Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 20 of 40

The Corner Meeting

The hall was got for nothing, and the reason it was got for nothing is the reason this chapter is hard to write.

The society had no hall any more. Its hall had been on the ground floor of a building that Jagdish Wagh had taken down in six weeks in the summer of 2003, slabs cut and lowered rather than dropped. Eleven families scattered across four transit buildings in Kopar have no room to meet in, which is a small fact about redevelopment that nobody puts in the agreement, and which Bhalerao had solved twice already in two years by borrowing.

He borrowed this one from the school, which gave it on a Saturday evening for the price of the electricity, because Bhalerao’s wife had been taught there, and because the clerk who dealt with such requests had also been taught there, and because when Bhalerao gave the name of the society and the purpose the clerk said, “Wagh? Sumati teacher’s son?” and did not charge him.

So the room in which Jagdish Wagh moved the date for the first time was a room in the school where his mother had taught for thirty-one years, obtained free because of her, on the last Saturday she would ever be well enough to have been told about it.

He did not know that when he walked in. He learned it about four minutes before he stood up, from Bhalerao, who mentioned it as a pleasantry.

Twenty-nine people. All eleven households, some of them three deep. The tube lights were the long grey kind that a school hall has and two of them were failing at the far end, so the back third of the room was dimmer than the front, and the people who had come late were standing in it.

Meera sat at the end of the second row and did not take anything out to write on.

He stood up at ten past seven and did not have notes, for the same reason he had not had notes in February 2003, and this time the reason was not true any more; he had written it out four times in a diary and thrown all four away and could have recited any of them.

He began well. He gave them the building. He told them the structure had topped out in March and the brickwork was complete to the ninth, and that the internal plaster was at the fifth and running, and that the lifts had been ordered on the fourth of October and he had the order copy here for anybody who wanted to see it, and he put it on the table, and Bhalerao — of course — came and looked at it.

He told them about the ground.

That was the part he had not planned in any of the four drafts and it came out of him standing there, and it was the best five minutes of the evening: the two point one that turned out to be three, the fill under a fifth of the footprint, the brick-lined well from before he was born sitting exactly under the lift pit, the twenty-six lakh, the seven weeks. He said that he had paid for it and that not one rupee of it had gone to their account and not one rupee of it ever would.

He should have said it in October 2003. He said it in November 2005 and the room received it exactly as well as it would have been received then, which he registered, and which cost him something to register.

And then he gave them the date.

“The period in the agreement was twenty-six months. That went on the twenty-second of August. You know that; I’m not going to stand here and pretend the date passed without anybody noticing.” He put his hands behind his back. “It is my failure that I did not come to you in August. I should have come in August.”

The room was very quiet.

“The date I am giving you tonight is April 2006.”

He watched it land.

It landed as relief. That is the fact of the evening and everything that came afterwards, in a different hall in August, was determined by it. Twenty-nine people in a school hall in Kopar had walked in that Saturday not knowing whether they were about to hear April or whether they were about to hear a builder start using words like circumstances, and they heard a date five months out with an order copy for the lifts on the table in front of them, and the room let go of something.

Somebody at the back said, “That’s Gudi Padwa,” and somebody else said no, later, and there was a small ordinary argument about the calendar which lasted perhaps ninety seconds and in which four people were briefly happy.

The elder Deshpande asked what happened if it was not April. Jagdish said the rent ran until handover, whatever the date, and that this had always been true and was in the agreement, and Deshpande said he knew it was in the agreement and that he was asking a different question, and Jagdish said, “Then ask it,” and Deshpande, after a moment, said that he would not, and sat down. It is the single most perceptive thing anybody said that night and it went nowhere.

Mrs. Ranade’s son Sanjay did not speak.

Gokhale said something graceful about the well, and about the twenty-six lakh, and about how not every builder would have done that, and there was a murmur of agreement, and Bhalerao wrote in the register the next morning:

12/11/05 — Society meeting, school hall, 7.10 to 8.35 pm. Wagh saheb attended. Revised completion date given: April 2006. Lift order copy shown (dtd 4/10/05). Explained extra foundation work 2003, cost stated as Rs 26 lakh borne by developer. Sanitary fittings — three ranges circulated, society to decide by 30/11. No objections raised.

No objections raised. Four words, accurate, in a register that would be read aloud in a solicitor’s office nine months later.

They chose the sanitary fittings before they left. It took eleven minutes and was, by some distance, the most enjoyable eleven minutes any of those families had had in connection with that building since June 2003. The middle range. Bhalerao wrote it down.

Afterwards there was tea, which the school did not provide and which Bhalerao had arranged, and Jagdish stood with a paper cup and was thanked by four people.

He got out at about nine.

Meera was in the car already. He got in and sat with the keys in his hand and did not start it.

Through the windscreen, the school: two floors, painted the colour that all such schools were painted, the staff room window on the first floor at the near end, which was the window he had been made to stand under at the age of nine while his mother finished a meeting, and which he had not looked at in thirty-five years and did not look at now.

“April,” Meera said.

“April.”

“Salvi’s number is October.”

He turned his head. She was looking straight ahead.

He had not shown her the eleven sheets. They were in a folder in the desk drawer in a room she had a key to and came into four days a week, and he had known, at some level available to him since April, that not showing her a thing and hiding it were not the same act and that he had stopped being able to tell them apart.

“October’s if the lifts come in December,” he said.

“And April is if everything is green.”

“April is achievable.”

Meera did not answer that. She had put it to him in a doorway the previous evening in six words and he had said he would, and he had gone into a room borrowed free in his mother’s name and told them the ground and the well and the twenty-six lakh and the failure to come in August — all of it true, all of it costly, all of it his — and then he had given them a number he had built out of green lights, and the room had thanked him.

That is where Part Two ends: in a car outside a school in Kopar on a Saturday night in November 2005, with a good man having just done the hardest honest thing of his career, four fifths of the way, and with the last fifth of it sitting in a folder in a drawer.

He started the car.

They were four hundred metres down the road when she said the only other thing she said that night.

“They’ll forgive you the ground.”

End of Part Two