Part One — The Promise · Chapter 2 of 40

Kopar Side

He went to Kopar at seven the next morning, before the office, because of Mrs. Ranade’s knees.

This was not, he would have said, a thing worth doing. He had told a woman in a meeting that two of the four transit buildings had lifts and that she would be in one of them, and the statement had a ninety per cent chance of being true, and the ten per cent could be handled later by moving her. The rational course was to check it from his desk at eleven with one telephone call.

He took the seven o’clock instead, and stood in the compound of a four-year-old building on the Kopar side while a watchman who did not know him decided whether to be rude.

“Whose flat?”

“Nobody’s yet. I’m taking the second and third floors from June.”

The watchman’s face performed an entire small drama — builder, then possibly the builder, then a recalculation of the last four seconds of his own tone. “Sir. Sir, you should have said.”

“I did say.”

The lift worked. It was a six-passenger Kone with a scratched door and it went to the fourth floor and came back with the noise all such lifts make, and Jagdish rode it twice and looked at the maintenance card, which had been signed every month since 2001 in the same hand. He felt the relief out of proportion to the risk, which told him something he chose not to examine.

Then he walked, because his car was at the office and because he had two hours and because it was Kopar, and Kopar was the only part of the city he could still walk through without seeing it as a set of plots.

That was a lie he told himself, and he knew it before he reached the end of the lane. He could not walk anywhere in Dombivli without seeing plots. What was true about Kopar was that here the plots came second and something else came first.

The lane he grew up in ran between two rows of four-storey buildings put up in the sixties, and it had aged the way that generation of building aged: badly in the concrete and well in everything else. Balconies had been enclosed. Ground-floor flats had become a photocopy shop, a tailor, a place that sold nothing identifiable and had been open every day of Jagdish’s life. Above them the wires crossed and recrossed until the sky came in squares.

Anywhere else in the city he would have looked at that row and seen four and a half FSI going to waste. Here he looked at it and saw the exact spot, third building, second floor, where a window had been open in 1969 and a woman he could no longer picture had leaned out and told him his father wanted him.

“Wagh saheb.”

The tailor. Sixty-odd, half a foot shorter, entirely bald, holding a shutter he had stopped raising.

“Kelkar kaka.”

“You’ve become fat.”

“You’ve become old.”

Kelkar accepted this trade with satisfaction and finished raising the shutter. “Sit, sit, I’ll make tea.”

“I’ve eaten.”

“Nobody eats tea.” He was already inside. Jagdish sat on the step, which is what you did at Kelkar’s, and the tea came in ten minutes in a steel tumbler, and it was too sweet, as it had been too sweet in 1974.

“You’re taking the Shivaji Chowk building,” Kelkar said.

News in Dombivli did not travel. It arrived, fully formed, ahead of the people it was about.

“They vote in March.”

“They’ll vote yes.” Kelkar sat down on his own step with the reluctance of a man whose knees had opinions. “Bhalerao’s a fool but not that kind. And they’ll vote yes because of your mother.”

Jagdish drank his tea.

“You know that,” Kelkar said, not unkindly.

“They’ll vote yes because I’ve built eleven buildings that are standing.”

“Yes, yes.” Kelkar waved the eleven buildings away like a fly. “Also because your mother taught Bhalerao’s wife, and Gokhale, and both Deshpandes, and half of that hall, and because a man whose mother taught you does not run away to Nashik with your corpus money. That is not an insult, Jagdish. It is capital. Everybody starts with something. Some people start with land.”

The tea sat in Jagdish’s hand and cooled.

“My father started with land,” he said.

“Your father,” said Kelkar, “started with other people’s land, which is a different business entirely, and he was very good at it, and I say that with love.” He drained his tumbler. “How is she?”

“Marking papers for a school that retired her in ninety-two.”

“Then she is fine.”

He was recognised twice more before the end of the lane, and both times the same way, and by the second time he had begun to count.

The first was a man of about thirty pushing a scooter with a flat rear tyre, who stopped, looked at him, and said: “Sumati teacher’s son?” — not as a question needing an answer, more as a label being confirmed against a stock list. Jagdish said yes. The man said his own mother had been in the same batch, meaning the same staff room, meaning something. Then he went on pushing his scooter.

The second was a woman at a hand-cart buying methi who said nothing at all, but who looked at him and then looked at him again in a way that Jagdish, at forty-five, had stopped misinterpreting years ago as anything to do with himself.

Nobody said builder. Nobody said Wagh Infrastructure, which was painted on twenty-two hoardings in this city and which he had spent seventeen years making mean something. In Kopar he was a schoolteacher’s son and would be until he died, and probably after.

He thought about this all the way to the station road, and what he thought was not resentment, though a version of him at thirty would have made it that. What he thought was: this is worth money.

It was an ugly formulation and he did not soften it, because he had learned that softening a true thought only made it harder to use later. Eleven families were about to hand him their building on twenty-six months of his word. The word was worth what it was worth partly because of eleven standing buildings, and partly — he could not say in what proportion, and the not knowing was the uncomfortable part — because his mother had taught their children to write.

Vasant Wagh had spent thirty years learning who owned which plot and who would sell and what each man’s brother-in-law wanted, and had made a modest, unglamorous living out of standing between those facts and the people who needed them. He had died in 1994 without ever having poured a slab. Jagdish had believed, at the funeral and for a decade after, that he had escaped his father’s trade by learning an actual one.

Walking up the station road at ten past nine, he understood for the first time — not fully; that would take three more years and a room with a lawyer in it — that he had inherited the business exactly. Not the skill. The access. His father had traded in knowing people. So did he. He had simply added a building to it.

The office was above a bank on the station road, and the stairs were the reason he was still thin. He was on the second flight when his mobile went off.

“Where are you?” Meera said.

“Stairs.”

“Salvi has been in your room for forty minutes with the ground report and a face.”

“How much of a face?”

“He brought his own tea,” Meera said, and rang off.

Jagdish stood on the landing for a moment. Through the window there was the station, and the seven-forty going out towards CST packed to the doors in the way that had stopped being remarkable to anyone who lived here, and beyond it the roofs going north and east, and somewhere in among them the Shivaji Chowk building, four floors, eleven families, forty-one years old, still standing, waiting to be knocked down by him.

Twenty-six months, he thought.

Then he went up.