Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 26 of 40

Salvi Leaves

He came in on a Monday morning with the letter typed, which meant he had typed it at home on his brother-in-law’s machine over the weekend, which meant it had been decided by Friday at the latest.

“Effective from the fifteenth of November,” he said. “After handover, after the snag list, after the society’s certificate. I’ll do the defects for six months as a consultant if you want it and if you don’t want it I’ll say why to anybody who asks.”

Jagdish read the letter, which was four lines and correct.

“Sit down.”

“I’d rather not, saheb.”

“Sit down, Salvi.”

He sat down.

“Is it money?”

“No.”

“Because it can be money. I’ve been paying you what a site manager gets and you have not been a site manager since about 1999, and I’ve known that and I’ve let it run because you never asked, and that is on me and I’ll fix it today.”

“It isn’t money and please don’t offer it again, because if you offer it again I will have to say something unpleasant.”

“Then say it.”

“No,” said Salvi.

Jagdish put the letter down.

“Is it another firm?”

“Kambli’s people asked in June and I said no. Since then, nobody.” He had his hands on his knees. “I’ll take something in September or October next year. I’m going to spend nine months not building anything.”

“Then what is it?”

And Salvi gave the reason, which he had prepared, and which is the reason he gave to everybody who asked for the rest of his life:

“In September last year I sat in that room and put eleven sheets on your desk and told you the period was thirty-eight months. I had every one of those figures by July of two thousand and four. Some of them by March. I could have added them up on any Sunday in fourteen months and I did not add them up, because adding them up was not my job.”

“I told you at the time. You didn’t have authority to be told the total was worth adding.”

“You did tell me that. It was generous and it was true and I have thought about it for eleven months and it is not enough.” He was very steady. “A man who can add and does not add because nobody asked him to is a man who has decided that the arithmetic is somebody else’s. I was thirty-nine years old and I had run four buildings and I knew that board was wrong. I looked at it every time I came into this office. I ran my site against a date I knew was gone and I called it absorbing.”

“You did absorb. You got back four days in every ten. Nobody else would have got back two.”

“Yes,” said Salvi. “And every one of those four days made the ten easier to not report.”

Nobody in the firm accepted it.

Pallavi did not accept it and said so to Meera, who did not comment. Nikam did not accept it and spent a week convinced that Salvi had been quietly forced out, and was disabused only when Salvi told him directly, at some length, in a tempo. Rege telephoned from Pune when he heard, and said that a man who resigns over a spreadsheet is a man with something else on his mind, and Jagdish said he did not think that was it, and Rege said, “Then he is a better man than either of us,” and that is the only conversation on the subject that Jagdish ever found useful.

The eleven households did not accept it either, and this is the part that matters.

Bhalerao asked, in September, at the site, whether it was true that the site manager was going, and was told that it was. He wrote it in the register — 4/9/06 — Told Salvi saheb leaving after handover. Reason not stated to me. — and then, six weeks later, at the handover, in front of about thirty people, he made a short speech in which he thanked Salvi by name and said that in three years and four months there had not been one day on which a member of that society had gone to that gate and been turned away or lied to.

It was accurate and it was public and it was the last thing anybody said out loud about who was responsible for what, and it landed on Jagdish Wagh standing four feet away exactly as Bhalerao had not intended it to.

The thing Jagdish did not do was argue.

He tried once, on the Monday, for about four minutes, with the money and the title and a partnership he had been half-considering since Rege left, and Salvi declined all of it politely, and then Jagdish stopped.

He could have gone on. That is the point. He had talked round harder men than Salvi over the years — suppliers, a bank manager, two societies — and he had a specific talent for finding the thing a man actually wanted and putting it on the table, and he did not use it.

He worked out why in about 2008, which is two years later, and the answer arrived while he was doing something else entirely, and it was this:

If I keep him, I have accepted his reason.

Because Salvi’s reason was not really about Salvi. Strip the modesty out of it and it says: there was a board on the wall that was wrong for thirty months, and every man in this firm ran against it, and I am leaving because I ran against it knowing. And a builder who talks that man into staying has to say, out loud, in a room, the board was mine.

He did not say it in September 2006. He let a good man leave instead, and he wrote him a reference that Salvi’s next employer described as the best he had ever received, and he paid the consultancy for the defects period at a rate Salvi had not asked for and did not refuse.

They stayed in touch. Not often — twice a year, and then once. Salvi took a firm in Ambernath in 2007 and was a partner in it by 2011, and built decently and unspectacularly and never lost a society.

He was at Sumati Wagh’s funeral in 2009, at the back, with his wife.

He did not go to Site 14.