Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 27 of 40

Fourteen Months

The occupation certificate came on the sixth of October and the keys were handed over on Saturday the fourteenth, between ten in the morning and about two in the afternoon, in the compound, at a table with a cloth on it.

Fourteen months and twenty-three days after the twenty-second of August 2005.

Thirty-eight months and twenty-two days after the twenty-second of June 2003, against a contractual twenty-six.

Every family got the flat in Annexure B. Every carpet area was as specified or fractionally over. Every family got a flat larger than the one it had given up, which was the transaction as he had explained it to his daughter at a dinner table in April 2003 for eleven minutes, and which was, on the fourteenth of October 2006, delivered in full.

Bhalerao took the first set because he was the secretary and it was in order.

His wife went up with him. She had arranged that flat four times in her head, in the evenings, across three years and three months, and she went through the door of the actual one at eleven minutes past ten in the morning with her husband behind her and stood in the middle of the front room and turned round once.

Jagdish was not in the flat. He had learned, over eleven societies, not to be in the flat. He was in the corridor, four doors down, doing nothing, and what he heard through an open door was a woman saying, in a completely ordinary voice, “The window is on the wrong side.”

It was not on the wrong side. It was where it had been in the plan she had approved in 2003.

She had built it four times against a memory of the old building and the memory had won, and it took her, by her own account later, about two months to stop walking to the wrong wall in the dark.

Gokhale’s father came at about noon, brought by two of his sons, and was walked through the flat on the seventh floor, and was pleasant to everybody, and asked twice on the way out when they were going home.

Gokhale had told them all this would happen. He had said it in a school hall in August in front of twenty-nine people — he goes to a place he has never been — and he had said it without accusation and had asked for nothing, and it happened exactly as he said it would.

At about half past twelve the family took a photograph in the compound, all of them, three generations, with the youngest child held up at the front so that his face was in the frame, which is the same arrangement they had used on the morning of the twenty-first of June 2003 in front of the old building.

The old photograph and the new one hang in that flat one above the other. In the first, the boy held up at the front is four. In the second he is seven and does not want to be held.

The Deshpandes took their keys separately, which nobody had planned and everybody noticed. The elder went up at about eleven to the fourth floor and the younger at about one to the seventh, and they did not go up together, and their wives did, later, and stayed in the younger brother’s kitchen for an hour and a half.

Sanjay Kanetkar came at half past one, signed for flat 4 on the first floor, and did not go up.

He stood at the table with the keys in his hand and Jagdish came over, and they shook hands, and Sanjay said the correct things, and Jagdish said something about the transfer paperwork and the name of the man who would not charge him.

“Thank you,” said Sanjay Kanetkar, and put the keys in his shirt pocket, and stayed for perhaps another eleven minutes talking to Bhalerao about nothing, and left before the tea.

The building had two lifts.

They had been ordered on the fourth of October 2005 against the earliest delivery any supplier had ever offered, delivered fifty-seven days late, installed, tested, inspected, and signed off on the second of June 2006, and they were the single largest reason the handover was in October and not in April, and they worked perfectly all day on the fourteenth.

So there was nothing to carry.

Eleven families moved back over the following three weeks in tempos arranged by Nikam, and the cartons went up in two lifts, six or eight at a time, in the way that cartons go up in any building put up after about 1975, and there was no point at all in that process at which a man standing in a compound could have made himself useful by picking something up.

Jagdish had thought about it. He had thought about it more than he was willing to admit to himself, in September, in the way a man thinks about a thing he has decided not to think about: which day, and whose, and whether it would be understood, and whether it would be grotesque.

The building he had built made the question unaskable. He had specified those lifts himself in 2002 in the first sketch scheme, because a twelve-floor building has two lifts and an eleven-family society four floors high has none, and the entire purpose of the exercise had been to replace a building where an old woman lived on the first floor because she could not manage the stairs with a building where it would not have mattered which floor she was on.

He had done it. It worked. It went up and down all day carrying other people’s boxes.

Bhalerao made a short speech at about half past one, which he had not told anybody he was going to make.

He thanked the committee. He thanked the families for their patience, which got a laugh of a particular kind. He thanked Nikam by name for the transit shifting, both ways.

And 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, and that he wished to have that recorded because Salvi saheb was leaving the firm in November and had asked for no such thing.

Salvi, standing near the gate with his arms folded, looked at the ground.

Jagdish was four feet away and applauded with everybody else, and the sentence went into him and stayed there, and it is one of about four things in his life he could quote verbatim thirty years later.

Bhalerao did not mention the developer at all, and it was not an omission; he had thanked Jagdish personally, at length, in the corridor at eleven o’clock, when there was nobody there.

At about two he went round the compound one more time and then stood by the gate.

Thirty-eight months. Twenty-six lakh under the ground that nobody would ever see. Two lifts. A raft over a filled well. Eleven flats larger than the ones he took, on the floors specified, handed to eleven households of which one was now a man from Mulund who did not want his.

A woman had arranged her flat four times and walked into the wrong wall for two months. An eighty-six-year-old man had gone home to a place he had never been. Two brothers were three floors apart. A boy had changed school twice and was nineteen.

And the rent had gone out on the first of every month for thirty-eight months except once, and he had given notice on that one, and by any standard applied by any bank, any solicitor, any forum or any builder in that district, Jagdish Wagh had done a good job on a difficult redevelopment and had absorbed the cost of it himself.

Both of those sentences are true. This book has now said that four times in different words and this is the last time it will say it.

He drove home at three. Meera asked how it had gone and he said fine, and it had.