Fiction. Jagdish Wagh is an invented character and nothing on this site is a record of real events. Full disclaimer

Vacant Possession

Vacant possession is the term in a redevelopment agreement for the day a family hands over the keys to its own home. The novel follows Jagdish Wagh, a builder in Dombivli, from the meeting where he promises eleven families twenty-six months to the day, six years later, when he signs for the plot he once refused. Free to read, chapter by chapter.

Published anonymously. The author has chosen not to be named.

Part One — The Promise

1. The Promise February 2003. At a general body meeting in the Shivaji Chowk society hall, Jagdish Wagh gives eleven families twenty-six months — and then, to an old woman who says she wants to die in her own house, says one sentence more than the contract will ever record.
2. Kopar Side The morning after the meeting, Jagdish goes to Kopar to check a lift he has already promised works. He is recognised four times on the way, none of them as a builder, and begins to understand what he actually inherited from his parents.
3. Forty People The firm at its largest: forty on the rolls, four sites, a partner buying out. In a corridor between two other conversations, Jagdish hands Shivaji Chowk to his site manager to run day to day, and neither of them notices him doing it.
4. The Agreement Forty-one pages, drafted by a good lawyer and read by three careful people. Meera finds two things wrong with it and has them fixed. Nobody in the room has a record of what was said in the hall in February, and nobody thinks to want one.
5. Aditi His daughter is fifteen and has been given a word by a newspaper. Over one dinner she uses it about her father's work, he objects to it on grounds he believes are technical, and neither of them understands that the argument will take twenty years.
6. Transit June 2003, and eleven families hand over their keys. Ten of them pack. Mrs. Kanetkar, seventy-eight, does not, and Jagdish spends a Sunday afternoon packing her flat himself and carrying her boxes down.
7. What They Say About Him At a dinner in Thane a man who has never met him tells Jagdish the story of the plot he refused in 1991. The story is wrong in most of its particulars and right about the refusal, and Jagdish lets it stand.
8. Ground October 2003. The excavation opens the corner by the compound wall and the fill goes deeper and further than the bores said. Jagdish decides to pay for it himself and not to tell the society, for reasons that are good, and closes a channel he will need later.
9. Monsoon The end of the first year. Rain that arrives late and stays, a schedule board that still reads August 2005, and a margin that no longer exists anywhere except in the memory of the man who put it there.

Part Two — The Slip

10. Clearance The amended plan is required because a woman of seventy-eight was moved from the third floor to the first. It is applied for in February and comes back in June, and the four months between are available for purchase at a price Jagdish does not pay.
11. Nikhil The son is thirteen and in the house every day of 2004. This chapter is the record of what his father noticed, which is not nothing, and which is assembled here in full because the full amount is short.
12. The Second Contractor The steel supplier walks over ninety days of credit, because Jagdish's cash is under the ground at Shivaji Chowk. Salvi finds a replacement who is cheaper and slower, and makes the call himself, correctly, on a Wednesday when nobody asks him to.
13. Rent Day In January 2005 the transit rent goes out on the ninth instead of the first, for the first time in nineteen months. Two families notice. One of them says nothing about it for a year and a half, and the reason she says nothing is the whole of the chapter.
14. Bhalerao In March 2005 the society secretary buys a new register and begins writing things down. He is not building a case. He is replacing a channel that closed eighteen months earlier without anybody announcing it, and he does it the way he does everything.
15. A Good Year The firm's best year on every figure that gets measured. Thakurli sells out, Sawant is paid in full, the bank is pleased, and Jagdish does not stand on the Shivaji Chowk site for eleven consecutive weeks.
16. The Site 14 Enquiry February 2005. The creek plot is offered a second time, over tea, by a man being polite about it. Jagdish refuses inside four minutes and tells nobody at all, and the not telling takes a different kind of effort from the refusing.
17. What Meera Knew She stopped keeping the books in 1998 and never stopped reading them. In the spring of 2005 she finds something. This chapter records what can be recorded, which is her behaviour, and declines to record the rest.
18. Mrs. Kanetkar She dies in the transit flat at Kopar in April 2005, sixteen months short of the building she voted for, still believing the date she was given at a gate in June 2003. Four of her eleven cartons were never unpacked.
19. The Number The date on the board goes by in August 2005 and nobody says anything for three weeks. Then Salvi does, on paper, the addition that has never been done, and Jagdish takes five weeks to do the only thing left to do with it.
20. The Corner Meeting The twelfth of November 2005, in a school hall in Kopar that Bhalerao got for nothing because of who taught there for thirty-one years. Jagdish gives them a date he has built out of green lights, and it goes well, which is the worst thing about it.

