Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 28 of 40

Vasant's Trade

The cupboard had to be cleared because Sumati was moving downstairs.

She was seventy-two and had been in hospital twice in fourteen months and the stairs in the flat had become a subject, and in November 2006 it was settled without much argument that she would take the front room and the front room’s contents would go somewhere else. The somewhere else was the tall cupboard, and the tall cupboard had not been emptied since 1994.

Jagdish did it on a Sunday.

Most of it was what such cupboards contain: a broken fan, four school registers in his mother’s hand from before he was born, a tin of documents relating to a plot at Titwala that his father had never owned and had somehow accumulated paper about anyway, and a Bombay street directory from 1971 with a spine like a dead leaf.

At the bottom, in a cloth bag, were nine notebooks.

They were the same kind Bhalerao bought. Long, ruled, hard-backed, the kind sold to small businesses for stock. Vasant Wagh had used one a year and a bit, and the nine of them covered from 1982 to 1994, which was the last twelve years of his working life and the first twelve of his son’s.

Jagdish had known they existed. He had seen his father write in them at the dining table two evenings a week for twenty years, and had been shooed away from them at nine and at fourteen and had stopped being interested by nineteen. After the funeral in 1994 somebody had put them in a cloth bag and somebody had put the cloth bag in the cupboard.

He sat down on the floor of the front room with the fourth one and did not get up for two hours.

There was nothing confidential in them and nothing scandalous, which was the first surprise.

The entries were four or five lines each and ran perhaps six to a page.

Dhamankar plot, Kopar, 4800 sq ft approx. Three shares. Eldest in Nashik, will not come. Younger two willing. Wife of the eldest is the one who decides — she taught with Sumati at the school 1968–71.

Marathe, 3rd flr, wants to sell but not to a builder. His son’s opinion. Son works Bombay Port. Approach through the son, not the father, and not before the father’s brother’s wedding in May.

Kulkarni compound. Do not touch. Two of the four brothers are not speaking. Ask again in three years.

Twelve years of it. Nine notebooks, perhaps four thousand entries, and there was not one figure of any kind in the whole of the fourth notebook until page sixty-one, and when a figure finally appeared it was a bus fare.

Vasant Wagh had not been recording land. He had been recording people: who would sell, who would not, who was actually deciding, who had to be approached through whom, whose wedding was in May, who had taught with whose wife in 1968, which two brothers were not speaking and what year to ask again.

Do not touch. Ask again in three years. It appears eleven times across nine notebooks in various forms, and in four of those cases there is a later entry, years afterwards, in which the thing was asked again and worked.

The 1991 notebook has an entry for the creek plot.

It is four lines long, it names the two brothers correctly, it notes the position on the far bank in eight words, and it ends: J. going to see it Thursday.

There is no entry after it. The rest of that week is a water connection at Kopar and a man called Sane who wanted to sell a shop.

Vasant Wagh never wrote down what his son decided about Site 14, or why, or what he thought of it. He wrote down that the boy was going on Thursday and then he wrote about a shop.

Jagdish read those four lines several times and then closed the notebook and sat with his back against the cupboard for a while.

Here is what he understood on the floor of the front room in November 2006, and it took him two hours to get to it and it had been available to him since a step outside a tailor’s shop in Kopar in February 2003, when a bald man of sixty-odd had handed it to him with too-sweet tea and he had not been able to take it.

He had spent thirty years believing that he had left his father’s trade.

The belief had a specific shape. His father brokered; he built. His father stood between people and information; he stood on ground and made a thing that had not been there before. His father had never poured a slab in his life, and Jagdish had poured, by 2006, something over four hundred of them, and every one of them was still standing, and that was the difference and it was a real difference and he had been proud of it since he was twenty-four.

And on the floor with the fourth notebook open he saw that the eleven households at Shivaji Chowk had voted for him in March 2003 for exactly the reasons in his father’s book.

Not because of eleven standing buildings. Because Sumati Wagh had taught Bhalerao’s wife, and Gokhale, and both Deshpandes, and half of that hall. Because Kelkar the tailor said so to anybody who asked. Because a man whose mother taught you does not run away to Nashik with your corpus money.

Approach through the son, not the father. The wife of the eldest is the one who decides. His father had written those sentences down in a notebook because they were the whole of his working capital, and had died without a rupee’s worth of land, and had left his son the only asset he had, which was a town full of people who would take a Wagh’s word.

Jagdish had spent it on Shivaji Chowk. All of it, over thirty-eight months, in silences — the well he did not report, the four months he did not explain, the date that passed on a Monday in August 2005 while nobody in his office said anything.

He had not stolen anything and he had not cheated anybody and he had paid twenty-six lakh out of his own margin into ground nobody would ever see. And he had drawn down, to about the last rupee, a line of credit that had been opened in 1968 in a staff room by a woman marking papers in red.

Then carry them, she had said to him in this same room, on the night of the eleventh of February 2003, with a school register open on her knees.

He put the nine notebooks back in the cloth bag and put the cloth bag on the shelf in his own almirah, where they still are.

Then he went into the kitchen, where his mother was doing something to vegetables that she was not supposed to be standing up to do, and he said:

“Aai, did Baba ever say anything about the creek plot? In ninety-one?”

Sumati Wagh thought about it.

“He said you’d gone to look at it on a Thursday,” she said. “Then he talked about a shop.”