn any of it round to face Jagdish, which was how Jagdish knew before either of them had spoken.

“I’ve done the addition,” Salvi said.

“All right.”

“Nobody asked me to. I want that said, because I’ve done it on the firm’s time and you may take a view on it.”

“Salvi.”

“The rain in September ninety-three — ‘three, sorry, two thousand and three. Nineteen days, three weeks on the excavation start.” He put down the first sheet. “The ground and the well: seven weeks. The amendment: I gave you six in July ‘four and it was six, I’ve checked it against the pour dates and it’s six and a half. The slab cycle: I have it at thirteen point eight average against twelve, eighteen slabs, that’s thirty-two days. Plumbing revision, nine. Lift shaft in February, six. Tayde’s truck in February, eleven days, of which I got back seven.”

He laid the sheets out one at a time, and it took a while, because there were eleven of them and he had not left anything out.

“There’s more of it than you think,” he said. “It isn’t the big ones. It’s that I have got back about four days in every ten I’ve lost, all the way through, and I have been reporting the four and not the ten, because the four is what I did and the ten is just what happened.”

Jagdish looked at the eleven sheets on his desk for a long time.

“What’s the number?”

“From the twenty-second of June ‘three, the period ran twenty-six months. My honest figure for the period is thirty-eight.” Salvi’s hands were flat on the edge of the desk. “It’s thirty-eight months, saheb. It’s August 2006, and I don’t believe August.”

“What do you believe?”

“I believe October if I have the lifts ordered by December and the sanitary fittings decided by January, and I believe December if I don’t.”

Jagdish did not argue with any of it, and afterwards he was grateful for that, because it was the only part of that autumn he could look at without flinching.

He went through the eleven sheets line by line for ninety minutes and disagreed with two figures and was talked out of one of them. He asked four questions about the lift order and three about the finishing sequence. He did not once suggest that the number was wrong because it could not be right, which is the standard behaviour of a man in that chair receiving that paper, and which Salvi had spent nine days bracing for.

At the end of it he said: “You should have brought me this in July of last year.”

“I should have brought it to you in July of last year,” Salvi agreed. “I didn’t have the authority to add it up.”

“You didn’t need authority to add.”

“I needed authority to be told the total was worth adding.” Salvi said it without heat. “There’s a board on your wall that has said August 2005 since February of ‘three. Every man in this firm runs against that board. I have been absorbing against that board for two and a half years, and I have been good at it, and if you had come to me in July ‘four and said ‘the board is wrong, the board has been wrong since the well, I want the true number every month’ — I’d have given it to you every month.”

There was a pause.

“That’s fair,” Jagdish said.

“It’s not a complaint. I’m telling you what happened so that it doesn’t happen in the last year.”

Jagdish stood and went to the board and looked at the Shivaji Chowk column, and picked up the pencil, and did not use it.

“Leave it,” he said. “I’ll change it when they’ve been told.”

He was told the number on the twelfth of September.

Bhalerao telephoned the office on the twentieth and asked, directly, for a revised completion date, and Pallavi said she would ask Wagh saheb, and asked him that afternoon while he was in the car between Thakurli and the site, and he said tell him I’ll come and see them and meant it entirely at the moment he said it.

The meeting was held on the twelfth of November.

Fifty-three days. Five weeks and eighteen days between the day he learned the true number and the day he stood in a room with the people it belonged to.

It is worth going through what those fifty-three days contained, because the answer is not cowardice, and the answer being not-cowardice is what makes it bad.

They contained the lift order, which he wanted signed before the meeting so that he could stand up and say the lifts are ordered — nine days of quotations and eleven days waiting for a revised delivery commitment from the second supplier, and it was signed on the fourth of October, and it was the right thing to do.

They contained the sanitary fittings decision, which needed the society’s own choice from three ranges, and which he wanted to take to the same meeting so that the meeting had one item in it that was not bad news. Pallavi prepared the sheets. They were good sheets.

They contained eleven days in October when Sumati was in hospital again, and this time it was eleven days and not nine, and he was at the hospital every evening, and nobody, then or since, has held that against him.

They contained a fortnight in which he wrote out what he was going to say, four times, in a diary, and threw all four away.

And they contained the thing that took the longest, which was arriving at the number he would actually give them.

Salvi’s honest figure was thirty-eight months. October 2006, or December if the lifts slipped.

The number Jagdish took into that hall on the twelfth of November 2005 was April 2006.

He did not invent it. He built it, in the diary, over four attempts, and every input into it was a real thing that could really have happened: the lifts arriving on the earliest date the supplier had ever achieved, the finishing gangs doubled from January, Sundays worked from February, the sanitary decision taken in that hall that night, and the plastering catching up in a way that it had not managed once in two years.

It was, in the technical sense, achievable. Salvi would have said — did say, in a corridor on the fourteenth, in six words — that it was achievable in the way that a train is catchable if every light is green.

And it had the property that no other number had, which was that it let a man stand in front of eleven families who had been out of their homes for twenty-nine months and say five more rather than eleven more.

He knew what he was doing. That is the thing to be clear about, at the end of Part Two. He was not confused, he was not misinformed, he had eleven sheets of Salvi’s handwriting in a folder in his desk, and on the evening of the eleventh of November his wife stood in the doorway of the front room and said tell them the whole of it, and he said he would.