Part Three — The Handover

21. April The date built out of green lights goes by, and this time he does not come. Four months of silence in which the building is genuinely, visibly, almost finished, and a letter arrives in July signed by all eleven households.
22. The Transcript Looking for the 2003 minutes, Bhalerao opens a carton marked SOCIETY — OLD for the first time in three years and two months. Two days before the meeting he brings what he found to the office, because he is a decent man and thinks Jagdish should see it first.
23. Contract and Promise The tenth of August, in Ketkar's office. The lawyer reads five lines from a spiral notebook and gives an assessment that is correct in every particular, and Jagdish agrees with all of it and cannot use any of it.
24. The Ledger of the Wait The eleventh of August 2006. He gives them October, and then, against his lawyer's explicit advice and his own interest, he asks eleven households to tell him what the thirty-eight months have cost them. They tell him. It does not add up to anything.
25. Meera Says It Nine months of silence end at about eleven o'clock on the night of the eleventh of August, in a kitchen, in four sentences. She says the true thing about the question he asked in the hall. She does not say the other thing.
26. Salvi Leaves He resigns on the fourth of September, effective after handover, and gives a reason that nobody else in the firm accepts. Jagdish does not argue him out of it, and spends two years working out why he did not.
27. Fourteen Months The second week of October 2006. Every family gets the flat it was promised, on the floor specified, larger than the one it gave up. The building has two lifts, so there is nothing for anybody to carry.
28. Vasant's Trade Clearing a cupboard in November, Jagdish finds his father's plot book — twelve years of who owned what and who would sell — and reads it properly for the first time. It is the third register in this story and it is the one he is descended from.
29. The Federation Six weeks after the handover the Dombivli Housing Federation asks him to speak to a hall of society office-bearers on scheduling in redevelopment. He accepts, and gives the best talk of his life, and is thanked for his candour.
30. What the Register Says Bhalerao closes the register on the nineteenth of November 2006 and stands down after twelve years. At the handover of charge it is read aloud, in full, by a man who moved into the society in 2005 and was not there for any of it.

Part Four — The Ground

31. Quiet Year 2007. He is offered four redevelopments on the strength of a talk about scheduling and turns down all four, and the firm goes from forty people to twenty-two without anybody being sacked.
32. Nikhil Leaves He is seventeen. He applies to a place two days' travel away without telling anybody, gets in, and goes in June 2008. He is asked why by four people and gives four non-answers, and this book does not have a fifth.
33. Site 14, Third Time September 2008. Ghaisas comes back with the same plot and the same folder, and this time every reason Jagdish gave in 2005 has quietly stopped being true. This time he asks to see the paper.
34. The Reasons He Gives In the fortnight he asked for, he tells four people that he is looking at the creek plot, and gives each of them a different reason for looking. He believes all four while he is saying them.
35. The Dispute He goes and stands on it alone, in the rain, on the twenty-ninth of September 2008. The water is where it was in 1991. Everything anybody has resolved about that plot in seventeen years was an answer to a question he never asked.
36. He Takes It The fourth of November 2008. He signs three documents that morning and the plot is the second of them. Four days later, in a car, he asks his wife a question he has been carrying since 2005 and gets an answer of one word.
37. Aditi's Silence Home from Pune in December, two years into planning, she reads the Shivaji Chowk development agreement properly for the first time and delivers a verdict that is worse than an accusation. Then she says nothing at all about the creek plot.
38. Sumati She dies in July 2009 at seventy-five. Half the town comes, and almost all of them were taught by her. In the corridor outside the ward, four days earlier, Meera answers a question for the third and last time.
39. The Trust The Sumati Wagh Trust is registered in September 2009 to build and repair classrooms. He intends to fund the whole of it himself, and within four months he cannot, because of who else wants to pay.
40. Ground October 2009, the morning they break ground for the retention tank. He walks the plot at the hour he used to inspect, and then does the one thing the last six years have taught him: he puts the true number on the board where everyone can see it.

While you read

The companion covers everyone and everything in the book without spoiling what has not happened yet: the biography, the timeline, the projects and the glossary of terms the chapters use without explaining.