Part Four — The Ground · Chapter 33 of 40

Site 14, Third Time

Ghaisas was sixty-three and had had something done to his hip and came up the stairs above the bank slowly and made no remark about it.

He put the same folder on the desk. It was visibly the same folder; it had a mark on the corner that Jagdish recognised across three and a half years, and this seemed to him at the time to be the most ridiculous detail of the entire business and he has never been able to explain why it affected him.

“I said I would not offer you the same thing twice,” Ghaisas said. “This is the third time and I am aware of it, and I have come anyway, and I will tell you why in one sentence. I am sixty-three and I have been carrying this plot since 1989 and I would like to stop.”

“Who’s it with now?”

“The same two estates. One of the brothers died in 2006 and his share is with his daughter, who is in Bangalore, who has never seen it and wants it sold. The other brother is seventy-one and has stopped saying no. The price is what it was in 2005 in nominal terms, which after three years means it has come down.”

He did not open the folder.

“You will want to know why nobody has taken it,” he said. “Nobody has taken it because in 1991 a builder called Wagh went and stood on it and said no, and this district has never got over it, and every man I have shown it to in seventeen years has asked me the same first question, which is: what did Wagh see?”

Here is what had changed since February 2005, and it had all changed by accident, and none of it had anything to do with the creek plot.

In 2005 he had said: no capacity, three live sites and a redevelopment in its last year. In September 2008 he had one small commercial job finishing in November, twenty-two people on the rolls, and a site manager who had been asking since June whether there was anything coming.

In 2005 he had said: capital committed. In September 2008 the firm’s balance was, in Meera’s phrase from the previous December, entirely uncomplicated. Shivaji Chowk’s sale flats had all registered by mid-2007. Titwala had closed clean. There was no debt on anything.

In 2005 he had had a redevelopment with fourteen months still to run and eleven families in transit flats at Kopar, and the sentence I have no room for this had been the plainest kind of truth.

In September 2008 there were no families anywhere waiting for anything he had promised.

Every wall he had put between himself and that plot in 2005 had been a real wall, load-bearing, built out of facts. And between February 2005 and September 2008 all four of them had come down in the ordinary course of a business getting smaller, without his ever making a decision about any of them.

That is the position Ghaisas walked into and Ghaisas did not know it. He came with a hip and a folder and a daughter in Bangalore, and he happened to arrive in the one month of Jagdish Wagh’s working life in which there was no honest reason to say no.

“What’s on the far bank now?” Jagdish said.

“Nothing. Warehousing. The godown that took the land in ninety-nine sold on in 2004 and it is four sheds and a compound wall and about eleven men who do not live there.”

“And the households.”

“Resettled in ninety-nine by the purchaser. Eleven households, and they went to a scheme at Diva, and it was done properly, and I have said this to you before.” Ghaisas paused. “In 2005 you did not ask me for the paper.”

“I know.”

“I have brought it again.”

“I know you have,” said Jagdish. “Open it.”

Ghaisas opened the folder.

It took about forty minutes and it was, as a piece of work, better than most of what Jagdish had seen in twenty-six years in that trade. There was the sale deed of 1999 for the godown land. There was a schedule of the eleven households by name with the head of each household and the number of persons. There were eleven receipts. There was a covering letter from a lawyer in Kalyan on a letterhead Jagdish recognised, dated November 1999, confirming that the resettlement scheme at Diva had been completed and that possession of the eleven tenements had been given.

There was a photograph, taken for the file, of a row of single-storey tenements with the numbers painted on them.

It was complete. There was nothing missing from it and nothing evasive in it, and Jagdish went through it the way he went through everything, looking for the places where a sentence stopped early, and there were none.

“Where’s Diva?” he said, at the end.

“The scheme? Off the Shil road. Eleven tenements in a row of forty.”

“Have you been?”

Ghaisas looked at him.

“No,” he said. “I have the paper.”

“I’ll want a fortnight,” Jagdish said.

“You said four minutes in 2005.”

“I know what I said in 2005.”

Ghaisas gathered the folder together and did not put it away.

“Wagh saheb, I am going to ask you the question this district has been asking for seventeen years, and then I am going to go down the stairs and I am not going to ask it again.” He set the folder square on the desk. “What did you see?”

There was a long pause in the eleven-by-nine room, with the four schedules on the wall — three of them blank now, and one of them with a small commercial job on it finishing in November — and the board that Meera Wagh had wiped and rewritten in her own hand on a Saturday in August 2006.

“Ghaisas saheb,” Jagdish said, “everybody in this district has been answering a question I never asked. Including you. Including me, for about fifteen years.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No. It’s the reason I want a fortnight.”

Ghaisas left the folder on the desk. He did that deliberately, and Jagdish noticed it deliberately, and neither of them said anything about it, and at the door Ghaisas said the last useful thing anybody said to Jagdish Wagh before he made his decision:

“It is a good paper. It is the best paper I have ever carried. And I have never once in nine years driven forty minutes to look at a row of tenements off the Shil road, and neither has anybody else, and the reason is that when a paper is that good nobody ever does.”

Then he went down the stairs slowly, because of the hip.

Jagdish sat with the folder for a while and then telephoned Pallavi’s extension and asked her to find out what the tide table was, which was not a question anybody in that office had ever been asked, and which Pallavi answered in forty minutes without asking why.