Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 22 of 40

The Transcript

He had gone looking for the minutes.

That is all it was. The letter of the fourteenth of July had asked for a revised date in writing, and Bhalerao, preparing for a meeting the way he had prepared for meetings for twelve years, wanted the minutes of the general body of the eleventh of February 2003 in front of him, because a secretary going into a meeting about a date should have the meeting where the date was given.

The minutes were in the carton marked SOCIETY — OLD, which had come to the transit flat at Kopar in June 2003 and had gone into the top of the cupboard and had not been opened since.

He got it down on the evening of the eighth of August and put it on the bed and cut the tape.

The minutes were there, a page and a half, signed by eleven households four months late in the way of all society minutes, recording that the Developer had explained the proposal, that queries were raised and satisfactorily answered, and that the matter was put to vote on the ninth of March.

Underneath them, third from the bottom, was the spiral notebook.

He knew what it was before he opened it. He had bought four of them a year for eleven years and this was the one for 2002–03, ruled in a hand-drawn column down the left for the date, and it was full of meter readings and water tanker bills and the number of the man who did the lift AMC on the old building that no longer existed.

The entry for the eleventh of February 2003 was seven lines down a page that also contained a note about a leaking terrace.

GBM 11/2. Wagh Infra proposal. Attend approx 26 + standing.

26 mo from VP. Said in front of GBM.

Sale flats to outsiders — said direct, no hedging. Good.

Kanetkar aaji re Diva builder. He answered.

Will carry boxes.

Bhalerao sat on the edge of the bed in a transit flat in Kopar with a notebook in his hands and read those five lines several times.

He was sixty-eight. He had been out of his own house for three years, one month and seventeen days. He had written those lines himself, at about half past nine on a February night, at a table in a flat that had since been demolished, in the same twenty minutes in which he had noted that a terrace was leaking.

He had not written them as evidence. He had written them the way he wrote the meter reading.

And now they were the only contemporaneous record in existence of what had been said in that hall, and he was two days away from a meeting at which eleven households were going to ask a builder why April had passed, and he was the man holding it.

He came to the office at six on the ninth, without an appointment, and Pallavi put him straight in, and he sat down and put two things on the desk.

The register — long, hard-backed, forty-two rupees, two hundred and six entries — and the spiral notebook, open, held flat with his hand.

“I found this yesterday,” he said. “I was looking for the minutes.”

Jagdish read the five lines.

He read them the way he read everything, which was for the places where a sentence stopped early, and there was nowhere in these five lines where anything stopped early at all. They were complete. 26 mo from VP. Said in front of GBM. A period, a start point, and a witnessing.

And then the last one.

“I want to say something before you say anything,” Bhalerao said.

“Say it.”

“I have not shown this to anybody. Not to the committee, not to my wife, not to Deshpande, and Deshpande has asked me twice this week what I have got.” He kept his hand flat on the page. “I am showing it to you two days early because in my judgement a man should not be handed a thing like this in a hall in front of twenty-nine people. That is the whole of my reason and I do not have another one.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” Bhalerao turned the register round with his other hand. “This is the other thing and it is worse.”

It was worse.

Jagdish went through the register for forty minutes while Bhalerao sat and drank a cup of tea he had not asked for and did not want.

There was nothing in it. That was the horror of it and it took him about eleven minutes to understand the shape of what he was looking at. Two hundred and six entries and not one adjective. Cheque recd 1/4. Eighteen of nineteen rent entries recording it arriving on time — the man had recorded the rent arriving on time, month after month, in a document he was assembling because he could not get an answer out of the office.

One rumour in two hundred and six entries, marked not verified, and never repeated.

And on the twentieth of September 2005: Phoned office re date. Pallavi bai: Wagh saheb will come and meet society. No date given for meeting.

Then eleven entries. Then the twelfth of November.

Jagdish put his finger on that page and held it there, and Ketkar, when he saw the same page the following afternoon, spent four minutes looking for the clause it breached before Jagdish told him to stop, because he had understood on the ninth of August at about a quarter past six that there was no clause, and that this was the problem.

The register did not accuse him of anything. It could not be answered, because it did not ask. It was two hundred and six dated observations by a retired bank clerk who had wanted to know what was happening to his house and had built himself an instrument because the one he had been reading went dark, and every single entry in it was true, and any lawyer alive could have read the whole thing aloud in court without doing Jagdish Wagh the slightest legal damage, and no person in that hall on Friday was going to hear it as anything but what it was.

“What do you want?” Jagdish said, finally.

It was, he knew as he said it, the wrong question, and he asked it because he wanted the answer to be a number — a compensation, a rate, an amount per month, something with a column he could put a figure in.

Bhalerao considered it seriously, which was worse than if he had been offended.

“On Friday? I want you to tell them the truth about the date and I want you to have the truth about the date before you come.” He stood up and began, unhurriedly, to gather his two documents. “For myself, personally — I want to go home. I have been out for three years and one month and I am sixty-eight and my wife has arranged that flat four times in her head.”

“Bhalerao saheb—”

“And I want to say one more thing and then I will go, because Pallavi bai wants to lock up.” He had the register under his arm and the notebook in his hand. “You are not a bad builder. My committee knows it, the whole of Kopar knows it, and I have told six people this month what you did with that well and the twenty-six lakh. You could have come to us at any time in the last three years and said the truth and we would have taken it. In February 2003 you told us the ground was bad before we voted, and I have never forgotten that, and neither has Gokhale.”

He put the notebook in his cloth bag.

“That is what I do not understand,” he said. “You told us the bad news when it could still have cost you the job. And then you stopped.”